Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

Regardless of whether the rumors turned out to be true, I’ve always been excited for Spider-Man: No Way Home, even if only by dint of being the next Marvel movie. But as I waited for the lights to dim, it occurred to me that I’ve been going to see Spider-Man movies for nearly twenty years. That revelation, more than anything, finally led me to understand why some fans and critics have been hyping No Way Home as Spider-Man: Endgame. In the way that Avengers: Endgame was the conclusion of twenty-plus films and more than ten years in the making, No Way Home finds itself as the unlikely apogee of the eight Spider-Man films that preceded it. (And yes, I’m including Into the Spider-Verse.)

With his identity now revealed to the world, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) finds his whole life upended. It’s no longer fun or easy to be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, but Peter finds a way out when he asks Doctor Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell to make the world forget. Cocky as ever, Doctor Strange agrees, but after the magic spell backfires, Spider-Man gets more than he bargained for when the multiverse drops some of its worst villains (Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Jamie Foxx, and more) into his world.

 

As there usually is with this sort of movie, there’s a tension between how much to review and how much to preserve over and against spoiling the film. Suffice it to say that the marketing has well and truly revealed that a few familiar faces are returning in the form of spider-villains past, so it’s fair game to talk about what a joy it is to see the likes of Dafoe and Molina in particular. These performers remind us how iconic their original turns were while layering in something new, turning fan service into an art form; there are reprises of famous lines and moments, but deployed with a winking reverence instead of simply putting coins in a jukebox. 

 

There’s more to the film, as there often is with a Marvel movie, that shouldn’t be spoiled, and many fans (myself included) will have anticipated at least some of it. My sense is that the things we didn’t predict will land a little better than the things we did, if only because we’ve had years to try to guess what No Way Home might do – and, in some ways, a film this highly anticipated can end up feeling a bit like a composite of all guesses on the internet. Kudos, though, to Kevin Feige and the rest of the Marvel crew for sifting through the fan service and the cameos to find an emotionally resonant core for this iteration of Spider-Man.

 

That core, finally, brings Tom Holland’s Spider-Man the closest he’s ever been to the original Stan Lee and Steve Ditko comics. Where the preceding films had treated Peter Parker as a kind of protégé for the technocratic Tony Stark, outrigging him with enough gadgets and super-suits to make Batman blush, No Way Home strips that back for the post-Endgame world and gets into the poignant purpose behind Spider-Man. After years of fumfering around the quotation (and I’m including Andrew Garfield’s duology in that indictment), we finally come back to the idea – and No Way Home actually gets the line right – that “with great power, there must also come great responsibility.” I won’t spoil how the refrain comes up, nor how elegantly it’s hammered home in one of the better-acted scenes of the film, but it’s a point that this Peter Parker has sorely needed to learn.

 

One thing that’s held the Holland trilogy together has been the supporting roles played by MCU heavy-hitters Robert Downey Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson. For No Way Home, it’s Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange, but for the first time the relationship isn’t one of veneration. Instead, when they meet, both Peter Parker and Stephen Strange are flawed characters, arrogant and cocky (in the way that Cumberbatch does better than nearly anyone else in the MCU), and by the end of the film, Peter has, remarkably, learned from Doctor Strange’s negative example and pursued a better, harder path. One hopes that Doctor Strange has learned just as much too, though in his example let’s not forget, “the warnings come after the spells.” (See you in The Multiverse of Madness, eh?)

 

In the way that Avengers: Endgame reminded us all why we like Marvel movies, No Way Home fairly becomes an ur-text for why Spider-Man stories matter and why we have spent twenty years watching films (of admittedly variable quality) about this amazing, spectacular hero. We’re rooting for this impossibly optimistic kid who keeps trying to do the right thing, even when it’s the hard thing, even when it costs him. After twenty years, there’s more to him than just corporate synergy or pure nostalgia, and one feels that – finally – the creators of this film care just as much about the character we do. After an overfull Spider-Man 3 in 2007 and the desperate grab for franchises in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, No Way Home feels like building the future and honoring the past all at once, not jumping ahead to what some Hollywood bean counter thinks will maximize profit but rather acknowledging and celebrating Spider-Man fandom itself. It’s terrific, it’s fun, and it’s emotional, and I can’t wait to see it again.

 

Spider-Man: No Way Home is rated PG-13 for “sequences of action/violence, some language, and brief suggestive comments.” Directed by Jon Watts. Written by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, and Marisa Tomei.

Eternals (2021)

If Dune was big, Eternals is a lot. It’s a lot of characters, a lot of exposition, and – for many in the audience – a lot of time on Wikipedia afterward. While the film is biting off so very much more than it can chew, director Chloé Zhao goes for broke in ambition, so while the film isn’t failing, it is (appropriately enough) stumbling in the way of so much of the later work of its original creator, Jack Kirby.

Ten Eternals have been living on earth for the last 7,000 years, gently nudging the evolution of society and sparing humanity from the monstrous Deviants. After being apart for 500 years, Sersi (Gemma Chan), Ikaris (Richard Madden), and Sprite (Lia McHugh) discover that the Deviants are reconvening when one of the Eternals is killed. The trio sets off to reassemble their team before the Deviants can strike again.

Eternals has earned the dubious distinction of being the first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to receive a “Rotten” rating on Rotten Tomatoes – whatever that’s worth. I went into the film knowing it was largely divisive, but having heard Zhao talk glowingly about drawing inspiration from Man of Steel, I was willing to give Eternals the benefit of the doubt. Yet the moment that I realized Eternals was in trouble was the moment that I realized that the film would indeed have ten main characters, two underbaked and disparate villains, and a whole host of forward-reaching Marvel Universe teases that are nigh indecipherable within the context of the film. If you’re deep into the comics, you’ll be able to sort out a few of these references, but I myself had to rely on the excited whispers of the guy a few rows back to unpack one cameo – and I literally have a Ph.D. in this stuff.

Perhaps Eternals would have been better suited as a television show, giving six to eight hours of space for these characters and the fascinating flashbacks that fill in many of the blanks. Indeed, the movie is structured like a few of the better episodes of Lost, giving us deep layered mythology to help introduce and explain characters that are about to become very significant. For example, we see the Eternals part ways with Druig (Barry Keoghan) in the 1500s shortly before the other Eternals reunite with him in the present day; throughout, the film weaves in the complicated romantic history between Sersi and Ikaris. Any one of these Eternals could have been a fine pivot point for the story, or perhaps Zhao might have gone with an audience surrogate like Dane Whitman (Kit Harington) appears to be before he disappears altogether from the film. Instead, Zhao selects for herself the unenviable role of juggler, keeping a dozen plates spinning at once.

 

To be fair, Eternals is never quite boring, save for the beginning of the third act (which, after Shang-Chi, is beginning to become a pattern for the MCU’s fourth Phase). It is sweepingly ambitious, spanning from the birth of the universe until today. And like the original Kirby comics, it seems to hold the greater Marvel Universe at bay; outside of passing references to Thanos, Doctor Strange, and the fallen heroes of Endgame, Eternals restricts its greater MCU ties to a pair of post-credits scenes. One can imagine how the Eternals fit into the larger picture (which is going more cosmic than I think most of us had predicted), but overall it’d be just as easy to consider Eternals as a one-off errant venture in speculative sci-fi. One wonders what the film’s critical (mis)fortunes might have to do with the future of the Eternals themselves.

 

Yet as the credits rolled – after a finale which might as well have been a post-credits scene all its own – I couldn’t help but think of Jack Kirby, and not only because he (finally) gets a solo on-screen credit. Any comics fan would rightly feel a thrill in seeing “Based on the MARVEL COMICS by JACK KIRBY,” but I was thinking more particularly of the way Kirby ended his comics – or rather did not end them, as the case more often ended up being. Kirby was fairly driven off Fantastic Four, and his “Fourth World Saga” at DC was ignominiously cancelled, resurrected, and edited until its conclusion lost its weight. Likewise, it was a small miracle that Kirby was allowed twenty issues of The Eternals, which combined pulp conspiracy theories with high cosmic melodrama until the audience either lost patience or lost the plot. Put another way, Kirby – especially in his later years – tended to have ambitions which far exceeded his sales figures. For a comics reader like me, Kirby’s million-ideas-an-issue attitude is invigorating and fascinating, but I can understand why Joe Popcorn might reject it when Zhao takes the same approach for two hours and thirty-some minutes. It’s a lot to take in, and Kirby’s style can leave one feeling a bit like the unfortunate Irina Spalko from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, whose mind (spoilers) fairly combusts under the strain of learning too much at once.

 

Like Kirby, Zhao is grasping for so much at once, and you can’t help but feel she should have been given more space to do it. As with Kirby’s work, you wish it would keep going and going until it makes sense, but then again that’s part of the charm. There’s something fundamentally ineffable about a movie with ten protagonists from the planet Olympia, in service to an unknowable Celestial god with goals and obligations beyond human comprehension. When you try to cram something like that into a mere cinematic franchise, something’s bound to give. For some moviegoers, it’s their own tolerance for the strange, and Eternals is such a concentrated dose that even I had problems accessing it. I left the theater scratching my head, and that doesn’t happen often, especially when I’ve read the source material. 

Eternals is rated PG-13 for “fantasy violence and action, some language and brief sexuality.” Directed by Chloé Zhao. Written by Chloé Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo. Based on the Marvel Comics by Jack Kirby. Starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Harish Patel, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, and Angelina Jolie.

Dune (2021)

There’s a moment in Denis Villeneuve’s long-anticipated Dune that will take your breath away. However, I can’t tell you what that moment is – not because it’d be a spoiler to do so, but because there are so many of these moments in Dune that it’s impossible to predict which one will do it for you. It isn’t likely to be the next Star Wars as its marketing declares, but Dune is majestic in its enormity, and even with its simultaneous release on HBO Max it demands to be seen in the largest, loudest auditorium available. 

Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) reckons with his destiny as an ersatz “chosen one” when his father, Duke Leto of House Atreides (Oscar Isaac), is assigned custody of the unforgiving desert world Arrakis – a planet populated by colossal sandworms, the native Fremen people, and the hallucinogenic drug known as spice. While Paul and his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) study his prophetic dreams, the corpulent Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) schemes against House Atreides in his quest to retake Arrakis. 

 

These are only some of the things that happen in Dune, and there are so many more characters who don’t fit into a brief plot synopsis. The scope of the film is compounded by the fact that Villeneuve is consciously adapting only half of Frank Herbert’s dense 600-page novel, with a fairly logical if abrupt breaking point midway through the story. I say “abrupt” only because by that point Dune is so resolutely in its groove and the audience is well and truly vibing with the film that any stopping point would feel jarring; put another way, I would have been just as content to see another two hours and thirty-six minutes. It’s not that the movie is unsatisfying, but rather that it’s too satisfying to stop, like a theme park dark ride you don’t want to get off.

 

Perhaps appropriate for a movie set largely on a desert planet, Denis Villeneuve is on a real hot streak. I haven’t seen his 2013 Enemy yet, but every other film since that year – Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049 – has been a winner. Particularly in the latter two, both science fiction films, Villeneuve is finding his niche: speculative futures of overwhelmingly immense scale, where humanity is both dwarfed and magnified in the shadow of the profound. Amy Adams had to reckon with an expanding sense of the cosmos in Arrival, while Blade Runner 2049 was Ryan Gosling’s confrontation with his own ebbing humanity in a foreboding neon cityscape. Here, in the year 10191, everything is enormous – the worms, the spacecraft, the political maneuvering, and the veritable heft of destiny (manufactured or genuine) – and no filmmaker is better equipped than Villeneuve to carry those weights.

 

An IMAX screen so perfectly befits the size of Dune, but its speaker system is perhaps even better suited for the task. Throughout the film your bones will rattle, thanks to Hans Zimmer, who turns in the Hans Zimmer-iest score imaginable. (Equally Zimmer is the sprawling release of the score, which spans three albums and nearly five hours of orchestration.) It’s atonal, lingering, and eclectic, perhaps the only film score in recent memory to include both an electric guitar, bagpipes, and a didgeridoo. The bass shakes to the point where it’s unclear whether you’re hearing a spaceship in flight or Hans Zimmer in action; either way, the sound design is so meticulous and acute that it becomes a character in and of itself. See also the moments when Paul and his mother use “the voice,” a kind of Jedi mind trick that erases free will; the first time we heard “the voice,” its bass shattering eardrums before the words make it to our auditory canals, everyone in my theater sat up a little straighter.

 

I think diehard fans of the novel will enjoy what Villeneuve has built, and it seems that more casual filmgoers are digging it, too. I came to Dune from the unique position of having just read the book – or, at least, half of it; I had wanted to finish the novel entire before seeing the movie, but as it stood I got within twenty pages of the film’s chosen ending. (I promise I’ll finish before Dune Part II, the sequel which seems inevitable now.) In the process of translation, some of the characters got flattened, particularly and disappointingly the Duke himself. Duke Leto is a terrific character in the novel, torn between his duty, political machinations beyond his control, and his personal loyalty to his bloodline; he’s heroic, chivalric, and gracious, but the film seems content to let Oscar Isaac’s natural charisma do most of the character work. Conversely, Timothée Chalamet’s Paul is more human and accessible than the novel’s distant and aloof protagonist, perhaps because of his increased self-consciousness of his place as the manufactured messiah of Arrakis. 

 

Instead of diving deep into the characters, it seems that Villeneuve has gone the more unconventional route of letting his visual design do the character work. There are some lines about backstory, and there’s a clever narrative device in the form of Paul’s talking schoolbooks, but largely Villeneuve lets the images do the talking. It’s a mode of storytelling that seems to have fallen out of favor of late, trusting your set designers and cinematographer to do their job well. The Harkonnens are the villains because of their unfathomable ugliness, their unlit home and grotesque bodies belying the depravity of their souls; save for his distinctive voice, it’s almost impossible to recognize Stellan Skarsgård beneath the mass of flesh that is Baron Vladimir. Likewise, the Atreides are the heroes because of how gosh-darn pretty they are, warm and human. They’re also the only ones who seem to be having any fun, especially Jason Momoa as the swashbuckling (and brilliantly named) Duncan Idaho, about whom I would surely watch a miniseries or two. 

 

Dune is a movie into which you can easily sink, like a hot bath or a deep hill of shifting sand (both of which figure prominently in striking images within the film). It’s as much an atmosphere as a narrative, like the moodier bits of Blade Runner 2049 dialed up to eleven. Most importantly, Dune is like a dream, as in the best cinema can be, from which one does not want to awaken. Maybe it’s a little obtuse, maybe it’s bigger and more ambitious than it ought to be, but Denis Villeneuve has earned the right to make idiosyncratic science fiction. Dune is an event, a kind of heraldic “welcome back” moment for moviegoers who may have forgotten (as indeed I did) what kind of narrative spectacle best belongs in the cinema. 

 

Dune is rated PG-13 for “sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images, and suggestive material.” Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Written by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth. Based on the novel by Frank Herbert. Starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem.

Monster March II: Frankenweenie (2012)

Frankenweenie is not quite the movie I was expecting. Certainly I got more than my fair share of Tim Burton hijinks, all angular bodies and the subtle terrors of the suburbs. What I wasn’t expecting was how much of a faithful and loving adaptation Frankenweenie would prove to be of the original James Whale Frankenstein – and what a fitting inclusion for Monster March II. (Remakes and mash-ups and sequels, oh my.)

Young Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) loses his beloved dog Sparky (Frank Welker) in an unfortunate accident, but the words of his eccentric science teacher (Martin Landau) inspire Victor to undertake his own experiment. Sparky lives! Yet as Victor struggles to keep his science project secret, his classmates begin to realize that his experiment has the potential to change their town.

 

From the beginning of Frankenweenie, it seems that Tim Burton has set out to make a film about his own childhood. The story begins with Victor screening his latest short film for his parents. Like Burton, Victor clearly has an appreciation for low-budget horror with all its gimmicks and movie magic, even equipping his parents with 3-D glasses for the living room premiere. It’s the sort of peculiar precise detail that suggests Burton actually lived this moment. Already the film was defying my expectations, and I do wish Burton had spent more time on this hobby of Victor’s; I’m not sure how it would fit into the Frankenstein allegory he’s telling, but it’s certainly unique and clearly a passion for Burton.

 

As Victor attempts to discover a world beyond his love for his dog, the film veers into a riff on Edward Scissorhands, which was itself a kind of Franken-fable (with Johnny Depp as a kinder, gentler creature who nonetheless became feared for his unnatural appearance). Here Burton’s obsession with the simulacrum of the suburbs is on full display; though the streets and houses all look normal, the people that occupy them are anything but – especially the children, who are cartoonish and borderline monstrous, even before their fierce competitive spirit drives them to burglarize his attic laboratory. Kids can be real creeps, Burton says here, and having had a childhood myself I would have to agree.

 

Yet if the film starts out in the vein of Edward Scissorhands, it well and truly reminds us by the end of the story that it’s from the same odd mind that brought us The Nightmare Before Christmas. Victor’s relationship with the reanimated Sparky is both bizarre and sweet, a comfortable niche for Burton, but the creature horror of the film’s third act puts one in mind of the vampire bat toy that Jack Skellington’s minions set loose on Christmas Eve. As the children of New Holland reanimate their pets, only some of whom have joined the choir invisible, one can almost hear Burton gleefully rubbing his hands together from behind the camera as he intones, “I will show you fear in a handful of sea monkeys!” 

 

Frankenweenie is plenty enjoyable, even when it feels a bit like a Tim Burton cover band, but it’s of particular interest this month for being a spot-on adaptation of the Frankenstein legend, especially as remediated through the lens of horror films like the Karloff classic. (Indeed, one neighborhood boy, voiced by Martin Short, may as well be Karloff.) Colin Clive’s ecstatic “It’s alive!” is replaced by Victor’s more jubilant “I did it!” And of course, no modern Frankenstein would be complete without Elsa Lanchester’s iconic hairdo from Bride of Frankenstein, though it would be criminal to spoil who gets to wear it. (Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not the neighbor girl Elsa Van Helsing, voiced by Winona Ryder.) This is a madcap Frankenstein, a mishmosh of all the iconography Burton loved as a child, run through his instantly recognizable stop-motion filter. It is perhaps exactly the movie you’d anticipate coming from Burton, but by the same token it’s never quite the movie you expect. After two hundred years, this old story still has a little spark to it.

Frankenweenie is rated PG for “thematic elements, scary images, and action.” Directed by Tim Burton. Written by John August and Tim Burton. Starring Charlie Tahan, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Landau, Winona Ryder, and Frank Welker.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)

It’s been a while since we saw a new Marvel movie – and I’m not counting Black Widow, which felt very much like more of the same. I’m not counting Spider-Man: Far From Home or Endgame or Infinity War. No, I’m thinking all the way back to 2018 for this one, because Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings reminded me more of Black Panther than anything else in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like Black Panther before it, Shang-Chi opens up a new corner of the MCU, introducing us to a much deeper world we haven’t seen while striking a blow for diversifying what a Marvel superhero looks like.

Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) has spent a lifetime running from his father Wenwu (Tony Leung), the immortal leader of the Ten Rings. After a reunion with his sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) goes sideways, Shang-Chi and his best friend Katy (Awkwafina) decide to run toward their destiny, which will take them to Ta Lo, the mystical ancestral home of Shang-Chi’s late mother (Fala Chen).

 

While Shang-Chi put me in mind of Black Panther, I have to say that it’s not the instant classic that Black Panther was. Perhaps it’s that star Simu Liu isn’t quite as charismatic as the late Chadwick Boseman, or perhaps it’s the twenty minutes near the end of act two when the film slows down to accommodate too many flashbacks and montages. Shang-Chi isn’t a perfect movie, but it is lots of fun when it’s working. It is more infectious than Black Widow, which felt overly dour in places, and I will take, every time, the chipper pragmatism of Awkwafina’s Katy over David Harbour’s desperate mugging as the Red Guardian.

 

Moreover, I think Shang-Chi is the sort of film that is going to age very well when we see how the film expands the realm of the MCU; to be a Marvel fan is to live with one foot in tomorrow, thinking about how this franchise – now twenty-five films deep – will grow and evolve. In the way that we couldn’t wait to rush back into Wakanda, Shang-Chi creates a world of characters, creatures, and ideas that could fill at least a trilogy of its own. There are certainly theories to be generated about the film’s mid-credits sequence, while the post-credits scene tees up a very intriguing future, but at the end of the day Shang-Chi leaves us all too ready to see more. As much as Simu Liu isn’t Chadwick Boseman (then again, who is?), he’s engaging in a different way, human and quite powerful, and I can’t wait to see him team up with some of the heavy-hitting Avengers. (The presence of Wong, late of Doctor Strange, seems to tee up a natural next appearance.)

 

I’m a few weeks late to the Shang-Chi party, so I’ve read a lot of reviews about what a wonderful villain Tony Leung makes, and I have to agree. As ostensibly the “real” Mandarin (with a healthy helping of shade thrown in the direction of Iron Man 3), Wenwu is fascinating to watch because his goals are clear and distinct from other Marvel villains. He’s not trying to conquer the world or burn it down; his plans don’t, thank goodness, involve a giant laser beam in the sky or a third-act deception. Instead, he’s an undying conqueror with a particular axe to grind, even if we never quite learn how the titular ten rings work (they seem to be able to do everything the plot requires). Leung is never mustache-twirling but rather wholly realized as broken and furious, and his optimism at his short-lived family reunion is heartbreaking.

 

The redress of the Mandarin subplot from Iron Man 3 raises one of the better aspects of Shang-Chi, which may constitute a light spoiler about the cast. (If you don’t know who pops into the film, skip down to the next paragraph; you’ll only miss a spoiler and a brief gush about Awkwafina.) I had rightly predicted, based on some red carpet photos and a curiously-timed upload of the short “All Hail the King” on Disney+, that Sir Ben Kingsley might turn up in Shang-Chi to reprise his role as Trevor Slattery, the actor (“ack-tor”) hired to impersonate the Mandarin. It’s the sort of deep cut into continuity that MCU fans will appreciate, tying up a thread that could have been left to dangle, and Sir Ben has a knack for turning basic prose into comedy gold, as when he muses, “That’s a weird horse.” But the scene-stealer, aside from the toyetic and fluffy headless hundun Morris, is Awkwafina as Katy. Think Michael Peña’s Luis in Ant-Man – and as I type that sentence, I’m ready to pay money for that crossover – with Katy as the source of irreverent comic relief and the occasional Eagles lyric. What’s more, her friends-only chemistry with Simu Liu is a welcome change of pace from the MCU’s stubborn insistence on forcing its attractive leads to kiss.

 

But it wouldn’t be Shang-Chi without a decent martial arts display, and on that front the film succeeds more than once, from a bravura setpiece on a bus to a chase sequence on the scaffolds of Macau. Director Destin Daniel Cretton keeps the camera in close, and the absence of masks lets us appreciate that it’s truly our stars exchanging blows. While the third act of the film does get into Marvel’s overreliance on CGI special effects, the vast majority of the runtime is spent in action sequences where the digital seams aren’t quite as apparent. It’s that reality, that willingness to ground the numinous in the personal, that usually glues the Marvel Cinematic Universe together. I’m not sure what other genres are left to graft onto superhero stories, but Shang-Chi proves that the MCU still has the secret sauce to hold it all in place.

 

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, and language.” Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. Written by Dave Callaham, Destin Daniel Cretton, and Andrew Lanham. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Simu Liu, Awkwafina, Meng’er Zhang, Fala Chen, Florian Munteanu, Benedict Wong, Michelle Yeoh, Ben Kingsley, and Tony Leung. 

Monster March II: The Mummy Returns (2001)

For as much as I love The Mummy – and as much as I loved The Mummy Returns when it came out in 2001 – I haven’t seen it all the way through in many years, and its fortunes only waned in the intervening decades. By the time I got back to The Mummy Returns, after watching all the Universal Classic Monsters films and seeing the 1999 film more times than I can count, The Mummy Returns is so ephemeral, so underwhelming, that it’s hard to believe these are the same filmmakers.

With their ten-year-old son Alex (Freddie Boath) in tow, adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his archeologist wife (Rachel Weisz) accidentally trigger a chain reaction that will awaken the slumbering Scorpion King (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), whose ancient army threatens to destroy the world. Meanwhile, the mummified high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) is resurrected by the reincarnation of his lost love Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez), who wants the power of the Scorpion King for herself.

 

Here’s the thing about The Mummy Returns – Brendan Fraser is having so much fun that it’s very easy to overlook the fact that this film isn’t really very good at all. The first film was lightning in a bottle, clipping along without any dead weight and taking itself seriously enough that the audience could play along too. The Mummy Returns is, plainly put, bonkers; very little of it makes sense outside of the immediate scene you’re watching, and while it does obey its own internal logic, it’s akin to the logic of a dream, where details only connect if you force them together.

 

The Mummy Returns is full of, for lack of a better word, stuff. There’s a trio of brigands who never accomplish their disparate missions before Imhotep summarily dispatches them; an indestructible hot air balloon; a tribe of shrunken-head pygmy mummies; a sinister museum curator who never does any curating; an implicit prophecy regarding Rick O’Connell’s destiny; and no fewer than two distinct reincarnation subplots, neither of which fazes anyone in the film. These are all things that occur, in roughly this order, and no one comments on the fact that these things simply happen. I suppose that, after the events of The Mummy, these characters are well and truly prepared for anything, yet it’s hard to fathom anyone simply accepting this many unexplained phenomena in the span of one week. Recall that everything spectacular in The Mummy came back to Imhotep; here, there are so many supernatural forces jousting that the plot feels like a staged production at Pharoahic Times. 

 

So the plot doesn’t make much sense, a collection of bits rather than an integrated narrative, but I’m not entirely sure that one comes to a mummy film with “coherent plot” high on the list. The action sequences are a notch better than the ones in the adventure-heavy Mummy, and it seems we can’t go fifteen minutes without something spectacular happening on screen. As much of an intellectual chore as the movie can become, requiring leaps of logic and credulity, the action scenes are well-staged, particularly an early banger in which the crew are accosted by mummies aboard a double-decker bus. This flavor of action doesn’t align with the gee-whiz thrills of the first film, but it’s respectably dynamic and worth rewatching out of context. So too the pygmy mummy attack, which makes not a lick of sense in the structure of the film and has no real purpose for being there, but which is nevertheless suitably creepy and electrifying on its own merits.

 

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Mummy Returns is that it is never quite a mummy movie. Imhotep’s reanimation and revivification feels perfunctory, designed to move the character as quickly as possible into position as a comic book supervillain. As much as the film outfits itself with the trappings of reincarnation and dynastic Egypt, it has no larger theme or purpose for these matters beyond the fact that they were principal concerns of the first film. The Mummy Returns is a cliché of a sequel, doing it all over again but only a little bit differently – and losing so much of the magic in the process. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a gag near the climax in which young Alex struggles to read the hieroglyph “Amenophus”; Jonathan gleefully reminds us that he too had the same problem in the first film. But beyond the surface-level pleasure of remembering better days, The Mummy Returns is serving only lukewarm leftovers.

 

Put another way, The Mummy remains one of my favorite films of all time, yet The Mummy Returns is little better than a footnote, as if to say, “Oh, yes, and they made another one, too.”

 

The Mummy Returns is rated PG-13 for “adventure action and violence.” Written and directed by Stephen Sommers. Starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo, Oded Fehr, Patricia Velasquez, Freddie Boath, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Monster March II: The Mummy (1999)

If you’re having a sense of déjà vu, don’t be alarmed. We did review the Universal Mummy films back in March, and we even reviewed this remake in 2012. But for an entry on the Personal Canon itself, it deserves more than 270 words. The Mummy is one of my all-time favorite movies. Here’s why.

Thousands of years after the high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) was condemned to an eternity of suffering, librarian Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) and her treasure-seeking brother Jonathan (John Hannah) hire adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) to lead them to the fabled lost city of Hamunaptra. Beneath the sands of Hamunaptra, though, the mummified Imhotep sleeps, and this band of explorers will soon learn that what awaits them is something other than buried treasure – and infinitely worse than death.

 

I’ve long made the joke that The Mummy may as well be called Indiana Jones and the Curse of Hamunaptra. With a similar pace, setting, atmosphere, and attitude, The Mummy needs only a few cosmetic tweaks to sneak its way into the Indiana Jones franchise for good. Brendan Fraser is heroically fun as our cocky swashbuckling protagonist, a kind of early “fortune and glory” iteration of the good Dr. Jones. He’s got the self-aware sarcasm down pat, yet he can flip to sincerity with a well-timed smolder. In short, Fraser is the key to the movie allowing us to have fun – he’s very clearly enjoying himself, too. Like Fraser, the movie is a master of its own tone, zany and madcap at one turn, cavalier and daring at the next, without losing any of its own integrity. The movie might poke fun at itself, but it never makes a fool of its audience.

 

Fraser is the perfect model for what’s going on with The Mummy because the film overall is never boring. If it’s not being funny, it’s ably building tension or hosting a rollicking action sequence, helped in no small part by Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing score. As the old meme goes, Jerry Goldsmith didn’t have to go so hard, but he did that – he did that for all of us. Goldsmith’s orchestral work soars, dabbles in the romantic, and plays around in the Arabesque; it works perfectly in the film, and it’s a darned good listen outside of the cinema, too. Longtime readers of the blog know that a good score is often my favorite thing about a movie, and you can get away with a lot if the music is doing its work right. Goldsmith is trying to do an uncomplicated arrangement a la Old Hollywood, but his use of motifs and swirling patterns mean this score isn’t one to ignore. (And yes, I was listening to the score as I wrote this review. How could you tell?)

 

Among the rest of the cast, everyone is doing their level best to make this world believable, and they do succeed. Weisz and Hannah are divinely cast as bickering siblings – somewhat broadly caricatured, it’s true, but their devotion to the clichés make these characters feel real. Arnold Vosloo, meanwhile, has a real presence as Imhotep, and though he doesn’t say much he’s expressively sinister in the scenes when he has all his skin; when he’s in ‘monster mode,’ Imhotep is creepy and ghastly to behold, which is all the better when the movie needs that quick jolt of terror that only a decaying corpse can deliver.

 

Then there’s the smaller supporting roles, a veritable who’s-who of late-90s character actors. Oded Fehr (who, incidentally, played a terrorist on Sleeper Cell while Vosloo played one on 24) is tons of fun as the dead-serious protector of Hamunaptra, while Kevin J. O’Connor is equally a blast in the role of servile weasel Beni, handily a top goon in the annals of monster movies. And don’t sleep on Erick Avari, indisputably the fin-de-siècle king of “Hey, it’s that guy!”, in the thankless role of fez-wearing museum curator Dr. Bey (not to be confused with Fehr’s Ardeth Bay); in mummy movies, there’s always a guy with a fez, and there’s always a shady museum curator, so Avari is the pristine cherry on top of a perfect sundae.

 

One of the things I’ve always loved about The Mummy isn’t quite apparent in the film itself, though it’s equally impossible to ignore. In 1999, The Mummy comes at the tail end of a decade of period pulp films, which is precisely my favorite flavor of cinematic ice cream. I’m thinking of films like Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow, and The Phantom – all of which I loved as a child and still do as an adult. We can enroll Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman in this pattern, and indeed we might even consider it the progenitor of a host of imitations to follow. At the climax of the decade, The Mummy is arguably the most successful of these period pulps, though I’ll always have an elemental soft spot for The Rocketeer. I’m a sucker for this kind of heightened reality, placed into a distinct historical past, without postmodern cynicism or deliberate genre subversion. Take a story and a time period, and revel in it; that’s what The Mummy does best of all.

 

The Mummy is rated PG-13 for “pervasive adventure violence and some partial nudity.” Directed by Stephen Sommers. Written by Stephen Sommers, Lloyd Fonvielle, and Kevin Jarre. Starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo, Oded Fehr, and Kevin J. O’Connor.

No Time to Die (2021)

It’s hard to believe it’s been twenty months since I set foot in a movie theater. It’s perhaps harder to accept that it wasn’t a superhero movie that brought me back to the box office – though two, Black Widow and Shang-Chi, have been released since my last outing with Birds of Prey in February 2020. I hadn’t missed a Marvel movie until this year, yet nor had I missed a James Bond vehicle starring Daniel Craig. Fifteen years and five films after Casino Royale, I had to see this supposed swan song in all its IMAX glory.

It isn’t Craig’s best – that honor still and forever goes to Skyfall, as perfect a Bond movie as you can get – but No Time to Die is a fitting conclusion to this iteration of the character, thematically consistent and perhaps the most Fleming-esque of the Craig era.

 

Five years after defeating the forces of Spectre, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is called back into the fight after Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) kidnaps a defecting scientist (David Dencik) and his powerful bioweapon. The chase for Safin finds Bond crossing paths with his old friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), a new 00-agent (Lashana Lynch), and his old love Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) before the trail leads back, as it always does, to Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz).

 

As much as the Craig-era Bond films have struggled to fit all its disparate parts into one unified narrative – we all remember how Spectre tried unsuccessfully to weave its antecedents together – the films have been at their best when considering the psychological toll that Bond’s life is taking on the man. Casino Royale intimated that Bond’s callous womanizing stemmed from a deep personal trauma, while Skyfall showed us that happened when Bond’s closest relationship (with Judi Dench’s M) got too close. No Time to Die picks up on the unlikely ending of Spectre, in which Bond ostensibly rode off into the sunset with Madeleine Swann, but it wisely reminds us that Bond has been down this road before, in more films than just Casino Royale. There are numerous nods, for example, to (and this may be a very light spoiler) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which for many is the gold standard for Bond. (Appropriately enough, it was #007 when I ranked the films in 2014.)

 

But No Time to Die is conscious of its place as a finale of sorts, and so we get reunions with Felix Leiter from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, and with the Blofeld of Spectre; there’s even a wink-nod at Skyfall with a portrait of Judi Dench and a well-timed cameo from her porcelain bulldog. These references tie Craig’s tenure together more authentically than Spectre’s stubborn insistence that it was all connected, but the true payoff is in Craig’s Bond getting a better understanding of himself. He’s cognizant of his own flaws, sensitive to his blind spots, and determined all the same to save the world as only he can. When one character asks him if he knows the worst thing about himself, he quips, “My timing?” He’s become self-aware and, in the process, self-realized. Having taken Bond from his roots to his ultimate self, it’s only fair that Craig calls it a day and leaves the character for the next – and, perhaps not insignificantly, seventh – incarnation.

 

No Time to Die is, then, a kind of grand tour through the Craig era, but it has its eye on a more distant past, going back to Connery’s 1962 debut and to the Ian Fleming novels of that era. Safin is not, as the rumor mill had hoped, secretly Doctor No in disguise, though his island lair may as well be the good doctor’s; with its hazmat-suited servants, nuclear generators, and vaulted ceilings, one half-expects Joseph Wiseman to saunter out in his Nehru jacket. Meanwhile, the lair’s retractable bay doors are straight out of the film version of You Only Live Twice, while the denouement and a certain Jack London epigraph are airlifted from the novel of the same name. The 1967 film, scripted by Roald Dahl, was somewhat less than faithful to Fleming’s 1964 original, which saw Bond stalking Blofeld in a poison garden; here, it’s Safin who becomes the lethal horticulturalist, while Bond has no Tracy to avenge but comes bearing equally personal motivations. Indeed, I came out of No Time to Die – as I often do when a new Bond film arrives – finding myself lunging for the Ian Fleming novels on my bookshelf. 

One wonders what Fleming would have made of this latest Bond film. Once you get past the big-budget trappings and the unfathomable gadgetry, I imagine Fleming would find something very familiar in Daniel Craig’s interpretation, globetrotting yet guarded, equal parts damaged and damaging. There’s so much in this film that works, thanks to the distinctive persona Craig has crafted for Bond. Once you have a character as solid as this one, the rest is a breeze, especially by the time the film makes its way to Cuba for an unforgettable sequence costarring the inimitable and infectiously fun Ana de Armas, late of Knives Out with Craig. Where she was timid and prone to fits of nausea as domestic worker Marta Cabrera, de Armas is a far cry from Knives Out here as Paloma, who winkingly exaggerates her naïveté while nervously downing a vodka martini. It’s almost criminal that she has only the one sequence, though one wonders if she too might recur down the road.

The unlikely star of the film – though perhaps not so unlikely, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while – is Hans Zimmer. After a forgettable title track by Billie Eilish, Zimmer runs away with the film, giving us a rousing score that had me stomping my feet with excitement. When he’s not winking at previous soundtracks, Zimmer is remixing and reinventing Monty Norman’s Bond theme with fearless aplomb. Thomas Newman did a fine job with Skyfall (though he revisited his own footsteps too closely with Spectre), yet throughout No Time to Die Zimmer makes a compelling case for the next Bond maestro. If Inception was a kind of proto-Bond for director Christopher Nolan, its Zimmer score was only the beginning; his love theme here is reminiscent of Inception’s showstopper “Time,” while his 007 action beats would be equally at home in Nolan’s ski lodge setpiece. David Arnold’s score for Casino Royale famously winked in the direction of Bond as we know him, and Zimmer takes us over the finish line with dexterity. 

 

It was a gamble to try to tell one story across five films, rather than tell more standalone stories about the world’s greatest spy. Before his untimely passing at 56, Fleming came to that concept late in his novel series, with his final three books forming a kind of “Blofeld trilogy.” No Time to Die is, finally, the successful culmination of that ambition, and it gives a suitable arc to these versions of Fleming’s characters. Whether it’s an ending or a transition may be for the casting directors to decide; let’s hope, however, that the MI6 crew – Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, and Naomie Harris – opt to stick around for that sense of internal continuity. Yet if you find yourself wondering, as the credits roll, what comes next – stick around. There’s no postcredits sequence, but there is one final guitar riff and the words “James Bond Will Return.” So too will I; after twenty months, it was fun to go to the theater once again and tell the coronavirus that now was no time to die.

 

No Time to Die is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, brief strong language, and some suggestive material.” Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukunaga, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Starring Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Léa Seydoux, Lashana Lynch, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Christoph Waltz, and Ralph Fiennes.

Monster March II: The Batman vs. Dracula (2005)

Leave it to The Cinema King to find a way to work Batman into a month of monster movies. But for so very many reasons, how could we not review The Batman vs. Dracula? It’s got everything I love, with a perfect tie-in for October and an even more perfect excuse for me to check out one of the last corners of Gotham City I haven’t yet visited.

 

When The Penguin (Tom Kenny) and The Joker (Kevin Michael Richardson) break out of Arkham Asylum, their quest for loot leads The Penguin into a desolate Gotham crypt, where he accidentally reawakens the long-dead Count Dracula (Peter Stormare). But there’s only room for one bat-man in Gotham, as Bruce Wayne (Rino Romano) learns when he meets his latest supernatural foe.

 

It may surprise you to learn that I’ve never seen an episode of The Batman (2004-2008), the animated series to which The Batman vs. Dracula belongs. It was made just when I was phasing out of comics and ended just before I jumped back in, and I’ve never quite gotten used to the character designs, which look like inexpensive Saturday morning cartoons compared to Batman: The Animated Series (which, you’ll recall, is much more my jam). It ran for five years and sixty-five episodes, which is a significant investment of time for a project I’m not sure cuts the mustard for me.

 

After watching The Batman vs. Dracula, I’m still not sure if it’s “my” Gotham, per se, but I’m a little more intrigued after having dipped my toe. Still, The Batman vs. Dracula isn’t a new classic in the Gotham canon, a la Mask of the Phantasm or even Batman: Under the Red Hood. It’s perfectly serviceable but a little more shallow than some of my favorite Batman stories. It does exactly what it says on the tin – Batman does indeed fight Dracula – but it does so without the sophistication that might come of pitting two children of the night against each other. Indeed, the script feels very much like what might happen if you gave action figures of Batman and Dracula to a child: simple and straightforward, with a certain charm in its innocuous lack of depth.

 

Even before we meet Dracula, for example, when Bruce Wayne announces that he’s working on a device that will process solar energy, he may as well call it the deus ex machina, since we know it’s going to come up in the third act. Penguin, meanwhile, is relegated to the Renfield role without really doing much of anything else in the film; it’s perhaps just as well, since this Penguin seems to have the mentality of a twelve-year-old, with a scatological sense of humor to match. The Batman’s Joker is an interesting ragdoll of a man, with a husky voice and a colossal mop of green hair; while this isn’t the Joker I’d have written, it’s an intriguing and perfectly valid take on the villain, and Richardson captures that manic energy that makes the Clown Prince so compelling.

 

Then there’s our titular antagonist, and it’s hard to imagine better casting than Peter Stormare as Count Dracula. Stormare’s voice isn’t always recognizable – which is a shame, given how distinctive his line-readings can be (cf., The Big Lebowski, Seinfeld’s “The Frogger”) – but he’s clearly relishing the role, turning every line into a deep-throated snarl. The character is undercooked, only a surface-level interpretation of Stoker’s original, though perhaps anything would pale in comparison to Lugosi or Oldman. Stormare might have fared better in a longer theatrical release; as it is, direct-to-video animation doesn’t give this Dracula ample room to spread his wings. 

 

I’ve said almost nothing about Rino Romano’s Batman, but then again I grew up with Kevin Conroy, and there are very few who can hold a candle to his Dark Knight. Romano (no relation, apparently, to Andrea Romano, who assembled the voice cast that included Conroy) is evidently playing a younger Batman, and the script seems to lean into his inexperience. He assumes, for one, that Joker’s death in the opening sequence is permanent, but then again, the city later assumes Batman has gone rogue based on the word of only one less-than-credible witness. Perhaps this is overall a younger Gotham than I realized? Then again, Romano’s Batman simply isn’t as vocally distinctive as some of his Bat-counterparts, though I may feel differently after watching more of the cartoon.

 

All told, The Batman vs. Dracula is not a great Batman movie, nor is it a great Dracula movie. I can’t imagine it being of much interest to anyone beyond the most ardent aficionados of either franchise. It’s serviceable and inoffensive, and it is transparently a product of its time, a particular era of Saturday morning cartoon that is hard to describe if you didn’t live through it. Its soundtrack, full of wailing electric guitars, makes it feel as much like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as anything else, and at least for this reviewer that’s not a tremendous compliment. 

 

The Batman vs. Dracula is not rated. Directed by Michael Goguen. Written by Duane Capizzi. Starring Rino Romano, Peter Stormare, Tara Strong, Tom Kenny, Kevin Michael Richardson, and Alastair Duncan.

Monster March II: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Seven months ago, we began Monster March on a Mummy Monday with Boris Karloff’s The Mummy, but the first Universal Classic Monster movie was Tod Browning’s Dracula. And so it seems appropriate to return and begin again for Monster March II (cue the spooky music) with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, nominally more faithful an adaptation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gary Oldman as the Count in all his myriad forms. 

I say “nominally more faithful,” because from frame one, Coppola’s Dracula veers wildly from the source material by reimagining the legendary vampire as a Byronic antihero, cursed by his dark past and searching for the reincarnation of his lost love in the person of Mina Murray (Winona Ryder). Alas for the Count, Mina is already engaged to solicitor Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), and so Dracula’s journey to England becomes less a real estate game and more an amorous quest that just so happens to involve a little bloodletting. 

 

Plainly put, Oldman acts rings around everyone else in the cast, even the delightfully hammy Anthony Hopkins as Abraham Van Helsing. Oldman plays Dracula in no fewer than four different iterations, and he aces all of them. Bela Lugosi was iconic, but he seems one-note in comparison to Oldman’s more sophisticated portrayal of a vampire who is alternately tortured and torturer, a lusty bedfellow and a carnivorous lover. The image of Oldman never quite supplants Lugosi, however, proof positive of just how primordial the 1931 original remains, yet Oldman’s “Old Dracula” is a close second as he defies the laws of physics, suckles at shaving razors, and commands your attention in a riveting first act.

 

That opening third of the film, in which Count Dracula holds Harker hostage in his castle, is the best the film ever gets, a note-perfect introduction to an adaptation that never quite lives up to its own beginning. The opening is so compelling, in fact, that you’ll almost forget that Keanu Reeves is madly out of his depth as a young British solicitor, encumbered by the worst British accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins (and perhaps even worse, given that his greeting of “Count Dracula” sounds more like “Count Chocula”). So good is Oldman, and so spooky is his castle, that Coppola might well have stopped the film there and turned in the best short film about Dracula.

 

After Dracula leaves Transylvania, however, the film slows to a crawl in its depiction of Dracula as romantic foil. Oldman is often too psychotic for the work of courtship, and it’s frequently unclear whether Mina is truly falling for Dracula or whether she’s laboring under his hypnosis, his absinthe, or both. Meanwhile, the film spends a great deal of time with Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), her three suitors (Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, and Billy Campbell), and Van Helsing, such that it feels like Coppola wasn’t quite sure which film he wanted to make – the star-crossed lovers or the paranormal medical mystery. Of the two, the latter is more compelling, but it never bears Coppola’s full attention.

 

What’s very clear, however, is that Coppola wanted to make one of the most erotic Draculas ever, filling the film with copious nudity and literalized subtext. In doing so, however, much of the tension of the film becomes inert. To borrow an unfortunately apt line from Alfred Hitchcock, the terror is not in the bang but in the anticipation; the sensuousness of Lugosi’s Dracula was all subterranean, where Oldman’s Dracula is, in the biblical sense of the word, openly ravishing. It’s an interesting forerunner to the Twilight films, of all things, with a doomed immortal languishing as an unabashed romantic, but its erotic dimension is so overblown, so baroque, that it becomes fairly ridiculous. 

 

Coppola’s direction, too, is sumptuous and ornate. Often Coppola is attempting to ape the filmic style of Old Hollywood, with dramatic fades and creative camera angles that would make Orson Welles blush with envy. It’s for those reasons, Coppola’s fiendish attention to classical styling, that the film’s exaggerated sexuality and violence end up distracting rather than amplifying. When Dracula licks the shaving razor that nicks Harker’s throat, it’s icky but spontaneous, yet when the vampiric Lucy vomits blood onto Van Helsing’s face, it’s nauseating for all the wrong reasons. 

 

By dubbing the film “Bram Stoker’s” Dracula, there’s an immediate claim to authenticity, an appeal to authority that suggests this is the definitive adaptation of the novel. Hokey reincarnation notwithstanding, Coppola may have succeeded in spite of himself. The film replicates the novel’s obsession with emerging technology, particularly its intersection with the epistolary mode of storytelling, and the script has a keen interest in Stoker’s most likely inspiration, Vlad the Impaler. And Keanu Reeves aside, this Dracula stars as good a cast as any (including the woefully underrated Tom Waits as the sniveling Renfield). Yet Bram Stoker’s Dracula tries so hard to be grown up that it loses some of the power of suggestion. Lugosi could say more with a discreet bow than Oldman says by leaping into bed with his prey.

 

Put another way, Oldman is no Lugosi, but it’s worth it to watch him try. Gliding across the carpet and whirling a titanic sword, his Dracula is buckets of bloody fun.

 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is rated R for “sexuality and horror violence.” Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Written by James V. Hart. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker. Starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, Sadie Frost, and Tom Waits.

Black Widow (2021)

A year without Marvel movies is hard to fathom, but that’s what 2020 gave us. Two years is even more impossible to imagine, and yet Black Widow is, finally, the first foray into Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Spider-Man: Far From Home was, improbably, the coda to Phase Three). Positioned at this odd juncture in moviegoing history, and slotted into the MCU timeline of five years ago, Black Widow is something of an odd duck, and it is for my money the first MCU disappointment in a long while.

Set after the events of Captain America: Civil War, Black Widow finds Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) on the run when a coded message from her erstwhile sister Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) summons her to Budapest. The two Black Widow spies agree to take down the Red Room training program that created them, but they’ll need the help of their two former foster parents (David Harbour and Rachel Weisz) to defeat the spymaster (a ludicrously un-Russian Ray Winstone) who molded them.

 

After thirteen years of Marvel movies, television shows, and short films, the MCU has become almost entirely unwieldy, all but inaccessible to newcomers. I thought about this as I watched Black Widow, precariously positioned in a continuity that expects you to know when and why William Hurt is wandering around the periphery of the plot as Secretary Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. For the true believers (or, as they’ve also been dubbed, “Marvel Zombies”) who haven’t missed a moment, it’s a frisson of continuity glee to see how Black Widow slots into the chronology, but it’s truly groan-worthy when the film reveals – surprise! – the secret origin of the vest Natasha was wearing in Infinity War. Not since Solo felt the need to explain Han Solo’s surname has a prequel bent so far over backwards to explain something no one asked.

 

Hurt aside, there aren’t many opportunities for the film to include any of the major MCU cameos we might expect, and this is actually for the better. A Black Widow movie, especially if it is indeed Johansson’s swan song in the franchise, ought to expand the title character’s world beyond what we already know about her. And on this count, the film both succeeds and fails. We do get a family of sorts for the orphan Natasha, who we learn spent formative years deep undercover in Ohio with a phony family. Then again, where were they this whole time, and where have they been since? (The easiest answer – that they were all “blipped” off-screen – is somewhat dramatically inert.) Rachel Weisz is intriguing but entirely humorless as Melina Vostokoff; unfortunately, she’s given very little in the film to do because so much oxygen is taken up by David Harbour’s excessively hammy performance as Alexei Shostakov, the Red Guardian. I didn’t read many reviews of the film during its hybrid theatrical/streaming release, but it seemed audiences were mostly enamored of Harbour, though I found his acting broad, cloying, and a little desperate.

 

With Johansson sleepwalking through the film, just about the only performance that caught my attention was Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, ostensibly the “new” Black Widow. Pugh is fun, believable, and layered in a way most Marvel fan-favorites are (think The Falcon or Wanda Maximoff, even before they got their own shows). It’s a delight to hear that Marvel has further plans for Pugh, including a stint on the upcoming Hawkeye show, because Yelena could ably fill the void left by Natasha or create her own space entirely in the MCU (however that pesky lawsuit shakes itself out). When Pugh’s on screen, the film really seems to work, however dodgy all the so-called Russian accents might be.

 

I like Marvel movies more than most, and it’s not that Black Widow is wildly incompetent, a theatrical mess like whatever Batman & Robin was trying to be – or, more recently, the tonal hostage situation that was The Suicide Squad. Black Widow has an internal logic, a clear narrative, and a different set of stakes that the Marvel movies don’t always see. It works; it’s fine. But it was the first Marvel movie in years – perhaps ever – where I almost fell asleep. Granted, it was late, and all the lights were out, and I was alone; yet while the movie never lost me, nor did it ever really have me. The plot is predictable and without nuance, a kind of vanilla apology for the second-stringer position formerly occupied by Natasha Romanoff.

 

Then again, Natasha has been so much better in other, better films. She managed to make perfect sense among demigods and super-soldiers in The Avengers, and she was emotionally compelling in Endgame. And she was an absolute vision in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, still the best Marvel movie, hands-down, in part because it left her past as shadowy and oblique. Here, the truth about her childhood ends up making her a supporting character in her own film. In fact, maybe that’s the key. Black Widow doesn’t grow over the course of the film, having already reckoned with her past in other Marvel entries. All we get is a little padding around the edges, which may or may not come to bear on future projects.

 

At the end of the day, Black Widow is one of the lesser Marvel movies, about on par with Thor: The Dark World but never quite as engaging as, say, an Ant-Man or two. The Dark World was fine enough, but it’s never been something I sought out to rewatch. Throughout Black Widow, I found myself wishing I were instead watching The Winter Soldier. Natasha had an arc there, a purpose, and she was darned fun to watch too. Black Widow feels a bit like homework, obligatory for any true believer who’s come this far. Maybe brew a pot of coffee before you dive into this assignment.

 

Black Widow is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence/action, some language, and thematic material.” Directed by Cate Shortland. Written by Eric Pearson, Jac Schaeffer, and Ned Benson. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle, Olga Kurylenko, William Hurt, Ray Winstone, and Rachel Weisz.