Summer Vacation Roundup

And now, a note

As some of you might already know, I spent a number of weeks on vacation last month in various remote parts of the world (Stalingrad!). As such, this threw my schedule into more chaos than it typically is in even at this time of year, and I was unable to give proper reviews and attention to a handful of movies I saw, and liked. Though the films below are now pretty much all out of theaters, I wanted to record, for the record, my thoughts on a trio of films that you may or may not have seen, such that if you did miss them, you have a chance to make up for it on Netflix or other such services.

I also wanted to take the chance to talk about a film that deserves no longer review, but we'll get there...

Three films you should see if you haven't already (and one you should not)

Sleight

Alternate Title:  Straight Outta Frankenstein

One sentence synopsis:    A young man with a passion for street magic gets tangled up in the drug world while trying to find a way out for himself and his sister.

The Verdict: When the mainstream theaters fail you, and they eventually will, I find that the indie parts of the multiplex often provide relief. And so it was that I decided to see an intriguing little film by the name of Sleight, a biopic of sorts about Bo (Jacob Latimore) a young black man living in the bad parts of LA. With his parents both dead, Bo's life consists of trying to make enough money to get himself and his younger sister out of the ghetto. By day, he works as a street magician, using sleight of hand, misdirection, showmanship, and clever film editing (all magician movies give into this temptation eventually) to amaze crowds on Venice Beach. By night, he works as a drug dealer for regional drug baron Angelo (played by The West Wing's Dulé Hill), selling pot and ecstasy to partyers and club owners around Los Angeles. Bo treats his drug work as just another job (as, I assume, do most dealers), but inevitably things begin to get darker when a rival gang moves in and Angelo's demands begin to escalate from drug running to hardcore violence, and Bo must find a way to get out of a life he no longer wants any part of.

Oh, and there's also mad science.

Yeah, Sleight is kind of a weird one, folks, in that it's a perfectly conventional "nice kid tries to escape the hard life" story that periodically dips into semi-deranged territory, as early on we discover that Bo's magic isn't a hobby or even a vocation but an obsession, a means by which he can, as he puts it "do what nobody else can", using everything from old-fashioned tricks to backyard cybernetic surgery to give himself the capacity to amaze and astonish. If that means implanting an electromagnetic dynamo in his shoulder and swabbing the resulting infection with iodine every day, then in Bo's mind, it's a small price to pay for greatness. As such, while the whole pattern of the movie is something we've seen a dozen times before, the film has these moments where all of a sudden it replaces the scared, naive kid at the center of the swirling world of drugs and crime with Magneto and just kind of watches what happens. The result isn't quite as revolutionary as it could be, but it has its moments, such as one scene where Bo walks into Angelo's house and responds to a gangster's threats by ripping out his dental fillings.

All of the participants do a reasonably decent job with the material, particularly Latimore, and Seychelle Gabriel, playing Bo's girlfriend Holly (and whose previous appearance in a movie I saw shall not be spoken of). Neither one are transcendent, mind you, but this is a genre where the primary competition is Pras in Turn it Up, and both of them manage to clear that low bar with fair ease. Dulé Hill, meanwhile, tries his best to be a menacing gangster in the vein of Denzel Washington from American Gangster, talking a big game and smiling a lot before switching on the screaming tirades and machete mutilations, but is hampered by the fact that Dulé Hill has always appeared approximately as intimidating as a bowl of soup, regardless of the role. The story is entirely predictable, from the gradual descent into moral quandaries to the beyond the pale threats of the villainous gang leader, to the final rousing scene in which our hero finally stands up to the violent thugs who are oppressing him, but the details, tinged as they are with the unhinged, keeps things reasonably fresh, even if we know where the movie is ultimately going.

In the end, I have to admit that I liked Sleight a good deal more than I expected to. There are, after all, always new ways to tell a well-worn story, and while Sleight never quite lives up to the zaniness of its premise, it does enough to avoid being just another stale rehash of one of Hollywood's oldest tales. And given that I've seen movies with literally a thousand times its budget come up with literally a thousandth of its sincerity and charm, I'm certainly not going to gainsay an interesting movie for not being anything more.

Final Score:  7/10

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Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2

Alternate Title:  Daddy Issues

One sentence synopsis:   The Guardians discover Starlord's semi-divine father while fleeing from a host of old foes hellbent on taking their revenge.

The Verdict:  And speaking of small, modest indie films that you've probably never heard of...

Guardians of the Galaxy was a spectacular movie in more senses than one, proof positive (if ever it were needed) that Marvel's infinite universe of magic and wonder could extend beyond basic superhero stories and into other genres like Space Opera. I loved Guardians, but was concerned about the possibility of a sequel, so delicate was the balancing act it performed, trying to be both totally irreverent and totally sentimental at the same time. And perhaps returning writer/director James Gunn knew that, for this time he has put together a movie that is much heavier on the sentiment while going a bit lighter on the irreverence. I suppose there probably wasn't much of a choice.

Now a semi-organized band of douchebag mercenaries/bounty hunters for hire, the Guardians have made themselves a host of enemies across the galaxy, partly because of the Marvel Cosmos being filled with officious dickheads, and partly because the Guardians themselves are the same kleptomaniacal, violent lunatics that we all fell in love with back in 2014. On the run from several different gangs of heavily armed assholes out for their heads, they encounter Kurt Russell (his character has a name, but it's basically Kurt Russell), who has been searching for them so that he can reveal to Starlord that he's his father, and that he's a God. Because of course he is. At the same time, half the galaxy is chasing down the rest of the guardians, be it Gamora's sister Nebula (Dr. Who's Karen Gillian), screaming mad and desperate for revenge, Ravager captain Yondu (Michael Rooker), now exiled from his fellow space pirates for child trafficking and looking to find Starlord for purposes he himself likely doesn't know, or an entire host of gold-painted douchebags called the Sovereign, who want to lay waste to the Guardians because they are assholes (and because Rocket, in perfect raccoon style, stole everything of theirs that wasn't nailed down. A lot of these subplots exist simply to give some of the other Guardians something to do for most of the run-time, but I'm hardly going to complain about that, resulting as it does in things like an opening battle sequence filmed completely offscreen as a backdrop to the adventures of baby Groot's misadventures, David Hasselhoff cameos, two enormous battle sequences where one of our heroes disposes effortlessly of so many heavily-armed ravagers that the sequence becomes gut-bustingly funny, and best of all, Sylvester Stallone making an appearance as a Ravager admiral with ties to Yondu. Sly seems to be sending up his performance in Judge Dredd, which given the tone of this movie, is beyond hilarious, and if this leads to him appearing in future Marvel films, so much the better.

Honestly though, the focus this time isn't on the zaniness but the characters, which is not exactly what I expected from Guardians of all movies, but looking back is probably the correct move. Starlord's lingering abandonment issues from having lost his mother and having been kidnapped by space pirates as a kid continue to haunt him, while both Gamora and even Rocket, of all people, get some excellent moments circulating around their place in a misfit surrogate family like the Guardians, and the distance between what they claim their place is and what it actually is. The film never moves into telling instead of showing, but it's plain that Gunn is more comfortable with the characters this time, and more willing to explore the dynamics between them in greater depth than the previous movie, five-way-origin-story as it was mixed with a galaxy-devouring threat, had time to do. The core theme of the film though is fatherhood, surrogate or otherwise, as evidenced by Kurt Russell trying to make up for lost time with his demigod son, Yondu's remarkably complex relationship with Starlord, one explored throughout the course of the film with surprising depth and even pathos, Nebula and Gamora's shared experience being raised by an abusive monster in Thanos, and even Sly's own semi-father relationship with Yondu (okay, I'm stretching here, but I wanted to shoehorn the fact that Stallone is in this film into the review once more).

So does this mean that Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 is just as good as its predecessor? Well... no. It's not far off, to be fair, but with this much emphasis on secondary characters and on the sentimental possibilities of certain characters' stories, someone kind of has to get the shaft. Both Dave Bautista's Drax and Zoe Saldana's Gamora have very little to do in this film save for sitting around commenting on the actions of other characters, including those of Pom Klementieff's Mantis, a fairly forgettable throwaway who doesn't bring enough to the film to justify her existence there. The writing isn't quite as sharp as it was last time, the film needing to spell more of its emotional core out rather than let it flow organically. The difference is one of degrees, but it's there, palpable in that the sequel to a movie that created a surrogate family without once using the word 'family' now has to actually hammer the point home with considerably less finesse. There's also the question of the missing humor. Not that Guardians 2 isn't funny mind you, it's just not as funny as the last film, in part because the movie is concentrating on other matters, but also because the simple fact that the characters embody their archetypes is no longer good enough. Rocket being homicidal despite being a furry little procoynid, or Drax speaking in utterly literal statements all the time is no longer good enough to carry the film. In fairness to Gunn, it's clear he and the cast knows this, but nevertheless, some of the edge that carried Guardians through the original minefield of sentiment and saccharinity has clearly been lost, and will need to be freshly honed in the sequel.

All that being said, Guardians of the Galaxy's second chapter is a really good film, the best superhero movie of the year so-far, and a worthy addition to the illustrious Marvel canon. It may be a little less fresh than its predecessor and it may feel unavoidably like filler at points, but when the filler is this good, it's hard to get upset.

Final Score:  7.5/10

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Your Name

Alternate Title:  Freaky Friday the 13th

One sentence synopsis:    A young man in Tokyo and a girl in the Japanese countryside begin spontaneously switching bodies, and struggle to discover who each other are.

The Verdict:  I will not pretend to be the biggest anime fan around. Oh don't get me wrong, I've nothing against Japanese animation, and I've seen the classics, like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Naussica, Akira, Ghost in the Shell (not that one), Howl's Moving Castle, to name a few. But beyond the Miyazaki canon and a handful of other films or series that have crossed my path, Anime and I have a fairly cool, if cordial, relationship. It's not that I dislike it, it's just that the cultural conventions of the art form, from the stammering male protagonists to the unsubtle upskirt shots of the female ones, just really aren't my thing overall. Still, that sort of objection has never prevented me from catching a good movie when one presents itself, and so on the back of several absolutely glowing reports from friends of mine who do appreciate Anime, I decided to go and check out our latest import from our friends in the Far East.

Your Name comes to us from the CoMix Wave Films studio, a studio whose pedigree is second only to the legendary Studio Ghibli itself, and not by much at that. Though nowhere near as well known in the States, CoMix Wave is responsible for several classic masterpieces of the Anime film world, including 5 Centimeters per Second, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, and The Garden of Words. The majority of CoMix Wave's films, including the aforementioned three classics and Your Name itself, come from director Makoto Shinkai, CoMix' Miyazaki (though he disputes this characterization). Shinkai's specialty has always been labyrinthine films with complex, philosophical plots, rather than the more artful fantastical fare that Ghibli focuses in, and Your Name is no exception. At its core, the film is about two young people, Taki, a university student in Tokyo, who works nights as a waiter to make ends meet, and Mitsuha, a high school student from a small town in rural Japan, who serves as a shrine priestess in the local Shinto temple, and who is otherwise bored stiff by her small town's limited horizons. For reasons neither of them can understand, the two begin body swapping one day, waking up in one another's lives for a day at a time. Communicating with one another by leaving text messages on their smartphones, the two try and puzzle out what's happening without actually having physically met, at least until...

... well never mind the until, really. Let's just say the plot gets real complex real fast, as Taki and Mitsuha try and discover what seems to be happening here, and why. All of this, however, takes place before the backdrop of gorgeous animation, classical in style for anime, though not if one is only used to the Ghibli films. The focus here is on quotidian animation, fireflies at night, the glint of torchlight on painted faces, a weed-filled vacant lot near the outskirts of a town, cramped Tokyo apartments, that sort of thing. It's a far cry from the hyper-extended fantasias of films like Paprika or Spirited Away, but no less beautiful for the lack. The characters, as well, are more subdued than the customary anime stock types, less explosive screaming and sweat drops than the typically-madcap pace of Anime allows for (I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here, but Anime does have its tendencies). The characters are well written, and sharp enough to follow along with the twists of the plot, and the film overall has a charming, romantic quality to it that translates well out of context, cultural and otherwise.

Unfortunately, the need to translate out of context is pretty vital, because Your Name, for all its charming simplicity at points, is a tremendously complicated film, involving not only body swapping but time travel, astrophysics, spiritualism, hallucinogenic drugs, memory loss, and a pair of narrators, both of them unreliable. Readers of this blog know that I've got nothing against a complex plot, I sang the praises of Cloud Atlas for years after all, but Your Name stuffs so much intricacy into its runtime that it is legitimately difficult to follow. This is not an uncommon problem with more adult-oriented anime (not that kind of adult-oriented... well maybe that kind too). Ghost in the Shell's films and TV shows both involved complex philosophical-political discussions about everything from cognitive theory to tax policies in parliamentary governments, smashed into the middle of a modern techno-thriller. Your Name, though, is supposedly a lightweight romantic drama, which periodically gets so dense that the audience is expected to simultaneously keep track of intricate animation, complex subtitles, and explanatory super-titles used to illustrate untranslatable subtleties of grammar and wordplay within the sub-titled dialogue. Watching a film while reading two books at the same time is a tall order for anyone, and it's for that reason that, contrary to all of my snobbish tendencies, my recommendation for those who do go looking for Your Name is to find a dubbed copy, and reduce the parallel tracks you have to simultaneously juggle to two or so.

Honestly, Your Name is quite a good film, though its indulgence of far too much complex gamesmanship keeps its from being a great one. It bears very little in common with most of the popular anime which we of the non-Otaku world encounter, but it's no less of a film for it, a highly-complex telling of a very simple story, done without the melodrama and artifice that such stories would normally be lathered with, either in Japan or here. And given the number of people I know who absolutely adore this film, I'd bet that if you're willing to put work into decoding it, Your Name may just wind up surprising you.

Final Score:  7/10

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Megan Leavey

Alternate Title:  The Arf Locker

One sentence synopsis:   A marine with a troubled past bonds with her bomb-sniffing dog while deployed to Iraq.


The Verdict:  As longtime readers of this project already know, some weeks do not offer a lot of choice when it comes to what to see, weeks that offer either a slate of movies I've already seen, or things like Alien: Covenant (Prometheus did not warrant a sequel) or The Mummy (now with 90% less fun!). As such, I went to see Megan Leavey despite my ambivalence towards both subject and cast, in the hopes that, as has happened many a time, the movie would prove better than my expectations allowed for.

It did not.

Admittedly, it didn't prove much worse either. Megan Leavey stars Kate Mara, older sister of Rooney Mara, and an actress I have never, despite all the stuff I keep seeing her in, decided if I like or not. Marta plays the titular character of Megan Leavey, a washed up kid from some dead-end town on the Atlantic seaboard who joins the Marines due to a lack of options beyond overdosing on drugs, and through a series of misadventures, winds up assigned to the K-9 corps, working with an "incorrigible" German Shepherd named Rex. They don't like one another at first, they bond, they go to Iraq, they get into combat and perform heroically, they have trouble adjusting to civilian life back home, you've seen this song and dance before, both better and worse, in a hundred other movies. So what makes this one different?

Well... not much, to be honest. This one has a dog, certainly, and that's not nothing, as the dog actor playing Rex is the best actor in the movie (animal actors often are, I find, mostly because they have better lines). True, the film has the usual problem wherein they get the dog to bark a few times and then expect the audience to pretend that it's a 'wild, uncontrollable beast', but I suppose there's limited options for getting a nice dog to appear fearsome. There are, admittedly, a couple of nice lines relating to the business of dogs in Iraq, such as the one where a soldier tries to scare Megan with tales of how the insurgents will kidnap K-9 dogs and strap bombs to them before sending them back to their handlers, only for Megan to respond that, given that Rex can tear a man's arm off with his jaws at her command, she's not overly concerned about that possibility (there's a really awesome action movie to be made here somewhere).

There's also the cast, which is somewhat more exalted than one might normally find in movies like this, though the film does not exactly take full advantage of that fact. Common, who I'm finding increasingly ubiquitous in my filmgoing experiences, plays Megan's tough-but-with-a-good-heart sergeant at the K-9 corps, but while on paper this should seem to be a perfect choice, the fact is that Common is not a particularly good actor when forced to play things straight, being wooden and inflexible in all the wrong ways. Granted, there are movies where he can work around this (John Wick 2 for instance), but here he goes into his Selma/Timothy Green style of direct unemotional declarations of his lines, and it just doesn't work. Tom Felton, of the Harry Potter series, has a small role as a veteran dog handler, which seems to have been added to the movie purely to make the young girls coo (which several of them literally did upon seeing him in my screening), while veteran stars Edie Falco and Will Patton get to play Megan's mother and step-father, the former as a bubble-headed shrew, the latter practically without lines. Neither has much chance to do more than play stereotypes. At least they get a better shot than Bradley Whitford though, who is horrifically mis-cast as Megan's blue-collar working stiff father. I love Whitford, I have for years, but he's about as authentically blue collar as Donald Trump, and has about the same ability to pretend as much, and his attempts to portray a salt-of-the-earth character are just embarrassing, given his polished accent and upper-crust mannerisms. Whitford works great in films like Get Out or The Cabin in the Woods, not in this.

Ultimately, Megan Leavey isn't a bad film. The dog is always entertaining, and Mara is actually pretty decent given the material, underselling everything heavily, which is the right call in a story that can easily slide into melodrama. But the movie overall is really nothing special, a re-hash of American Sniper with dogs, and of about the same level of quality. Unless you're one of those who absolutely has to see every movie involving the military out of some misplaced sense of patriotism (or if you're punishing yourself with a weekly film schedule), there's just no reason to run out for this one. If you've seen the trailers, you've already seen the entire production.

Final Score:  5/10



Next Time: We kick off the heart of the summer blockbuster season with style.

Wonder Woman

Alternate Title:  About Goddamn Time

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  The daughter of the Queen of the Amazons enters the world of Men to stop a madman from using a horrific weapon to stop the end of World War One.


Things Havoc liked:   ... hi, everybody.

[chorus responds]: "Hi, General Havoc."

So er... before we get started today, I'd... like to take a little trip back through memory lane.

Below, we have an excerpt from my review of last year's 2nd worst movie, Batman v. Superman, Dawn of Justice:

"... in keeping with my stated policy of only going to see movies that I suspect have a chance to prove worthwhile, consider this my preemptive rejection of the entire DC cinematic universe. I do this project for many reasons, but one of the main ones is to let my readers know what films are worth seeing and what ones are not, but there is a limit to even my cinematic fortitude, and in consequence, I am afraid that if you wish to know how the future movies in this series will turn out, you shall all have to find out for yourselves."

Next, an excerpt from my review of last year's 1st worst movie, Suicide Squad:

"It should be no surprise that after watching Batman v Superman, swearing off DC forever, relenting, and being presented with this movie, that I intend to see the error of my ways and return to my policy of bothering only with superhero films attached to the MCU."

And now, a transcript from my end-of-the-year podcast, in which I discussed both of these films.

"... fuck the entire DC Universe that they're building. Fuck Wonder Woman. Fuck Justice League. Fuck the Flash. Fuck Aquaman. Fuck all of it. [....] I'm through with that whole series. I said I was done after Batman v Superman, and I relented, because Suicide Squad looked different."

Yeah... um... so... here we are.

Wonder Woman, needless to say, is a movie I did not intend to go see. It's a movie I did not want to go see, not because I hate women (sorry to disappoint you all, you valiant keyboard warriors), nor because of that stupid promotion Alamo theaters ran down in Austin, but because... well because look at the fucking track record for this series. LOOK AT IT! See the decrepitudes, the depths, the vile nilotic rites that this series of films has fallen to. Batman v. Superman was a fucking atrocity cast forth onto screen, so bad that when Suicide Squad came out and somehow contrived to be even worse, I had entirely run out of superlatives and hyperboles to throw at it. I don't know how many times I've had to repeat this old saw, but I do not go and see movies for the express purpose of entertaining you all with my pain. I go see them because I want to. And when a series has disappointed me, hell has pissed in my face as much as this one has, I stop fucking going!!! What other rational course of action is there to take, I ask you? I said those things above because I meant them, every word, with every fiber of my being. And yet...

I don't read reviews before going to see a movie. To do so would be to prejudice my opinion after all. But for some movies, the hype is unavoidable, as reviews bury the internet at large, and so it was for Wonder Woman. Even then, I would not have relented on this one, save that several friends of mine, foremost among them Captain Corvidae (yarrrrr) insisted that this one was worth going to. Corvidae has previously been subjected, on my account, to films such as High-Rise, Under the Skin, Leviathan, and Suicide Squad (please bear this in mind if I should ever turn up the victim of a gruesome wheat thresher accident), and so I felt that it was not a suggestion that I could refuse.

And so, having now wasted enough of everyone's time with preamble and explanations, I shall get to the question at hand. Having violated all semblance of consistency, to say nothing of common sense, and having gone to see the latest DC movie in direct defiance of all of the horrific acts of cinematic blight that preceded it, was it any good?

...

...

... yeah. Yeah it was.

Wonder Woman is, against all odds, a good movie. Indeed, in some ways it is a very good one, but the mere fact that the word 'good' can be applied to it in any form is something of a miracle in and of itself. To say I expected little from this film is... well I mean scroll back up and read those quotes, for I meant every word at the time that I wrote or said them, but despite the cynicism that DC and Warner Brothers has spent the last year or so inspiring within me, this film actually managed to produce something, dare I say... fun. Something creative and enjoyable and interesting. Of course the mere fact that the movie posits a setting in which fun and adventure and interest is possible makes it a tremendous step up from its predecessors, but rather than recap how terrible those movies were, let us discuss what Wonder Woman, miraculously, does right. And for that, let us begin with a woman named Patty Jenkins.

Who is Patty Jenkins? Well I assume the majority of you know this already, but she is a film director, or at least was a film director way back in 2003, when she wrote and directed a Charlize Theron film called Monster, which Roger Ebert called the best film of that year, and which won Theron her only Oscar (to date). Monster was a legitimately great film, and so I can't quite figure out why, in its aftermath, Patty Jenkins vanished without a trace, save for a handful of television episodes of shows I didn't watch, and a 2011 Lifetime Original Movie about breast cancer (be still, my beating heart). Whatever the reason, she has returned from the negative zone (or wherever) to helm Wonder Woman, and thank God she did because without a strong director at the helm, this film risked becoming yet another stamp on DC's frequent shopper's card at the House of Shitty Fucking Movies (franchising opportunities coming soon). Though I promised myself that this review would not simply turn into another list of all the ways that Suicide Squad and Batman v. Superman sucked, this biggest differentiator between this film and those is simply the fundamental mechanics of how it is shot, with Wonder Woman taking place in a world with a vibrant color palate and artful, carefully-selected shots, designed to frame characters in the act of doing awesome things. The design, the cinematography, the sound design and score and all the other mechanistic elements of the film are all top notch, from the sun-dappled cliffs and beaches of the Amazonian island of Themiskyra, to the mud and trenches of the Western Front. There's no muddied darkness, no oversaturated color-leach, no desperate attempt to make the art design beat the audience over the head with how grim and gritty everything is. Instead, we get a movie that is actually... god forbid, fun and interesting to look at, a development so revolutionary, that I assume that the flywheels over at Warner Brothers will spend the next fifteen years trying to figure out how to prevent it from ever happening again. And yet this shying away from over-grim, over-gritty bro-douchery comes despite the fact that the movie is set in the middle of World War 1, a setting movies have traditionally avoided because of how unrelievedly grim everything is. As a result, Wonder Woman is one of the very small number of WWI films in existence that actually have something interesting to look at.

But what are we getting to look at, overall? Well among other things, action. Badass action, by any conceivable standard. One of the reasons I originally looked so favorably on Man of Steel was the tremendous scale of the thing, the Olympian action that covered for all of the misfiring story-beats and busted characters. While Wonder Woman (wisely) doesn't try to match the scale of that film, it does, within the bounds of its universe, manage to elicit the same feelings of awe and... well... wonder, that the aforementioned movie did. Unlike the choppy, badly-paced action of Batman v. Superman, Wonder Woman uses a much more traditional format, including two absolutely standout action sequences, one a pitched battle between Amazons and German soldiers on a sun-draped beach, the other a set-piece, operatic assault across the tangled ruin of No-Man's Land and the lethal maze of the trench lines, a sequence that includes Wonder Woman caving an armored car in with her fists and taking out a sniper by decapitating a belfry. The direction for these sequences is a little heavy on the slow-mo, but as with Snyder's own 300, all that is forgiven if the scenes being focused upon are sufficiently awesome. And they are.

And then there's the cast, and for once Warner Brothers and the rest have outdone themselves in getting the right people for the job. Casting has always been Marvel's strength and DC's bane, but this time we have Chris Pine, Captain Kirk himself, as Captain Steve Trevor, Wonder Woman's partner in war, her introduction to the wider world, and her... love interest? Maybe? Whatever definition we use, Pine is absolutely spot-perfect in this role, as he has the Robert Downey Jr. skill of being able to disarm a scene or line that might sound insufferably cheesy through a combination of roguish charm and utter sincerity. The dynamic between his character and Wonder Woman is deft and nuanced, with just enough tension, romantic and otherwise, to keep everything interesting, while imparting his character with motives, skills, and interest of his own enough to stand alongside the main event (something, I need not remind you all, which is fantastically rare for the usually-female characters that typically populate this archetype in these sorts of films).

The rest of the cast does not let the side down either, including as it does the incomparable David Thewlis as a member of Parliament who seeks to bypass the red tape of the war office by means of Wonder Woman, and a host of excellent character actors as Wonder Woman's squad, including French actor Saïd Taghmaoui (whom I first met in the staggeringly-good 1995 Mathieu Kassovitz film La Haine), playing a Moroccan con-artist and womanizer straight out of the Casablanca playbook (upon watching Wonder Woman throw a man through a wall, he comments that he is simultaneously terrified and aroused). Veteran Spanish actress Elena Anaya (you might remember her from Justin Timberlake's 'Sexyback' video) gets to ham things up as the frazzled, obsessive "Doctor Poison" (there's a Golden Age of comics name for you). The biggest surprise, though, is the Amazons themselves. Jenkins apparently lobbied to have their ranks filled, not by supermodels (as many films would have), but by towering Olympic athletes, all rippling muscle and... forgive me... Amazonian statures. These woman may or may not be great actors (my guess is not, given the limited lines they get), but they have the physicality of warrior-women down cold, and their stage presence and bearing is such that I was actually disappointed when the film left Themiscyra for a trip into the relatively sedate world of The Great War. Studded among the Amazons are real actors, including Gladiator's Connie Nielson as Queen Hippolyta, and none other than Robin Freaking Wright, Princess Buttercup herself (whom I hadn't seen in so long that I mistook her for Patricia Arquette), playing General Antiope, commander of the Amazon army. Robin Wright is a goddamn national treasure, and this, this role right here is why, as she takes her limited time on screen and turns it into rapturous badassery, culminating in the sorts of slow-mo action money shots usually reserved for scantily-dressed characters (male or female) in Zach Snyder films.

Things Havoc disliked: In case my above ravings was not clear enough, Wonder Woman is a good movie, and that alone is a hell of an achievement, given the pedigree from whence it was born. But is it a great movie, as some reviewers have been quick to pronounce? In a word... no. No, I'm afraid it's not.

Why not? Well, there's a couple of reasons, really, but the biggest one is front and center, and it's Wonder Woman herself, played in this case by Israeli actress Gal Gadot. I admit, I didn't expect much out of Gadot here, not after the dismal work she did in Batman v. Superman, and I admit as well that she easily outdoes that performance here, with one that has a number of things going for it. She has the look down pat, the presence, the physicality, everything but the acting itself which is... just not very good. It's not awful, mind you, but Gadot is just unrelievedly wooden throughout much of the film, only occasionally rising to the level of her co-stars. I appreciate that it's not easy acting in a language which isn't your native tongue (trust me, I know), but the end result is what it is, and it gives the movie's quieter scenes, the ones where the direction and action can't wallpaper over the movie's flaws, a decidedly B-grade feel to them.

There's also, of all things, the CGI, which, for some reason, is markedly sub-par, enough that it gets distracting more than once. How in the world this could happen on a $150,000,000 epic superhero film backed by several of the largest companies in Hollywood, I have no idea, but the CG work (as distinct from the practical effects) looks downright embarrassingly bad at points, with the digital stand-ins for Wonder Woman and her troops moving like marionettes from a mid-2000s throwaway film. Amber Hirsch, the film's VFX director, has a decent enough pedigree behind her (albeit mostly on shit movies), so I have no idea what the problem here was. But while Marvel's films have had their occasional slip-ups (one particular sequence involving Captain America in the climactic sequence of the Avengers comes to mind), this one looks so consistently awful that you can actually see the seam between the crappy CG effects and the decent practical ones. That's not something you ever want the audience to be able to pay attention to.

But overall, the problems with Wonder Woman aren't so much giant glaring things, it's small things, minor things, things that would normally, in the course of affairs not come up in a review like this, but which I must bring up here because there are so damn many of them. I'm talking about continuity mistakes, editing gaffes, minor (and less minor) errors in scripting, dialogue, and general research that point to a significant lack of attention to detail somewhere along the line during the production of this film. One of the aforementioned battle sequences, the brilliant one between the German soldiers and the Amazon warriors, involves a German warship joining the battle only to be mysteriously sunk, offscreen, by means we never get to see. The various trips that our heroes make to German bases and aerodromes involve innumerable errors of basic continuity and logic, with anachronistic weapons and equipment scattered about, or background material written in the wrong languages (duty rosters for German pilots written in French, for instance). And speaking of languages, one scene midway through the film has Wonder Woman identifying a captured German document as having been cyphered in a combination of "Sumerian and Ottoman", the writers being apparently completely unaware that Sumerian is a nigh-untranslatable language which has been dead for 5,000 years, one which the author of the document has no way of knowing, and 'Ottoman' doesn't exist, the language of the Ottoman Empire having been called 'Turkish' since its inception through to today. This isn't a pulp movie like Captain America or the Rocketeer, where such things could be hand-waved away as unimportant, the tone of Wonder Woman is reverent and earnest to a fault, attempting to use its WWI setting to tell a serious, mythic tale about the nature of war and the human urge to violence, and this many basic mistakes, ones that could have been corrected by a single line of dialogue or a simple editing alteration speaks to a general research failure on the part of the studio, the crew, or both. It's not that any one of these issues are major problems. It's that the sum total of them makes the film look sloppy, and when you consider the staggering lengths that epic film series like the MCU or the Lord of the Rings have gone to to produce a holistic, internally consistent universe, all this serves to show me is how far DC still has to go, even with a good movie under their belts at last.

Final thoughts:   And lest I render things murky with my criticism, that is exactly what Wonder Woman is, a Good film, a Very Good film at parts, one that clearly aspires to be a Great film but does not get there, held back by a limited leading actress, and generally sub-par crew and production work across the board. It is, at long last, a worthy inclusion in the ranks of Superhero staples from DC, a film on-par, qualitatively, with the second-tier offerings from Marvel such as Ant-Man or Thor 2. Like those movies before it, Wonder Woman, almost miraculously, has earned my seal of approval, and though it was not good enough to get me to re-think my policy on the DC-cinematic universe overall (the Justice League movie can go fuck itself, as far as I'm concerned), it has forced me to relent somewhat, in that I will see the inevitable Wonder Woman sequel, and will... consider the other standalone films that they have for me, though I still feel that the series has a long way to go before they can be spoken of alongside their august competition.

But... of course... there's another factor at work here, one that should in all fairness be addressed as well, which is that even with all of the positives and negatives I have summed up , the fact is that this is not just another Superhero movie, of the sort we have seen before, not simply another Ant-Man or Thor 2, but Wonder Woman, a movie that comic fans, particularly female ones, have been waiting to see realized for generations. It is a mainstream, A-list, multi-hundred-million-dollar superhero epic about a world-famous female superhero made by a female director for an audience that is expected to be in no small part female. And as such, while I stand by every line of my review above, and while I reject, in totality, all suggestions that I or other male critics have either no right or no capacity to review such a work, it is true that this is a movie made, in no small part, for another group of people entirely. It is a movie made for my sister, no stranger to movies like these, who saw the film and spent an hour on the phone with me describing nuances of shot selection and editorial decisions that stood out as obvious to her, but were entirely transparent to me. It is a movie made for Corvidae, whom all of you already know, who praised this movie in rapturous terms while I was out of the country, who loved it start to finish to the point where she volunteered to see it again alongside me, despite a schedule full of nightmares, and all of the awful, awful movies she has seen at my instigation.

It is a movie made for my mother. The original Wonder Woman. Who has no use for superhero movies in general, but who once spent every Halloween as Wonder Woman, and who went to see this movie for her own reasons, and loved it. When I asked her why, the main reason she gave me was not the action nor the fight sequences nor even the characters and story, but the fact that, for the first time in all her years of seeing movies like this, she could tell instantly that this one was directed by a woman, that it had a "woman's perspective", one I didn't even notice, but that she identified instantly. She loved this movie, because for the first time it was about a character she actually cared about, made by someone who wanted her, her specifically, to enjoy it.

I stand by everything that I have said about Wonder Woman, and about the wider DC universe. And I would be lying if I said I thought the fact that this movie is about a female superhero, about the female superhero, made these other opinions better than mine. But they are not worse than mine either, and the fact that this movie managed to cause people who hated the entire genre sing its praises, or become excited about future possibilities of future films from this source, all while still producing a film that I thought legitimately good, is something that deserves recognition. I did not regard Wonder Woman as a great film, but there are many, many others who did. And insofar as it's ever possible to be objective about film quality, maybe it is.

All I know, ultimately, is that Wonder Woman is a movie that has justified its existence. That is no small feat, when one regards all of its predecessors, both in and out of the official DC cinematic universe (consider Catwoman or Elektra), that did not. It is a film that I enjoyed watching, and that some people loved. Does this mean that the DC universe has finally found its footing and been placed on the right trajectory?  Maybe. But if it does not, then at least those who loved it will have one film they can treasure forever.

And if it does, then it would not be the first time in history that, when all hope was lost, Wonder Woman saved the world.

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  Three films you should see before Blockbuster season REALLY begins...

Colossal

Alternate Title:  Gone Kaiju

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  Following a traumatic breakup and dealing with spiraling alcoholism, a woman returns to her hometown to reconnect with old friends just as a tremendous monster begins attacking a city on the far side of the world.

Things Havoc liked:  I had an astoundingly hard time coming up with the synopsis above, because Colossal, whatever else it might be, is a really weird movie.

A personal project directed and written by Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo (none of whose previous work I am familiar with), Colossal was a movie I went to see entirely on spec. A woman named Gloria (Anne Hathaway), unemployed and a raging alcoholic, breaks up with her boyfriend (Beauty and the Beast's Dan Stevens) in New York City, and moves back to her hometown somewhere in small town middle America. There, she meets an old childhood friend (Jason Sudeikis), who gives her a job at his bar to get back on her feet, and seems to be interested in kindling a relationship, introducing her to his friends around town and helping her put her place in order. What sounds like a setup for a particularly boring romantic dramady is salvaged however, by two complicating factors. One of these factors is that a two hundred foot reptilian monster begins assaulting the city of Seoul, South Korea, smashing things, killing people, and vanishing into thin air from whence it came. Over the course of several nights of these rampages broadcast on live news and YouTube, Gloria begins to realize that the monster is mirroring her own actions whenever she stumbles home drunk at eight in the morning through a disused playground somewhere in town, and that she is consequently responsible for the murder of hundreds and the destruction of much of Seoul. The other one of these factors is actually important.

But... before we get to that, let's talk about what we've got here. All of the above actors, particularly Hathaway, are sublime. Of course Anne Hathaway is always sublime, even in bad movies like Bride Wars or Alice in Wonderland. Her character is a blind drunk, accustomed to getting away with murder (metaphorically, one hopes) by acting cute and batting her eyes, and pivoting instantly to hyper-serious when confronted with real consequences, such as being thrown out of her home or realizing that she may have started World War III by accident. A great early sequence has Hathaway effortlessly expressing total desperation, shock, and misery, all without a word, after her boyfriend throws her own of their shared apartment and her drunken friends carry on carousing behind her, oblivious. Given the weirdness of a premise that requires her to discover that she can control Godzilla, she, and the movie, plays things very down to earth, as she struggles to find a way to make things right without the wider world discovering what is actually going on. Vigalondo's direction is light on effects and heavy on quotidian observation (he wrote, smugly), with the emphasis firmly on the characters and their reactions to what, in a worse movie, would be a world-shattering discovery leading to super-heroism or chase scenes, and in this movie leads to slurred conversations in bars while watching events play out on television. In fact, one of the funniest things I've seen in years is a CNN report that plays a YouTube video of one of the Kaiju "incidents", complete with internet memes and embellishments. I almost choked.

But I said a moment ago that there was another factor that was actually important. What factor is this, you ask? It's the character of Jason Sudeikis' Oscar, who starts the movie off as a friendly, neighborhood bar-owner, willing to help Gloria out with a job and spare furniture, and ends it as... well... one of the most toxic, abusive, controlling people that I have ever seen applied to screen. It's not that Oscar is a monster, although he is, it's that the movie does a sterling job of portraying what an abusive person actually looks and acts like, rather than the cartoon psychopaths that are generally put on screen. His behavior is cyclical and self-delusional, with subtle warning signs initially before spiraling into full-blown narcissistic delusion and aggressive, controlling behavior, fueled, in-part, by his own incipient alcoholism and circumstantial opportunities (the aforementioned Kaiju situation) to force his fantasies into reality. Sudeikis, an SNL alum, is an actor I've known about forever, but I don't think I've ever seen before this, at least not in movies, and he's amazing. This is a role that most directors would fill with guys like Vince Vaughn or Billy Campbell, tough-looking creepers who can loom menacingly and appear monstrous at the drop of a hat, with the usual consequence that one wonders just how the abused protagonist couldn't see this coming. But this film has Jason Sudeikis, of Mother's Day and Zach Galifianakis movies, a guy whose established movie persona and look are about as threatening as a bowl of soup, turning on the repressed rage and toxicity, rather than unconvincingly turning it off. It's an incredibly good performance, a star-making performance, helped by a restrained script that only provides the barest glimpses of what must be going on underneath the surface of the character, letting the audience figure it out for themselves.

Things Havoc disliked: So... here's the thing...

Some films are just bad. That's hardly a shocking statement. Some are the product of bad scripts or writing, some of terrible performances, some of awful direction, a rare few are victims of all of the above. Over the years I've been doing this, in fact, I've come to appreciate that there are an infinite number of ways to make a bad movie, and in the aftermath of one, it is often not that easy to sit down and parse out what actually went wrong. That's one of the reasons (beyond simple procrastination) why these reviews take so long. You need to give a movie time to percolate, time to settle in your mind. Sometimes you simply need to take the time to clarify your thoughts on a film before you can start speaking intelligently about it. And this is often the case for films, like this one, that are objectively very well made, with good acting and good writing and a good director overseeing it all, and yet which, for whatever reason, I found I didn't like.

Why? What more could I be asking for beyond a bunch of good actors acting well together in a refreshing story that occasionally had me howling in laughter? Initially, I thought that the problem was that the movie reminded me too much of films like Enough, the 2002 Michael Apted "thriller" that starred Jennifer Lopez as a woman fleeing her cartoonishly-evil ex-husband, who would sneer at the camera before monologuing about how deliciously evil he was and how helpless she was to thwart him. But as I mentioned above, that comparison isn't fair, as Sudeikis' performance (and, frankly, Vigalondo's directing) is miles beyond the cheap mawkishness of that early-00s snoozer (there's a reason the 1997-2004 period is now regarded as the Dark Age of Cinema). What, then, was the problem? Was there something more fundamental in this film that made me react this way, some deep-rooted issue of script or premise? Or was it instead a subjective matter, and whatever it was had nothing to do with the movie at all, just a facet of the baggage that all critics, no matter how objective they try to be, bring into the theater with them?

Maybe. Or maybe the problem lies, not with Enough, but with a movie from 2014 called Gone Girl.

Long-time readers will remember Gone Girl, the David Fincher film based on a Gillian Flynn book, the one that starred Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck at the top of their form, with a labyrinthine script involving insanity, betrayal, murder, manipulation, and the hunger for scripted villains by mass media. It was, by many standards, a great film, well created and shot, and written crisply enough that even Tyler Perry wound up looking good. And I hated it. Not because of any of the things above, but because I concluded, following a similar agonizing process to the one above, that it was a shallow, manipulative piece, coded in the language of misogynist sexism, one that romanticized all of its men, no matter how awful, and condemned all of its women, no matter how unbelievable. It was a movie that pretended to show the steamy underworld of obsession and manipulation, but refused to play fair with its characters, with the audience, or with the scenario it had set up, preferring instead to deal in thin stereotypes hidden by good performances and direction. At the time I reviewed Gone Girl, I said that I rejected the film, in part because "If a movie was made this way about men (and there have been some), I and others would be trumpeting outrage to the skies." And readers, I'm sad to report that the time has come, because Colossal is that movie.

The problem isn't Sudeikis' character, not really. He's an obsessive, evil, manipulative person, willing to commit horrific acts so as to control Gloria's life, but that much isn't sexism any more than Norman Bates was, it's a character of terrible depths played brilliantly, and one we don't often get to see, at least not with this spin. No, the problem, as always, is in the context in which we get to meet this character, because this isn't a simple story of girl-goes-home-and-is-manipulated-by-monster, Kaiju-laden or otherwise, and the movie treats it like it is. Gloria, lest we be reminded, is herself a blind drunk, one who, even after discovering this miraculous capacity to control the actions of Godzilla, drunkenly plays with the notion and shows off to her friends, resulting in the deaths of thousands and the obliteration of large portions of Seoul. It would be one thing if the story were one of Gloria learning from her terrible mistakes and taking back control of her life, while Oscar slides deeper into the throes of his own demons, but it's not, not really. Instead, Gloria is instantly forgiven everything that she's done wrong because... well because she's the heroine, I guess. She cures her raging alcoholism, a disease that has led her to kill thousands of people, offscreen, suddenly no longer suffering from it because she apparently decided not to. She does this, despite still working in a bar, surrounded by alcohol, an environment no alcoholic on Earth has sufficient willpower to resist. And just as she does so, everyone else in the movie swallows their evil pill, so that she can appear more saintly. Not only does Oscar take a turn from "weird and creepy" to "utterly irredeemable" (which is fine), but her ex-boyfriend (Stevens), the one who broke up with her in the beginning of the film because he didn't know what else to do, and has spent the movie calling her up and begging her to get help, even apologizing for sounding so superior and lecturing about it, the one who turns up in her hometown, having faked a buisness trip for the purpose, because he's afraid that she may be in real trouble (which she absolutely is), this boyfriend suddenly turns around and becomes a negging, verbally abusive, dismissive egomaniac, denigrating her attempts to do exactly the things he had previously been begging her to do, just so that when she inevitably tells him off and excises him from her life, the audience can feel good about cheering.

But that's not the only character this happens to. Consider Tim Blake Nelson, a wonderful character actor whom I've adored in films like Holes, Syriana, and O Brother, Where Art Thou. He plays Garth, an ex-drug abuser and friend of Oscar, whom Oscar turns on one night in a drunken rant, exposing his past as a drug addict and belittling him mercilessly. He tells Oscar off, and... is never seen again. Despite the fact that his character has been set up heavily as an important part of the story, and the fact that he knows the secret about the Kaiju, one of the most explosive in the history of mankind, he vanishes outright from the rest of the film, something the film tries to frame as moral cowardice, and I am tempted to re-frame as the film being afraid that having a male character who isn't an abusive monster will undercut their heroine. For proof of this, look no further than Austin Stowell, of Whiplash and Bridge of Spies, Oscar's other friend, with whom Gloria has a brief fling, prior to him turning into a doormat and an enabler for all of Oscar's worst habits, actively abetting him in the murder of thousands of people with no reason given beyond the fact that, well, he's a man, and you know how they are. I don't mind that these characters are all flawed, or addicts, or stupid, or abusive, or even monstrous. I've loved many a film with many a character that evidenced all of those things, some with much less acting skill than is on display here. I mind that the movie is coded such that they are those things because they're men. And that Gloria, no matter what she does, no matter who she kills, is not any of those things, because she isn't.

Final thoughts:   It should be noted that the people I saw this movie with had no such experience, and thought the movie was interesting and well made, and rated it highly. I do not claim that they are necessarily wrong, but I will note that I felt the same way about Gone Girl when I left the theater, and that it was only after much time and conversation with those who had reacted negatively to that film's latent misogyny that I came to realize that I hated it. I would not go so far as to say that I hated Colossal the same way I ultimately did Gone Girl, but I did not like it, not when I saw it and even less now, with several weeks' distance to think about the matter. The issue isn't just that it stereotypes men as abusive, manipulative monsters, although it absolutely does this. It's that in doing so, it also manages to imply that the only way the audience will empathize with a woman in the throes of an abusive relationship is by making her literally the only likable person in existence, beatifying her by proxy despite the fact that she manifests many of the same behaviors as everyone else. The only difference is that, as a woman, she's infallible, while men are the scum of creation. And if you think I'm laying this on too thick, consider for a moment that the character is named Gloria, and that one of the final scenes has her literally walking on water.

Enough then. I don't expect that many people will hate Colossal, in fact I expect quite the opposite, as the movie is unquestionably well made and acted by all concerned. I don't begrudge those who find value in the exercise as a result, but I cannot number myself among them. I mentioned in the Gone Girl review that a good film can be made about any subject, but only if it made with honesty, and like that film, Colossal is a crude simplification that gathers airs of depth because of its evident technical virtues. I denounced Gone Girl because of its insidious misogyny despite these virtues, and I will not refrain in this case simply because the shoe is on the other foot. To do anything else would be dishonest, and that would make me no better than the film itself.

Final Score:  4/10

Next Time:  Magic, Mayhem, and Mad Science.

Alien: Covenant (Guest Review)

Alternate Title:  An Android's Love Language (and Other Bad Life Decisions)

One sentence synopsis:     Colonists land on a planet occupied by a certain android.  Horror ensues.



A Note Before We Begin:  Having recently returned from my trip abroad, I am presently engaged in catching up on all the wonderful things I missed.  But as there have been a handful of movies that have come out recently that I had no intention of seeing whatsoever, I managed to threaten convince one of my cinematically-inclined associates to assist me by seeing one of these godawful phenominal movies that I simply wasn't going to have interest in time to see.  And so, without further ado, let me reintroduce to you all one of my finest contributors and collaborators over the years (and the man who, after myself, bears the most blame for the 2014 Worst of the Year Musical Showcase) , the incomparable Dr. Comrade Tortoise.

A Note from our Guest Reviewer: Hello there!  In case you hadn’t guessed, I am not General Havoc.  Instead, I am the creature (in)formally known as Comrade Tortoise.  A bit of background is in order, I think.  I need to get my Alien street cred out there.  I first saw Alien when I was two, loved the Xenomorphs, and now study vicious predatory and parasitic insects. This naturally means that when Havoc was gone, came back, and had catching up to do, I volunteered to shoulder the burden of a movie he was (justifiably, given Prometheus) nervous about inflicting upon himself.  There are limits to his masochism, ladies and gentle-beasts.

That said, I do things a bit differently.  I am scoring different aspects of the film separately, and providing a composite score consisting of the average of its components at the end, along with final thoughts.  These scores will be in the form of grades, with the final composite score being a GPA on a standard 1-4 scale.

Cinematography and Visuals: A

Ridley Scott is a visual storyteller. No matter what else one might say about his films, they look amazing, and this movie is no exception to the rule.  Every shot is perfectly framed and the CGI is crisp and realistic looking, including the various creatures appearing to and behaving as if they have mass.  This is often a problem with films heavily dependent on digital rather than practical effects (as an example see The Lizard in The Amazing Spider Man) and something that was successfully dodged in this movie.  The sets (physical and CG) were realistic looking and faithful to the original retro-future look of the original film (though with some modern tweaks), everything that needed to remind us of the glory of H.R. Giger did so successfully.

Plot: C-

Here I am defining plot as the overarching story, not the details that comprise it, but the filmed representations of the storyboard elements.  Here, without spoiling anything, it holds up pretty well.  Colony ship, things happen and decisions get made, land on planet, terrible things happen.  It is not especially creative, but it works.  There are no notable plot twists, and everything is pretty well telegraphed.  Probably too well, actually.  I was able to easily predict most of it, including the kill-order of the various characters, so for that it takes something of a hit.

Writing: D

This is where it falls off.  If plot is the A to B to C of a film, the writing consists of the details that get you to the various points.  Here… oh god. The quantity of contrivance and ridiculously bad decisions that get us to the end game is awful.  Just awful.  It literally starts in the first five minutes of the film, with the shit going down that initiates the sequence of events leading to planetary landing.  It is a ridiculously improbable event.  Then the crew decides to do something reckless (landing on an uncharted system that was either passed over for colonization or *somehow* not seen in stellar surveys over the objections of the XO, and that when they arrive is horribly unsuited for manned surveys).  No environment suits. This planet just so happens to be the one planet in all the universe that David landed on… The list goes on and on and on.  In the original Alien, most people made smart decisions except where outright malice or very human concern for a friend came in.  They died anyway.  In Alien: Covenant, people make stupid decisions and you find yourself wanting them to be punished for them.  That said, the dialogue is good, and the way the film slowly reveals just how fucked up David is (even with the bad decisions of those around him) was very well done.  These things don’t give the writing a passing grade, but they do rescue the film as a whole.

Writing: B-

Every actor did an adequate job selling that shitty writing as something their characters would do, for the most part, the performances were competent. If Fassbender were not involved, the score would be a C.  However, he was involved and managed to single-handedly elevate the performance.  His portrayals of David (and malignantly narcissistic psycho AI) and Walter (his Friendly AI counterpart) were perfection. I have to give a shout-out to the sheer terror portrayed by a shuttle pilot as well.  It was… delicious.

Final Score: 2.33, C

This movie scrapes by with a middling C, like so many slacking undergrads who will never make it into medical or law school but who may find themselves in a corporate boardroom or the oval office one day.  It was… Okay.  It had the potential to be a great film, but the writing failures and lackluster plot drag down the actors and the amazing visuals into a film so mediocre it hurts to behold.  “What could have been…” looms large in my assessment of the film..

Final Score (Translated into Havoc's Rating): 6/10

The Fate of the Furious

Alternate Title:  As The Rock Turns

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  Following a shocking betrayal from within, the Toretto crew must team up with old friends and adversaries to stop an international cyber-terrorist from seizing control of a doomsday weapon.


Things Havoc liked:  Let us now consider a work of high art...

The Fast and Furious franchise is one of the strangest things in film, an action movie series that somehow re-invented itself halfway through and became awesome on its fifth installment. How it did this is a complete mystery to me, partly because this is something that is simply never done, and partly because I took one look at the original Fast and the Furious and noped out right then and there. It took the dregs of 2015's indie dreck to drag me, kicking and screaming, into Fast & Furious 7, where I discovered to my amazement that the series had metamorphed into an action-soap opera involving wonderful self-aware humor, and some of the most ludicrous action setpieces I've seen since the heyday of the 80s. The writing was terrible, the actors sub-par, the plot ludicrous, the movie patently stupid. I kind of loved it. And now here we are, two years later, with another sequel, the eighth in the franchise, and one which has, at time of writing, scored the biggest opening weekend in the history of cinema (a record that is broken every six months or so, but still). Not bad for a movie series where two of the lead characters can't act and the third one is dead.

Too soon?

The Fate of the Furious is a movie directly taken from the vein of the previous films (I assume. Remember, I haven't seen any but 1 and 7). Dominic (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) are on their honeymoon in Cuba, visiting old friends, when trouble arrives in the form of Charlize Theron's Cypher, a super-hacker/Bond villain with ties to Dom's past (after eight movies, are there people still in existence who do not have ties to Dom's past?) out to do nefarious things for the sake of being nefarious. This is the sort of villain character that we have seen time and again in bad action movie after bad action movie, but this is Charlize Theron, a woman who embodies campy insanity, as a glance at the Snow White and the Huntsman movies will tell you, and she makes it work by vamping it up with icy-blonde dreadlocks and a murderous stare. She joins a cast that by now has passed unmanagably large and entered ludicrous territory (zing!), including The Rock, Kurt Russell, and F&F7's main villain (now converted into a protagonist, like every Fast and Furious villain), Jason Statham. Each and every one of these men are veterans of myriad bad action movies, and know just what they are doing here, from The Rock's larger-than-life personality (an early scene where he coaches a girls' soccer team includes a hilarious bit I would not dream of spoiling), to Kurt Russel's cock-eyed, self-assured arrogance (something he does oh-so-well), to Jason Statham's virtuosity when playing an abrasive asshole (something he is so much better at than playing a leading nice guy). These characters join the "crew", now comprising half-a-dozen members in their own right, even without the late Paul Walker, including Ludacris, Tyrese Gibson (I love these two men so much), Nathalie Emmanuel (who played a hacker character in the seventh movie that I assumed was disposable, forgetting that this series never discards anyone), Michelle Rodriguez, Elsa Pataky, and... you know what if I keep going, we're gonna be here all day, so let's just leave it at "also everyone else in the universe". Some of these people are good actors, some are not, but every one of them inhabits a lived-in role designed just for them, one that fits their strengths and er... non-strengths... just right, with the result that even the bad performances are charming in their own way. This isn't a movie you go to see in order to watch great thespians bare their souls. It's a movie you go to see to watch shit explode and one-liners said.

So who is the ringmaster of this absurd collection of action movie tropes and variable-quality acting? None other than F. Gary Gray, who we last saw two years ago directing the incomparable musical biopic Straight Outta Compton. One forgets, given the critical acclaim that movie produced, that Gray got his start directing stupid, stupid action movies like The Negotiator, The Italian Job (the 2003 version), and Law Abiding Citizen. While I would not recommend you all run out to find those movies (especially not the last one), they are in the vein of this sort of willfully absurd action extravaganza, and fortunately, Gray, as well as long time series screenwriter Chris Morgan (whose other work we shall not speak of here), seem to have found their senses of humor this time to go along with the ridiculous action. One of the secrets of this series' success is just how little it cares about how dumb everything is, and while it's hardly the first action series to give in to the stupidity and just run with everything, Gray succeeds where others fail by playing up the melodrama of everything to truly hilarious levels. Characters cannot simply discuss their feelings, they must weep and wail and gnash their teeth and cast about for scenery to chew upon, so overwrought are they by the soap opera-style drama and relationship complexities that overcome them minute by minute. With a lesser cast, this sort of thing would be insufferable, but Gray trusts his cast to go for it, relying on the good actors (or at least the good bad actors) to carry the bad ones through the material, and the stunts and action to take care of the rest.

Oh did I mention there was action in this movie? Because there is. And it's awesome. Granted, I don't know that anything will top the sheer lunacy that was the climax to the last movie (recall that that one ended with an akimbo lug-wrench fight between Vin Diesel and Jason Statham on top of a collapsing building), but I'll be damned if they don't try. Listing everything insane that happens in this movie would take a hundred years, but standout sequences include one where a computer hacker seizes control of thousands of self-driving cars for a chase through New York City, one that quickly comes to echo the zombie hordes from World War Z more than your traditional car chase. An extended, Mad-Max-style car chase sequence on a frozen estuary livens things up with the addition of a nuclear submarine to the mix, while Jason Statham, in the company of several cameos that made us all howl with laughter, gets to have a brutal hand to hand fight with innumerable military goons while holding a baby in a bassinet. I won't say this is the weirdest fight I've seen Statham engage in (the aforementioned lugwrench fight comes to mind, as does the occasion in The Expendables 2 when he fought off a platoon of soldiers with an incense censer), but it's one of the funniest, as Statham mugs for the baby (and the camera) during the entire engagement, which had me, at least, in stitches.

Things Havoc disliked: I love a good, stupid action movie as much as anyone, believe me, but all joking aside, I don't mistake it for a work of high cinematic achievement. Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez simply cannot act, not like this (in Rodriguez' case, not ever), and I'd be lying if I said it didn't get tiresome watching them try. And the film, in making them share the screen with actors like Charlize Theron, does not do them any favors, nor even when it pairs them with people like Statham and The Rock, who whatever their acting limits, are extremely good at overacting in action movies like these, and thus can't help but show up those in the cast who do not have such skills. This was a problem in the seventh movie as well, but it's a bigger one here, as the soap opera turns of the plot (has Dom Toretto turned on his "family"?!?!) forces everyone to start overacting in a hyper-melodramatic manner, resulting in about seventy billion repetitions of the already pre-established fact that the crew here are a family, and that family is very important when family bonds are strained by familial family obligations of family family family family family. Given that Guardians of the Galaxy managed to set up a believable, fun, surrogate family dynamic without ever once using the word 'family', it's a little much to sit through scene after scene after scene in which characters narrate their own familial relationships to one another in repetitive detail, especially when the actors doing so have no idea how to deliver a goddamn line.

That said, there's nothing wrong with the concept of course, in fact more movies could stand to have a showcase of characters of different ethnicities, backgrounds, and accents like this, family or not. But if you're going to have a cast this size, then the question of what the hell to do with everyone is going to rear its head, and while the film manages to give most of the cast something to do, there's an unavoidable sense that some people are just here because they're expected to be here. With so much attention on Dom's dilemma and his cat-and-mouse games with Theron's evil villainess, the rest of his crew gets short shrift. Gibson and Ludacris are mostly there to score points off one another and flirt with Emmanuel, Rodriguez has nothing whatsoever to do besides look constipated and growl the word family every five minutes, and a new character, a stick-in-the-mud G-man played by Suicide Squad's Scott Eastwood (because an association with fucking Suicide Squad was what this series needed), is pretty much introduced becasue we need someone to play the handsome generic white dude in the absence of Paul Walker, and I guess he'll do. Even The Rock, whom I adore to death, has very little material in this film, other than a handful of fun scenes playing off his rivalry with Statham. I understand that there's a limited number of movie minutes to go around, but a film that fails to use The Rock properly is a movie that is struggling to invent a reason why everyone is there. I grant that plot is a tertiary concern at best in a movie like this, but there has to be something in it for everyone, or the film will begin to resemble nothing but franchise maintenance, along the lines of the third films from the X-Men and Iron Man series.

Final thoughts:   Granted, I wouldn't quite go so far to directly compare Fate of the Furious with those films, but the parallel did assert itself as I was watching, and thus for all its action setpieces and soap opera plotting, I have to confess that Fast & Furious 8 is not as good a film as its direct predecessor was. By no means is it a bad film, but it feels... limited, in a way that the previous one did not. It's possible that's just a reversion to the mean, or a factor of the previous film being an auspicious combination of low expectations and bad competition, but I honestly think that the series, given its disregard for taste and its enormous cast of quality bad actors, is capable of better than this.

That said, for all my reservations, I do recommend Fate of the Furious, perhaps not as strongly as its predecessor, but strongly nonetheless, as only in this series have I found such a wonderful disregard of logic crossed with an embracing of fun, despite all the efforts to ape it by lesser studios and series. For my part, I shall file this one away as a lesser-but-still-fun episode of my favorite action-soap opera, and wait for better things. Of course, given the fact that Fate of the Furious has just finished making roughly all of the money in existence, I expect that the aforementioned cast will soon have an opportunity to try the whole exercise again. And when they do, I will be there to see it.

Final Score:  6/10

Next Time:  The Princess Diaries 3:  Attack of the Kaiju