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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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Madame Web (2024)
What even is this movie and who is this for? I think the real answer is to help Sony’s bottom line, but that’s generally the real reason for most studio blockbusters, the opportunity for the parent company to make more money. Sony has the rights to Spider-Man and they’re not going to let those things lapse, and while Marvel is shepherding the Tom Holland-lead Spider-Man franchise, Sony is left to their own devices to build out the Spidey universe with lesser-known solo vehicles meant to launch an interconnected web of Spidey’s rogues gallery. It’s about growing more franchises, and it worked with 2018’s Venom, a favorite Spidey villain with a sizable fan base and benefiting from the goofiness of its execution with Tom Hardy and company. It didn’t work out for Morbius in 2022 because nobody cares about Morbius as a character, just like nobody cares about Kraven the Hunter as a character (coming August 2024!), and just like nobody cares about Madame Web, who wasn’t even a Spidey villain and instead an old blind lady that saw the future. The far majority of Spider-Man villains are only interesting as they relate to Spider-Man, so giving them solo vehicles absent Spider-Man is a game in delayed gratification. Madame Web is the latest in this misguided attempt to create an enriched outer circle of brand extension. It’s a promise of a continuity of superhero movies that will never come to pass. It’s a bland return to early 2000s superhero heroics with some substantial structural flaws to its own tangled web.
Cassandra “Cassie” Web (Dakota Johnson) is an EMT in New York City and frustrated by her humdrum life until after an accident she starts seeing the future. You see her mother was researching spiders in the Amazon before she died, and she was researching them with Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) who killed her because he needed a special spider with special properties. Her dying mother gave birth to Cassie thanks to some… mystical Amazonian spider-people? It’s rather confusing but so are Cassie’s visions. A trio of young students (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor) is in danger of being killed by a 30-years-older Ezekiel, so she takes it upon herself to save them, as they one day will become Spider-laden superheroes themselves. This Ezekiel, however, has super strength, agility, and the ability to walk on walls, so overcoming a Spider…man’s abilities might be too much for one EMT driver/psychic.
This movie is more Final Destination or That’s So Raven than a big superhero adventure, and that leads to lots of structural and narrative repetition. Cassie’s power involves her getting glimpses of the future, generally warnings of things to avoid or to intervene. It also makes for a very annoying structure because the movie never gives you clues about what is a vision and what is the real timeline of events. This leads to many repetitions of scenes and fake-outs, and after a while the story feels like it’s mostly jerking you around as well as treading in place. We don’t really know why these flashes happen and what larger meaning they may have. They just happen because the plot needs them to, and so they do. Early on, Cassie gets a vision of a bird flying into her window, and she chooses to open the window, signifying that she can avoid these fates. Why couldn’t Ezekiel Sims think likewise? He’s devoted his whole life to killing these mysterious girls because they’re destined to murder him, but if he’s known for years, why not strike when these girls were younger and more vulnerable, Skynet-style? Or maybe try just not being evil too? I guess that one was too difficult for him as he’s cryptically profited off his Amazon spider steal. More work needed to go into the story to make these characters important and for the fake-out scenes to feel more like horror double-takes. It just gets tiring, and you’ll likely start second-guessing anything of import is merely a vision about to rip away the consequences.
I think a big problem is our protagonist. She’s just so boring and we don’t really understand why she’s so compelled to save these three girls more than anyone else. Her entire back-story with her mother is merely the setup for how she might have super magic powers to kick in at a convenient yet unknown combination of elements and to provide motivation why she might want to kill Ezekiel. It’s all so rudimentary and mechanical, designed just to supply enough connective tissue of plot. As an EMT, finding out how to better save lives could be really useful, although I wish the movie had the gall to make her disdainful of her job beforehand and actively bad at saving lives so that way it would feel like the universe was interjecting and saying, “Here, be better.” You would think if she’s trying to prevent death, and especially the deaths of the people she knows, that it might kick in for her to warn a couple Spider-Man-related characters of note (more on this later). Instead, the Spidey girls have an extended moment learning CPR that feels forever and then tell Cassie, “Wow, you’re a really good teacher” after a rather unimpressive learning session with a motel room pillow. This character just isn’t that interesting even with her new psychic vision powers.
The Spidey girls are also rather uninteresting and given one note of characterization. One of them likes science. One of them has a skateboard and… attitude. One of them is Hispanic. I may have even confused about the characterization, that is how meaningless these characters are. They’re simply a glorified escort mission, a challenge for Cassie to simply keep alive. The scene where they stumble into a brightly lit diner in the middle of nowhere, after Cassie saved their lives and warned them to lay low for their own self-preservation, is immensely irritating. They take it upon themselves to stand on a table of letter jacket-wearing jocks and dance because that’s laying low. They’re annoying characters that never convince you why Cassie should go through such valiant efforts to keep alive. The flashes of them in Spider costumes are only brief glimpses of a possible future, one I can guarantee we’ll never see coming to fruition in this discarded universe.
The strained efforts to transform Madame Web into a disjointed Spider-Man prequel are distracting and generally annoying. It also reveals the doubts the studio had that anyone would be interested in a Madame Web story without additional connections to Peter Parker. Why do we need to have a pregnant Mary Parker (Emma Roberts) in this movie? Why does the climax also involve her giving birth? Are audiences going to wonder whether or not Peter Parker might be born? There’s also the prominent role of Uncle Ben Parker (Adam Scott) as Cassie’s EMT partner. He’s practically the third-leading character. The movie makes several ham-handed meta references about his eventual role in crafting Spider-Man’s development (I also guess he gets to marry Marissa Tomei, so good for you). “Ben can’t wait to be an uncle,” one person says, with, “All of the fun and none of the responsibility.” They might as well just turn to the camera and point-blankly state, “This man will eventually die and inspire Peter Parker to be a hero.” The worst moment of all this forced connectivity is when Mary demurs on picking a name and says she’ll determine when he’s born, even though the film has a “guess the name” baby shower game. Does this mean she saw her newborn babe and the first thing she thought was… Peter? The entire Spider-Man lineage feels so tacked-on and superfluous as glorified Easter eggs.
I’m generally agnostic when it comes to product placement in movies. People got to eat and drink and drive cars, and as long as it’s not obnoxious, then so be it. However, the product placement needs to be mentioned in Madame Web for its narrative prominence, and this leads to some spoiler discussion but I’d advise you read anyway, dear reader, because this movie is practically spoiler-proof by its very conception. Ezekiel Sims is battling Cass and the Spider girls atop a large warehouse with a giant Pepsi sign built onto scaffolding. Then the engineer of Ezekiel’s doom is none other than the falling “S” from Pepsi. That’s right, the villain is dispatched through the help of Pepsi, as well as a literal sign falling from above (cue: eye-roll). Without the assistance from Pepsi (or “Pep_I”), these women might not have lived. You can’t expect that kind of divine intervention from any other cola company. Coke was probably secretly working with the villain, giving him aid and comfort from being parched (begun these Cola Wars have). Deus ex Pepsi. It’s just so egregious and in-your-face that I laughed out loud. Is it also a reference to the original Final Destination ending or am I myself reading the signs too closely?
For those hoping for a so-bad-it’s-good entertainment factor, I found Madame Web to be more dreary, bland, and confusing than unintentionally hilarious. Johnson is an actress I’ve grown to enjoy in efforts like Cha Cha Real Smooth and The Peanut Butter Falcon, also the much-derided but still enjoyable Netflix Persuasion, but she sleepwalks through this movie. I don’t blame her. I don’t blame any of the actors (poor Rahim’s performance seems entirely replaced by bad ADR lines). The character’s nonchalance already zaps the low stakes of a movie where a psychic character we don’t really have fond feelings over is trying to save a trio of annoying teenagers before a vague hodgepodge of a villain succeeds in killing them before they can kill him, which means they all need to kill him before he can kill them before they are destined to kill him. No wonder the executives decided to crassly cram in some Spider-Man relatives to make people care. Madame Web is less a bad movie and more a poorly executed and confused movie, one that doesn’t understand the desires of its intended audience. It’s barely even a superhero action movie, with few scenes of elevated action, though the director enjoys her ceiling perspective flips. There’s a moment where our villain flat-out says, “You can’t do [a thing],” and literally seconds later, through no setup or explanation, suddenly Cassie can do [that thing]. The whole movie feels like this moment, arbitrary and contrived and desperately reaching for an identity of its own. It should have stayed in the Amazon researching spiders before it was destined to die.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is he last of the Zack Snyder-then-not-Snyder-verse DCU movies, and with that the ten years of mostly middling super hero heroics comes to an end not with a bang but with a whimper. I was a fan of 2018’s original Aquaman thanks to the self-aware craziness and visual decadence from its wily director, James Wan (Malignant). This is still the major appeal of the franchise, a universe that feels pulled from a child’s imagination and recreated in loving splendor on the big screen. The problem with this tone is that it’s a delicate balance between silly fun and silly nonsense. The goofy charm of these movies is still alive and well as they open up an even bigger undersea world of lore (Martin Short as a fish lord!), but this time it feels like a movie that is making it up as it goes, and all that “and this happens next” storytelling begins to feel like a monstrous CGI mess needing to be tamed. This might have something to do with the fact that Wan finished filming the movie over two years ago and it’s endured several re-shoots, including featuring two different Batman actor cameos at different points, to now bring to a close a decade of interconnected movies that are going to be blinked out of larger continuity in 2025 (excluding Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, I guess). Lost Kingdom has plenty of enjoyably weird undersea nightmare creatures, a specialty of Wan given his horror roots, but the ultimate villain spends most of his time sitting on a throne in wait and is laughably dismissed so easily in the climax. The whole evil magic trident that corrupts from its evil influence has a very Lord Sauron ring to it. I give the movie points for transforming into a buddy movie between Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) and his brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) halfway through. The jail break sequence is fun and different, and their bickering dynamic makes for winning comedy. However, the drama feels too overworked, with holdovers from the first film (Black Manta, Amber Heard’s unremarkable love interest) repeating their same beats with robotic dedication. The opening reveal of Arthur being a new dad and it cramping his macho-cool style made he fear we were headed for Shrek 4 territory, where the new dad needs one more adventure to realize the importance of family, etc. Because even when you’re riding a mechanical shark, fighting alongside the crab people, and tunneling through worm prisons, it’s all about recognizing the importance of family, kids (the real undersea treasure after all). I defy anyone not to laugh at the literal concluding speech and its enigmatic “sure, fine, whatever”-energy. As a mere movie, Lost Kingdom is silly escapist entertainment that could enchant a few with lowered expectations, and as the final entry point in a universe of super heroes, it’s a fitting nonsensical end.
Nate’s Grade: C
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The Marvels (2023)
No Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie has had a bigger trail of negative buzz than The Marvels, the supposed sequel to not just 2019’s Captain Marvel but also an extension of two Marvel television series from the Disney streaming service. The film has had its release delayed three times, rumors abound that heavy portions were re-shot, and its own director, Nia DeCosta (2021’s Candyman), had already moved on to starting her next project while her last movie was still being finished in post-production (to her defense, the movie was delayed three times). The opening weekend wasn’t kind, setting an all-time low for the MCU, and the critical and fan reception was rather dismal, with many calling the movie proof that Marvel was in trouble. There is a lot going against this movie, and yet when I actually sat and watched The Marvels, I found it a flawed but fun B-movie that doesn’t deserve its intense pile-on. Although, caution dear reader, as I’m also one of the seemingly few critics who enjoyed Black Widow and most of Eternals as well.
Carol Danvers a.k.a. Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) has been absent for most of the past 30 years, trying to do right by the universe’s many alien civilizations in need. The people of Earth also feel a little left behind, notably Monica Lambeau (Teyonah Parris), who knew Carol as a child in the 1990s and is now acclimating to her own light-based superpowers (see: WandaVision). A power-hungry Kree warrior, Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton, Tom Hiddelston’s wife in real life), is seeking a way to restore a home world for her people. She finds one super-powerful weapon, a bangle she wears on her arm that opens interstellar portals. The other bangle happens to belong to a New Jersey teenager, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a first generation Pakistani-American who also moonlights as the bangled-powered hero, Ms. Marvel (see: Ms. Marvel). Through strange circumstances, Kamala, Monica, and Carol are all linked by their powers, so if one of them uses said powers they happen to swap places in space, teleporting from three different points. It makes it really hard when you’re supposed to save the day and work together to defeat the bad guy.
The core dynamic of the movie is this trio of powerful women learning to work together, and while that might sound trite for the thirty-third movie in a colossal franchise, it’s a serviceable arc for a movie that only runs 100 minutes, the shortest in MCU history. The swift running time is both a help and a hindrance, but it allows the film not to overstay its welcome while juggling three lead characters and multiple space-time-hopping action set pieces. I wish Marvel could return to an era of telling smaller stories that don’t have to feel so grandiose, with personal stakes tied more to their characters than saving the planet yet again (2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming is a great example). Even though this too falls into the trap of world-destroying-energy-hole, it still feels lighter and breezier, and I think that is a result of its pacing and lowered ambitions. That’s not an insult to the filmmakers, more a recognition that The Marvels doesn’t have to compete with the likes of Endgame or the Guardians for emotional stakes. It can just be fun, and simply being a fun and well-paced action movie is fine. That’s what the MCU diet can use more of, especially considering the Ant-Man movies have transformed from palate cleansers to same-old bombast.
On the flip side, the speedy running time is also a very real indication of its troubled production and the attempt to salvage multiple versions into one acceptable blockbuster. There are signs of heavy editing and re-shoots throughout, from lots of ADR dialogue hiding actors visibly mouthing these patchwork lines, to world-building problems and solutions that can seem hazy. The rationale for why these three women become linked is so contrived that even Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) bemoans Carol not to touch a strange unknown space light because it’s shiny. The concept of the three heroes being linked by their powers offers plenty of fun moments, of which I’ll go into more detail soon, but the execution left me questioning. Which superpower use qualified and which did not? It seems a little arbitrary which powers using light trigger the switcheroo. I don’t think the movie even knows. There’s also a late solution that feels so obvious that characters could have been like, “Oh yeah, we could have tried that this whole time.” A reasonable excuse was right within reach, blaming the inability to attempt the solution on not having sufficient power before assembling both of the bangle MacGuffins. It also, curiously, allows the villain to win in spite of her vengeful indiscriminate killing, but don’t think too much about that or its possible real-world parallels as that will only make you feel dramatically uncomfortable.
There are remnants of what must have been a fuller movie of Marvels’ past, as each character has an intriguing element that goes relatively under-developed. Monica was gone thanks to Thanos while her mother died and is also trying to square her feelings of resentment for Carol, a woman she felt so close to as a child who flew away and didn’t return for decades. So we have attachment issues and issues of closure. Carol is likewise trying to rebuild her relationship with this little girl she let down, and she has to also consider the unintended consequences of being a superhero. The Kree worlds refer to Carol as “The Annihilator,” a powerful being that doomed their civilization. She’s become a culture’s nightmare. That re-framing of heroism and perspective, as well as the larger collateral damage of the innocents from defeating villains makes for an interesting psychological stew of guilt and doubt and moral indecision. Then there’s Kamala, who worships Captain Marvel as her personal hero and wants nothing more than to join the ranks of superheroes. Her rosy version of the duties of being a hero could be seriously challenged by the harsher reality, like when Carol has to determine that saving “some lives” is more important than losing all life to save more. She could become disillusioned with her heroes and re-examine her concepts of right and wrong. And there are elements of all these storylines with our trio but they’re only shading at best. There’s just not enough time to delve into this drama when the movie needs to keep moving.
However, the fun of the body-swapping concept leads to some of the more enjoyable and creative action sequences in the MCU. DeCosta really taps into the fun comedy but also the ingenuity of characters jumping places rapidly. It begins in a disorienting and goofy way, as characters jump in and out of different fights and have to adapt. It makes for a fun sequence where at any moment the action can be shaken up, as well as forcing there to be enough action going on for three people. This also leads to some interesting dangers, as Kamala gets zapped high above her neighborhood and plummets to the ground, as these are the dangers when your two other linked superheroes can fly. The use of the powers into the action feels well thought through, and the combination of the women working together and strategizing when and where to swap places makes for creatively satisfying resolutions. The action sequences are also very clearly staged and edited without the use of jarring and confusing edits. You can clearly see what is happening and what is important, and the choreography is imaginatively spry.
There are some asides to this movie that had me smiling and laughing and just plain happy. The Marvels visit a planet where the only way to communicate with the locals is through song, and it starts out like a big old school Hollywood musical with some Bollywood flourishes. I wish the movie had done even more with this wonderfully goofy rule, possibly even setting a fight sequence that also plays into the musical quality of the weird setting. Oh well, but it was pure fun and forced the characters outside of a comfort zone (though this too had some hazy rules application). There’s also a montage involving alien cats and a life-saving and space-saving solution that had me giggling like crazy (my extra appreciation for the ironic use of “Memory”). It’s because of these sequences, the delightful exuberance of Vellani, and the above-average action sequences that make it impossible for me to dismiss the movie as a waste.
The Marvels has problems, sure, with its lackluster villain, some hazy rule-setting and application, not to mention an overstuffed plot that feels a bit jumbled from the likes of twenty other stories trying to appear as one semi-unified whole. But it’s also fun, light, and entertaining in its best moments, and even the good moments outweigh the bad in my view. I would gladly re-watch this movie over the likes of Multiverse of Madness, Love and Thunder, and Quantumania. While it can seem initially overwhelming to approach, the movie does a workable job to catch up its audience on who the other Marvels happen to be just in case you didn’t watch 17 episodes of two different TV shows. It’s mid-tier Marvel but refreshingly comfortable as such, only aiming for popcorn antics and goofy humor with some colorful visuals. It all feels like a special event from a Saturday morning cartoon, which again might be faint praise to many. Blame it on my lowered expectations, blame it on my superhero fandom, or simply call me a contrarian lashing out against what seems a very ugly strain of vitriol for this movie to fail, but I found The Marvels to be a perfectly enjoyable 100 minutes of super team-up tomfoolery.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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The Killer (2023)
Were you even aware that David Fincher had a new movie? The celebrated director has been very mercurial since 2014’s Gone Girl, only helming one other movie. His partnership with Netflix has afforded the notoriously perfectionist director a lot of creative latitude, though sadly not a third season of Mindhunter. But even the artistic cache of a new Fincher movie isn’t enough for Netflix to change its business model. The Killer only played in theaters for two weeks before beaming into millions of homes. You would think this streaming giant would want to leverage its big names and their new projects, but I’m reminded of how much money Netflix likely left aside forgoing Glass Onion’s theatrical run. Alas, The Killer is an intriguing if cold and unsatisfying thriller that epitomizes the limits of surface-level living.
Our titular killer (Michael Fassbender) is hired to kill a Parisian businessman and botches the job. He’s on the run and fears for his well-being from his employers wanting to eliminate any loose ends. His girlfriend in the Dominican Republic is beaten and threatened, and the lead killer realizes he’s going to have to out-kill all the other killers after him if his loved ones don’t get killed. Through five chapters, each ending in a death, the killer works his way up the food chain.
Fincher is attempting to strip out the movie-cool mythos of the world of hired assassins, to subvert the entertainment value that can come with expert murderers leading to blood and death. The Killer is Fincher’s stubborn subversion of what a trained assassin movie should be, and his main takeaway, beyond stripping the misplaced glamor from the profession, is how tedious it would all be in real life. In the movie world, being a trained killer involves all sorts of exciting derring-do and acrobatics and the like. In the possible real world, being a trained killer is more like a paid security guard; it’s a lot of protracted sitting and waiting and watching, and it’s easy to understand just how overwhelmingly boring all this would be. The opening twenty minutes quite convincingly strips the cool factor away from this profession. It doesn’t make you feel the weight of the culpability, like 2018’s You Were Never Really Here (more on that later), but what it makes you feel is just how maddening and boring this whole job must be and what kind of dedicated people would succeed. It’s like Fincher is making a bet with a mainstream audience that he can find a way to make a boring assassin movie, and while doing so can be seen as subversive to some degree, bleeding much of the thrills out of the picture, it also feels like a bet gone wrong. You made the main character boring on purpose to prove a point, but regardless of intent, your protagonist is still boring. Victory?
As physically inactive as Act One proves, watching our title killer sit and wait and watch, it is conversely hyperactive in narration. This is wall-to-wall narration as our lead character expounds upon his regiment to keep his mind and body ready when his eventual window materializes. It reminded me of the narration of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, about his methodical lifestyle routines. Except that character was being satirized from their first moments, whereas the emptiness of our killer here is the larger point, that he’s fashioned himself into an unfeeling weapon. Here is a character that feels he is only effective if he strips everything human away, if he only focuses on the job regardless of politics or consequences, and lives his spartan existence. I’m sure he envisions himself as some noble modern-day samurai, living a code others cannot keep. Except the movie reveals throughout that he might not be the best killer in the phone book. First off, he misses shooting his target, which sets everything into motion. All his narration about focus and yoga and dedication and even I know you shouldn’t fire while someone else is in front of your target. There’s a jarring scene where he fires nails into the lungs of a character and theorizes the man has six or seven minutes left to live before his lungs fill up. Nope. The man dies within one minute max. For all his resourcefulness, which is benefited by the long reach of capitalism, the man also doesn’t live up to his self-image. His paranoia keeps him from returning to his home on time and allows the attack on his girlfriend to happen in his absence. There might be an even deeper commentary on how even the lead is confusing his life for a movie.
My favorite scene is a sit down with a competing hired hitman played by Tilda Swinton (Three Thousand Years of Longing). She’s one of the two competing assassins responsible for targeting his girlfriend, so she presents a threat. He meets her at a fancy restaurant and she already accepts that she will not be making it to dessert. She is the exact opposite of our main character, a woman who has found a way to live a normal life in the suburbs, marry a man, and enjoy the luxuries of a life afforded by her wealth. She’s not living out of storage units or purposely dressing like a German tourist to stay under the radar. In some ways, this has allowed our more single-minded assassin to get the jump on her, to take advantage of her complacency. However, it’s also an indictment on the stripped-down, isolationist life our lead killer has prioritized. Here is a woman who has embraced allowing herself to enjoy things. She’s not eating McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches minus the slimy egg patty. She’s not slumming it for her “art.” She sees no value in abstinence. This stark contrast, as well as a sustained conversation between two foes, is the highlight of the film. It’s also interesting to watch Swinton’s character go through her own mini-grieving process accepting the likelihood that this will be her final meal, and so she savors it without fear.
Being a David Fincher movie, you can rightly assume that the technical elements are nearly flawless. The visual arrangements are beautiful, the cinematography is chilly and atmospheric, and the editing is precise and smooth. The first attempted kill has a nice degree of tension simply from shifting audio levels, going from diegetic to narration, never allowing the viewer to properly adjust during such a heightened point of paying attention. It’s naturally unsettling and effectively raises the tension of a moment we’ve been waiting over twenty minutes to arrive. There is an extended hand-to-hand fight sequence that’s exceptionally well choreographed and carries on from room to room, transforming with each new location and utilizing the geography of each space nicely (the John Wick folks would approve). The overall movie feels more in keeping with the likes of Fincher’s Panic Room or The Game, a more straightforward thriller that lacks simply extra levels and commentary, like Zodiac or Gone Girl. There’s nothing wrong with a well-executed and developed thriller purely designed to be a good time. It’s just at this stage of Fincher’s career, the expectations are raised, fairly or unfairly, with every new release. The Killer is a polished thriller meant to be pared down to its essential parts and can be enjoyed as such.
There is little to hold onto here emotionally though, so we’re left with the intellectual curiosity of watching a so-called professional go about their business and see how he gets around obstacles. Very often it’s dressing up in a delivery outfit and simply waiting on other polite strangers to open doors for his unassuming facade. One could argue that the character arc is about a man who rejects empathy, argues that it is weakness, comes around to accept empathy, and embraces it on his way out. I can see some of this, as the motivation for his trail of vengeance is to protect his loved one from being harmed again. There’s even a moment where he demonstrates a sliver of sympathy to a victim, albeit still utilizing gruesome violence. Except I don’t believe that easy assessment of this being a journey of embracing empathy. This doesn’t come across as a character changing who they are but instead as a character cleaning up their own mess. The main character keeps reiterating to “stick to the plan, don’t improvise,” but I don’t think he’s reflecting at any point on his actions beyond a clinical cause-effect relationship. He’s stripped all the complexities of humanity out from himself but recognizing fault isn’t the same as building and maintaining a sense of empathy. I also think the reading that many critics are making of Fincher standing in for the main character, a dedicated tactician who tries to do it all, is a little too cute and desperate for meta-narratives to derive a better lens to analyze the overall vacancy of the lead character.
This is very different from Lynn Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, a film that also subverted the same hitman sub-genre and made the audience re-examine its own bloodlust. As I wrote in 2018: “The focus of the movie is on the man committing the acts of violence rather than how stylish and cool and cinematic those acts of violence can be. …Ramsay offers discorded images and brief flashes and asks the audience to put together the pieces to better understand Joe as a man propelled and haunted by his bloody past…. It’s not all tragedy and inescapable dread. Amidst Joe’s tortured past and troubled future, there’s a necessary sense of hope. You don’t know what will happen next but you’re not resigned to retrograde nihilism.” This is not the feeling I took from The Killer, and I recommend everyone watch Ramsay’s movie too.
The problem with making a boring assassination thriller on purpose is that, at the end of the day, you still have a boring assassination thriller. Fassbender (who hasn’t been on screen since 2019’s Dark Phoenix killed the X-Men franchise) can be compelling for two hours doing just about anything, and a performance that is minimal in spoken dialogue does not mean a minimal performance. He’s great to sit and watch, the running commentary of his narration serving as a starting point to assess all the concentrated, nuanced acting under the surface. The Killer has sheen and skill, much like its title character, but it too also misses the mark where it counts.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
As an elder millennial, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been a formative franchise for me. I grew up on the cartoon, got the toys for Christmas, died endlessly during the shockingly hard underwater stage of their Nintendo video game, and generally have a soft spot in my 80s nostalgia for the likes of Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo, plus their surrogate father, Master Splinter. Apparently Seth Rogen felt the same way, and he and his writing partner Evan Goldberg have spearheaded a new animated variation of TMNT that just so happens to also be co-written and directed by the man behind my favorite film of 2021, The Mitchells vs. The Machines. It was a recipe to guarantee my personal enjoyment, and Mutant Mayhem thusly delivered. The biggest selling point for me was how lovingly realized the “teenage” part of the title was, getting a foursome of actual adolescents to portray our heroes, and using high school experience about acceptance and fitting in as effective and even poignant parallels. I loved just hanging out with these characters, who view their surrogate dad (voied by Jackie Chan) with a mixture of love and embarrassment, and who want to be accepted by a world predisposed to finding them monstrous. Naturally, becoming crime-fighting heroes is their best method for winning over the public, with a young and aspiring journalist April O’Neil (The Bear‘s Ayo Edebiri) hoping to improve her own social standing at school by breaking the existence of these unknown mutants. The comedy is robust and layered while allowing for nice character details and moments, giving each turtle their own satisfying arc. The action is fun and inventively staged while still being thematically relevant. The vocal cast is great, and the young actors are tremendous together, sparking an enviable improvisational energy that made me smile constantly. The art style has an intentional messiness to it, like smeared colored pencil drawings, and the imperfections are themselves part of the vast visual appeal. It’s a family movie that will succeed with old fans and new, and Mutant Mayhem is the best film depiction yet of the famous heroes in a half-shell.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 (2023)
It’s taken me longer to review the third, and reportedly final, installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy because I didn’t think that I nor my family had the emotional bandwidth when the movie was originally released to herald the summer. I’ve been a big fan of writer/director James Gunn’s comic book escapade efforts with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), as well as his first DC entry, 2021’s The Suicide Squad, the best DC film of the new era, so I’ve been highly anticipating a third Gaurdians ever since the second ended six years ago. Of course all fans have had to wait a little longer after Disney fired Gunn in 2019 for offensive social media posts they already knew about before the first Guardians film in 2014, and then they came to their senses and re-hired one of the most unique voices working within their giant sandbox of superheroes. The reason I decided to wait even longer is because I had been warned by many of my critical colleagues about the heavy thematic nature of the third entry, namely the frequent sequences of animal abuse. My family had to put down their household dog of over ten years in late April, and having to re-open that wound by watching pretend animals get abused was not the best for any of our emotional states. And so I waited until it was available on digital and in the comfortable sanctity of my home, and I alone in my family watched Volume Three, partly as a harbinger of future warning over what scenes to skip over for them. It’s a fitting end to a strange and funky series of movies that taught us to feel real emotions over racoons and trees, and even though I’d rate this as last in its respective Guardians standing, it’s still a winner and a topical reminder that these big-budget blockbusters are only ever as good as when the passion is evident.
The Guardians are on a mission to save their friend, Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper). He’s been incapacitated and is sought after by his creator, The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a maniacal man with a god complex who is trying to create a perfect life form. This forces the Guardians to learn more about Rocket’s tragic past as a cruel science experiment, and it brings back Gomorrah (Zoe Saldana), though she’s not the same woman who fell in love with Peter Quill (Christ Pratt), and he’s having a hard time reconciling the different green girls. They’ll have to work together to rescue Rocket and stop the High Evolutionary from further harm.
This is a movie built around the back-story and emotional connections of Rocket, a character that, prior to Gunn’s first film, had fewer than a dozen comic appearances but has had an outsized influence over the movies. If the first movie was about the formation of our team, and the second was deepening the supporting characters, as well as exploring Quill’s daddy issues, then the last movie is all about how we say goodbye to the ones we love. Volume Three is clearly structured like Gunn’s fond farewell for these characters rather than merely a pause in their contractually obligated appearances (whether Marvel overrules Gunn is another matter). It makes the interaction more meaningful and also more emotionally rich, not just because certain characters might perish, but because of the journey we’ve been privileged to hop along for, how far they’ve come and how much they matter to others, and by extension us, the audience.
Case in point: the emotional evolution of Rocket Racoon. He began as a surly visual joke, a teeny mammal with a big gun and a big attitude. It wasn’t until a drunken outburst in Volume One that you got a glimpse of the trauma and pain beneath that antisocial demeanor. With Volume Three, he gets sidelined pretty early, which means the majority of the time we spend with Rocket is through a series of flashbacks with baby Rocket and his cute pals, all ongoing science experiments (one needs only to recognize the absence of these childhood friends as grown-ups to anticipate where this is inevitably heading). In some ways, it is cheap and manipulative. It’s not hard to make an audience feel extreme emotions by introducing a slew of adorable animals as well as a villain who hurts them and sees them as expendable experiments undeserving of sympathy. I wish Gunn hadn’t gone so hard in this direction because it feels excessive in the ideas that the film bluntly communicates. Yes, a storyteller will need time to establish a baseline of relationships, conflicts, and looming change, but do we need six or seven flashbacks to settle the concept of animal testing and animal cruelty being a bad thing? I credit Gunn with making his thematic intent unambiguous; this is wrong, and you will feel it explicitly. However, sidelining Rocket for a majority of the movie and having characters project onto his unconscious body, while providing more insight through a system of excessive and heavy-handed flashbacks, might not be the best model for ensuring this character gets his due when it comes to this showcase. Quill keeps calling Rocket his “best friend” and I’m trying to remember when this happened. I re-watched Volume Two this summer, and now consider it the best of the trilogy, and I cannot recall the specific events that bonded these two bickering alphas into inter-species BFFs.
Another facet of Gunn’s relevant themes is personified in the romantic realizations of Quill. Not to get too complicated, the current Gomorrah is a past version of herself and not the one who joined the Guardians, fell in love with Quill, and died in Infinity War. She’s back, but from her perspective she never left, and this moon-eyed dolt keeps projecting his feelings onto her. I respect that Gunn doesn’t try and wave away this complication, nor does he mitigate the agency and importance of this Gomorrah not having to follow the same path as her predecessor. The easy thing would have been for Quill to wait and for this new/old Gamorrah to see the same qualities that made the old/dead Gomorrah fall in love. It would be like one of those soapy romances where a person suffers amnesia and gets to fall in love with their spouse all over again. Gunn doesn’t do that. These are different people, and despite the aching desire of Quill to rekindle what he had, it has been lost, and this needs to be acknowledged and accepted. “I bet we were fun,” she says, and it’s a bittersweet summation that extends beyond the Guardians.
There is still Gunn’s signature sense of style and humor while checking the boxes of a big-screen action blockbuster. There’s an infiltration set piece that plays like a goofier Mission: Impossible setup but in a squishy bio-mechanical facility that reminded me of the eccentric and schlocky sci-fi diversions personified in the Lexx movies and TV series. There’s an entire planet of animal-human hybrids that feels wasted as further proof of the High Evolutionary’s already established evil. The entire character of Adam Warlock (a beefed up Will Poulter) is a himbo that definitely feels lacking in larger purpose now that the Infinity Era is over. There is one signature action scene involving a protracted fight through a crowded hallway, and it’s exciting and fun. The jokes are mostly contained to sardonic banter, which can be hilarious depending upon the combination of characters, though it also can be grating when it feels forced, like Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) butting heads. The celebrated dad rock soundtrack has moved onto 90s and early 2000s music, and as a 90s kid, it gave me a personal nostalgic lift watching scenes jamming to dreamy whoo-hoo alt-rock acts like Radiohead and Spacehog and The Flaming Lips.
This also might be the grossest MCU movie yet, and not just from the animal abuse but a face-peeling scene that will startle most. I had to pause the screen and drag my 12-year-old stepdaughter into the room with the promise, “Want to see the grossest thing ever in a Marvel movie?” She agreed that it was indeed that. It’s reassuring that no matter the budget, Gunn’s sensibilities that make him the unique storyteller he is, the same man who began with Troma, will be there. Though this point also concerns several of my friends wondering if Gunn can abandon these silly and schlocky tendencies to tell an earnest and tonally appropriate tale for his 2025 Superman reboot.
Guardians of the Galaxy volume 3 is the end of an era for Gunn and for the MCU. As the new head of the DC film and TV universe, it’s unlikely he’ll be lending his talents to Marvel any time soon, although the characters he made us fall in love with could carry on. Gunn clearly loves these characters, and especially identifies with Rocket, the angry malcontent lashing out in pain, so it’s fitting to give this character the big stage for a final outing, and if he can throw in some animal cruelty messaging along with silly humor and pathos, then so be it. This practically feels like Marvel is giving Gunn even more leeway as an apology for firing him. The Guardians trilogy stands out from the prolific MCU assembly because of how much Gunn has personalized these movies to make them special. They have permission to be weird, to be heartfelt, and to be reflections of their idiosyncratic creator, a much more benevolent force than the High Evolutionary. Perhaps there’s even a parallel to be drawn there, a filmmaker trying to endlessly tinker with their creation in the futile pursuit of perfecting it whereas the imperfections and rough edges are often the lasting appeal of a movie. I don’t know if the MCU will contain a series quite like this again, and that adds to the feeling of this serving as a farewell. It was a fun, messy, ridiculous ride, and it was all Gunn.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Nimona (2023)
Based on the graphic novel by ND Stevenson (She-Ra), itself a web comic from 2012-2014, Nimona was developed by Blue Sky Animation Studios and originally scheduled to be released in 2020, and then Disney bought Fox, shut down Blue Sky, and pushed back against the gay content of Nimona before just canceling it altogether in 2021, and then Netflix came in and saved the project and released it, gay and all, during the last day of Pride Month. It’s been a long, protracted journey for Nimona to get to your screen and, reader, it was worth it. The movie is a rambunctious and revisionist fairy tale that is both subversive and deeply sincere, enough so that an emotional confrontation of accepting someone on their own terms elicited genuine tears on my part (for those keeping record, that’s three straight animated movies in the month of June that caused me to cry). Nimona (voiced superbly by Chloe Grace Moretz) is a high-energy prankster in a fantasy world melding Medieval culture with future technology. She befriends a fellow outsider, Ballister (voiced by Riz Ahmed), after the kingdom views him as a wanted villain. Together, they try and clear Ballister’s name by finding the real killer, and maybe they can wreck some stuff too just for fun. The cell-shaded style, a familiar aesthetic in the realm of video games, adds a bright and slickly appealing quality to the animation, and the frenetic pace and anarchic humor keep the movie bristling with entertainment, while the emotional core (vulnerable outcasts finding community) sneaks up on you and delivers a more resonating climactic finish than simply vanquishing a baddie. The ending even has rich thematic notes of The Iron Giant, which is never a bad influence. The queer content is also treated without sensationalism and treated as any other aspect of human compassion. The heart and message are just as impressive as the visuals and the humor. Nimona is a funny all-ages adventure that deserves its big screen moment after its long gestation.
Nate’s Grade: B
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The Flash (2023)/ Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Released within two weeks of one another, two big summer movies take the concept of a multiverse, now becoming the norm in comic book cinema, and explore the imaginative possibilities and wish-fulfillment that it proposes, but only one of them does it well. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the sequel to the Oscar-winning 2018 revolutionary animated film, and it’s a glorious and thrilling and visually sumptuous experience, whereas DC’s much-hyped and much-troubled movie The Flash feels like a deflated project running in place and coming apart. Let this be a lesson to any studio executive, that multiverses are harder than they look.
Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) has the ability to travel at fantastic speeds as his superhero alter ego, The Flash. He’s tired of being the Justice League’s errand boy and still fighting to prove his father is innocent of the crime of killing Barry’s mother. Then Barry discovers he can run fast enough to actually travel back in time, so he returns with the intention of trying to save his mother. Except now he’s an extra Flash and has to train his alternate self (also Miller) how to control his powers. In this different timeline, there is no Justice League to combat General Zod (Michael Shannon, so thoroughly bored) from destroying the planet for Kryptonians.
This is the first big screen solo outing for The Flash, and after none other than Tom Cruise, Stephen King, and James Gunn calling it one of the best superhero movies of all time, it’s hard to square how trifling and mediocre so much plays out as an example of a creative enterprise being pulled in too many directions. Miller was cast as the speedster almost ten years ago, and this tale has gone through so much tortured development, leaping through numerous filmmakers and writers, that its purpose has now gone from being a pillar of the expanding DC cinematic universe began with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel in 2013 to becoming the Snyderverse’s death knell. The premise of traveling back in time is meant for Barry to learn important lessons about grief and responsibility and the limits of his powers, but it’s also intended as the reboot option for the future of these cross-connected comic franchises. It allows Gunn, now the co-head of the new way forward for DC movies and TV, to keep what they want (presumably Margot Robbie and Jason Momoa) and ditch the rest (Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, Black Adam, Shazam, and Zack Snyder’s overall creative influence). So reviewing The Flash as only a movie is inadequate; it’s also a larger ploy by its corporate overlords to reset their comic book universe. In that regard, the quality level of the movie is secondary to its mission of wiping the creative slate clean.
Where the movie works best is with its personal stakes and the strange but appealing chemistry between the two Millers. It’s an easy starting point to understand why Barry does what he does, to save his mother. This provides a sturdy foundation to build a character arc, with Barry coming to terms with accepting his grief rather than trying to eradicate it. That stuff works, and the final talk he has to wrap up this storyline has an emotional pull that none of the other DCU movies have exhibited. Who wouldn’t want one last conversation with a departed loved one, one last opportunity to say how you feel or to even tell them goodbye? This search for closure is a relatable and an effective vehicle for Barry to learn, and it’s through his tutelage of the other Barry that he gets to see beyond himself. The movie is at its best not with all its assorted cameos and goofy action (more on both later) but when it’s a buddy comedy between the two Barrys. The older Barry becomes a mentor to himself and has to teach this inexperienced version how to hone and control his powers as well as their limits. It puts the hyper-charged character into a teaching position where he has to deal with a student just like him (or just him). It serves as a soft re-education for the audience alongside the other Barry without being a full origin story. The impetuous young Barry wanting to have everything, and the elation he feels about his powers, can be fun, but it’s even more fun with the older Barry having to corral his pupil. It also allows the character an interactive checkpoint for his own maturity and mental growth. Miller’s exuberant performances are quite entertaining and never fail to hit the comedy beats.
The problem is that the movie puts so much emphasis on too many things outside of its titular hero. Much was made of bringing back Keaton to reprise his Batman after 30 years. I just wish he came back for a better reason and had legitimate things to add. His role is that of the retired gunslinger being called back into action, and there’s an innate understanding with Barry wanting to go back in time and save his family, but too much of this character’s inclusion feels like a stab at stoking audience nostalgia (the callback lines all made me groan). I highly enjoyed Keaton as Batman and appreciated how weird he could make the billionaire-turned-vigilante, but he’s no more formed here than a hologram. The same thing happens with the inclusion of Super Girl a.k.a. Kara Zor-El (Sasha Callie). In this universe, there is no Superman, so she’s our requisite super-powered alien that Zod is hunting to complete his plans for terraforming Earth. She’s an intriguing character as a tortured refugee who has lingering doubts about whether humanity is worth the sacrifice, but much of her usage is meant only to make us think about Superman. She’s not given material to make her own impression, so she simply becomes the imitation of the familiar, the shadow to the archetype already being left behind. But these character additions aren’t even the worst of the nostalgia nods, as the final climactic sequence involves a collision of worlds that harkens to just about every iteration of the famous DC heroes, resurrecting several with dodgy CGI and uncomfortable implications (spoilers… the inclusion of George Reeves, when he felt so typecast as TV’s Superman that he supposedly killed himself because he thought his acting career was over, can be galling).
The action of The Flash is mostly fine but with one exceptional example that boggles my mind. In the opening sequence, no less, Barry is trying to help clean up a crumbling hospital when it collapses and literally sends a reign of babies falling through the air. I was beside myself when this happened, horrified and then stupefied that this absurd action sequence was actually happening. Barry goes into super speed to save the day, which more or less reverts the world into super slow-mo, though he needs to power up first, so we get a quick edit of him stuffing food into his face to load up on calories. We go from Barry breaking into a falling vending machine, stuffing himself in the face with snacks, getting the green light from his suit which I guess measures his caloric intake, and then grab a baby and literally put it in a microwave to shield it from danger. Just describing this event makes me feel insane. I figure the filmmakers were going for an over-the-top approach that also provides light-hearted goofiness to separate the movie from the oppressively dark grist of Snyder’s movies. However, this goes so far into the direction of absurdity that it destroys its credibility. It’s hard for me to fathom many watching this misguided and horrifying CGI baby-juggling sequence and say, “Yes, more please,” rather than scoff and shake their head. It’s not like the rest of the movie keeps to this tone either, which makes the sequence all the more baffling. There are Flash rules that are inconsistently applied to the action; Barry’s caloric intake is never a worry again, and the effects of moving a person during super speed don’t ever seem to be a problem except for one spewing gross-out gag.
While not being an unmitigated disaster, it’s hard for me to see the movie that got so many figures in the entertainment industry raving. The Flash has some notable emotional stakes, some amusing buddy comedy, and some goofy special effects sequences that run the gamut from amusing to confounding, but it’s also quite a mess of a movie, and too many of its nods to the fandom feel like empty gestures of nostalgia compensating for imagination. For all it gets right, or at least keeps interesting, it seems like another cog in a multi-billion-dollar machine, a stopping point also intended to be a reset and starting point. It feels like the character wasn’t trusted enough by the studio to lead his own solo movie even after years of buildup with Miller, nine seasons of the popular TV series, and 80-plus years of prominent placement in DC comics.
Conversely, Across the Spider-Verse is a sequel that expands an already stuffed story but knows what stories and themes to elevate so they don’t get lost amidst the fast-paced lunacy. Taking place a year later, Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) has grown into his role as the new Spider-Man for his world. He strains to meet the expectations of his parents, and keep up his grades, while fulfilling the duties of a superhero jumping into danger. When Gwen Stacey (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) reappears to discuss joining the multiverse police, Miles jumps at the chance, having genuinely missed his other Spider friends, especially Gwen. There are countless Spider people in countless worlds, even including a Spider-T. Rex and a Spider-Car (Peter Parked Car, I believe the name was). Miguel O’Hara (voiced by Oscar Isaac) is the Spider-Man tasked with keeping order across the many interconnected multiverses, and he insists that sacrifice is essential to maintain balance, one that hits too close to home for Miles to abide.
The 2018 original is a hard act to follow, and while Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t quite overrule its predecessor it is a more than worthy sequel that has everything fans loved about the first trip. The visual inventiveness has been taken even higher, with the mixture of even more different animation and art styles. I loved seeing each Spider person and how they fit into their unique art style of their world, like the living water colors of Gwen’s world and the punky paper collage style of Spider-Punk (voiced by Daniel Kaluuya). There’s a villain that comes from a paper universe, so he resembles a three-dimensional paper construction with hand-scribbled notes appearing around him like Da Vinci’s commentary. There is something to dazzle your senses in every second of this movie. The visuals are colorful, creative, and groundbreaking with the level of detail and development. There’s probably even too much to fully take in with just one viewing. I want to see the movie again not just because it’s outstanding but so I can catch the split-second vernacular asterisk boxes that pop up throughout the movie. Going further into living comic book aesthetics, new characters will be introduced with boxes citing their comics issue reference point, and certain names and vocab will get their own citations as well. These are split-second additions, nothing meant to distract from the larger narrative. Simply put, this is one of the most gorgeous looking movies of all time, animated or live action. It’s bursting, thrumming, nearly vibrating with life and love stuffed into every nook and cranny, and it’s exhilarating to just experience a vivid, thriving world with animators operating at peak talent.
However, the movie has an engrossing story to better position all those eye-popping visuals. The worry with any modern multiverse story is that the unlimited possibilities of variations and opportunities for characters to do just about anything will overwhelm a narrative, or like The Flash, become a checklist of overburdened and empty fan service. The screenplay by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Dave Callaham is all about relationships. If Miles’ relationship with his stern police lieutenant father (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry) wasn’t such an important focal point, then the emotional stakes of the movie would be meaningless. We see a relatable struggle from both sides, the parents trying to connect with their growing child and give him enough space to find himself, and the child who clearly loves his parents but doesn’t fully appreciate or understand their concerns. They worry about Miles leaving them and whether others will love and support him like his parents. Miles has to experience a wider world of possibility, but these experiences make him appreciate what he has at home, and what could be permanently lost. I don’t mind saying there were more than a few moments that caused me to tear up. I found Gwen’s storyline equally compelling, and her turmoil over keeping her secret identity and then coming out to her father was rather moving. The family bond resurfacing will get me every time, and the simple action of a hug can be as heartwarming and fulfilling as any romantic ode. Across the Spider-Verse makes sure we care about the characters and their personal journeys.
At a towering 140 minutes, this is the longest (American) animated movie ever, and it’s still only one half of a larger story. I knew ahead of time this was only the first part so as soon as we entered Act Three I kept gearing up for the cliffhanger ending. Every five or so minutes I thought, “Okay, this is going to be the end,” and then it kept going, and I was relieved. Not just because I got to spend more time in this unique universe but each new moment added even more to raise the stakes, twist the intrigue, and make me excited for what could happen next. I was shaking in my seat at different points, from the excitement of different sequences to the emotional catharsis of other moments. I cannot wait to experience this same feeling when the story picks back up reportedly in March 2024, though I fear it will get delayed to late 2024.
Even with the unlimited possibility of jokes and silly mayhem, the filmmakers keenly understand that it doesn’t matter unless we care about the characters and their fates. I am shocked that a goofy character I thought was going to be a one-scene joke, The Spot (voiced by Jason Schwartzman), could end up becoming the ultimate destroyer of worlds. I think this reflection nicely summarizes the impeccable artistry of Across the Spider-Verse, where even the moments or characters misjudged as fleeting or inconsequential can be of great power. It’s a movie that is full of surprises and thrills and laughs, all in equal measure, and a blessed experience for a movie fan. In the crush of comic book multiverse madness, Across the Spider-Verse is a refreshing and rejuvenating creative enterprise, one that builds off the formidable talent of its predecessor and carries it even further into artistic excellence that reminds us how transporting movies can be. If you see one superhero multiverse movie this summer, the choice should be as obvious as an inter-dimensional spider bite.
Nate’s Grades:
The Flash: C
Across the Spider-Verse: A
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Ant-Man and the Wasp in Quantumania (2023)
Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has had a bumpy ride, coming after the significant climax of 2019’s Avengers Endgame and releases shifting thanks to COVID, with plenty of think pieces and pundits waiting to seize upon the possible decline of the MCU’s box-office and pop-culture dominance. This was still a phase with several enjoyable blockbusters with stars of old (Black Widow, Loki, Black Panther 2, Spider-Man No Way Home) and stars of new (Shang-Chi, Ms. Marvel), but it’s been defined by movies and series that have not engendered the same level of passion with fans and audiences, and left many questioning whether audiences are finally suffering from dreaded Marvel Fatigue. I cannot say, because even movies people were so-so on have generated tons of money, and it’s not like I even have to travel far in the past for a good-to-great Marvel movie with Wakanda Forever last November. However, after the muddled response to a third Ant-Man movie, as well as a bland Shazam sequel within weeks, then the old media narrative reignites the Marvel Fatigue question. I think the better question is aimed at the studio and whether we’re entering into Marvel Complacency.
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is trying to live a normal life, at least for a superhero that helped save the world. His adult daughter Cassie (recast as Kathryn Newton) is a social activist and a burgeoning scientific genius, and with the help of her grandad, Hank (Michael Douglas), they’ve developed a way to communicate into the Quantum Realm, the metaphysical world of subspace where Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) was lost for decades. The entire family gets sucked into the Quantum Realm and separated, fighting to make their way in a strange new land. Among all the unorthodox beings is Kang (Jonathan Chambers), a banished interdimensional conqueror. He’s looking to break free of his prison and thinks Scott can be persuaded to help under the right pressure.
Ant-Man and the Wasp in Quantumania is blatantly weird and shapeless, which allows for some of the most silly character designs in the MCU yet, and it also adds up to so precious little. From a character standpoint, we get minimal forward progress, which is strange considering Scott was deprived of years from his daughter, missing out on her growing up into an adult. When you have a villain who can manipulate space and time, and this scenario, wouldn’t you think that the ultimate appeal would be to regain that lost time? Maybe Scott feels like this older Cassie is a version of his daughter he doesn’t recognize, and he misses the innocence of her younger self, and therefore he wishes to experience those moments he had missed. Mysteriously, this doesn’t factor in at all with Ant-Man 3. I suppose it’s referenced in vague terms, but you would think the thematic heft of this movie would revolve around lessons learned about thinking in the past, of trying to recapture what is gone, of moving onward and trying to be present for those we love, you know, something meaningful for the characters besides victory. Nope, as far as Cassie is concerned, she serves two story purposes: 1) being a plot device for how we got into this crazy world, and 2) being a damsel in distress. Kang’s threats to withhold Cassie or harm her are the motivating factor for him to collaborate with the villain. How truly underwhelming. I did enjoy a sequence where a plethora of Scotts across multiple timelines come to work together with a common goal, with every one of the many Scott’s love for Cassie being their top ambition.
As for the universe existing between space, the Quantum Verse of our title, it’s the highlight of the movie, so if the characters and their personal conflicts aren’t hitting for you, like me, then at least there’s some fun diversions to be had with every new locale and introduction. There’s an enjoyable sense of discovery like a new alien world where the possibilities seem endless. The strange quirks were my favorite. I adored the exuberant goo creature Veb (David Dastmalchian) fascinated by other creatures having orifices. There’s also a mind reader played by William Jackson Harper, who was comically brilliant on The Good Place, and just repeating the same lazy joke here about people’s minds being gross. There’s even Bill Freakin’ Murray as a lord. I enjoyed how many of the new characters, many of them strange aliens, had prior relationships with Janet, and her hand-waving it away explaining that over thirty years she had certain needs. This subplot itself could have been given more. time, with Janet having to deflect Hank’s sexual inadequacies in the face of so many virile lovers (“How can I compete with a guy with broccoli for a head?”). I think this reunited couple confronting their discomfort would be far more entertaining than yet another massive CGI face-off with thousands of soulless robots. There are interesting moments and characters in this strange new world, but they’re all so fleeting, meant to be a goofy supporting character or cameo or simply a one-off joke and not what matters.
Like Multiverse of Madness and Love and Thunder, this feels very much like a table-setting MCU movie, meant to move the pieces along and set up other movies, chiefly the next Thanos-level big bad with Kang, first portrayed in Loki’s season one finale in 2021. I found this character version underwhelming. Part of this is that Kang’s first appearance was so memorable, spirited, anarchic, but also subversive, going against the audience expectations of what the final confrontation with the puppetmaster was going to involve. With Ant-Man 3, this version of Kang is an overly serious, well-poised castoff in a secondary Shakespeare play, which would work if the screenplay gave the guy anything interesting or memorable or even really threatening to play. He’s just another authoritarian who speaks in grand speeches of their greatness and then proves not to live up to his much-hyped billing. I worry that the next few years of the MCU will feature a rotating set of Kangs to topple with every film, which will make the villain feel less overwhelming and powerful and more like a reoccurring Scooby Doo villain (“I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you meddlin’ heroes, and YOUR ANTS!”). This isn’t to say that Majors (Creed III) gives a poor performance. It’s just so stubbornly stern and shouty and rather boring in comparison to He Who Remains from his Loki appearance. Note to Marvel: given the serious charges that have surfaced against Majors, if you do wish to recast the role, a character who is different in many universes should be a pretty easy explanation for any change.
Is Ant-Man and the Wasp in Quantumania the beginning of the end of the country’s love affair with the MCU? Well… probably not. Just three months later, Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 hit it big, so maybe it’s less fatigue with big screen superhero escapades and more fatigue with mediocre movies. Maybe the public won’t be so forgiving of less-than-stellar efforts, but at this point the MCU in a moving train and some movies seem to get caught in the churning wheels of “progress.” After thirty movies and counting, some of the novelty is gone, that means just delivering the same old won’t deliver the same old results. Too much of Ant-Man 3 feels like the characters are inhabiting a large and empty sound stage. The visuals are murky and gunky and less than inspiring, and while some of the special effects are occasionally dodgy, they aren’t the travesty that others have made them out to be (though MODOK is… something, I suppose). It’s such a dank-looking movie that it feels like somebody put the light settings on power saving. There were things I enjoyed but most of Quantumania left me indifferent, and that’s the feeling I got from the cast and crew as well. I dearly missed Michael Pena’s Luis, who should have gone along for the ride just for his commentary for all the weirdness. At this point, you’re along for the MCU ride or not, and this won’t deter your 15-year investment, but coasting on its laurels will also not satisfy anyone. Not every MCU entry will be great, but they can at least try harder.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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