Captain America: Civil War review

Whether it’s “Batman v Superman” or Hillary v Bernie or Trump v the eventual democratic nominee, this has been a year of highly publicized, clashing ideologies. Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War” is based on a 2008 run of “Avengers” comics about a government plan to register superheroes to end vigilantism. The fictional law split the team down the middle and for six or so issues the heroes fought on different sides of the issue. This film takes the bones of that premise and carries over the “choose your side” marketing hook, playing into the vaguely political, red verses blue temperature of this year’s election cycle. The movie itself, however, isn’t nearly as divisive or as politically minded as even the comic presented said dispute and instead settles into the usual action blockbuster, good guy/ bad guy stuff that easier to tell and, of course, easier to sell.

After the Avengers botched a rescue mission in Africa and one of their own, Scarlett Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), is held responsible for the failure to psychically contain an explosion, the U.S government presents the group with a new global initiative to have every member contracted with the government. Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) sees the Sokkovia Accords as a possible hindrance to the team’s overall effectiveness and rightfully doesn’t want to The Avengers or any other super-team become militarized. Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) feels guilty about the mass destruction involved in taking down aliens, gods and sentient robots and agrees that it’s better for the team to play ball. They fight. And hey, Marvel has the rights to Spider-Man now, so he fights too.

Joe and Anthony Russo, the same team who brought us the considerably better “Captain America: Winter Soldier,” presents superhero material with a certain amount of gravitas and grit that lacks in most of the other Marvel films. Through the first half of the movie, while they set up their chess pieces on their narrative board, the seeds of an interesting and emotionally satisfying political-ish thriller are promised. Bucky Barns/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) may or may not have turned back to the dark side, T’Challa/Black Panther is looking for retribution after losing his father during the movie’s inciting incident, and the other team members, such as Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Vision (Paul Bettany) all have interesting and compelling reasons for choosing the sides they fight for. That’s why it’s all the more deflating when the movie forgets to pay off or conclude any of the previous threads of this grounded Boun-esque thriller and slides comfortably into blockbuster auto-pilot for the final third, when the Russos grab their action figures and clack them together in a big, silly fight. Whatever resolution we do get is merely there to set up a future sequel and the battle of ideologies presented in the initial Civil War concept is somewhat easily resolved.

Reservation’s aside, before the story reveals all its cards and before the narrative tension is eased, this movie is pretty damn satisfying and is still somewhat sophisticated for the genre. As with any Avengers team-up flick—and make no mistake, this is an Avengers film through and through— there’s a lot of characters to keep track of and a lot of plates to keep spinning, and in that regard “Captain America: Civil War,” while less consistent, is substantially better than the previous Avengers adventures. The plot gives up two thirds in, and Spider-Man is shoe-horned in for pandering, fan-baiting reasons (full disclosure: I took the bait and it tastes pretty good) but it can’t be ignored that this installment contains some of Marvel’s most impactful action scenes and strongest performances yet.

Grade: B-

Originally written for The Idaho State Journal/May-2016

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Avengers: Age of Ultron review

              Joss Whedon returns with Disney/Marvel’s much-anticipated “Avengers: Age of Ultron”; a bigger, longer, louder sequel to 2012’s successful superhero team-up, “The Avengers.” In what was once seen as the impossible task to bring together five separate movie franchises and support each protagonist under one umbrella universe, this idea is quickly becoming the new normal. With “Terminator,” “Star Wars” and Warner Brothers’ DC Comics properties setting up multiple films and side stories, the term ‘cinematic universe’ has become the new Hollywood buzz-phrase. Rather than waiting every two years for a single sequel to rake in the dough, now studios can expand the universe of an intellectual property and have many characters and plot ideas producing multiple movies at once.

            Of course this has been happening in the world of comic books forever, but the cost to mass produce and sell a 20 page superhero magazine is nothing compared to fortune it takes to pull off something as massive as their cinematic counterparts. Strangely enough, though the risk is higher and the economic stakes are raised to create these movies, their stories sometimes reward less than those provided by pulp they were modeled after.

           Iron Man (Robert Downy Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawk Eye (Jeremy Renner) and The Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) return to save the world yet again, and this time the threat is of their own creation—an impossibly smart robot intelligence named Ultron, voiced by James Spader.  After breaking into a soviet compound looking for…something or other, Tony Stark/Iron Man finds a robot technology that would allow him to update his computer A.I. with the ability to make his Iron-Dones smart enough and powerful enough to allow the team to retire. Quickly it grows too smart and develops its own reasons to kill the heroes. Newcomers Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) join the evil robot to avenge their parents and their childhood home, destroyed years ago by Stark’s military weapons.

           The set-up is simple enough, yet somehow the movie fractures into many whirling plot points and set-pieces that never quite harmonize, creating an out-of-breath, jumble of action-spectacle. Whedon is a smart writer and his knack for dialogue and characterization is still intact, but his work as a storyteller seems stifled by Marvel’s bottom-line to set up even more potential properties within their ever-expanding multi-verse. Midway through the film, the threat of Ulron, who’s marvelously introduced with a genuine sense of menace, is diluted by competing plots regarding mystical prophecies about magic gems and otherworldly cosmic dangers. By the end, the movie’s climax is strained to decide which story element needs to pay off. Allegiances change, more new characters are introduced, romances are fulfilled and further franchises are hinted at, at which point Stark’s self-destructive hubris is the thing we’re thinking the least about.

          Joss Whedon’s work as a television show-runner (“Buffy: The Vampire Slayer”, “Firefly”) has earned him a lot of goodwill over the years, but with “Avengers: Age of Ultron” it seems like his talent for telling extended, episodic stories is forcibly compressed into a confused and frustrating mess of a narrative. Some of the action is well-staged and entertaining—the fight between “Iron Man” and “The Hulk” is pretty neat—but most of it, while expensively produced, is ineffectual and weightless.

        The dialogue is quick and funny and these actors are now so comfortable in there theme-park personalities that even the most mindless scenes float along well- enough, but they’re supported by a plot that’s so over-stuffed with things to do, placed to be, and sequels to sell that it tears itself apart before it can naturally develop. 

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2015

Captain America: The Winter Soldier review

                  Captain America is a tricky Marvel character to sell to global movie market, despite his recognizable brand and the backing of a powerhouse film production conglomerate. These days people are a little jaded when it comes to national pride and a character that fights for truth, justice and the American way is an increasingly harder pill to swallow, especially when party divisions have dramatically split the country on the specific interpretation of what the “American Way” is even supposed to be. Even when conflict is injected into the character to please those on the homeland, the blatantly patriotic imagery of Cap-Am risks appearing like propaganda to those abroad.

                Though Disney/Marvel Studio’s first attempt to introduce this character in 2011 wasn’t an altogether failure, it really only managed to work as a placeholder for the anticipated Avengers movie being hyped at time.  Now, with the overwhelming success of “The Avengers” in 2012, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is afforded the benefit of doubt by those who may have been skeptical before. Surprisingly, in changing time-period, style, tone and directors, this movie cleverly takes advantage of its second chance and manages to exceed expectations by simultaneously defying and celebrating its genre-conventions.

                Having grown up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, only to be preserved in ice and unfrozen to become a superhero soldier, fighting alongside sci-fi anomalies like Bruce Banner’s Hulk and Tony Stark’s Iron-Man, Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans) is now suffering from state of mild temporal dysphoria, with only his work as a SHIELD super-spy to keep him focused and grounded. However, when his boss and mentor, SHIELD’s leader Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is targeted and hunted by his colleagues, Captain America is then forced to go rogue and figure out how high the governmental corruption infiltrates. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and military veteran Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) help Rodgers with his impossible mission, while keeping guard from a mysteriously lethal mercenary known as the Winter Soldier.

                It’s actually difficult to be prepared for just how exceptional this pop-corn thriller is. Not since Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” has a sequel so magnificently improved upon its predecessor in a way that actually fixes some of the problems of the previous film. Rather than the cartoony, gee-golly pulp aesthetic of Joe Johnston’s “Captain America: The First Avenger”, Joe and Anthony Russo’s steely, post-Bourn, politically-minded sequel resembles the kind of cool immediacy of Michael Mann’s “Heat”, as well as ‘70s paranoid dramas like “The French Connection" and "All the President's Men."  The tensely-blocked, handheld bursts of action-violence is impactful, the performances are confident--particularly Evans who'd previously appeared a little stiff within the do-gooder limitations of his characters--and unlike even the best films from Marvel’s amoeba-vers, this world feels lived-in and dangerous with a semi-realistic sense of scale and threat. 

                With that said, this is still a comic-book action movie aimed at a young teenage audience, and we're reminded of that whenever the plot makes an illogical leap or when there's an occasional tonal hiccup. This includes some high-concept sci-fi tech that feels out of place compared to the movie's more sober interpretation of the Marvel world, as well as, a sporadic line of Saturday-morning dialogue.  In the third act, as is the demand for any film that costs more than 100 million dollars, the movie eventually devolves into an extended effect-driven sequence, slowly drifting the whole thing away from the refreshing tactility and level-headed sophistication it had built up to that point.

                Flaws and nitpicks aside—though not excused—“Captain America-The Winter Soldier” is still an exciting and daring move forward for the superhero genre, and it at least hints towards a maturity that Marvel Studios hasn’t been as interested in exploring since the Iraq war metaphors of the first “Iron Man."  Here, themes of political unrest and social distrust regarding NSA monitoring and military drone technologies make this sequel not only satisfying as a genre picture, but timely and relevant as well.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2014