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The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
Apparently there must have been an ancient curse that brings forth a new attempt at a Fantastic Four franchise every ten years, even further if you want to include the 1994 Roger Corman movie that was purposely made and never released just to hold onto the film rights (I’ve seen it, and once you forgive the chintzy special effects and shoestring budget, it’s actually a pretty reverent adaptation). The 2000s Fantastic Four films were too unserious, then the 2015 Fantastic Four gritty reboot (forever saddled with the painful title Fant4stic) was too serious and scattershot. Couldn’t there be a healthy middle? There has been an excellent Fantastic Four film already except it was called The Incredibles. That 2004 Pixar movie followed a family of superheroes that mostly aligned with the powers of the foursome that originally made their debut for Marvel comics in 1961. It makes sense then for Marvel to borrow liberally from the style and approach of The Incredibles because, after all, it worked. There’s even a minor villain that is essentially a mole man living below the surface. Set on an alternate Earth, this new F4 relaunch eschews the thirty-something previous films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). You don’t need any prior understanding to follow the action, which is kept to under 105 minutes. The 1960s retro futurist visual aesthetic is a constant delight and adds enjoyment in every moment and every scene. The story is a modern parable: a planet-eating Goliath known as Galactus will consume all of Earth unless Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), a.k.a. Mr. and Ms. Fantastic, give over their unborn son. The added context is that they have struggled with fertility issues, and now that at last they have a healthy baby on the cusp of being theirs, a cosmic giant wants to call dibs. It makes the struggle and stakes much more personal. It makes the foursome genuinely feel like a family trying to resolve this unthinkable ultimatum. I cared, and I even got teary-eyed at parts relating to the baby and his well-being, reflecting on my own parenting journey.
From a dramatic standpoint, this movie has it. From an action standpoint, it leaves a little to be desired. It incorporates the different powers well enough, but there are really only two large action set pieces with some wonky sci-fi mumbo jumbo. There’s a whimsical throwback that makes the movie feel like an extension of a Saturday morning cartoon show except for the whole give-me-your-baby-or-everybody-dies moral quandary. While I also appreciated its running time being lean, you can feel the absence of connective tissue. Take for instance The Thing (The Bear‘s Ebon Moss-Bachrach) having a possible romance with a teacher played by Natasha Lyonne (Poker Face). The first scene he introduces himself… and then he appears much later at her synagogue seeking her out specifically during mankind’s possible final hours. We’re missing out on the material that would make this personal connection make sense. The same with the world turning on the F4 once they learn they’ve put everyone in danger. It’s resolved pretty quickly by Sue giving one heartfelt speech. The movie already feels like it has plenty of downtime but I wanted a little more room to breathe. I was mostly underwhelmed by Pascal, who seems to be dialing down his natural charm, though his character has some inherently dark obsessions that intrigued me. He recognizes there is something wrong with him and the way his mind operates, and yet he hopes that his child will be a better version of himself, a relatable parental wish. There are glimmers of him being a more in-depth character but it’s only glimmers. The family downtime scenes were my favorite, and the camaraderie between all four actors is, well, fantastic (plus an adorable robot). Kirby (Napoleon) is the standout and the heart of the movie as a figure trying to square the impossible and desperate to hold onto the baby she’s dreamed of for so long.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an early step in a better direction. It’s certainly better than the prior attempts to launch Marvel’s first family of heroes, though this might not be saying much. It does more right than wrong, so perhaps the fourth time might actually be the charm.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Batman Begins (2005) [Review Re-View]
Originally released June 15, 2005:
I have been a Batman fan since I was old enough to wear footy pajamas. I watched the campy Adam West TV show all the time, getting sucked into the lead balloon adventures. Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman was the first PG-13 film I ever saw, and I watched it so many times on video that I have practically worn out my copy. Batman Returns was my then most eagerly anticipated movie of my life, and even though it went overboard with the dark vision, I still loved it. Then things got dicey when Warner Brothers decided Batman needed to lighten up. I was only a teenager at the time, but I distinctly remember thinking, “You’re telling the Dark Knight to lighten up?” Director Joel Schumacher’s high-gloss, highly stupid turn with Batman Forever pushed the franchise in a different direction, and then effectively killed it with 1997’s abomination, Batman and Robin. I mean these films were more worried about one-liners and nipples on the Bat suits. Nipples on the Bat suits, people! Is Batman really going, “Man, you know, I’d really like to fight crime today but, whoooo, my nipples are so chaffed. I’m gonna sit this one out”?
For years Batman languished in development hell. Warner Bothers licked their wounds and tried restarting their franchise again and again, only to put it back down. Then around 2003 things got exciting. Writer/director Christopher Nolan was announced to direct. Nolan would also have creative control. Surely, Warner Brothers was looking at what happened when Columbia hired Sam Raimi (most known for low-budget splatterhouse horror) for Spider-Man and got out of his way. After Memento (My #1 movie of 2001) and Insomnia (My #5 movie of 2002), Nolan tackles the Dark Night and creates a Batman film that’s so brilliant that I’ve seen it three times and am itching to go again.
The film opens with a youthful Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in a Tibetan prison. He’s living amongst the criminal element searching for something within himself. Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson) offers Bruce the chance to be taught under the guidance of the mysterious Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe), the leader of the equally mysterious warrior clan, The League of Shadows. Under Ducard’s direction, Bruce confronts his feelings of guilt and anger over his parents’ murder and his subsequent flee from his hometown, Gotham City. He masters his training and learns how to confront fear and turn it to his advantage. However, Bruce learns that the League of Shadows has its judicial eyes set on a crime ridden Gotham, with intentions to destroy the city for the betterment of the world. Bruce rebels and escapes the Tibetan camp and returns to Gotham with his own plans of saving his city.
With the help of his trusted butler Alfred (Michael Caine), Bruce sets out to regain his footing with his family’s company, Wayne Enterprises. The company is now under the lead of an ethically shady man (Rutger Hauer) with the intentions of turning the company public. Bruce befriends Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), the company’s gadget guru banished to the lower levels of the basement for raising his voice. Bruce gradually refines his crime fighting efforts and becomes the hero he’s been planning on since arriving home.
Gotham is in bad shape too. Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), a childhood friend to Bruce, is a prosecutor who can’t get anywhere when crime lords like Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) are controlling behind the scenes. Most of the police have been bought off, but Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) is the possibly the city’s last honest cop, and he sees that Batman is a figure trying to help. Dr. Crane (Cillian Murphy) is a clinical psychologist in cahoots with Falcone. Together they’re bringing in drug shipments for a nefarious plot by The Scarecrow, a villain that uses a hallucinogen to paralyze his victims with vivid accounts of their own worst fears. Bruce is the only one who can unravel the pieces of this plot and save the people of Gotham City.
Nolan has done nothing short of resurrecting a franchise. Previous films never treated Batman as an extraordinary character; he was normal in an extraordinary world. Batman Begins places the character in a relatively normal environment. This is a brooding, intelligent approach that all but erases the atrocities of previous Batman incarnations. Nolan presents Bruce Wayne’s story in his typical nonlinear fashion, but really gets to the meat and bone of the character, opening up the hero to new insights and emotions, like his suffocating guilt over his parents murder.
Nolan and co-writer David S. Goyer (the Blade trilogy) really strip away the decadence of the character and present him as a troubled being riddled with guilt and anger. Batman Begins is a character piece first and an action movie second. The film is unique amongst comic book flicks for the amount of detail and attention it pays to characterization, even among the whole sprawling cast. Nolan has assembled an incredible cast and his direction is swimming in confidence. He’s a man that definitely knows what he’s doing, and boy oh boy, is he doing it right. Batman Begins is like a franchise colonic.
This is truly one of the finest casts ever assembled. Bale makes an excellent gloomy hero and really transforms into something almost monstrous when he’s taking out the bad guys. He’s got great presence but also a succinct intensity to nail the quieter moments where Bruce Wayne battles his inner demons. Caine (The Cider House Rules, The Quiet American) is incomparable and a joy to watch, and his scenes with the young Bruce actually had me close to tears. This is by far the first time a comic book movie even had me feeling something so raw and anything close to emotional. Neeson excels in another tough but fair mentor role, which he seems to be playing quite a lot of lately (Kingdom of Heaven, Star Wars Episode One). Freeman steals every scene he’s in as the affable trouble causer at Wayne Enterprises, and he also gets many of the film’s best lines. Oldman (The Fifth Element, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) disappears into his role as Gotham’s last good cop. If ever there was a chameleon (and their name wasn’t Benicio del Toro), it is Oldman. Holmes works to the best of her abilities, which means she’s “okay.”
The cast of villains are uniformly excellent, with Wilkinson’s (In the Bedroom) sardonic Chicagah accented mob boss, to Murphy’s (28 Days Later…) chilling scientific approach to villainy, to Watanabe’s (The Last Samurai) cold silent stares. Even Rutger Hauer (a man experiencing a career renaissance of his own) gives a great performance. Seriously, for a comic book movie this is one of the better acted films of the year. And that’s saying a lot.
Batman Begins is such a serious film that it almost seems a disservice to call it a “comic book movie.” There are no floating sound effects cards and no nipples on the Bat suits. Nolan really goes about answering the tricky question, “What kind of man would become a crime-fightin’ super hero?” Batman Begins answers all kinds of questions about the minutia of the Dark Knight in fascinating ways, yet the film remains grounded in reality. The Schumacher Batmans (and God save us from them) were one large, glitzy, empty-headed Las Vegas entertainment show. No explanation was given to characters or their abilities. Likewise, the Gothic and opulent Burton Batmans had their regrettable leaps of logic as well. It’s hard not to laugh at the end of Batman Returns when Oswald Cobblepot (a.k.a. The Penguin) gets a funeral march from actors in emperor penguin suits. March of the Penguins it ain’t. Nolan’s Batman is the dead-serious affair comic book lovers have been holding their breath for.
The action is secondary to the story, but Batman Begins still has some great action sequences. Most memorable is a chase sequence between Gotham police and the Batmobile which goes from rooftop to rooftop at one point. Nolan even punctuates the sequence with some fun humor from the police (“It’s a black … tank.”). The climactic action sequence between good guy and bad guy is dutifully thrilling and grandiose in scope. Nolan even squeezes in some horror elements into the film. Batman’s first emergence is played like a horror film, with the caped crusader always around another turn. The Scarecrow’s hallucinogen produces some creepy images, like a face covered in maggots or a demonic bat person.
There are only a handful of flaws that make Batman Begins short of being the best comic book movie ever. The action is too overly edited to see what’s happening. Whenever Batman gets into a fight all you can see are quick cuts of limbs flailing. My cousin Jennifer got so frustrated with the oblique action sequences that she just waited until they were over to see who won (“Oh, Batman won again. There you go.”). Nolan’s editing is usually one of his strong suits; much of Memento’s success was built around its airtight edits. He needs to pull the camera back and let the audience see what’s going on when Batman gets physical.
Another issue is how much plot Batman Begins has to establish. This is the first Batman film to focus solely on Batman and not some colorful villain. Batman doesn’t even show up well into an hour into the movie. As a result, Batman Begins perfects the tortured psychology of Bruce Wayne but leaves little time for villains. The film plays a shell game with its multiple villains, which is fun for awhile. The Scarecrow is really an intriguing character and played to gruesome effect by the brilliant Cillian Murphy. It’s a shame Batman Begins doesn’t have much time to develop and then play with such an intriguing bad guy.
Batman Begins is a reboot for the film franchise. Nolan digs deep at the tortured psyche of Bruce Wayne and come up with a treasure trove of fascinating, exciting, and genuinely engrossing characters. Nolan’s film has a handful of flaws, most notably its oblique editing and limited handling of villains, but Batman Begins excels in storytelling and crafts a superbly intelligent, satisfying, riveting comic book movie. The best bit of praise I can give Batman Begins is that I want everyone responsible to return immediately and start making a host of sequels. This is a franchise reborn and I cannot wait for more of it.
Nate’s Grade: A
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Batman Begins could have also been subtitled, Christopher Nolan Begins. The eponymous writer/director, who has defined the twenty-first century in the realm of artful blockbusters perhaps more than anyone, had made three movies prior to this big moment. He began with 1998’s Following, but it was 2001’s Memento that got everyone’s attention. His immediate follow-up, 2002’s Insomnia, is a very good movie, and actually a better version than the Nordic original, but it was really proof for Warner Brothers that this clever indie guy could handle a larger studio project. In the early 2000s, Warner Brothers was desperate to relaunch Batman after the demise of the franchise with 1997’s ultra campy Batman & Robin, and many filmmakers were courted to relaunch the Dark Knight. It was literally a month after rejecting Joss Whedon’s reboot pitch that in January 2003, the studio announced Nolan was attached and writing the screenplay with David S. Goyer, who was hot off the Blade movies and seemed to have cracked the code for making more mature comic book movie adaptations. What followed was a dramatic reworking of Batman, grounding him and his world in realism and opening Bruce Wayne up for a closer psychological examination, giving the man behind the mask an opportunity to be the actual focus for once. The results reinvigorated the dormant franchise, provided a path for superhero reboots in a post-9/11 landscape, and launched Nolan on his ascendant trajectory to being the biggest blockbuster voice of the modern era.
Batman was a popular character in DC comics (note: DC stands for “Detective Comics,” so saying, “DC comics” is like saying, “Detective Comics comics,” much like the way the “Sahara” means “desert”) from his inception in in 1939, but he was always well behind Superman, the golden boy. The campy Adam West TV series was popular, and actually saved the comic from being discontinued, but it wasn’t until 1989 that Batman became the most popular superhero. The darkness and edge of Batman was more appealing for the modern masses, and paired with Tim Burton, it proved the new levels of studio blockbusters after the steep decline from the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. Ever since, we’ve had over ten live-action headlining Batman movies and only four Superman live-action movies, now five thanks to James Gunn’s recent high-flying addition. Much as the Burton 1989 Batman brought the character to an even bigger height of modern stardom, it was Nolan who likewise took the character and made it an even bigger spectacle that also steered the zeitgeist of what superhero movies could be.
While 2008’s The Dark Knight is widely regarded as Nolan’s best movie in his trilogy, I actually consider Batman Begins his best. That is no insult to The Dark Knight, a wildly entertaining movie that is something truly special every second Heath Ledger is onscreen with his magnetic portrayal of the Joker, a modern-day anarchist seeking validation from the costumed crusader who “changed all the rules.” It’s a good movie with some wonky plotting you don’t think of as long as Ledger is lighting it up, but that first movie was a proof of concept that Batman can carry his own movie. It humanizes the character and strips him down before gradually putting him back together, explaining how this character assembles the tools of his trade and the allies that help support his mission. It’s a satisfying series of trial and error that proves entertaining as we watch the myth of Batman take shape. This first movie is about the formation of Batman, whereas the second is about the escalating consequences of introducing a well-armed vigilante into the bloodstream of organized crime. The first film is the most complete movie, and while it has some flights of fancy like a secret ninja conspiracy, it still works on a relatively grounded level. For the first time in perhaps the character’s film history, you will find yourself caring about the character. That is an accomplishment, and you can feel it when Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) merely standing amidst a swarm of bats is played as a turning point of self-actualization. And it works. This is Nolan’s best Batman.
We don’t even get our first glimpse of Batman as we know him until halfway through the movie. That’s a lot of waiting for a movie with “Batman” as the first word of its title. Even twenty years later, I find the build-up satisfying, watching Bruce Wayne put together the pieces that we associate with Batman, from his cowl to his cape to his suit to the Batmobile, which is practically an all-terrain tank. Finding interesting ways to generate these familiar parts, iconography, and allies makes an invigorating drama that is better than the more action-heavy second half of the movie. It’s still fun and enjoyable how Nolan is able to bring together so many elements with payoffs. This is Nolan’s first blockbuster and he proves that he has an innate feel for popcorn entertainment, knowing how to structure and pace the action and intrigue and laying in those setups and payoffs along with winning character beats and themes. He shows how he can make the moments matter to form an even greater whole. That’s the lasting impact of Batman Begins, where every moment helps to build the mystique of the superhero but also the psychology of Wayne and what motivates a man to dress up and punch dudes for a living.
It also helps that this movie is perfectly cast from top to bottom. Bale was as sturdy a center as you could get. He only went on to be nominated for four Oscars, winning once for 2010’s The Fighter (and should have won in 2018 as Dick Cheney in Vice). He’s long been known for transforming himself completely with his roles. Between 2004’s The Machinist and Batman Begins, there’s a 100-pound difference in Bale’s physique. His performances can get too easily overlooked because of the gimmicky body transformations, but Bale has been one of our most consistent and interesting actors for these last twenty years. Getting Michael Caine (Oscar winner), Morgan Freeman (Oscar winner), Gary Oldman (future Oscar winner), Cillian Murphy (future Oscar winner), Tom Wilkinson (future Oscar nominee), Neeson, Wantanabe, and even Rutger Hauer to be in your movie is obviously a setup for greatness. Nolan and company even get the smallest roles right, like hiring Rade Serbedzija (Snatch, Eyes Wide Shut) just as a homeless man Bruce gives his coat to. He’s only in two scenes for maybe thirty seconds but you got this actor for that part. The odd one out is Katie Holmes as Bruce’s childhood friend who becomes a crusading prosecutor. It’s not a knock on Holmes but simply her character’s role in the story. There’s also the knowledge that this role was recast with Maggie Gyllenhaal in the 2008 sequel, so one wonders what Gyllenhaal would have been like here. I like Holmes as an actress but Maggie Gyllenhaal is a definite upgrade.
Allow me to question the mission of the League of Shadows and good ole Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Wantanabe, but really Liam Neeson). They are a secret order of ninjas trained to fight injustice through extreme measures. They’ve been in existence for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, and claim to have contributed to the destruction of such empires as Rome and Constantinople when they became breeding grounds of injustice. Their next target is Gotham and they become our returning antagonists for the climax, Batman having to take down his mentor. This philosophy purports to link criminality with borders, alleging that criminals are only encouraged by the corrupt institutions of the city. If Rome can no longer support a thriving criminal network, the assumption is that crime goes away. You take away the platform and, voila, injustice and criminality are gone. That’s quite an oversimplification. You could make the argument that destroying a corrupt city makes it harder for criminals to find footing, but does it eliminate crime or just force it to migrate elsewhere? This also assumes that only cities are cesspools for criminality and corruption; look into the Sackler-lead network of pill mills dotting rural America. I guess drug and sex trafficking only exist in urban America, right? The League of Shadows have a bad idea forming a bad philosophy that is being applied badly, and I just wanted to point this out.
The legacy of the Nolan Batman trilogy carries on twenty years later. They are considered some of the biggest blockbusters of the twenty-first century, but it’s also the beginning of the meteoric ascent of Nolan. 2006’s The Prestige, likely his most underrated film, is the last of the Before Movies. Ever since, every Nolan movie has been an event, even ones that step back into more personal and cerebral spaces, like 2023’s runaway Oscar juggernaut, the billion-dollar three-hour biopic, Oppenheimer. He’s become one of a very select few filmmakers whose very name is a selling point to the general public regardless of whatever the project might be (joining Spielberg, Tarantino, James Cameron, and maybe Jordan Peele at this point). I agree with my 2005 criticisms that Nolan is not an expert handler of action. He’s tremendous at atmosphere, with judicious editing and eye-popping visuals, but action construction is not his forte, even after several more action movies to his name. I was much more entertained by the horror sequences from the Scarecrow fear toxin than I was by the straight action. I do wish the villains had more time, especially the Scarecrow, but it’s a result of having so much more plot to do, and centering around Bruce Wayne and his personal journey to superhero-dom means everything serves this streamlined goal.
I saw Batman Begins three times in the theater back in 2005. As a longtime Batman fan, a kid whose first VHS tape was the 89 Batman, who obsessed over every detail for the Batman Returns release, who religiously watched the excellent 90s animated series, I felt a sense of elation that this was a movie that got it. Nolan and his team got Batman and did him justice that had been denied for years. We now likely live in a universe where we’ll never be more than four years away from another live-action Batman movie or appearance. I enjoy the Matt Reeves’ Batman era we’re currently living through, another gritty take favoring realism and depth of character to comic book pulp heroics. The Nolan movies walked so that the Reeves films could fly. If you’re a fan of Batman in the real world, then these last twenty years have been resplendent (Ben Affleck was the highlight of Batman vs. Superman – no joke). It’s interesting to see that convergent point in 2005, where Nolan re-imagined the character for today, and also where Christopher Nolan became the signature blockbuster filmmaker we now freely associate him to be. Batman Begins is a comic book movie that feels so well-suited for the times as well as all time. It’s still smashing.
Re-Review Grade: A
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Superman (2025)
Has the world ever needed Superman more? I don’t know about you, but I could really use a symbol of good right now who represents the best of us, fighting for justice and protecting the innocent against the diabolical in power that seek to profit and prey upon the vulnerable. Vulture film critic Allison Wilmore has a fantastic headline for her review: “Superman [the movie] isn’t trying to be political. We just have real-life super villains now.” James Gunn, the quirky filmmaker who made us fall in love with a raccoon and a tree in the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, ascended to be head of DC movies in 2022, and he eyed reigniting Superman as the top priority, selecting himself as writer and director. It’s a lot of pressure to rebuild the DC movie brand by yourself, as there are only two other movies with scheduled release dates currently. This movie could make or break the fledgling DC Universe (DCU) rebuild soon after the smoking demise of the DC Extended Universe (2013-2023), informally dubbed the Snyderverse. Fortunately, Gunn’s take on the boy in blue is a reminder why this character has lasted so long and why the world still needs a symbol of hope.
Superman (David Corenswet) a.k.a. Clark Kent, has been a defender of Metropolis for three years now. He’s romantically involved with ace reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Bosnahan), who knows his secret identity but still chides Clark on somehow getting all those “exclusive interviews” with Superman. He’s also been a thorn in billionaire industrialist Lex Luthor’s (Nicholas Hoult) side and become an obsession of his. The world is still debating Superman’s unexpected intervention, thwarting a powerful military from invading its neighbor’s sovereign border (very reminiscent of Russian aggression). The U.S. government needs actionable proof that Superman is a threat, and Lex is determined to eliminate the alien for good.
Amazingly, this movie feels like the second in a series rather than a reboot kickoff. From the opening text, Gunn drops us into this world already in progress. We’re skipping over the origin story, the character introductions, and all the table-setting that comprises many first films in franchises. It’s usually that second film that really takes advantage of the setup and patience of the first movie, expanding the world and deepening the character relationships and conflicts. Gunn has mercifully skipped over all that and gotten us right to the good stuff. The opening minutes of the movie drop us into a super-powered battle with the declaration that this is the first time our Superman has lost, and that beginning follows the most powerful alien on Earth having to patch up his injuries. I think that’s a very intriguing first impression, but I’ll detail more of that in a later paragraph. The world that Gunn establishes already feels well underway but the story is still accessible and the supporting characters have meaning within this world. This is a world that has been used to super heroes, a.k.a. metahumans, for some time, so when Superman finally dons his red underwear it’s not a complete shocker. This is not necessarily a reality where one super-charged character has reconfigured mankind’s entire sense of identity. The world is accustomed and adapted to extraordinary figures and monsters. This is where the Justice Gang comes in (Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, and Mr. Terrific). They’re the corporate supes, the ones called in to sign autographs, smile for pictures, and save the day for good P.R. Perhaps that’s too flippant, but the trio of established heroes doesn’t feel the same call to activism like Superman. It’s hard to fully articulate, so bear with me dear reader, but Gunn’s Superman already feels fully established, with the figure known, his relationship with Lois already in play, and Lex having already put nefarious time, research, and lots of money into combating this super obstacle with his own lethal experiments. With Gunn, there’s no time to waste. It’s already fully formed from his imagination, and the parts have their reasoning and meaning, making the whole much more satisfying.
Another way to differentiate this Superman is less from his strength than his vulnerabilities. This is a character long regarded as overly powerful, too indestructible and therefore lacking realtability. Well with Gunn’s version, here is a Superman that gets beat up. A lot. Ben Affleck’s Batman pointedly asked Henry Cavill’s Supes, “Do you bleed?” Gunn has answered in the affirmative. Much like Matt Reeves’ 2022 Batman, we get a work-in-progress superhero that is still feeling out how to best be a superhero. It’s a version that takes lots of lumps and Gunn finds interesting ways to test Superman’s limits, both emotionally and physically. The introduction of nanites into orifices certainly provides nods to Gunn’s body horror roots. While this is a Superman that gets knocked around quite a bit, his biggest vulnerability is his doubt. He’s simply trying to do good and save lives regardless of the political ramifications, but the world and its people, and especially their fears and paranoia of an Other, are more complicated. Superman explains he intervened in an international border war for the simple reason of saving lives. When Lois pushes him in a practice on-the-record interview, during one of the better scenes, about his decision-making, thinking through the consequences, consulting with world leaders and the like, he gets flustered and says there wasn’t time. All he wanted to do was save lives that would have been lost, so why is the rest of the world having a hard time with that? Over the course of those two hours and change, we watch this Superman battle through his self-doubts in a very real and compelling way that I don’t feel like any other Superman movie has better demonstrated. This is a world already rife with heroes, but is it better with a Superman? Is his existence a net positive?
Gunn truly understands the character in a way that Zack Snyder never did. With Man of Steel and the subsequent film appearances, we were given a Superman that didn’t really want to be Superman. He was an overburdened superior being tasked with serving as mankind’s savior, and came across as annoyed. That version of Pa Kent famously told his super son that it might have been best if Clark had just let a bus full of kids die to keep his secret. Thanks for the life lesson, dad, and oh, by the way, your sacrifice was ultimately meaningless when your entire worldview was proven wrong by the end of Man of Steel. Regardless, here is a Superman that is unabashedly sincere and even a little corny. That’s who this character is, a do-gooder wanting to inspire others and wanting to save all life, even the villains, even the wildlife (my theater took special note when Superman saved a squirrel from being crushed). Snyder’s Superman was part of an entire Metropolis 9/11 of horrible collateral damage disaster porn. Gunn’s Superman works hard to make sure the giant kaiju monster, when teetering over, doesn’t fall on any building to protect the people inside. This is also a Superman that feels compelled to be a hero, to do better with his super gifts, and to keep trying even when he fails, that there can be dignity in losing a fight but continuing on because you know that fight is worth it. The depiction of Superman/Clark makes him feel much more a character worth closer examination. He’s not a detached god feeling above these petty mortals always needing saving. The real super power is his empathy and desire to help others, and that may sound corny, but Superman is too, and that’s completely fine in a world that would be better if we had more Supermans and fewer wannabe super villains.
The big question for me was whether Gunn could adapt his cheeky, irony-rich goofball sensibilities from the Guardians movies and make a Superman movie that was earnest and restrained. He has, and let this be a lesson that Gunn does not disappoint when it comes to superhero projects. There are still unmistakable elements of Gunn’s humor and style, like the ironic distance from action serving as an extended joke while characters discuss an unrelated topic, the bouncy and specific needle-drops that cue extended fight or action sequences, and of course the quippy sense of humor. I don’t agree with some of the early reviews I’ve come across that accuse Gunn of undercutting his drama with too many jokes. That is exactly why I was afraid that Gunn would be too insecure with straight drama and earnestness that he would have to rely upon an awkwardly squeezed-in ironic joke to, in his mind, balance the tone. There are jokes, some of them wild and unexpected, but this is most certainly not a movie in the same tonal space as anything Gunn has done before either as a director or a screenwriter. I did not feel that the comedy ever undercut the stakes or the sincerity of the scenes and the movie as a whole. Gunn has shown he can re-calibrate his style and comedic voice while at the same time still making things his own without copious slow-motion. The action is refreshingly staged to be immersive, with few cuts and wide camera swings in order to present everything on the screen in an easily oriented field of vision.
Corenswet (Pearl, Twisters) has some big tights to fill, as I would argue while there have been iffy-to-bad Superman movies there hasn’t been a bad Superman. Obviously the one that all others are defined by is Christopher Reeve who was the greatest special effect the original movie had (I know the flying sequences were groundbreaking for their time, but they play out so cheesy and dated, complete with sudden Margot Kidder poetic resuscitation). Watching him switch from suave hero to clumsy Earthling in a split-second was the best. Corenswet certainly looks the part, clean-cut All-American looks, even though he’s British. He really channels the character’s big heart with his struggle to be accepted, by the public, by the media, by Lois, by even his enemies. He’s got the presence to fill out that suit but the emphasis is not on the contours of his abs but on the unfailing dedication and goodness of a character trying to do right. He won me over early, and it doesn’t hurt hat he has terrific chemistry with Brosnahan, who has been readying herself for this part for years with The Fabulous Mrs. Maisel. She’s great too. Hoult (Nosferatu) channels his smarm perfectly as a very punchable Lex who might make you think about a certain DOGE-master and his team of flunkies wreaking havoc on the rest of the country through unchecked hubris. I loved his pettiness and thinly-veiled vanity, like during an approaching apocalyptic cataclysm and he says to screw the people of Metropolis. “They chose him, let them suffer.” It sounds a lot like, “Your state voted against me, so you won’t get immediate emergency assistance.” You will cheer hard for Lex’s defeat, even more so when his plan involves literal extra-judicial forever confinement.
However, the real brreak-out star of the movie will most certainly be Krypto, the adorably jumpy super dog. Every time this pooch makes an appearance it is welcomed and he’s utilized as more than just easy comic relief. I expect a sharp uptick in the number of good boys named “Krypto” afterwards.
James Gunn has alleviated all of my fears about him tackling the Man of Steel, and he’s created a Superman that soars above the superhero field. It’s so vibrant and funny and accessible to anyone regardless of their prior feelings or understanding of Superman. It’s also a clear-cut example of what a Superman movie can and should be, sincere and bright and, yes, a little bit corny too. We need this character, and we especially need film artists that know how to craft engaging stories with this character who’s existed for almost 90 years. There’s an inherent lasting power to Superman, and it’s his sheer goodness as an outsider, a feared alien, who has all the powers in the world but just wants to help others. Many have long viewed Superman as boring, a Boy Scout in a world that has grown too morally murky to maintain such a morally unwavering figure of truth, justice, and the American way (what does that last part even mean any more in the bleak environment of 2025?). Gunn has shown us how necessary the character can be, a balm to our troubled times, and the reality that do-gooder figures can be inspirational and aspirational no matter the circumstances. He’s made a Superman movie with an intriguing, lived-in world, one that I now believe can easily support a fuller universe of stories and side characters. He’s also made what I consider the best Superman movie to exist yet (apologies to the nostalgia of the fans of the Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve originals). I have some minor quibbles, like how Lois fades into the background for the second half, but they are only quibbles. This movie was exactly what I needed. I’m sure there are millions of others yearning for the same. Superman is proof that the DC film universe might actually have the perfect person in charge of charting their cross-franchise courses. Kneel before Gunn.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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The Old Guard 2 (2025)
I wasn’t a big fan of the 2020 immortal action movie The Old Guard, but apparently it became one of Netflix’s most viewed movies, so here we are five years later with a sequel about the ancient conspiracy of warring immortals co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (not to be confused with Infinite, which is about an ancient conspiracy of warring immortals who are reincarnated into new bodies co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor). I found the action and the general world-building to be underwhelming, but Old Guard 2 makes The Old Guard look like Michael Bay in comparison. There are two key developments in this sequel. Uma Thurman plays the first immortal and she wants to destroy the world or whatever. The second is that anyone injured by our newest immortal, Nile (Kiki Layne), loses their immortality. The rules of this universe get awfully hazy. I’m taking this directly from the film’s Wikipedia summary: “Additionally, anyone who has lost their immortality can regain their power by another wounded immortal who can transfer their power to the host they choose.” Still following? So we have one person who can make immortals mortal, but any mortal immortal can also choose to have their absent immortality bequeathed to a mortal immortal of their choice, reasserting their immortality. Okay. The confusing rules would be mitigated if we found any of the characters compelling. The sequel does bring back Andy’s (Charlize Theron) ex-beloved Quynh (Veronica Ngô) who was locked into an iron maiden coffin and dumped overseas. The established rules had immortals reawaken from death, so this poor woman would keep waking back up again only to drown instantly and repeat the horrifying process again. Let’s do the math here. On average it takes about two minutes to drown (FYI, I typed into Google “how long does it take to drown,” and now my computer is worried about my mental health). Let’s cut that in half from the extra water pressure filling her lungs. So let’s say she dies every minute. That means she dies 1440 times a day. Over the course of 500 years she has died 262,800,000 times. Rescuing this woman should be a recognition not just of her relentless suffering but the fact that her mind should be shot. Having to endure that horror would break anyone, and Andy coming to terms with her inability to heal someone who cannot die but is also unable to continue life any longer woukd be interesting. That’s my preferred sequel. Instead with The Old Guard 2 we get a bunch of lackluster fights and convoluted lore, and it doesn’t even offer a conclusion, more an implied hand-off to a third movie where the characters may indeed be able to finish what they’ve started. It’s time to let these mortal immortals just die in peace.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Captain America: Brave New World (2025)
After seventeen years of constructing interconnected fables, not every Marvel movie is going to be exceptional, as each one serves as a mighty oar to propel the larger entity that is the Marvel cinematic Universe (MCU) forward. With over thirty movies, there are going to be duds and there are going to be movies that get lost in the machinery of the cinematic universe grinding onward. Consider Captain America: Brave New World one of those sacrificial offerings that nobody will remember in short order.
Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) has taken over the mantle of Captain America in the wake of the original, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), retiring. General Ross (Harrison Ford) has recently been elected president and he wants Sam to reconstitute the Avengers. However, someone is triggering sleeper agents to try and kill Ross, and Sam is entrusted to get to the bottom of this conspiracy.
Brave New World is certainly trying to relive the formula that made 2014’s Winter Soldier such a genre standout, upending the status order of good versus evil through the prism of a political thriller. There’s an assassination attempt on the newly elected president, and it also happens to be brainwashed sleeper agents that can be activated at a moment’s notice. What helped make that 2014 movie work was that the sleeper agent happened to be Steve Rogers’ former best friend he thought had died back in WWII. There was a personal connection to the mystery and especially the figure of destruction. With this movie, the personal connection that Sam has to the mystery is almost immediately locked away, made to be an objective needing to be saved by eventually capturing the real bad guy in the shadows. Rather than having to face down a ghost from the past, a personal friend gone rogue, now we have Sam just chasing one shady bad guy to link to the next shady bad guy to a conspiracy that doesn’t even involve him. That was another aspect that made Winter Soldier excel, Steve’s allegiance and sense of patriotism running in direct conflict with the wishes of his government. It was personal and meaningful and challenged his perception. With Brave New World, it could have literally been any character uncovering this very limited conspiracy. That’s not a great start, making your lead character practically superfluous to the larger plot.
Much of this lingering conspiracy also hinges upon the identity of the Red Hulk, which might have been mildly surprising had Red Hulk not been such a vital element of the movie’s marketing. He’s in the TV ads, he’s in the trailers, he is the poster. This movie had more Red Hulk advertising than its titular hero. Unless you’ve walked into the theater blind, and congrats to you, for all intents and purposes this has been sold as the Red Hulk movie, and even if you’re walking in hoping for some wall-to-wall Hulk smash, then you’ll be sorely disappointed. There’s perhaps ten minutes at most of Red Hulk action, and it’s saved for the very end. It’s a climax that feels more perfunctory than satisfying, with the obvious reveal being held as something revelatory and meaningful when it’s just going through its basic blockbuster dance moves.
As is typically the case with movies that undergo many delays and re-shoots, Brave New World feels like it has far too many things going on and also simultaneously not enough going on. This is an unexpected sequel to 2008’s Incredible Hulk, generally regarded as one of the weakest MCU movies. The only thing that survived that movie was William Hurt (R.I.P.) as General Ross. I don’t think too many Marvel fans have been dying to have those characters and storylines picked back up after 17 years, but at long last you can see Tim Blake Nelson’s character again. Do you know what his character’s name is? Unless you’re the keeper of the 2008 Incredible Hulk fan wiki, I strongly doubt it. Quick, what’s his name without looking it up? It’s Samuel Sterns. Did you even remember Tim Blake Nelson being in the 2008 movie? The movie also has a global resource land grab to finally explain the frozen celestial body rising from the ocean ever since the events of 2021’s Eternals, a movie I fear we’ll wait an additional 17 years to get its own conclusion. This colossal being is the source of a new all-purpose element – adamantium, and that name should be instantly familiar for fans of the X-Men, as this movie pushes their inclusion that much closer. If The Marvels gave us Kelsey Grammar and Patrick Stewart’s return as Beast and Professor Xavier, this one boldly gives us… an elemental alloy (at this rate, two movies from now will introduce the X-Men’s jet as another sign to those in the know about what’s to come). It’s taking the leftovers from another movie to set up the larger scope of a branch of new movies down the road, while also tying back elements and characters from the earliest days of the MCU. It’s all a lot of table-setting unless there’s a compelling storyline with engaging characters and relatable conflicts and drama, and Brave New World does not. As a result, it’s all like watching a fast-moving assemblage of familiar parts trying to package itself together as a cohesive movie, and it just cannot. It’s one of those sacrificial movies at the altar of larger stories.
Which is a shame because there was a really fascinating and thought-provoking story at the core of Brave New World that barely gets any recognition amidst the explosions and gunfire, namely what does it mean for there to be a black Captain America? How does society respond when their patriotic symbol of American might now has more melanin? Considering how the Internet has throngs that lose their mind whenever a traditionally white male character gets changed into something different, I have to imagine there would be waves of people grumbling that this new “thuggish” Cap isn’t “their Captain America.” This is epitomized in the character of Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), a veteran who was also selected for the Army’s experimental super soldier project that gave birth to Captain America. Except because he was black during a time of segregation as the norm, he never got the adoration of Steve Rogers, and his accomplishments were ignored. In our current political climate, where diversity has become a convenient boogeyman, it would have been interesting to explore how the culture responds to a black man picking up the shield and being the next Captain America. It also would have invited a worthy conversation about where this country has let down its black populace, symbolized with Bradley’s past. Some of these themes were explored in the 2021 Disney Plus TV series Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be meaningfully revisited given the elevated platform of the Captain America moniker. This was also the TV show that argued refugees could be terrorists, so there was room to grow. Unfortunately, this is only ever given passing mention, as institutional racism gets in the walk of Hulk smashing.
There was possibility with Brave New World but it too often seems to run aground with too many conflicting directions, underdeveloped ideas, and unfocused themes. The political complications, as well as evaluating the sins of the country’s past, could have made for a poignant and relevant movie with bigger things on its mind rather than getting to the next CGI slug-fest. It’s a Captain America with a new Captain America, so let’s explore what that means. It’s the franchise’s opportunity to begin anew with a different hero at its helm, and yet it feels more like an over-extended, disappointing finale to the Falcon/Winter Soldier TV series. It feels like an unneeded epilogue to an epilogue, and tying in so many disparate elements from films that people have forgotten or care less for seems like a strange creative choice when Marvel is looking to find its way in the wake of its post-Endgame walkabout. The worst crime with Brave New World is merely how boring all of it turns out to be. Far from brave, far from new.
Nate’s Grade: C
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The Crow (2024)
It’s been over twenty years since there’s been a movie based upon James O’Barr’s iconic graphic novel The Crow, and it’s been almost thirty years since there was a theatrically released movie. It’s a franchise that seems easy enough to make into a movie: a victim of violence comes back from the dead with some supernatural guidance to seek vengeance on those who killed them. Slather it in a moody atmosphere and some nice character beats, and you have yourself a born winner, like the 1994 movie that became a staple for a generation of disaffected teenagers. So why has it been so hard to bring this franchise back to life? There have been many starts and stops, with different directors and actors becoming attached and leaving over time, including Bradley Cooper, Luke Evans, Jason Momoah, and Alexander Skarsgard. Apparently, the producers finally found a story they felt could support a Crow reboot, or so they hoped. It crashed pretty hard at the box-office upon release. Despite its omnipresent placement on many worst of 2024 lists, I didn’t hate The Crow 2024. It has some serious problems but it also has some intriguing ideas that could have worked in a better version. It’s far less egregious than the 2005 Wicked Prayer where a literal plot point is stopping a climactic consummation between a villainous Tara Reid and David Boreanaz. It couldn’t be that bad, could it? It’s not, but it needed a lot of work.
Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgard) meets the love of his life, Shelly (FKA Twigs), where one meets all the hot and available singles these days – in drug rehab. She’s on the run from a criminal enterprise after she kept an incriminating video, so once she and Eric escape from their rehab center and try and make a go at a new life on the outside, the goons find them and kill them both. Except Eric’s spirit is sent to a purgatory netherworld and tge mysterious man Kronos offers to send him back to get vengeance. It seems this crime syndicate is led by Vincent Roeng (Danny Huston), who happens to be perpetuating his lifespan by offering fresh innocent souls to Hell. With the supernatural power of a guardian crow providing him invulnerability, Eric seeks to stop these bad people from dooming any other souls and maybe he can save Shelly’s soul in the process.
Let’s tackle some of the more noteworthy mistakes of the reboot before I begin providing the compliments and where I think the movie actually has some worthy ideas. The biggest creative mistake is delaying the tragically fateful murder that spurs the entire movie until 45 minutes in. For contrast, the original movie has its Eric and Shelly getting killed through an opening montage. It doesn’t waste any time getting to the real premise of the material, the supernatural revenge tale. If you’re going to delay that key turn by so long, then that relationship better pop off the screen, or the chemistry has to be amazing, or the characters are so in depth and charming that with the considerably increased time we will feel a deep pain at the loss. If you’re putting more weight on the love story and their connection then you have to back it up, and this movie cannot. Therefore, it’s drawing out its necessary supernatural transformation to a point that there is only a measly hour left for all that superhuman stalking and avenging.
In the original, Eric (Brandon Lee) tracked down the gang responsible for his and his wife’s murder and each member got their own section where they established their character. Each section allowed us to learn more about the powers Eric now had at his disposal as well as how they might change him. The structure allows the bad guys to learn about their predicament and plan a defense. It allows the exciting elements from the premise to develop and adapt. With The Crow 2024, there’s one initial attack where Eric discovers he can bounce back from bullets, then there’s one ambush on a car carrying our bad guys, and finally there’s an extended assault at an opera that gruesomely kills every disposable henchman money can buy. That’s it. Eric isn’t picking them off one-by-one or even working up the food chain to the really bad guys. The bad guys don’t even seem that threatened, as Vincent is still going about his routines, albeit with more armored guards. It makes the whole Crow parts of The Crow feel small and underdeveloped. This is the first Crow movie where the titular bird, the symbolic partner from the underworld, doesn’t even connect in any meaningful way. It’s just a background “caw.”
The entire inclusion of a villain who traffics innocent souls begs for further examination and probably a more formidable opponent. Vincent confesses he’s hundreds of years old and his agreement is with the Devil himself, so you would think this man would have learned some tricks in the ensuing hundreds of years. He has some vague super power where he can whisper suggestions into the ears of his victims and they’ll do what he commands, but does he use this power when he’s battling Eric or trying to flee from Eric? No. The demonstration of this super power basically resorts to being a more personal form of torture. Vincent doesn’t even seem worried about an undead warrior coming for him. Maybe that’s centuries of accrued over confidence, but if that’s the case, then make us love to hate this arrogant bastard. Also, if he’s had a successful transactional arrangement with the Devil for literal centuries, shouldn’t Ole Scratch have a thing or two to say about his soul supplier being brought to cosmic justice? If innocent souls are so much more delicious to the Prince of Darkness, there’s more to lose, and maybe that even brings the horned one into the fray, or he designates a promising underling or nepo baby demon, and then Eric has to fight the literal powers of Hell as well protecting his target, which raises the question how far is he willing to go to seek the vengeance that he craves.
That question is actually one of the more interesting points because this version of The Crow directly connects the hero’s strength to the power of love. This is where putting more emphasis and time with the love story could have worked… had the love story been compelling. I like that it’s not his hatred that gives him his powers but his love for Shelly. The movie also provides a more urgent reason for Eric to make these bad men feel his crow-y wrath: he can retrieve her from Hell if he thwarts Vincent and his soul-trafficking gang. Even though she’s dead, he can still save her, and that is meaningful and provides a better motivation for our protagonist. I don’t know why, and it seems like this Kronos guy could be far more active and helpful as an otherworldly guide, but it’s an effective goal to drive our hero to slay his targets. I liked that late in the movie, after he receives some upsetting news about Shelly, his conflicted feelings are detracting from his super powers. There’s a direct and personal sense of causality. His doubts in whether he loved Shelly are manifesting as physical vulnerability. This approach could have worked had the filmmakers given the audience an engaging love story. The movie also feels built around hiding the acting limitations of Twigs (Honeyboy). She tries but this performance feels so listless and lacking a spark or charisma that could convince why Eric would risk it all for her.
There’s one notable action sequence and it deserves some kudos for its morbid invention. When you have a hero that can take all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, it can lessen the stakes when it seems like they lack a credible weakness (call it the “Superman problem”). However, what I liked about the 2024 Crow is that even though he’s an undead warrior, that doesn’t mean Eric is somehow superior at fighting. He can take more punishment but that doesn’t mean he’s become an exemplary martial arts fighter, agile gymnast, or trained marksman. He’s still just a lanky guy, albeit one with washboard abs, the sculpted physique one naturally develops while recovering from substance abuse, of course. I enjoyed that this version of Eric was still struggling in his fights and could fall down and be bested. For his big assault scene at the opera house, he prioritizes a sword as his weapon of choice. At least that necessitates proximity to take out his opponents. The extended and very bloody fight scene is inventively gruesome; at one point, Eric uses the sword sticking out of his chest to lean forward and impale a henchman pinned on the floor. He even shoots through holes in his body to take out henchmen grappling him from behind. It’s the most thought put into utilizing the possibility of its premise. I don’t know why the rest of the movie couldn’t exhibit that same level of thought and creativity.
If you’re a fan of the comic or the 1994 movie, you’ll more than likely walk away from this newest Crow with some degree of disappointment. It wasn’t worthy of a placement on my own worst of the year list. Rather, it appears as a middling dark thriller that has some interesting creative choices that fail to pan out because the follow-through wasn’t as good as the idea. With a few more revisions, I think this basic approach could work, emphasizing the love story and devoting precious time to make it more impactful than just an innocent woman being avenged. However, by not fulfilling the possibility of these choices, instead we’re stuck with a lackluster romance eating up 45 minutes of screen time that could have been used for more satisfying supernatural action. By its sloppy end, I was just left shrugging. If this is what twenty-plus years of development wrought, maybe we needed a little longer for better results.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Kraven the Hunter (2024)
Kraven the Hunter feels like a movie that was never meant to be seen. That seems paradoxical considering the efforts of many talented people over years took place to bring the Spider-Man villain solo movie to some form of creaking, wheezing life. Since 2017, Sony has decided to create their own Spider-Man universes minus, of course, Spider-Man. They’ve been making solo movies about Spider-Man villains and while the Venom movies have been inexplicably popular, the rest have been regarded as unmitigated disasters. In 2022, Morbius was bad enough that Sony thought they could re-release it to capitalize on the memes and derisive entertainment factor. To no avail and a total lack of morbin’ time. In 2024, Sony released three Spider-Man villain movies, though Madame Web was never really a villain per se, but then again nobody really wanted a Madame Web movie anyhow, though it once again gave us some memorable memes. Now Kraven is reportedly closing out this shared cinematic universe experiment, and the president of Sony is blaming those mean ole film critics for the failures of these would-be superhero classics (always a smart movie, assuming audiences are incapable of making up their own minds). Delayed almost two years from its original January 2023 release date, Kraven the Hunter is the death knell of this enterprise and it comes to a thoroughly mediocre conclusion, feeling even more disposable, poorly developed, and mechanical, and ultimately a footnote to a footnote of superhero cinema.
Kraven, nee Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, portraying his third superhero) is the son of a notorious Russian crime boss, Nikolai (Russell Crowe). One day on a hunting trip in Ghana, Sergei rescues his brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger) from a lion. The lion injures Sergei and takes him for food, but thanks to a magic elixir from a tourist, Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who saves him. Now he has animal-like senses and speed and strength. As an adult, Kraven seeks out villains to bring to justice, but he’s also trying to square the legacy of his father and whether he is like dad. 
The problem with these Spider-Man-Minus-Spider-Man movies is making people get interested in the famous web-slinger’s rogues gallery. This usually means treating the character’s best known for trading punches with another hero as their own individual anti-hero, complete with a more villainous villain for our future villains to have to topple. Usually these villains (the actual individual movie antagonists, not the protagonists) are an imitation of our heroes (still referencing the future villains), the mirror version of them. So if your protagonist is going to be a vampire, then your antagonist is going to be a slightly more evil vampire. If your protagonist is an alien goo monster who likes to eat heads, then your antagonist is going to be a slightly more evil alien goo monster that likes to eat heads. You get the idea. However, you digest enough of these, and it all seems a bit too perfunctory, the main character having to defeat a version of themself. The main challenge is finding a way to make an audience care about these characters, and having them rescue a love interest or defeat a new-but-same villain with the implicit promise that maybe, if you’re patient enough, you might see them eventually try to murder Spider-Man, is not it. I’m not against the idea of giving these villains their origin tales, but it feels like in order to make them more palatable to a mass audience means they’re neutering the nature of these characters. The hypothetical future Sinister Six movie can’t all be six misunderstandings against Spider-Man.
Alas, Kraven is a real bore of an action movie even with its R-rating, the first for these Spider-Man villain movies. The added bloodshed and curse words don’t exactly make the movie feel more adult when we’re still dealing with plotlines like a super lion biting our hero and giving him super lion powers, much like the origin story of Spider-Man, or another villain suffering from a very silly and similar Amazing Spider-Man 2 Goblin-itus medical malady. This is not a serious movie in the slightest but that doesn’t mean it can’t be passably fun, but everyone is just so dour and passionless that it drains all entertainment. At least Madame Web was perplexingly interesting with its bad decisions. There’s such little energy to be had through the middling two hours. Kraven is gifted superhuman powers and he uses them to hunt down bad men and big game poachers, becoming let’s say Captain Planet if he watched nothing but Charles Bronson movies. There’s got to be an exciting movie there, or at least a more interesting one than what we eventually got here. It’s hijacked by some pretty rote family drama of a bad dad who was too hard on his kids and rescuing a kidnapped little brother who he feels guilty about leaving with the bad dad after Kraven got his new powers. The family drama is pretty rote and uninspired, with both of the other characters kept to the sidelines for most of the movie, which makes it hard to care that much about either of their impacts. The haphazard integration of a romantic subplot with Calypso is even more perfunctory when I would much rather see Kraven fall in love with a lion instead.
I like J.C. Chandor as a director, and he’s someone who leaps at new challenges. His debut movie, 2011’s Margin Call, was an engrossing character piece about Wall Street traders and execs on the verge of the 2008 financial meltdown. It was so bare-bones that it was practically a play. His next film, 2013’s All is Lost, was the exact opposite: a movie completely told through visual storytelling and with a minimum of spoken words as Robert Redford tries to patch up his sinking boat. 2014’s A Most Violent Year was a slow-burn crime drama about the lengths people will go to escape their past and their nature. From there, Chandor has been circling larger studio projects, leaving 2016’s Deepwater Horizon and then replacing Kathryn Bigelow for Netflix’s action thriller, 2019 Triple Frontier. He’s a chameleon of a director and the only real point of interest I had with Kraven. What would he do in the superhero space? Well, the answer is not much. The visual flourishes we’ve seen before in other movies but without a sense of humor. Watching Kraven periodically run on all fours may make him more animal-like but it doesn’t look good. The movie gets lost in the convoluted mythology and rules of its characters and what they’re capable of, and so the action sequences feel cobbled together and short on imagination. The climax is during a stampede of buffalo but there’s no real danger here like dodging around the animals. They very conveniently allow space for our hero to fight his battle, thus becoming a thundering backdrop. Even if you’re overly generous, there’s not much here to excite the senses or even your morbid curiosity.
There is one line of dialogue that needs to be singled out for its absurdity. While Madame Web was ridiculed for its “researching spiders in the Amazon with my mother before she died” line, the filmmakers had the good sense to eliminate it from the final film, though not the good sense not to include it in their initial marketing. With Kraven the Hunter, there’s a character who talks about her mother and literally says, “She died and I never saw her again.” That’s usually how that works.
As the final piece of Sony’s Spider-Man villain spinoff universe, Kraven the Hunter brings this diversionary superhero franchise to a merciful end. The frustrating thing is that Kraven as a character can work, as recently demonstrated in the popular Spider-Man PlayStation video game sequel. He’s supposed to be the ultimate hunter, a force of nature, but that doesn’t mean he needs to carry his own movie, just like Morbius or Madame Web or any other Spidey villain. Launching these characters could have worked but needed much more imagination and care. Instead, it was Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man and, with the exception of the Venom movies with their goofy buddy movie appeal, audiences have responded with the indifference you would assume. It’s not enough for these movies to merely be adjacent to Spider-Man to be appealing. They need to be good, to be able to stand on their own, and to support an extended time with this character. It’s hard not to see the larger machinations for eager franchise-extension as the primary motivation. But if these are the impressions of the characters we’re getting, who would want any more? Turns out nobody was actively cravin’ another underdeveloped and mediocre superhero movie.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
Movie musicals can be sweeping, invigorating, and at their very best transporting, They mingle the high-flying fantasies and visual potential of cinema, and we’ve gone through many waves of kinds of musicals. Today, we’re in an outlandish world of the outlandish musical, an experience in ironic air quotes, where stories that you never would have thought could be musicals would then dare to be different and attempt to be musicals. The much-anticipated Joker sequel, Folie a Deux, dares to be a challenging jukebox musical of old favorites. The French movie Emilia Perez tells the story of a cartel leader that undergoes a sex change and tries to do good with her second life. Both movies are deeply interesting messes as well as experiences I don’t think actually work as musicals.
Joker 2, which I will be referring to it as for the duration of this review mostly because I don’t want to type out Folie a Deux, and not due to some explicit dislike of the French, is a fascinating misfire that comes across as downright disdainful of its audience, its studio, and its very existence. The last time I felt this way from a sequel was 2021’s Matrix Resurrections, another fitfully contemptuous movie that was alienating and self-erasing and also from Warner Brothers. The first Joker movie in 2019 was a surprise hit, grossing over a billion dollars, which meant that the studio wasn’t going to sit idly by and not force a sequel for a movie clearly intended to be one complete movie. While the first movie cost a modest $50 million, the sequel cost close to $200 million, with big pay days for Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, and co-writer/director Todd Phillips, who I have to remind you, dear reader, was actually nominated for a Best Director Oscar in 2019. Having gotten their paydays, it feels like Phillips and his collaborators have set out to scorch all available earth, going so far as to even insult fans of the earlier movie. Add the bizarre musical factor, and I don’t know how else to describe Joker 2 but as an alienating and miserable protracted exercise in self-immolating artistic hubris. It’s so rare to see this level of artistic clout used to proverbially stick a finger in the eye of every fan and studio exec who might have hoped there could be something of value here.
Let’s tackle the plot first, as we pick up months after the events of the 2019 film where lowly Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is being tried for the murders he committed, most famously on a TV talk show where he debuted his stand-up comedian persona as Joker in full regalia. There’s an (un)healthy contingent of the rabble that idolize Arthur, finding the Joker to be some kind of mythic hero of class-conscious revolution, pointing out how society is failing all the little guys getting crushed by the rich and powerful and privileged, like that dead Wayne family. One of those fans is Lee (Gaga), a.k.a. Harleen Quinzel, a disturbed young woman obsessed with getting closer to Arthur, and he is extremely appreciative of the fawning attention. The defense case hinges upon whether or not Arthur was acting on his own accord or had a psychotic break, disassociating as “Joker,” and thus cannot be held accountable for the murders. Except it seems “Joker” is all the people of Gotham want to talk about, whether it’s the media or the public, and what about poor lonely Arthur?
If I had to fathom a larger thematic point, it feels like Phillips is trying to put our media ecosphere and comics fandom into judgement. He’s pointing to his movie and saying, “You wouldn’t have cared nearly as much about this project had it just been some other spooky, disturbed man losing his sanity and lashing out. You only care because he would eventually become the notorious Batman villain or lore, and that’s why you’re back.” Well, to answer succinctly, of course. When your movie’s conceptual conceit is all about providing a gritty back-story for a famous supervillain, don’t be surprised when there’s more attention and interest. This would be the same if Phillips had made a searing drama about teenage nihilism and easy access to guns and then called it Dylan Klebold: The Movie (one half of the Columbine killers, if you forgot). Stripping back layers to provide setup for a famous killer will always generate more interest than if it was some fictional nobody. It’s an accessible starting point for a viewer and there’s an innate intrigue in trying to answer the tantalizing puzzle of how terrible people got to be so terrible.
I found the 2019 movie to be a mostly interesting experiment without too much to say with its larger social commentary. It felt like Phillips relied a bit too heavily on that assumed familiarity with the character to fill in the missing gaps of his storytelling. It was a proof of concept for that proved successful beyond measure (a billion dollars, 11 Oscar nominations, including THREE for Phillips). This time, Phillips is taking even less subtlety with his blowtorch as he actively annihilates whatever audiences may have enjoyed or appreciated in the first movie.
And in order to fully appreciate the scope of this movie’s active distaste for its own existence, I’ll be treading into some major spoilers, so jump forward a paragraph if you wish to remain unspoiled, dear reader. The conclusion of this sequel is a miserable succession of hits that degrades Arthur. At the conclusion of the 2019 original, at least you could say he was becoming a more realized version of what he wanted to be, albeit a disturbed murderer, but one who became the face of a revolution and gained a legion of adoring followers that he desperately craved. At the end of Joker 2, Arthur pathetically admits in his trial there is no alternate Joker persona and that he’s just a sad loser. Then Lee admits that she was only ever interested in “Joker” and wants nothing to do with Arthur the sad loser. And then upon returning to prison, another inmate confronts Arthur, apparently feeling personally betrayed for whatever reason. This irate prisoner stabs Arthur to death and then laughs in a corner, slicing a smile into the sides of his mouth, Heath Ledger-style. The movie literally ends with Arthur laying in a pool of his own blood, staring dead-eyed into the camera, with Phillips metaphorically painting emphatically at his corpse and defiantly saying, “Look, he’s not even the Joker now! Do you still care? Do you?” These movies were designed to be the untold history of the man who would be Joker, and they now have ended up being four hours about the guy whose idea maybe inspired a criminal lunatic to improve upon what he felt was another guy’s brand. What’s even the point? We followed two movies about the guy who isn’t the Joker? Seems pretty definitive there won’t be a third Arthur Fleck movie, as there’s nothing left for Phillips and his anarchic collaborators to demolish to smithereens.
When I heard that Joker 2 was going to be a musical, I actually got a little excited, as it felt like Phillips was going to try something very different. Now the curse of many modern movie musicals is trying to come up with an excuse for why the world is exploding in song and dance, like 2002’s Chicago implying it’s all in Roxy’s vivid imagination. Joker 2 takes a similar approach, conveying that when Arthur is breaking out into song that it’s a mental escape for him, that it’s not actually happening in his literal reality. Except… why are there sequences outside Arthur’s point of view where other characters are breaking into song, notably Lee? Is this perhaps a transference of Arthur’s perspective, like he’s imagining them on the outside joining him in tandem? The concept fits with his desperate desire to forge meaningful human connections with people that see him for who he is, and having another character harmonize with him provides a fantasy of validation. Except… there’s no meaningful personal connection between Arthur and the allure of movie musicals. It’s not like he or his domineering mother, the same woman he murdered if you recall, were lifelong fans of musicals and their magical possibilities. It’s not like 2001’s Dancer in the Dark where our lonely protagonist dreamed of being in a movie musical as an escape from her depressing life of exploitation and poverty. It just happens, and you’re listening to Phoenix’s off-putting, gravelly voice straining to recreate classics like “For Once in My Life” and “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You).” It’s also a criminal waste of a perfectly game Gaga.
Phillips’ staging of his musical numbers are so lifelessly devoid of energy and imagination. Most of our musical numbers are merely in the same setting without any changes besides now one, or occasionally two, characters are singing. There’s one number that becomes a dance atop a roof, and several duets that appear like a hammy Sonny and Cher 1970s variety TV show, and that’s all you’re getting folks in the realm of visual escapism and choreography. In retrospect, it feels like the musical aspect of the sequel might have been a manner to pad it to feature-length, adding 16 performances and over 40 minutes of singing old standards. There’s a good deal of repetition with this sequel, as much of the plot is restating the events of the first film; that’s essentially what the courtroom drama facilitates as it trots out all the previous characters to recap their roles and point an accusatory finger back at Arthur.
There is one lone outstanding scene in Joker 2, and it happens to be when Arthur, in full Joker makeup, is cross-examining his old clown entertainer work buddy, Gary Puddles (Leigh Gill). Arthur admonishes Gary, saying he spared him, and Gary painfully articulates how hellish his life has been as witness to Arthur’s killing, how little he sleeps, how it torments him and makes him so afraid. For a brief moment, this character shares his vulnerability and the lingering trauma that Arthur has inflicted, and it appears like Arthur is wounded by this realization, until he settles back into the persona he’s trying to put forward, the “face” for his defense, and goes back to ridiculing Gary’s name and turning the cross-examination into an awkward standup session. It’s a palpable moment that feels raw and surprising and empathetic in a way the rest of the movie fails to.
Is there anything else to celebrate with Joker 2’s troubled existence? The cinematography by Lawrence Sher can be strikingly beautiful, especially with certain shot compositions and lighting contrasts. It makes it all the more confounding when almost all the musical numbers lack visual panache. The Oscar-winning composer returns and while still atmospheric and murky the score is also far less memorable and fades too often into the background, like too many of the technical elements. Joker 2 has plenty of talented people involved in front of and behind the camera, but to what end? What are all their troubles adding up to? It practically feels like a very expensive practical joke, on the audience, on the studio, and that is genuinely fascinating. However, it doesn’t make the end product any better, and the film’s transparent contempt sours every minute of action. Even if you were a super fan of Joker or morbidly curious, steer clear of Folie a Deux, a folly on all of us.
Nate’s Grade: D
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Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
Thanks to some release shuffling, there was only one Marvel movie being released in 2024, the fewest since 2012 (excluding the COVID punting of 2020). There’s been a lot of ink spilled over “superhero fatigue,” especially the recent downturn of certain Marvel movies like Quantumania and The Marvels, though as I’ve written before, I don’t think audiences have become sick of superhero cinema, they have become more demanding from mediocre superhero cinema. Audiences just want something more than the same old same old. Enter Deadpool & Wolverine, resurrecting one of the greatest Marvel heroes and transplanting the first new Fox hero into their new corporate landscape. It’s the least serious Marvel movie yet by design and, judging by its runaway box-office success, that was what the people wanted in a summer blockbuster that made them remember the escapist joys of men in tights with anger issues.
Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), a.k.a. the merc with the mouth Deadpool, is a man out of time. His universe is scheduled for elimination by the Time Variance Authority (TVA) because of the demise of Logan (Hugh Jackman) who served as an anchor being. Apparently, for reasons that don’t seem to make sense if you think of universes lasting longer than one human lifespan, once the anchor being goes, the universe dies out. Wade is thus in search of another Wolverine, but the one he finds is “the worst Wolverine,” a tragic hero drowning his sorrows and refusing to help. The two bickering mutants get cast to a dimensional dumping ground where they run into all sorts of castoffs and forgotten figures, chief among them Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), the twin who ate Professor Xavier in the womb rather than the other way around. She holds dominion in this strange realm, and Wade has to appeal to her, or eliminate her, to get out of this ashy purgatory and convince this wounded Wolverine to be a hero.
The Deadpool half of the title means that this movie is interested in serving as a meta-satire of superhero cinema, which means its breezy, surface-level charms can feel after a while like a fanboy sugar high. It’s hard to maintain the novelty of a fourth-wall breaking vulgar superhero with the third movie, but now we have Deadpool closing the book on the Fox era of twenty-first century superhero cinema as well as getting to play in a new sandbox of pop-culture references and superhero cliches. Welcome to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Wade Wilson, though, as stated on-screen, you’re entering at a bit of a low point. For a while, at least, the movie can get by by having its resident prankster mug his way through the MCU catalog, fawning like the biggest fanboy (he did unsuccessfully audition for the Avengers). The opening sequence literally involves Deadpool digging up the adamantium corpse of Logan and using his unbreakable bones to inflict bloody carnage. It’s quite an attention-getter as well as something of a promise: we’re not going to undo the dramatic conclusion of 2017’s Logan, and even though this is the MCU, this movie isn’t going to go soft as it wades in its signature off-color comedy and bloody chaos.
Your mileage will vary depending upon what the hit-to-miss percentage is with the comedy. I found a lot of the homoerotic/homophobic banter to be dull and repetitive, but this kind of comedy ethos has been present from the first movie, the more-is-more approach. There’s an extended series of cameos that are fun castoffs from Fox comics universes, and the actors are definitely having a blast reliving their characters, or in one very special case, getting to live it once and for all. I wish there was more specific MCU commentary, but I cackled loudly when Reynolds turns to Jackman and taunts, “Disney’s going to make you keep doing this until you’re 90!” I really wish there was an extended critique of the state of post-credit scenes introducing new characters that we all know will never be seen again (remember Harry Stiles or Brett Goldstein?). Deadpool could have gotten stuck in an endless loop of end credit sequences. I enjoyed that a car’s product placement was subject to constant abuse and destruction, while still trying to maintain that sleek car commercial framing. The angry/shouty dynamic between Wolverine and Deadpool makes up for a lot, so even if the jokes are less than stellar, the cranky buddy dynamic still delivers.
However, much like the 2022 Multiverse of Madness, the actual multiversal trips are quite few and quite disappointing. There’s a silly montage of Wade approaching the different Wolverines of different universes (no Dougray Scott, huh?) but almost all of the movie is spent between a dusty netherworld and a subway station. Again, with the promise of great possibility, these movies seem to say, “Will you settle for maybe TWO gray locations?” I was let down by the main setting reminding me of 2009’s Land of the Lost dumping ground for the nexus of discarded universes. When this whole multiverse phase comes to its inevitable conclusion, it’s going to feel like a promised epic family vacation that went about an hour down the road, visited two gas stations, a McDonalds, and then hastily turned around.
On the other side of the titular ampersand, Jackman is acting in a completely different movie, perhaps giving one of his most dramatically rich performances as the superhero. This is a different Wolverine than the one we saw in 2017’s Logan, so it allows Jackman the freedom to be able to hit some of the essential elements of the character while also getting a new opportunity to follow a different direction. This is a Wolverine haunted by his own sense of cowardice and blaming himself for the death of his X-Men. This is less the grumpy antihero we’ve grown to love over twenty years and more akin to the main character in 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, a war veteran who folded under pressure and attempts to live through their guilt and shame, ultimately finding solace in seeking the noble sacrifice but on the bigger stage now. This is a genuinely traumatized character working through the different dimensions of his trauma, and Jackman doesn’t for a second treat it like a joke. He’s set up to be the cranky straight man to Reynolds’ chatty goofball, and there is comedy to be had with that dynamic, but Jackman is so convincing with his portrayal, again twenty-four years into this character, that he made me tear up at a few points. That’s right, dear reader, Hugh Jackman is so great in his role, that he almost made me cry. Yes, in a third Deadpool wankathon movie. And that is why Jackman is such an incredible actor. The attempt at heart has never felt authentic for me with Deadpool, no matter how many side characters he collects and assures us that they “mean something.” However, by including Wolverine, the filmmakers allow the viewers to import our decades of accrued feelings onto him. It’s a cheat, but it works with an actor of Jackman’s caliber. Plus, who wouldn’t want to see more of this man in the role that he defined for a generation?
Look, the movie operates more so than any other MCU enterprise on an expectation reflection system, likely supplying what you want out of a project like Deadpool & Wolverine. If you’re looking for a darker, sillier jaunt, there’s probably enough to serve as a diversionary change-of-pace. If you’re looking for a low-stakes reset, you’ll likely find it, though much depends on Where We Go From Here. If you’re looking for the same brash sense of humor and vulgarity from the two previous Deadpool movies, you’ll be satisfied. If you’re looking for something a little more thematically rich and rewarding, well this is the third Deadpool movie and I would ask why that’s a priority, but Jackman practically delivers just that. If you’re looking for a movie that rewards impish fan service, then here’s your winner, rewarding viewers who can even recall the vague minutia of the rise and fall of studio projects of old. I’ll always wish that more of the jokes hit their marks, or that the action could be a little more stylish, or that Reynolds and company had more trenchant satire for their corporate overlords rather than an occasional naughty tweaking that feels pre-approved, like writing a roast of a host. I would say it’s no more than the sum of its parts, but it almost made me cry and ended in such a jubilant fashion that I didn’t really care about the wishy-washy timey-wimey nonsense that the movie barely wants to pay attention to as well. Deadpool & Wolverine is an unexpected elegy for the Fox universe but also a reminder of the appeal of both of its titular stars.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Hellboy (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released April 2, 2004:
Guillermo del Toro loves things that go bump in the night. The Mexican born writer/director has shown prowess at slimy, spooky creatures with Cronos and 1997’s Mimic. He helmed the 2002 sequel to Blade, which had super vampires whose mouths would open up into four sections with rows of chattering teeth. The man sure loves his movie monsters. del Toro also loved Mike Mignola’s cult comic book Hellboy enough to turn down directing Harry Potter 3 and Blade 3 to ensure he could bring Hellboy to the big screen. Was it worth the sacrifice?
Let me just explain to you the villains of this movie as an example of how ridiculously stupid Hellboy is. The villains are … Nazis. Yes, the tried and true villains everyone can hate – Nazis. But these ain’t yo’ daddy’s Nazis; they’re immortal and led by zombie Rasputin (yes, the Rasputin). They all wish to puncture a hole into another dimension. What’s in this alternate dimension? Why nothing except for a giant floating spaceship that houses, I kid you not, the Seven Gods of Chaos, which all happen to be gigantic space squids. Why would anyone create a universe that has nothing but the imprisoned gods of evil? That seems awfully precarious. How exactly are giant squids going to take over the industrialized, nuclear-age world? Shoot ink at everyone? Sorry, space ink?
Let me not forget a Nazi assassin and his handy dandy arm-length blades. This assassin is also 100 years old and his body is filled entirely with sand. He winds himself up like a big clock. But if his body is filled completely with sand how can the clock gears work inside? You see what the normal audience member has to deal with? Plus these are just the villains, there’s a whole plot left to toil over as well.
The story revolves around a hulking, red demon named Hellboy (veteran character actor Ron Perlman). Hellboy escaped the space squid dimension in the 1940s when the Nazis unsuccessfully tried to open a dimensional hole large enough for your everyday on-the-go space squid. Now, Hellboy is an elite soldier for the government’s Bureau of Paranormal Research. He fights the creepy crawlies. He has to deal with a wide-eyed rookie, the watch of his “father” (John Hurt) and an attempt to rekindle a romance with a mentally troubled fire starter (Selma Blair). Oh yeah, and all the Nazi/Rasputin/space squid stuff mentioned before.
Perlman is really the only redeeming thing about this movie. The makeup is impressive, and he gives an enjoyably droll performance as a man who fights monsters with the same ho-hum-ness as a plumber reacts to clogged sinks. The rest of the acting runs the gamut of either being too serious (I’m looking at you Blair) or just too over-the-top silly (I’m looking at you, league of villains).
Hellboy is strung together with bizarre inanities, flat one-liners, heavy Catholic imagery, conflicting logic and contradictions, ridiculous villains, painful comic relief, half-baked romance and frustratingly ever-changing plot devices.
Watching Hellboy is like playing tag with a kid that keeps making up new rules as he goes (“You can’t tag me; I have an invisibility shield!”), and after a while you lose any interest. Late in the film, the Nazis will all of a sudden decide not to be immortal, and at a very inopportune time. Why? How? I don’t know. Hellboy also gets sudden new powers for some reason. Like he can bring people back to life by whispering otherworldly threats in their ears. For some reason nobody’s clothes burn when they’re set on fire.
Not only does Hellboy frustrate by changing the rules of its world arbitrarily, it will also frustrate out of sheer uninhibited stupidity. How come characters can’t hear or see a pendulum the size of the Chrysler building? How come during a vision of the apocalypse we see a newspaper that actually had the time and staff, during the Apocalypse, to print an issue that reads, “APOCALYPSE”? Why doesn’t Blair use her pyro superpowers immediately to vanquish all the H.P. Lovecraft creatures instead of letting Hellboy foolishly wrestle with them all? The gaping holes in Hellboy are large enough to squeeze a gigantic space squid through.
All this frustration and insanity might have been moot if the action sequences were somewhat thrilling. Sadly, they are not. del Toro’s action sequences seldom matter. There’s such little consequence of what’s going on that the action becomes stiff and lifeless. The first time we see Hellboy chase a creature through city streets it’s a fun experience, but soon the novelty wears off. The overuse of CGI wears down the audience, and after the third or fourth time we watch Hellboy battle the same monster, the audience is ready to go to sleep. There’s little entertainment in the film’s action sequences but just as much frustration and stupidity.
I have never watched a film that induced more eye rolls, shoulder shrugs, raised eyebrows, pained and confused glances and mutters of, “What the hell (boy)?” Comic book aficionados may enjoy the fruits of Hellboy but general audiences will simply shrug. I’m amazed that the majority of film critics seem to think positively about this movie. Maybe I’m the last sane person in an insane world but Hellboy is one of the worst films of the year and one of the craziest films you could ever hope to see in a lifetime.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
When I first saw 2004’s Hellboy, toward the tail end of my undergraduate years that April, I had no real familiarity with the character and went in with my pal, and fellow college newspaper entertainment critic Dan Hille. I went in a blank slate to the grumbling demonic lug created by Mike Mignola. To say I was underwhelmed would be an understatement in my original review. I had an extremely hard time gelling with the world and finding some firm internal logic, and my general astonishment colored every inch of that incredulous review from a snarky 22-year-old soon-to-be college grad. Twenty years later, we have a sequel, reboot, and a series of animated shorts and feature-length films, so the character is much better known today than back in 2004. I also think its occult-heavy, Lovecraftian world-building has also been further established through mainstream horror and science fiction projects. So, in 2024, I’m more familiar with the title character, the cultural connections and background, and especially Guilermo del Toro as a filmmaker, and I’m still left unmoved by this initial pitch to the character and his weird world.
It took del Toro and company years to get this movie made as the big studios lacked faith in the material, in Ron Perlamn as the lead, and in superhero and comic book properties period. This really was its own superhero story with outlandish villains, oversized heroes burdened with secrecy, shame, and guilt, and heavy themes reaching into religion and determinism. The concept of an underground agency of monsters to fight monsters is a good starting point for stories, and Perlman brings the right degree of curmudgeon charm to the outcast character who might become the ultimate hero of the world or its instrument of doom. The iconography of a demon trying to be a good guy provides a fun sense of irony, as well as a natural point of conflict as the wider world would have trouble seeing past the red skin, forked tail, and big curved horns. It makes me think of the gut-punch reveal from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End where the benevolent aliens look exactly like the common visualization of a hooved and horned demon. The starting point for Hellboy has potential. However, it’s the rest that ultimately lost me.
Secret agencies and hidden conspiracies working behind the scene need to, themselves, be interesting. Think of the Men in Black and their assortment of goodies and agents. With the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), I expect more from the supporting characters and what they can unlock about our understanding of the world and the unknown. There really are only two super-powered supporting players, with Doug Jones playing Abe Sapian, a variation on the Creature from the Black Lagoon gillman, and Selma Blair as a pyrokinetic woman who checks herself into mental asylums to protect others. Both of these characters have possibility and are fellow outcasts like Hellboy, but neither feels sufficiently fleshed out and incorporated into this story. Because of Abe’s scenic limitations of being in water, he serves as more of a taste of “the world world” and narrative device. He’s not even involved in the entire final act of labyrinth misadventures. With Blair’s unstable pyro, her character is relegated to a tormented love interest for Hellboy to save, get jealous, and also save again through even more ludicrous means. For a secret agency, it all feels a little too small.
The biggest side character is John Myers (Rupert Evans, The Man in the High Castle), invented for the movie to be the audience’s entry point into learning more of this strange land of strange creatures. He’s a total bore, and he also doesn’t factor much more into the story than being a living reaction shot. He has one significant moment in the climax, and that’s simply telling Hellboy to remember who he is, ultimately convincing the big man to turn back from his destiny of enabling the apocalypse. Why do we need this character? Can’t another super-powered creature serve this same purpose? Why not Blair’s love interest figure, which would then present more attention on beginning that romantic connection between her and Hellboy? There’s a reason in X-Men that we followed a mutant to learn about other mutants and not some boring human. John Myers isn’t even included in the 2008 sequel, The Golden Army, because by that point he had served his only purpose of introducing us to a new world and being a benign romantic foil.
In a story with literal living Nazis brought to life through the magic of anti-Semitic clockwork, I’m dumbfounded why so much of the movie is watching Hellboy fight these boring lizard creatures with tongue tentacles. I appreciate the emphasis on practical effects and the reality that it’s a bunch of stunt performers in monster suits rather than complete CGI. The movie is another love letter of del Toro’s to his influences. His affection for the monsters and outsiders is apparent in every movie going back to his first, 1993’s Cronos. It’s too bad then that the primary opponent are these rudimentary lizard monsters that feel like the kind of easily disposable pawns you would see heroes fighting in other superhero spectacle. They’re faceless, and the fact they can regenerate and duplicate upon death doesn’t make them more formidable, only makes them more depressing as they can’t be easily rid of. If you’re going to give me giant space squids in an alternate dimension, then give me the giant space squids. If you’re going to give me Nazi zombies led by Rasputin, then give me that crazy mess. Don’t confine these potentially interesting villains to the opening and closing only. I will also say the ending is still a rather sizable letdown as far as how formidable these evil space squid gods might prove in a world of explosive devices and a modern military with a practical blank check for its budget.
Fun fact, at the time of its release, some theaters were so worried about playing a movie with “hell” in the title during Easter weekend, and coming off the ongoing success of The Passion of the Christ that brought in more conservative ticket-buyers, they decided to re-title it “Helloboy” on their theater marquis. I find this absolutely hilarious.
Hellboy has some points of interest, as del Toro was still fine-tuning his brand of fantasy-horror into a more mass-appealing conduit. It’s got terrific makeup effects and some fun ideas, and it’s also certifiably insane. It threw me for a loop back in 2004, and I just couldn’t process this level of hyper absurd elements jumbled together, and it still makes for a bumpy viewing. I enjoyed the 2008 sequel much more, which took more of a dark fantasy bent, and I wonder if I was more accepting of that realm of material than I was for Lovecraftian sci-fi nonsense. del Toro has learned from the Hellboy experience, becoming something of a masterful chameleon. He delivered one of the best kaiju action movies of all time that made me feel like a giddy kid. He created a haunting fairy tale timed to the Spanish Civil War. He created a charming romantic fable where a woman falls in love with a fish and it won an Oscar for Best Picture and he won Best Director. He created one of the most visually impressive stop-motion animated movies of all time that can make me cry like a baby and deservedly won another Oscar. Next up, he’s got another stop-motion animated movie and another creature feature, a remake of Frankenstein. Through his versatility, creative consistency, and inherent ability to find human drama in the most peculiar places, I’ll see any movie that del Toro decides to devote his worthy attention towards. Hellboy though? I’ve seen it twice now, and I think I can leave it at that. I’ll upgrade my earlier ranking but not too higher, Hoo boy is that 2004 review a fun read.
Re-View Grade: C
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