After the nonsensical to middling Avengers movies, and last winter’s mediocre Black Panther, I must admit that I didn’t expect much from Marvel Studios’ newest movie, Captain Marvel, for Hollywood’s only mega-studio. With mixed themes and flat characters, it’s Marvel’s worst movie yet. But, even on Hollywood’s new feminist Me, Too terms, this putters.
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Brie Larson (Kong: Skull Island), an affable actress, like everyone in this movie, including series mainstay Samuel L. Jackson, Jude Law (Closer) and Annette Bening (American Beauty), deserves better screenwriting and directing.
Larson is not what’s wrong with Captain Marvel. But she’s so stiff, dull and distant, the opposite of Marvel’s male comic book heroes, that you keep waiting for an alien to pop out of her to explain her lifelessness. And, oddly, a good chunk of Captain Marvel derives from alien abduction/torture conspiracies or fantasies.
With supernatural powers in a faraway galaxy with flying cars and some sort of Middle East type conflict that goes unexplained, Larson’s blank character aimlessly wanders wondering about her true identity. Though her mentor, played by Law, assures her that he seeks through her superior’s “supreme intelligence” to guide her toward her own “best version”, something’s off about the altruism. Somber music and platitudes forewarn.
But what exactly is the mystery and why doesn’t she remember her past? I stopped caring after a while. Any but the most diehard Marvel fans and Disney investors will, too. A race of shape-shifting aliens resembling a cross between Lucasfilm’s Darth Maul and Mandy Patinkin’s character from Alien Nation that figure into the plot are more interesting than Larson’s plain, ordinary woman.
In terms of plot, my primary objection is that the protagonist fails in almost every task at almost every turn. She’s either incompetent or incapable or both. But the lack of heroism, let alone superheroism, stands out. This fact is on prominent display when an earthling pal (Lashana Lynch) shows up and Captain Marvel, which measurably lacks anything remotely marvelous, turns into a female version of Top Gun complete with cocky pilots, rock music and a mascot named Goose. The gals strut and mutter about how they’re going to “show these boys how we do it”.
The audience is primed to react to the movie’s feminism via the soundtrack cues which include a nonstop string of female rock anthems from the Wilson sisters’ Heart, Gwen Stefani and Lita Ford. With fetishism, a Ford Mustang cameo and the multiculturalism of TV’s Deep Space Nine with the snooze-inducement factor to match, Larson’s confused woman traipses around with Cybill Shepherd’s style minus the sex appeal.
All of this might be tolerable or defensible as escapist fare if the protagonist accomplished anything but she rarely does. When she could use a hostage early in the action, she runs away instead, abandoning her shot at using the leader of the antagonists as leverage to make a clean getaway. By the time Captain Marvel arrives on earth circa 1995, complete with visual reference to the Smashing Pumpkins (minus, of course, their male vocals), you hope against the odds that, as one character puts it, “it all makes sense”.
Captain Marvel doesn’t come close to pulling it together. Each plot point is predictable. Every crash, dogfight and effect looks like it’s taken from a video game. Screenwriting is stale. Characters are boring. Women either dress like Madea and stomp about in perpetual, causeless anger or they pose, turn and pose again and wear outfits that men mock. In its forced feminism, Captain Marvel tries too hard and goes too far in counting on a sisterhood it never earns.
For example, a child character named Monica at one point enthusiastically urges her sole guardian, her mother, to fly into space against an army of aliens knowing that her mother, who expresses that she’d rather stay, live and enjoy raising her child, may die. Not only is this a shocking scene that’s hard to swallow, it is played for emotion, as if the audience should want the child to urge her mother to choose near-certain death. That this happens after the child is kidnapped by an alien, held at gunpoint and forced to watch an alien attack on earth is disturbing.
Larson’s character destroys private property with abandon, never once offering to compensate anyone for her crimes. She muses about what it means to be human, it’s true, between her many unsuccessful attempts to display that women, too, can be as devoid of values as nihilistic or inscrutable men. That she does this in a t-shirt that makes reference to a nihilistic male rock band whose name refers to a male sex organ is at once too clever, stupid and appallingly condescending to the rational individual.
I “can’t unsee” Captain Marvel, to borrow a phrase from Jackson’s Nick Fury character played here as younger thanks to computer animation, though this, too, feels forced as no one really used that expression in the mid-Nineties. I’m pretty sure this includes secret agents of the government.
But I can say that I have seen Marvel’s newest politically correct mixture of carefully calculated plot points and call out its cynically lazy sexism.
At a crucial point, one female character asks another female character: “How’s my hair?” This line sums up Captain Marvel‘s value as art and entertainment. Add a not-so-subtle plug for the pro-Palestinian “BDS” movement against Israel that’s being spread on college campuses and you get the essence of a movie about a woman that neither deserves to be called a captain nor what one might rightly consider marvelous. In this tale, the woman is pretty and she’s pretty dim.
What a difference three years makes. Ant-Man and the Wasp, directed by Peyton Reed (Ant-Man, The Yes Man), is less substantial than 2015’s wispy Ant-Man (which might not have seemed possible). Indeed, this poorly written and acted perceptual-level assault is worse than this year’s painfully mediocre Black Panther and overwrought Avengers: Infinity War. These Marvel Studios pictures, which began about ten years ago with cleverly blended action and humor, are getting dumber and dumber.
Ant-Man 2 is among Marvel’s worst pictures. The nonstop eye strain picks up after the fleeting and forgettable Ant-Man and spring’s Avengers film with virtually no attempt to distinguish its own plot line. It made me think that Marvel’s planning a theatrical release marathon of Marvel Studios movies to run in one, long continuous loop for what might be considered subliminal propaganda to accelerate the rate at which today’s population mentally checks out. I know that today’s audiences (including some of my readers) fixate on these pictures as a kind of escapism, which I do not think they provide (and, in today’s pre-ordained movie industry, I predict Black Panther has a lock on Oscar’s Best Picture). So, for disclosure, I can barely tolerate these incoherent movies anymore on even the most superficial level. And this writer generally praised most of them. I even recommended snarky Deadpool.
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But, from the start, this movie rots. Precocious children, lines about quantum this or that, stars that look much older than they’re apparently supposed to be — Ant-Man and the Wasp slams the audience with sensory data and lame jokes and never lets up. The title character makes origami and bounces a Superball while going stir crazy under police surveillance. This after a stale flashback pops up. Then, for the next couple of hours, you’re expected to dart from fragment to fragment of instantaneously upsized, downsized and disappearing buildings, cars and objects while keeping track of an incoherent mission. If this is your idea of downtime, it wouldn’t surprise me if you’re also sleep-deprived. Ant-Man 2 is suited for a dumbed down culture in which one is chronically going from app to app, fixating on screens and going dim, stoned or blank.
It’s so bad that when one character, a college professor, looks out at his audience and says he notices an “unusually high number of glazed eyes out there”, it struck me as the most relevant Marvel Studios movie wink — oh, pardon me, “easter egg” — ever planted. From the line that “the sizing coils are malfunctioning” to an unintentionally humorous and utterly, overly obvious line during the extremely dull climax that “it’s me”, the subatomic-molecular themed Ant-Man and the Wasp is so thin, fast and asinine that it defies description. At one point, there’s another Marvel mind meld, which is awfully convenient for the characters involved and makes no sense at all.
Add to this endless car chases while cars change sizes, often for no apparent reason, yet no one driver thinks to shrink, slow down and pull over to jettison from the chase. Not once. Policemen are either dolts or corrupt dolts. Villains are not wrong, bad or villainous. Ant-Man (Rudd) talks and acts like he’s in Animal House (so does everyone else) making him seem more inept than adorable this time. If you worship whim and today’s dumbed down culture in which dialogue is reduced to fragments of phrases and you wish everything was like one, big video game experience, tuh-bee-awnuss (translation: tbh) you will go absolutely apeshit over Marvel’s new Ant-Man movie and its trippy, Dionysian, Bay Area blend of computer generated anarchy.
Look for lots of product placement, for every brand from the city of San Francisco and Dell Computers to Mercedes-Benz and the Pez dispenser. The cast includes Michael Pena (Collateral Beauty, Lions for Lambs, Spotlight), a fine actor who is wasted in a role as a moron, Laurence Fishburne (Blackish, Boyz N The Hood), Evangeline Lilly (The Hurt Locker), Michelle Pfeiffer (New Year’s Eve, Hairspray, Murder on the Orient Express), Michael Douglas (Disclosure, Falling Down, Streets of San Francisco) and Paul Rudd (Ant-Man, The Cider House Rules) in the title role. Looking like what used to be known as a goth chick, with matching sneer and bad attitude, Hannah John-Kamen (Game of Thrones, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) appears as a ghost in the machine who messes with everything. But of course, to no effect. Indeed, Hannah’s ghost is an ideal mascot for this vaporous movie.
Marvel’s movies dominated this spring at the box office again. This time, however, the plot and character glut maxes out to the point of fatigue. I was already dissuaded from further investing in Marvel’s comic book-based series, which I’ve favored, defended and enjoyed, by the overwrought, confused and overrated Black Panther. I’m apparently alone in that camp, which is fine with me.
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Unfortunately, this season’s Avengers: Infinity War is worse; my review explains why. I doubt I’ll look forward to seeing another Marvel movie. Even before I saw the most recent Star Wars picture, I was already starting to lose interest in that series, too, which I’ve never thought were comprised of great motion pictures.
Then, Lucasfilm named director Ron Howard to direct the new movie (an origin story) about the main major Star Wars character I find the least involving, Han Solo, titled Solo. The film debuts later this month. I’ve decided to see the movie, however, because I like some of Ron Howard’s work, especially Frost/Nixon, Cinderella Man and his TV series Parenthood for NBC. As always, I hope for the best.
The best is what I get every time I attend the TCM Classic Film Festival and this year’s events, screenings and movies do not disappoint. After previewing the literary-themed festival, I covered the red carpet affair on opening night. I met and interviewed honored guest Robert Benton, who wrote and directed two movies which screened this year, which I also reviewed.
My roundup of TCM’s 2018 Classic Film Festival, with a critique of what went wrong and an account of what was wonderfully right, is available on The New Romanticist. Among the classic movies screened and reviewed are Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 murder mystery, Spellbound, Benton’s finely tuned Kramer vs. Kramer and my favorite film of all the pictures I saw, William Wellman’s original version of A Star is Born. They’re each reviewed and linked, with other films such as 1972’s Sounder and 1931’s I Take This Woman, in the roundup.
Too many characters, too long, too much plot but, at its root, lacking a meaningful theme. This is what I think about Marvel’s exhausting new comics movie for Disney, Black Panther, which pounces, confuses and contradicts.
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Five tribes converge in an African kingdom where a substance called vibranium once crash-landed, leaving the tribal nation rich in this superpowerful resource, which must be mined and developed to perform wonders. This place is called Wakanda and Wakandans hoard the stuff, which they mine, keep and profit from for themselves, concealing it from the world, despite its healing abilities. Some might say ‘but it’s only a comics movie’ and dismiss any other thought. As for me, I did wonder, and you might, too, about what Wakanda’s closely guarded windfall could do for people with cancer, for instance.
This is the main problem with the politically tinged Black Panther, which mixes nationalism, genetics and collectivism to address, question and challenge ideas without dealing with them. Being a Marvel movie, many merely want to know if Black Panther has fights, fun, humor, cleverness and action, all the marks of Disney’s Marvel Studios brand. So, yes, it has those to varying, uneven and inconsistent degrees. Humor is flip and scattered. Fun comes in spurts. Fights are too fast, cleverness isn’t clever enough and action is solid. Visuals are, as usual, computer-generated.
Co-written and directed by Ryan Coogler (Creed), the Fruitvale Station director (using a Bay Area angle here, too), Black Panther doesn’t settle on a theme. It ends up in a squishy mix of notions summed up by the arbitrary term social justice. It might have been called ‘Social Justice Warrior’, though this would run afoul of those who claim that title. Black Panther, with no overt relation to the 1960s black supremacist movement, opens with its first social justice mission to ‘bring back our girls’, the phrase associated with a campaign to reclaim girls kidnapped and raped by Islamic terrorists in Africa and forced to become veiled Moslems. The campaign omitted those facts and so does the movie, instead using the initial mission to introduce its leading lady and gentleman, Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia and Chadwick Boseman as her ex-boyfriend, Wakanda’s leading monarch. Knowing what the audience knows could happen to the girls, this packs stakes, severity and context into the plot. Boseman, Jackie Robinson in 42 and Thurgood Marshall in Marshall, and Nyong’o, Patsy the raped slave in 12 Years a Slave, rise above the script.
They’re not in Black Panther enough. Yet they carry the movie while sharing it with too many characters. Angela Bassett (Malcolm X, Boyz N the Hood) plays the king’s mother, Andy Serkis (War, Dawn and Riseof the Planet of the Apes) plays a wild-eyed villain who comes off like a drunken Englishman, Forest Whitaker (Phenomenon, Rogue One, The Crying Game) plays a kind of referee, Letitia Wright (Cake) plays a sassy royal sister with amazing tech skills and Winston Duke (Dwight on Modern Family) plays a rival tribal leader. Sterling K. Brown (This Is Us, Marshall) has an important role. Danai Gurira steals every scene as a warrior. Michael B. Jordan (NBC’s Parenthood), who played the title character in Coogler’s Creed, plays the arch-villain. There are several other characters, too, including a tribal farm leader played by Get Out‘s Daniel Kaluuya. They are each overwhelmed.
With horseback riding across the countryside and a sweeping score that briefly replaces the predominant drumbeat, the audience enters the great kingdom introduced in Captain America: Civil War. Wakanda comes with clipped, cliched narration as the story begins. A king is designated, then challenged (also cliched) during a waterfalls conference with leaders and warriors from the five tribes. All of this royal shuffle arcs into a plot to smuggle the powerful substance, which leads to the perils of poverty, presumed errors in judgment and what went down during that tie-in to the Bay Area. Wakandans speak English with foreign accents yet they also speak in a foreign language with subtitles and it’s never clear why. There are bands of all-female or all-male warriors — with all this same sex togetherness, I looked for gays in the military with none in plain sight — and the only enlistment shared by both sexes is subservience to nation, blood and the rule of the monarch.
For all the palace intrigue, it is natural to want to know who’s behind Wakanda’s smuggling amid painted faces and masks, decorative gear and furnishings and body and facial mutilation. Also, why are ritualistic displays practiced in a country so modern, enlightened and technologically advanced? An answer partly comes with the closest Wakanda has to a national slogan: Praise the ancestors! Even when sponsoring gladiator-style fighting to determine the nation’s ruler — this is intended as admirable? — familialism is as rampant as in Buckingham Palace … or Trump White House.
Black Panther tries too hard to have its genres, plot points and philosophies every which way.
Boseman’s ripped king gets tricked out with James Bond gadgets, Euro-electronica ala Bourne Identity accompanies an elaborate car chase, and a trip to South Korea (does every action movie have to have an Asian connection? Is South America off limits?) goes awry. Fast-cutting fights are disorienting. Drumbeats pummel the audience. Subplots turn over and over. This onslaught slips into sameness and gets stale. The plot spins and spins, lulling the audience into a bit of a slumber. In Marvel’s universe of wise-cracking white men gussied up in industrial gear and snapping lines to one another, a movie about a mythical African nation and its aristocratic superhero ought to achieve a distinctive quality or uniqueness, no? Does no one in Wakanda listen to jazz? The men go around shirtless, why not the women? Is no one in Wakanda gay? Not a single Wakandan apparently watches television, goes swimming or grooves to Lou Rawls, Sade or Johnny Mathis. Does every Wakandan have to be a 24/7 ‘badass’?
A late second wind gets Black Panther’s game on. When Michael B. Jordan’s angry urban black man finally kicks in, Boseman’s king finally gets some screen time and begins to doubt the ancestry worship, though never down too deep. Blood as defining one’s identity never gets challenged. Instead, it is mixed with mysticism. Black Panther, like last year’s Wonder Woman and Thor: Ragnarok and most Marvel movies, is agnostic about ideas. Question your country is a platitude which competes with the question of foreign entanglements but it’s all housed in lightness, wizardry and fanfare. The delicacy of Black Panther‘s social justice warriorism clashes with its sporadic sense of fun, suctioning the conflict of any sense of good versus evil. This might be the point, that all are redeemable, but the reign of duty to tribe, blood and nation never squares with the social worker drumbeat or the street take on ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’
Thoughtfully halting after uttering the word duty, which she nearly brings herself to doubt, Lupita Nyong’o’s character rests on acting “for what I love.” Nakia’s is an affirmation of a real King’s noble line about being judged by the content of one’s character. One senses in Black Panther‘s restless pacing and prowling that it’s stalling to keep from being stalked, hunted and downed by the social justice bunch.
With several credited writers, campy Cate Blanchett (Carol, Truth, Cinderella) in smeared black eyeshadow, full gothic gear and Maleficent-like antlers to match, butch lesbian warriors, scads of Marvel Comics characters and tie-ins, cameos and one gigantic Phallic symbol — even Jesus Christ and Moses if you know where to look — Thor: Ragnarok runs more than a bit amok. Pardon the kitchen sink analogy, but this Disney movie, directed by Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople), is almost a full-blown camp comedy, with action and a high body count.
With Chris Hemsworth (Thor, Snow White and the Huntsman) returning in the title role, Thor: Ragnarok starts flaming early on, with flying embers coming over the opening credits to Thor’s heavy metal musical theme. The Norse god of thunder narrates his own situation. Ragnarok is quickly explained (think the Rapture) and the movie’s off on its wild runs. Light, silly and depleted of the original Thor movie‘s mythology and sense of honor, in comes brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston, Thor, I Saw the Light,Kong: Skull Island) and their dad Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and a first-born child, Hela, played by Blanchett as a veiny goddess of death with black hair, black eyeliner and black bodysuit like she stepped out of an X-Men movie.
“This you must face alone”, Odin tells his son Thor about the new dilemma of the long-lost sister’s return to their mythical world. With shades of Terminator, Mad Max and Willy Wonka films, complete with a glitzier version of Thunderdome, the action comes in spurts while the comedy keeps the lines coming in crisp flamboyance. Blanchett’s Hela sashays around swinging her hips and dripping her lines such as: “You don’t know who I am?”
But Thor: Ragnarok, with Hemsworth gamely and amazingly staying in character the whole time, has more glitz and schmaltz in store with another planet’s grandmaster in gold lamé played by Jeff Goldblum (Jurassic Park) in a gray-haired pompadour with blue fingernail polish and face paint. Idris Elba (Star Trek Beyond, Zootopia, The Jungle Book) returns in the same role. Karl Urban (Pete’s Dragon, Bones in Star Trek Beyond), Tessa Thompson (Selma, Creed) and Mark Ruffalo (Hulk, Spotlight) are fine and look for an appearance by the director and, of course, Marvel and Thor creator Stan Lee. It’s all in good fun and games and the film feels and looks like a gaming play, complete with heavy use of automatic weapons and artificial scenes.
For instance, Hulk changes proportion. Hela is inexplicably regenerative while Thor is not. Others will probably notice an array of tricks, Avengers series nods and gimmicks, though it borders on exhausting and I opted to see Thor: Ragnarok in a two dimensional screening, not in 3D. Eye strain and fatigue may creep in but thematically interesting resistance, extermination and something called “obedience disks” gives the ensemble-driven, meandering plot a second wind. At root, Thor: Ragnarok is a comedy with action, not the other way around, though it is too long and I could have done without the Hulk and his subplot. Hemsworth’s Thor gets the best quip when he puts Bruce Banner in a bind to go somewhere else and says: “Use one of your Ph.Ds”. Fans of the original will want more of Thor’s mythology.
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With Chris Hemsworth (