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

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

I, Frankenstein review

               Like Frankenstein’s monster himself, “I Frankenstein”—brought to us by the creators of the “Underworld” franchise—is a soulless aberration made up of bits and chunks, sewed together from other pop-culture references and genre tropes. Trying desperately hard to be cool without any regard to logical plotting or coherent storytelling, this corpse of an action movie proves that the basin of Hollywood’s bad ideas apparently has no bottom.

                In the dark rainy city of god-knows-where Frankenstein’s monster, played by Aaron Eckhart, stumbles into a holy war between undercover demons and gargoyles sent to protect earth by the archangel Gabriel.  The gargoyles live in and protect a massive cathedral in the center of the unnamed city, where they decide, against their better judgment, not to kill Eckhart’s superfluous character—named Adam by the gargoyle queen—even though they know that he murdered his creator and that he doesn’t have a soul. You see, the demons need to build an army of animated corpses like Adam because in this universe they can only possess soulless bodies.  Though apparently they can’t just possess a regular buried corpse because that would be too simple and this movie never passes on an opportunity to toss a narrative hurdle in its path.

                Years into the future, in what I guess is supposed to be modern times, Niberious the prince of demons, played by Bill Nighy, is working to recreate Dr. Frankenstein’s results in a lab, ran by two scientists who are unaware of his evil conspiracy.  The lead physicist Terra (Yvonne Strahofsky) gets wind of her employer’s actions after she encounters Adam when he breaks into her lab to retrieve his master’s 19^th century journal.  Adam must then choose between protecting himself and joining the gargoyles in their battle against the possible threat of an army of demon possessed Franken-zombies.

                Overwrought and underwhelming this movie tries to stuff in every mistake made by every action-horror fantasy from the last 15 years. It attempts to balance myth and legend against genre tradition and bizarre Christian metaphors, resulting in a head spinning slosh of clanging production notes. And oh my god is this movie is stupid. I mean it’s bad… Like, really bad. It’s bad in a way I didn’t know movies could still be. But is it so bad it’s good? Not quite, though not for any lack of trying.

                  Practically every single thing that this movie wants to do it can’t seem to do at all. The performances all around are as stiff as a log and comprised of nothing but a series of slow-motion poses, but I can hardly the blame the actors when their characters speak in nothing but clunky exposition. The stylized violence, which should be fun in theory, is undercut by the fact that the angels/gargoyles are beamed up to heaven as soon as they are killed, while the demons explode into a badly rendered ball of CGI fire, sending them back to hell; a cheesy conceit that will make you nostalgic for the dated effects in “Ghost”. 

                There’s even an attempt to create a pseudo-romance between Adam and Terra the electro-physiologist. Of course when Eckhart bares his toned body, as he removes his war-tattered hoodie, we are immediately reminded that his character is a cadaver, patched together by other peoples dead flesh—hardly a sexy moment.

                Len Wiseman’s “Underworld” series, as stupid as most of it is, was occasionally watchable in all its pleather-clad monster brooding, but this mash-up mythology, directed by Stuart Bettie, only diminishes the good-will towards its antecedents. Designed to look like an Evanescence music video or a PS2 video-game cut scene, whatever campy joy one might want to find between the cracks of this schlocky mess is buried miles under a heap of dull self-seriousness.

Grade: F

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014