Monday at the Movies - July 30, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a mismatched pair with clowns in common.

Batman Ninja (2018) – Of late, DC have been killing it on their animated offerings, and Batman Ninja is perhaps the weirdest of their successes. The premise is precariously unstable, relocating Batman and his greatest foes to feudal Japan, and yet the film’s creators stick the landing by embracing that manic wildness and careening between set pieces that alternate mad action with eccentric animation choices. I can’t overstate how bonkers Batman Ninja is, with concepts like Gorilla Grodd’s time machine, Robin’s unacknowledged adoption of a monkey sidekick, and a clan of ninja dedicated to the prophecy of the Bat; that’s even before Bane shows up as a sumo wrestler while the other villains build castles that turn into mechanized warriors. In the middle of all this madness is Batman (Roger Craig Smith), who delivers with an impossibly straight face lines like, “Our weapons will be everything that exists.” His level deadpan is matched by Tony Hale’s madcap Joker, who outdoes Buster Bluth’s mood swings by a mile. Watching Batman Ninja, I could not help but think of Mad Max: Fury Road, which I took to task for a similar meandering plotlessness and overemphasis on action sequences dialed up to eleven. Was the difference, then, only that Batman Ninja wore a Batsuit to appease my biases as a comic book shill? Perhaps, but a key distinction is that no two scenes in Batman Ninja are alike; compare Batman’s duel with Joker to the meditative storybook quality of the sequence in which Jason Todd finds an apparently reformed Joker and Harley Quinn (Tara Strong). Fury Road was a two-hour car chase; Batman Ninja is eighty-five unpredictable minutes in which a change in tone, pace, and energy is usually only a few minutes away.

It (2017) – Stephen King adaptations have a hit-or-miss reputation, usually skewing more successfully toward his less supernatural stories (cf. The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile). I read It at an impressionable age, perhaps around fourteen or so, and vividly recall it as one of the most terrifying novels I’ve ever read. (Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon is up there, too.) I’ve not seen the original miniseries, starring Tim Curry, but I found director Andy Muschetti’s adaptation wholly successful, unsettling in all the right places and bloody terrifying in the rest. Muschetti has the unenviable task of directing a cast of children, which includes Jaeden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis, and Finn Wolfhard. Unlike many child performers, however, the cast of It are remarkably gifted, lacking that trying-too-hard aura that might have plagued another production. The kids all have striking eccentricities that give their performers something to embrace; Lieberher, for one, is adept at giving his Bill Denbrough a stutter, while Jack Dylan Grazer balances comic relief with crippling panic as the hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak. Of course, no one comes to It without wanting to talk about Pennywise the Clown, and on this count Bill Skarsgård is really frightening. Jump scares aside, Skarsgård’s Pennywise is this perpetually hungry, partly childlike specter of menace whose savage teeth and yellow eyes belie a physicality that could snap at any moment. From clips, I sense that Tim Curry’s original Pennywise casts something of a long shadow, and Skarsgård has mostly stepped out of that shadow; though the voice feels similar in places, Skarsgård substitutes Curry’s guttural rasp for pitch variances that recall Heath Ledger’s Joker. I admit that I am always skeptical when a novel is broken into parts for multiple films, but It strikes a good chord by consolidating the novel’s “past” segments into one story that doesn’t require you to come back for more. I am, however, more intrigued by It: Chapter Two having seen what a knockout horror film It ended up being.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

The Top 10 Episodes of "Batman: The Animated Series" (As Written by Paul Dini)

Next week, The Cinema King is proud to present full reviews of The New Batman Adventures, following on the heels of our eighteen-month tour through the eighty-five episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. But before we do that, there’s one bit of business left over from this month’s debrief on BtAS. Last week, we looked at the “Worst 10” episodes of the show, after a ranking of ten top episodes.

Those “top ten,” though, were notable for their significant exclusions. Not only did they not contain the unequivocal best two episodes of the series, the list altogether lacked the work of Paul Dini, arguably the show’s greatest writer, a man who fully understands Batman and his world, who can craft tales therein unlike nearly anyone else. (And for those keeping score, eight of these ten are Joker episodes or at least Joker-adjacent.) There’s a reason the DC Animated Universe is sometimes called “the Diniverse,” so important was one man’s vision to the success of the whole shared playground.

For this reason, then, we conclude our tripartite postmortem with “The Top 10 Episodes of Batman: The Animated Series (As Written by Paul Dini)!”

The Equalizer 2 (2018)

I should preface my remarks by reiterating the maxim which has lost none of its veracity – a Denzel Washington movie is always worth the price of admission. Denzel is a man who can do no wrong, always turning in a commanding performance regardless of what movie he’s headlining; moreover, he never repeats a trick, creating a new character each time while retaining a certain Denzel-ness across his career. With The Equalizer 2, much has been made of this being his (and director Antoine Fuqua’s) first sequel, and while it is – for the first time – more of the same, in the case of Denzel Washington, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Denzel returns as Robert McCall, a retired operative who’s lost none of his edge, using his side job as a Lyft driver to help the downtrodden and oppressed. When a friend is killed in the line of duty, McCall steps out of retirement to find the killers and avenge his friend.

I came out of The Equalizer 2 feeling slightly disappointed. Maybe it was just the overcast weather or the fact that someone had brought a howling toddler into the theater, but I felt that The Equalizer 2 hadn’t delivered on the promise that I had expected. I went back to my original review of The Equalizer from 2014 and found that I’d overhyped it in my imagination. I had said that The Equalizer was “nothing groundbreaking” and safely “by-the-numbers,” but the film was carried ably by Denzel’s charisma alone. Put another way, I was surprised how closely my reaction to the sequel matched my review of its predecessor.

The good news, then, is that The Equalizer 2 does exactly what it says on the tin, and fans of the first one will have roughly the same experience a second time around. (Compare to sequels like Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, which lacked any sense of freshness in repeating its forbearer’s bag of tricks.) The plots are roughly similar, with McCall picking up a few more subplots of assisting the common man, as the first film’s finale foreshadowed. It includes also some more bang-up sequences in which McCall proceeds to dismantle an entire room full of guys half his age. It was this edge that reminded me somewhat of Taken, though with somewhat less frenetic editing; like Neeson, Denzel is a man of advancing years (64 of them, to be precise), but he’s not shy about harnessing that youthful energy which makes his age so impossible to believe. Where the first Equalizer had two intensely memorable setpieces – the club scene and the hardware store finale – this one has at least three: an opener aboard a train, the apartment scene glimpsed in the trailers, and a final showdown that repeats the careful orchestration of the hardware store but expands the scope quite dramatically.

There is, however, the acute sense that we have seen all this before (and, if box office receipts are any indication, we will see all of this again). We’ve seen Denzel as the steady paternalistic hand – though not, I grant you, while pointing a gun to his own head and daring his mentee to pull the trigger. We’ve seen him as a one-man demolition crew when the odds would seem to be against him, and we’ve seen him as a helpful community leader. He is quite good at all of these things, so it’s little surprise that The Equalizer 2 calls on him to do them one more time. But the rest of the film is so conventional, so safe, that its plot can be deciphered from the concessions stand. (There is at least one genuinely effective twist, which relies more on an emotional beat than a narrative turn, one I genuinely did not see coming.)

The night I saw The Equalizer 2, I happened to catch Roman J. Israel, Esq. on television. I was reminded of what a commanding performance Denzel gave in that film and how surprisingly the plot’s careening nature presented itself. Like its predecessor, The Equalizer 2 is comparatively more by-the-numbers; when one of those numbers is Denzel Washington, it’s tough to argue, but you’ll be forgiven if you find yourself wanting just a little more Denzel. The Equalizer 2 is Denzel at about a six; just give him more to do.

The Equalizer 2 is rated R for “brutal violence throughout, language, and some drug content.” Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Written by Richard Wenk. Starring Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Bill Pullman, Orson Bean, and Melissa Leo.

The Worst 10 Episodes of Batman: The Animated Series

In advance of August 1 and the beginning of our tour through The New Batman Adventures, we’re in the midst of a few debriefs on Batman: The Animated Series. Last week, we went over the Top 10 episodes not written by Paul Dini. Arguably the best scribe on the writing team, Dini gets his own list next week.

But as the great food critic Anton Ego once noted, “We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.” And so, this week: the bad news. As accomplished as the show was, as masterful as its first-rate episodes could be, nobody’s perfect. The very funny thing about this list is how many episodes just don’t feel like BtAS episodes at all. We present, then, “The Worst 10 Episodes of Batman: The Animated Series.”

Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)

After a surprise encounter with Sicario a few months back, I was delighted to learn of an imminent sequel, even without the presence of Emily Blunt and director Denis Villeneuve (the latter of whom gave us Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 in the interim, which I’d say is a fair trade indeed). Here we have Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which many critics are calling an “unexpected” or “unlikely” franchise – though in the age of shared universes, can we really be surprised? And while Villeneuve’s absence is felt, to Soldado’s detriment, it’s only a detriment that exists in hindsight, as Soldado continues to be that curious kind of action film that relies successfully on overtones of dread.

When the United States government (represented by Catherine Keener and Matthew Modine) suspects that Mexican cartels are aiding Islamic terrorists in illegal border crossings, DOJ operative Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) cooks up a scheme with attorney-turned-hitman Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) to turn the cartels against each other. The plan, as most of Graver’s are, is all sorts of morally ambiguous, leading to violence on both sides of the border when a cartel princess (Isabela Moner) is kidnapped.

The first thing one notices about Soldado in comparison to Sicario is likely the result of Dariusz Wolski replacing Roger Deakins as cinematographer. Deakins, first among his profession, gave us a Sicario with lush color-washed landscapes and dusty interiors. Wolski is capable, though his images are much more washed-out and dusty to the point of being sandy. It is, I would say, the difference between Deakins on Blade Runner 2049 and Wolski on the Pirates of the Caribbean films – one a sprawling epic and the other a poppy genre flick; both engaging and visually appearing in their craft, but one with infinitely more depth (and the other with infinitely more Depp).

This is not to say that Soldado is shallower than Sicario, though it is perhaps less overwhelmingly potent. With the absence of Blunt’s Kate Macer as a moral compass, Brolin and del Toro are untethered, though incoming director Stefano Sollima smartly places that morality debate squarely in the audience’s hands; where Kate Macer might have been on screen to interrogate the wisdom of crossing lines, Sollima and returning scripter Taylor Sheridan find room for those questions between the silences. I think most of us came away from Sicario wanting to see more of what these two men could do, how far they were willing to go, and on that count Soldado is a hearty success. While there is perhaps nothing as shocking as Alejandro’s last-reel dinner incursion in Sicario, there are a number of opportunities when a more unwavering hero would have balked at the choices presented. Moreover, there is a fascinating arc about the relationship between Graver and Alejandro, one that these two silent men of stone would never acknowledge but one which undeniably affects the way they conduct their business.

If there is a difference between Sicario and Soldado which underscores the latter’s inferiority in the face of a latter-day American classic, it’s that Soldado ends with much less finality than its predecessor, punting a fuller conclusion for a Sicario 3 (a real pet peeve of mine). Where Sicario ended with Kate Macer confronted with a full understanding of Alejandro and a simultaneous inability to reckon with the horror of that knowledge, Soldado concludes by revisiting and deepening our sense of just what this man can do, and in that task del Toro is brutally terrifying, cold and dispassionate in pursuit of his own unique goal. That the film expects its audience to remember the translation of “sicario” (hint: “hitman”) to fully grasp the ending may be more my shortcoming than the film’s, but it is almost Empire Strikes Back-ian in its promise that there is at least one more story to be told with these characters.

If I didn’t enjoy Soldado as much as I did up to that point, it might have rankled me more than it actually does. But as compelling as the preceding two hours were, I found myself charmed by the promise of a Sicario 3. Likely none of us expected a Soldado, let alone a third, but this “unlikely” franchise carves a place for itself by filling its world with uncompromisingly gray characters in impossible situations, which escalate into dreadful stakes until the blood runs like a staccato rainfall. You’d think it’d get old, that we’d be numb to the dread and the shock of death, but Soldado finds a rhythm where that danger never fades. For two different directors, absent collaboration, to achieve that same Hitchcockian anticipation of the bang, the franchise that might not have needed to be ends up finding a very good identity for itself in the midst of blockbuster shared universes of much larger scale. (Never mind that Brolin figures prominently into at least three, counting this one.)

Sicario: Day of the Soldado is rated R for “strong violence, bloody images, and language.” Directed by Stefano Sollima. Written by Taylor Sheridan. Starring Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Moner, Jeffrey Donovan, and Catherine Keener.

The Top 10 Episodes of Batman: The Animated Series (Not Written by Paul Dini)

For the past eighteen months, we’ve been reviewing each episode of the masterful Batman: The Animated Series week by week. Beginning in 1992, this animated program began life as a follow-up of sorts to Batman Returns but grew to become an iconic portrayal of ostensibly the greatest fictional character of all time, definitively outlining his adventures for generations of viewers, even to this day.   

Eighty-five episodes aired between 1992 and 1995, with twenty-four more following between 1997 and 1999 under the name The New Batman Adventures. And we’ll get there, dear readers, beginning August 1 (appropriately enough, for a new beginning of sorts). For the next three weeks, though, the promised postmortem in the form of a few Top 10 lists.

In recognition of his unparalleled achievement in outstanding writing, Paul Dini gets his own Top 10 list in two weeks. Dini wrote ten of the best episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, and so he’s broken off into his own list so that we can get more of a sense of the heights of greatness this show achieved. (Next week, of course, it’s the Bottom 10, the curdled cream of the cartoon crop.) Without further ado, we present, “The Top 10 Episodes of Batman: The Animated Series (Not Written by Paul Dini)!”

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Perhaps there will come a day when I have to write a bad review of a Marvel movie, when I have to find a way to tell you to stay away, stay far away. It has nothing (okay, maybe a little) to do with my being something of a shill – a Marvel Zombie, if you will; instead, Marvel Studios is rapidly proving that there is little they cannot do. Where Justice League buckled under the weight of changing directors mid-stream, Marvel not only rebounded when Edgar Wright left the first Ant-Man, they established a brand identity for the little guy in the midst of creative differences and have now managed to build onto what ought to have been an unstable foundation.

Waylaid under house arrest after the events of Captain America: Civil War, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has a few days left on his sentence when his old friends Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) reach out to him for help on a case. Scott risks his freedom to don the Ant-Man suit once more – alongside Hope in her new life as The Wasp – in order to collect some tech, reenter the subatomic quantum realm, and protect his friends from the phase-shifting Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen).

Following Infinity War in the way that Ant-Man followed on the heels of Avengers: Age of Ultron, the Ant-Man franchise is garnering a reputation as a palate cleanser for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a breather away from all the high-stakes sturm und drang of saving the cosmos from extinction-level events. In Ant-Man and the Wasp, as in its predecessor, the focus is not on the fate of the universe but on more personal stakes – smaller plots, if the pun can be forgiven. Rather than put Scott Lang at the heart of ensuring the survival of the galaxy, the Ant-Man films have wisely bent toward the heist genre; “break into a place and steal some stuff,” Hank Pym advised in the first film, and while this film ventures into the quantum realm between molecules, it has nothing to do with tearing apart the foundations of reality.

It’s a task for which Scott Lang would be ill-suited, though one suspects that perhaps Hope Van Dyne might be up to it. There’s a sly joke about her absence from the Leipzig airport battle in Civil War, but her deft hand at superheroics will likely lead audiences to wonder why we’ve had to wait ten years to see The Wasp on the big screen. (Diehard devotees know well, for one, that it was The Wasp who gave The Avengers their name back in their 1963 debut comic.) Lilly is more than fantastic as Hope, a proper scene-stealer who’s exceedingly capable as a hero without the need for so much as a training montage. Paul Rudd’s doing his Paul Rudd thing as Scott, dopey and self-deprecating with a spot-on sense of comedic timing, but the film feels more properly a two-hander with Lilly bearing more than her fair share of the weight – both in terms of action sequences and emotional gravity.

Between this and Incredibles 2, I’m seeing a promising pattern of restraint in our big-budget sequels. Like Edna Mode before him, Michael Peña turns up to revisit Luis, a fan favorite from the first film for his relentless cheeriness and proclivity for shaggy-dog anecdotes. In a lesser version of Ant-Man and the Wasp, we’d get five or six Luis stories (up from two in Ant-Man), but instead Peña and the script recognize that Luis is more interesting if he’s not one-note, if his puppy-dog honesty is matched with new challenges, rife with their own unique opportunities for him to insert a foot into a perpetually open mouth. 

The filmmakers have not, however, exercised restraint in all the size-shifting shenanigans made possible by Pym Particles. Tiny things enlarge, large things shrink, and characters change scale to accommodate any number of sudden developments. Moreover, the characters never lose sight of how cool and hilarious these shifts can be, so we too get to enjoy them all the more. There is something equally engaging about the unpredictability of shape-changing and phase-shifting in this film; at any given moment, one or more of the laws of physics can bend in unexpected but visually stunning ways, making Ant-Man and the Wasp a particularly unique spectacle.

Twenty films into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and mere months after Thanos cut a bloody swath through Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Ant-Man and the Wasp is perhaps not the most obvious choice for an immediate follow-up, but it’s a welcome breather with a tight focus and a fine knack for summer blockbuster fun. It fits into the larger Marvel tapestry, of course, gesturing forwards and back, but it’s telling that I’m equally enthused about the prospect of a third Ant-Man film, or perhaps just a standalone feature for The Wasp. (Flashbacks in the first film introduced Hope’s mother Janet as the original Wasp; might a third introduce Hank’s other daughter Nadia, for Ant-Man and the Wasps?) Regardless, Marvel has proven itself capable like no other studio at harnessing an audience and leading them to queue up for another helping. More like this, please.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is rated PG-13 for “some sci-fi action violence.” Directed by Peyton Reed. Written by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby. Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Hannah John-Kamen, Michael Peña, Walton Goggins, Michelle Pfeiffer, Laurence Fishburne, and Michael Douglas. 

Monday at the Movies - July 2, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a forgotten film with comic book ties – it’s the pulpy adaptation of The Shadow.

The Shadow (1994) – In my ongoing effort to see and review any superhero movie I can get my hands on, it’s worth enrolling The Shadow in that tradition. Based on the hero of pulp novels and radio programs, from whom we can trace a direct line to Batman, The Shadow introduces Alec Baldwin as Lamont Cranston, a man who “knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men” because he’s intimately acquainted with the darkness in his own heart. After a Tibetan prologue that feels presciently similar to the first act of Doctor Strange, Baldwin dons a black hat and red scarf to fight crime in New York City, where a descendant of Genghis Khan (John Lone) has come to finish his ancestor’s work of conquest. As a devout fan of The Rocketeer, I had hoped that The Shadow would live up to that brand of retro-heroism; it doesn’t, though it does feel a lot like Rocketeer by way of Sam Raimi’s Darkman. The Shadow does an excellent job inhabiting a noir-esque version of New York between world wars, effortlessly classy and yet sufficiently dangerous. It also boasts a frankly astonishing cast of talented players in minor roles – Tim Curry as a sycophantic assistant, Peter Boyle as a cabbie, Jonathan Winters as a police commissioner, and Ian McKellen as an atomic scientist – all gifted character actors whose ilk we just don’t seem to have anymore, charming and magnetic screen presences no matter what they’re doing. As Margo Lane, Penelope Ann Miller more than keeps up with Baldwin, though the film never quite seems to know what to do with her. Nor does the film’s plot quite hang together as tightly as it pretends; many of the scenes feel fairly perfunctory, without sufficient character development to justify subplots of romance or archrivalry. The Shadow instead feels like a movie that paints by the numbers without obscuring those same numbers, including one moment when a title card explains a multiyear gap between scenes. The Shadow is ultimately somewhat charming, unmistakably of its time, and a property direly in need of being revisited now that Hollywood has a better sense of how to mine such rich source material. The Shadow is perhaps forgotten by virtue of not excelling, but its quaint approach to the process of adaptation merits it a place – if a curious one – alongside bygone efforts like Rocketeer, Dick Tracy, and The Phantom.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!