X-Men: Days of Future Past review

After essentially kick-starting the cinematic superhero renaissance fifteen years ago, the X-Men movie series has undergone many drastic creative shifts, including confusing continuity tangles and some exceedingly bad press surrounding one of its directors. Following two especially disappointing sequels in “X-Men: The Last Standm” by substitute director Brett Ratner and the unforgivably dreadful spin-off “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” a few years later, the franchise was partially revitalized in 2011 with the ‘60s cold-war installment “X-Men: First Class," starring Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. James Mangold’s “The Wolverine” was also watchable but mostly forgettable in the long run. Now, in an attempt to clean the slate, original director Bryan Singer has the unfortunate job of tying all of these films together and bridging their plot-holes with his newest entry, a time-travel thriller called “X-Men: Days of Future Past”, staring key players from both timelines.

Not only is there very high stakes for the cautiously optimistic fans who have endured and celebrated previously great and awful X-films, “Days of Future Past” has many tasks to carefully maneuver for itself. It must be reasonably faithful to the beloved comic story in which it takes its name, it has to tie together two timelines that are just different enough to makes things complicated, and it has to ret-con the mistakes of the previous sequels. Surprisingly, while not home-run success, it manages to do so with only a few notable discrepancies.

The plot immediately drops us into the near future of 2023, in a post-apocalypse where most of the X-Men have been killed by giant self-regenerating robots called the Sentinels who patrol the earth to terminate all of mutant kind. Aged Professor, Charles Xavier (Patrick Stuart) sends Wolverine’s consciousness back into his younger body during the ‘70s where he must inspire the recently jaded and crippled Professor (James McAvoy) to let out his imprisoned enemy Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to stop a misguided Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating the engineer responsible for starting the newly-formed Sentinel program. Jumping back and forth from these two events in time, we watch the future X-Men try as hard as they can to hold their defense, while Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has to prevent all the pawns of their eventual destruction from falling into place.

While I'm more than aware of the narrative heavy-lifting this plot has to do before we can even get into the main points of its story, unfortunately the first third of the film gets to a wobbly start with achingly stilted, tech-jabber dialogue and blunt introductions to the characters and their vague future-world, all of which are too brief and glossed over to effectively build to an appropriate emotional connection. But once Jackman gets zapped into the 70s and we get the 411 on where our "First Class" heroes have been since the last movie, the pieces start to come together, slowly building towards a grand climax that’s just as good or even better than anything we've previously seen from the series.

While “Days of Future Past” occasionally feels pieced together from hunks of scripts that were torn from different drafts, rewritten by committee and reshaped in the editing room, about half of its movie-parts contain genuinely original superhero moments; most notably some great comedic action sequences with X-newbie Quicksilver (Evan Peters), where his speed powers are portrayed by showing us how he moves normally in the slowed-down world around him. X-Men mainstays such as Lawrence, Fassbender, McAvoy, and Jackman are just as reliable as we have come to expect and newcomers like Peter Dinklage,  who plays the mutant-phobic scientist Bolivar Trask, are given their own scenes to steal as well. Most of all, by the end of the film, however rocky it was to get there, it’s very gratifying to see the fruits bared from the franchise’s willingness to apologize for its past mediocrities.

Grade: B -
Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/June-2014

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 review

                 Expectations of Marc Webb’s sequel to Sony’s successful 2012 Spider-Man reboot was  perhaps insurmountable. For some, the first film that was released only five years after Sam Raimi’s generation defining trilogy, satisfied what people wanted to see with the continuation of this superhero staple. For others (including this reviewer) despite having a terrific cast, the film lacked a unique point of view and the obvious rush to re-launch the series made for a somewhat competent but mostly tepid rehash of over-cooked Spidey-lore.

                You might think that now that the pesky origin story has been tediously reestablished, this anticipated sequel would be allowed the narrative freedom to further explore Webb's new interpretation of this timeless character and the cinematic universe he inhabits. But what we end up getting with this installment is a manic tangle of incongruent plot threads fighting for screen-time in an overlong, over-stylized disaster of a movie that's been marred by invasive studio-notes.  

                This movie has about six different movies going on at any one time, but most prominently we follow Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) as he's reeling from guilt by ignoring the dying wishes of his girlfriend’s father, and continuing to put Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) in harm’s way simply by dating her.  This then leads him to break things off with her to further his personal investigation surrounding his father’s mysterious death. The unfinished genetic research that surrounded this mystery is now being exploited by Oscorp’s new CEO, Peter’s childhood friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan). Harry plans to use the radiated spider venom to treat his body against the same genetic disease that killed Norman.  Unbenounced to Harry or Peter, or Gwen who still works for the secretive lab, the company has an insidious strategy behind this new science.

                You might think that’s enough story for one movie, but wait, there’s more! An awkwardly pitched Jamie Foxx plays a geeky disgruntled lab-tech with an unhealthy obsession towards Spider-Man. After an unfortunate accident at Plotcorp--I mean Oscorp—which apparently has an alarming track record of unsettling accidents involving staff, visitors and its proprietors, Foxx is then transformed into a translucent energy being called Electro. Can Spider-Man defeat him, while keeping Gwen from moving to London? Will she give up her dreams of becoming a super-scholar at Oxford and continue to put herself in danger in New York?  In only five minutes can Peter convince the audience that he and Harry have a believable, preexisting best-friend relationship? Can director Marc Webb figure out a way to make anyone still care about anything dealing with Peter's stupid dead father?  Can Spider-Man save danger-addicted children from Paul Giamatti as he marches the streets in giant, Rhino-shaped mech-suit? Wait, the Rhino’s in this movie too!? *Sigh*

                Despite a half-way decent love story between the real-life couple of Garfield and Stone, the rest of the movie is an over-crowded step latter where scenes seem to only exist to set up other scenes--half of which can’t even be resolved until the next sequel. Tonally, the movie oscillates between post-Twilight angst, superhero action movie spectacle, and campy Saturday morning silliness that clangs against the film’s more somber moments of sincerity. 

                “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is without a doubt an undisciplined, compromised affair, and the story suffers greatly from Sony’s desperation to catch up with the long-form world-building of Disney’s Marvel-Universe epics, but when Webb is able to slow the action down enough to let his characters actually breath, they momentarily expose a beating heart underneath all of the movie’s overbearing aesthetics and the screenplay’s stifling mechanics.

 Grade: C-

Originally published by Idaho State Journal/May-2014

The Other Woman review

                I get it, I’m a guy and this movie wasn’t made for me.  I am nowhere near the target demo for this kind of comedy, so if I tell you that “The Other Woman” is a rancid, misogynist, unstructured, belly-ache of a mess it can only mean that I just didn’t ‘get’ it, right? Wrong! These kinds of high-concept rom-coms come out every year between the weeks that are programmed full of comic-book action movies, and I sympathize with the girlfriend audience who can’t bear to see another chase scene, another mid-flight battle or another building explode, but girls, I promise, you deserve better than this.

                Carly (Cameron Diaz) has finally met ‘the one’ in Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a handsome, successful CEO who seems ready to commit but whose scheduling is a little erratic. After bailing on a dinner to meet the father, Carly decides to surprise her new lover in sexy plumber garb but is surprised to meet his wife Kate (Leslie Mann) when she answers the door.  Instead of instant hysteria or angry phone calls made, Kate decides to slowly gain the trust and friendship of her husband’s mistress and together they decide to travel the scenic route to his eventual takedown.

                Like many other pandering romantic comedies, aiming to lull the lowest common denominator into submission with poop jokes and slapsticky sit-com gags, this movie wants women to believe that the message of this retaliation plot is empowering, when in actuality it is doing very much the opposite.  Mann and Diaz are putting it all out there for the jokes and Mann especially sacrifices all sympathy for every contrivance this movie puts her pathetic character through. Despite knowing that her husband is a cheating with multiple women, embezzling from other companies with her signature, and even spreading STD’s, she still has to be convinced and reminded of his horribleness up to the very last 10 minutes. All the while, Diaz’s strong lawyer character gets over the heartbreak of losing Kate’s husband by eventually seducing her impossibly attractive brother.  But hey, it’s okay, because girl power!

                Essentially, “The Other Woman” plays like an evenly-lit, wealth-obsessed, PG-13 version of a rape-revenge exploitation film like “I Spit on Your Grave.”  And like those kinds of reprehensible movies, the women in this story have to be humiliated throughout the picture to finally earn their moment of payback, while at the same time furthering the beliefs that liberated or not, they still need men for sex, money and social position. Never mind the fact that whatever tension exists in the plot, only exists because we’re supposed to believe that everyone involved in this silly caper, including the brothers and fathers of the interested parties, agree to not spill the beans to this clueless dope of a husband. To fill time between this nonsense, director Nick Cassavetes—oh how far the acorn falls—lets the movie drift into baggy montages of bikini-beach partying and lazy, girl-bonding time-lapses. 

                Is it funny? Sometimes Mann’s physical performance and Diaz’s straightly delivered pep-talks generate a giggle or a desperate-for-anything chuckle, but the organic chemistry between these women is undercut by headache inducing, comedy set-piece clichés involving laxatives, spying in bushes with binoculars, and people falling out of windows. And of course, when we finally arrive at the overhyped moment of comeuppance, it’s treated with as much grace and as much plausibility as a Scooby Doo unmasking with Roadrunner violence. Make no mistake about it ladies; this toxic, cynical movie hates you.

Grade: D -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2014