DC comics movies continue to operate in the shadows of the Marvel juggernaut, but they’ve at least figured out how to avoid critical derision. Wonder Woman took stirring advantage of its place as the first female-led superhero film of the previous ten years, and Aquaman used a mythic, anything-goes approach to bludgeon its audience into awed submission. Both went back to the well-trod heroism well and left Zach Snyder’s overwrought approach, grasping futilely for insight, behind. With Shazam, DC continues its embrace of adolescent filmmaking with some old-fashioned wish fulfillment, while retaining, in pieces, the violent and dark tone from Snyder’s earlier output. This collision produces whiplash and makes it impossible for the very different parts of Shazam to work in harmony.
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Twenty-plus movies in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has had to rely less on the origin stories that fans have long been exhausted by. However, as the last ten years of superhero flicks gives way to the next hundred, new characters must be introduced, at least before CGI de-aging allows actors to portray superheroes well into their 70’s and Disney’s monopolistic growth captures the whole of Hollywood. Captain Marvel, the first female-led MCU film after twenty prior entries, is also the first origin story since the previous year’s critical and commercial juggernaut Black Panther. With that kind of immediate predecessor, Captain Marvel has very big shoes to fill. However, while the character herself might be the most powerful in the franchise, the film about her struggles to find a new way into a pattern that kids raised on Iron Man could now recite in their sleep.
Five years after its release, it remains impressive that The LEGO Movie managed to rise above its explicitly mercenary origins and distract viewers from an attempt to sell more toys. Some of this goodwill was surely generated by universal warm feelings towards the plastic Danish bricks, reminiscent of the wistfulness that greeted 2018’s Mr. Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor. In the intervening years, those warm feelings have been tested with two other LEGO movies and now a direct sequel. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part has the challenge of a stretched nostalgia, losing the meta surprise of its predecessor, and needing to build upon the madcap animation and comedy. With masterminds Phil Lord and Chris Miller out of the director’s chair in place of Mike Mitchell, the magic in this film isn’t fully replicated, as if several pages have been ripped out of the manual by an errant foot or a reckless younger sibling. The finished kit can still be achieved, but the builder is less confident it’s going to hold up.
Everyone’s favorite intergalactic trophy hunter, the Predator, shouldn’t be a difficult creature to build a movie around, but there’s somehow only been a single strong film about one of them and a string of mediocre follow-ups. Shane Black continues this tradition with The Predator, yet another entry that can’t measure up to the original. Having previously spent time in the jungle, the inner city, and a planetary game reserve, Black considers where the series hasn’t been yet and settles on suburbia, an environment that allows him and his impressive cast to hunt and be hunted on unimpressive grounds. The Predator doesn’t need to be bursting with ideas as the root premise is so simple, but this film lacks anything novel and the ideas it does have are terrible.
DC takes a big swing at Marvel with Aquaman by throwing everything possible at them in one tsunami of spectacle. The grandiosity of a shark vs giant crab clash of thousands, interrupted by no less than a leviathan voiced by Julie Andrews, exists alongside a fight for a fantastical throne, a revenge quest, a brief sojourn into an undersea horror flick, and a surprisingly earnest romance between a lighthouse keeper and an ocean queen played by Nicole Kidman. Director James Wan goes for the gusto in Aquaman, providing the movie equivalent of a joke dense half-hour sitcom: if you don’t like one massive setpiece, wait a few minutes for the next one.
The X-Men has always been my favorite set of superheroes. This group of mutants endured a tremendous amount of peaks and valleys throughout its inception. X-Men's greatest adaption - outside of the comics - was the 1990's cartoon television series. It was simply incredible. What made it great was severalfold but one of its high points was the Phoenix Saga. That story is so important to the show that it takes up most of season three and it worked because it was a continual series. Trying to repeat what happened in a television series in a two to three hour film is not only dangerous to the brand but also confusing to the audience.
Coinciding with the centennial of the end of WWI, the latest adaptation of the British play Journey’s End manages to remain potent and devastating, no matter how many casts and directors take a crack at it. So few films are set during this, the crucial event of the 20th century, that there may be some scarcity-induced grade elevation. It’s so important for audiences to consider a war that didn’t have simple good and evil dichotomies, but the material is so bleak and dreadful that it’s also understandable for studios to shy away from depictions of grinding trench warfare. Journey’s End might situate the viewer on the side of the eventual victors, but the film communicates the minimal comfort that status conveys.
Back in the mid-2000’s when Kevin Feige was first dreaming up the Marvel Cinematic Universe, did he know that everything would culminate in the 22nd entry in the franchise? This number just happens to coincide with the amount of episodes typically included in a network series of television, and Avengers: Endgame certainly feels like a season finale, with some characters saying goodbye and others beginning new arcs that will take them into season two. This blurring of media lines makes me somewhat uneasy for reasons I’m not completely sure of, but whether looked at as a single film or the artificial ending of a decade of big-budget, candy-colored filmmaking, Endgame does what the MCU has long been good at: satisfactorily entertain while making stabs at something deeper, most of which fall short because landing credible or coherent emotional beats aren’t required for their movies to be successful.
Joseph Kosinski sheds the high-flying science fiction of his earlier career to get down in the dirt for the gritty saga of Only the Brave. The director of Tron Legacy and Oblivion is on far firmer ground here, able to omit fantastical world-building in exchange for a surprising grasp of character and chemistry. In adapting the true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a crew of Southwestern wildfire fighters, Kosinski and writers Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer make an appealing and affecting tribute to benevolent masculinity, the kind that betters instead of levels and values self-knowledge instead of repression.
Tom Cruise’s efforts to distract from his high placement in Scientology while simultaneously advertising for its apparent rejuvenating powers continue with the sixth entry in the Mission Impossible franchise. A series that has continually topped itself with each entry, Mission Impossible: Fallout is the first to experience diminishing returns. Make no mistake; Christopher McQuarrie and his team are producing peak action filmmaking. Fallout contains what could be the best fight scenes, the best skydiving scenes, and the best land/air chases possible, but the bar has been raised so high by skyscraper climbs and underwater safe cracking that the best is no longer good enough. The film’s mastery of technique is appreciated, but it’s ingenuity that Mission: Impossible thrives on, and there’s just not enough of it here.
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