Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

***

As a child, my father would have Gamora and me battle one another in training. Every time my sister prevailed… my father would replace a piece of me with machinery, claiming he wanted me to be her equal. But she won… again and again, and again, never once refraining. So after I murder my sister, I will buy a warship with every conceivable instrument of death. I will hunt my father like a dog, and I will tear him apart slowly… piece by piece, until he knows some semblance of the profound and unceasing pain I knew every single day.

If you loved this movie and want to continue loving it, feel free to stop reading this review. This movie, in many ways, is the theatrical release of The Two Towers. That is to say that almost everything great about this movie was cashing in on the investment fans made through the quality of the first film. There are a couple of high points though, so I think I will Good, Bad, Ugly this.

The Good
Yondu’s character gets a chance to grow and to explain his prior actions. His story arc was good and moving.
Chris Pratt and co. are all as charming and amusing as ever and Kurt Russell was mostly a good addition.
Nebula–Karen Gillan–is in this movie and her relationship with Gamora–Zoe Saldana–is interesting, important to the plot of Avengers 3, and gets this film to pass the Bechdel Test.
Some of the CGI was really good and the Sovereign have a cool look.
Good music again.

The Bad
Sylvester Stallone’s hamfisted hamminess.
Some of the comedy feels tonally discordant with the action/drama on screen.
Baby Groot is more often annoying than cute.
Taserface’s savage turn with the Ravagers.
Some of the CGI, especially the Ego recaps.
The opening scene goes for funny and comes close, which made me worry that this was Age of Ultron again.

The Ugly
The child abuse scene where Baby Groot is tortured with water and has his cage shaken. It’s supposed to be showing that he is kind of brave and angry, but it is a prolonged and wholly unnecessary scene of child abuse. Oh the Ravagers are evil? Maybe when they senselessly and cruelly murdered half of their comrades while laughing sent that message already.
Mantis goes from being a fully fledged comic book character who can fight and speak in non-pathetic ways, to being a one dimensional tool of the story who seems vaguely racist against Asians and definitely sexist. She is meant to be the dumb yin to Drax’s dumb yang, but that does not work for her character because Drax has such a huge ego, while hers has no confidence and is extremely accommodating. They even took away her parents and made her just a thing created by Ego (the Celestial-planet, not the other kind). And how Drax, played for the audience’s laughter, just crushes her by calling her ugly over and over again.

Going through this has reminded me that there really was a lot about this film that I liked and that it was very well produced. But the better the rest of the film is, the more upsetting these two major offenses get. This is the James Bond slapping a woman on the butt after saying “Dink, say goodbye to Felix. Uhh, man talk.” Or this is James Bond undercover as a Japanese man. Or the casual use of Black slurs in Live and Let Die.  I am making light of the situation to get over the discomfort of what I said in the ugly portion. I still enjoy Goldfinger, but I have to acknowledge its flaws and view it through the right prism. This was 2017 and James Gunn should know better. To quote Treebeard in The Two Towers, “A wizard should know better.” I gave Guardians 1 ****. My instinct was to give this the same grade, but in hindsight maybe 1 deserves higher and this deserves lower. What do you deduct for two things that stuck with me far longer than the technically sound execution of a primarily amusing film? I gave the theatrical Two Towers **, so I averaged that with Guardians 1 to get the rating listed above.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

***½

Let me give you some advice. Assume everyone will betray you. And you will never be disappointed.

This was a good enjoyable film. I was concerned about not feeling that this Han Solo was going to feel like Han Solo and I was also concerned about the music. But the limited use of Star Wars music actually made its inclusions more meaningful. And for much of the film my mind told me that Alden Ehrenreich was Han Solo.

It would be easy to say that Woody Harrelson playing a grizzled grifter was the high point of the film, or that Donald Glover’s Lando was the best part, but for me I think that credit has to go to Emilia Clarke (Daenerys on “Game of Thrones”) as Qi’ra. I had to look that spelling up because it was Kyra in my head, which is patently insane. Why would my mind not go to Kira as in Major Kira Nerys from “Star Trek: Deep Space 9”? Her facial expressions and subtle body language really underscored whatever it was that we did not get to explicitly learn about her character and her path.

Here you can see just how much like a young Harrison Ford he really looks.

Parting thought — what the hell was with that ending? I can’t believe that character came back from the dead. And I didn’t know if he was who I thought he was, or if he was another Zabrak (I looked up his species). It is him. I don’t see why he is back or how they will pay off his existence. Marvel scenes all tease a greater narrative but we have that narrative already in the original Star Wars trilogy. Still, the twists in the movie before that moment made the twisty nature worthwhile.

Justice League

***½

But it doesn’t need you.

This gets an extra half-point for not giving away what happens in the trailers. The thing that Zack Snyder does as well as, if not better than, any other comic book director is  shooting epic battles. The end battle has an odd color scheme to it, but it’s the high point of the film. Or perhaps the first time the Justice League work together is. But both scenes kick ass.

Something that I found very interesting was that the story was based on the same source material that the animated Justice League: War had. But this is without Green Lantern or Captain Marvel. I love Green Lantern and I wish he were not just a punching bag for jokes now. Also, Hal Jordan was not my favorite Green Lantern. I would like to add that this movie was well cast. Also, I thought DC would jump straight to Darkseid, as a screw you to Marvel. He is like their Thanos, but Jack Kirby created him instead of Jim Starlin. And Jack Kirby is like the Stan Lee of comic books. Instead we got Steppenwolf, voiced by the wonderful Ciarán Hinds.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

***

My weakness is strength. How can strength be a weakness?

I went to this movie with my family during the holidays. There was a power outage 80% through the movie when, at least in my head, a puma was midair trying to kill Kevin Hart and snakes were all around Dwayne Johnson. Luckily the movie sucks you in to the drama when it wants to, and showcases comedy to lighten the mood at other times. So I still enjoyed the ending and came out of the theater thinking that everyone involved was a better actor, except for Bobby Cannavale.

Also, I learned that I could not recognize Nick Jonas and that I do not think that he is a very good actor. Maybe he can fall back on his career as super-rich singer if this acting thing does not work out. Still, his casting makes some sense since Hart and Johnson did not get their starts in acting, and Black had his first real success with a music-comedy-tv hybrid. The last major actor I have not mentioned, and the main female body in the movie is the wonderful Karen Gillan. You may recognize her as Nebula from Guardians of the Galaxy (1 & 2) and Avengers: Infinity War. Haha get it? Nebula is the blue cyborg! Even her voice is altered from her normal American accent (she’s Scottish). And she addresses one of my two main reservations about this movie:

1. Is this movie very sexist? Going against it is how she is dressed compared to the rest of the characters and that teenage girl Bethany is played by Jack Black instead of, say, a female actor. In its defense Gillan addresses her costume, Why am I wearing this outfit in a jungle? Tiny, little shorts and a leather halter top. I mean, what is this? This is because Jumanji is a 1990s video game with stereotypical 1990s character types. As for Jack Black’s Bethany, he really convinced me that he was portraying a teenage girl trapped in the video game body of a chubby middle aged scientist.
2. Is this movie dreck? Dreck is a great word. It means rubbish or trash and is usually employed regarding art. I thought the movie was fun and cute. The charisma between Hart and Johnson carry the film, so I think this movie is fine, especially for watching with your family. So for me it was not dreck.

Avengers: Infinity War

The rabbit is correct and clearly the smartest among you.

You know, I’m 1500 years old. I’ve killed twice as many enemies as that. And every one of them would have rather killed me than not succeeded. I’m only alive because fate wants me alive. Thanos is just the latest of a long line of bastards, and he’ll be the latest to feel my vengeance – fate wills it so.

Thor was the best written character of this movie. Chris Hemsworth finally gets to show his full range of acting ability in this sequel to Thor: Ragnarok. It is fun to call this culmination of 19 films just a sequel to the most fun Thor movie. After all this time the grade for the film really ought not be the number of stars, but was it all worth it? On that binary scale I give this film a yes.

Did I need to see all 18 films before this one? Obviously not. In fact I did not watch Incredible Hulk or Spider-man: Homecoming. I am so glad that I watched Thor 3 since the post credits sequence is the start of Infinity War. And it is Thor’s journey that really moves the film. With a 2:40~ runtime, most of which flowed pleasantly quickly, there was not much room for character introductions, which were shockingly minimal. For a genre obsessed with origin stories (if I still footnoted these, I’d put one here, but just wait until next paragraph) you get none of the main characters. It basically said, this is for the people who stuck with us, which, based on its first three weeks in theaters, was more than 100,000,000 people. But what about the villain? You see his smile in the credits of Marvel’s The Avengers. He is like a higher up boss in Guardians of the Galaxy. Besides learning that his daughters Gamora and Nebula want to kill him, and knowing that he wants power, we know nothing about him. This film finally tells us where he is from and why he wants to kill half the galaxy, but only just barely.

Back to my supposition that the comic book film industry is obsessed with origin stories. Who are the most famous superheroes of all-time? Batman? Superman? Spider-man? Wolverine? I’ve seen Batman’s parents die like five times in movies. He has been in like 5,000+ comic books, but you need to sacrifice 25 minutes to reminding me how he became Batman?? Even Wolverine, a character whose origin was unknown for years, had to get his own origin movie cleverly titled X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And done.

People often talk about spoiler alerts, and I wrote that how only some movies can be spoiled. But I wrote that in A Few Cubic Meters of Love, so probably most people skipped that review. There are two ways a movie can be spoiler proof: A. By being such an engrossing film that knowing the end is irrelevant, like United 93 or Apollo 13; and B. a movie is so bad or so predictable that foreknowledge of the ending, or some twist, is irrelevant because the movie sucks both ways, like any Transformers movie, or X-Men Origins: Wolverine. When I went into the film, I kind of knew what was going to happen because I read the mini-series back in law school. I knew what they could not do, and I wondered how far they were willing to go with this. But watching this film with other people, it is a very spoilable movie. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had not read the comic, but Vladimir Nabokov said that re-reading is the only way to read and would tell his students the end of their novels before they started to read them. Even though 100 million people have seen it, I won’t say what happened. But it was powerful. And the rationale was far superior to the comic book’s. Feel free to message me if you want to talk about the differences, or have any questions.

 

****