Cinemutants - Deadpool 2 (2018)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2018, it’s Deadpool 2. After a personal tragedy, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) finally enlists with the X-Men before running afoul of the time traveler Cable (Josh Brolin), who has come from the future to stop a killer before he murders Cable’s family. With his methods meeting the disapproval of Colossus (Stefan Kapičić), Deadpool decides to form his own team – the X-Force.

1. F#@% Wolverine. Deadpool 2 opens with a music box reenacting Wolverine’s death at the end of Logan, and watching the two movies nearly back-to-back was especially entertaining. If this Deadpool is aware that (a) Wolverine has died, it’ll be intriguing to see how he reacts to working with another Logan from another world. And where the first Deadpool film poked gentle fun at Hugh Jackman, Deadpool 2 primes their inevitable team-up with a post-credits gag in the Super Duper Extended Cut. In the theatrical cut, Deadpool shoots the Wade Wilson from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but the extended cut gives him more dialogue: “Look, eventually, you’re going to hang up the claws, and it’s gonna make a lot of people very sad. But one day, your old pal Wade’s gonna ask you to get back in the saddle again. And when he does, say yes.” Oddly prescient? Or just throwing down the gauntlet? In the way that the first film’s post-credits name-checked Cable, this one feels like Deadpool marking his territory (a pun I’m sure he would appreciate).
2. Just cleaning up the timelines. After swiping and repairing Cable’s time-travel device, Deadpool goes around time-hopping (or, as they call it in the comics, “body-sliding”), saving Vanessa’s life while killing Ryan Reynolds circa 2011. (In the Super Duper cut, he also pays a visit to baby Hitler.) With the TVA playing a role in the trailers, I can’t believe this flagrant continuity manipulation won’t be an issue for them. On the flip side, we reunite with two mutants in the post-Days of Future Past timeline – Yukio (Shioli Kutsana) and the Juggernaut (an uncredited and CGI-assisted Ryan Reynolds). Before this rewatch, I’d entirely forgotten that this is our second franchise Yukio, and in fairness it’s entirely possible this is a different Yukio from The Wolverine’s Rila Fukushima. (This one has an electrified whip, not precognition.) Still, it might be fun to see both Yukios on screen in a few weeks. Meanwhile, this Juggernaut is a fair case of “less is more”; rather than spout dated internet memes, this Juggernaut is a marked improvement, all force and demolition just for the hell of it. 
3. Our group will be forward-thinking. One of Deadpool 2’s best jokes is even funnier given how much the trailers played up the existence of X-Force. Domino, Bedlam, Shatterstar, Zeitgeist, Vanisher – the trailer made it look like these C-listers would be headlining the film, and in a world where Groot made a billion dollars, it wasn’t inconceivable. So to watch nearly all of them die horrible, grisly deaths to the spiraling guitar licks of “Thunderstruck” is still outrageously funny. It’s unlikely Marvel will get around to many (if any) of these characters; though the surviving Domino (Zazie Beetz) hasn’t been announced yet for Deadpool & Wolverine, I’d be amazed if she’s not involved. While the film teases that the whole thing was franchise bait for Josh Brolin’s multi-film contract, I do recall some buzz about a proper X-Force film before Disney bought the store. (Meanwhile, Deadpool cracks a joke that both anticipates and deflates a major beat from next week’s film. Like and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss that post.)
4. Essex House. Another film, another Mister Sinister tease that never materialized. The crux of the film centers around the violent mutant rehabilitation at the Essex House, run by Eddie Marsan’s sadistic and nameless Headmaster. Marsan isn’t playing Sinister, whose real name is Nathaniel Essex, but his gene therapy/torture at a home for wayward mutants is exactly the kind of scheme that might embroil Marvel’s leading eugenicist. This Sinister tease also plants the seeds for a deeper interconnectedness that never came to pass; having already seen Essex goons steal Wolverine’s DNA, and with one more Sinister tease yet to come (but left, as I recall, on the cutting room floor), this film posits the Essex House as a kind of anti-Xavier’s academy, with Domino realizing that she was raised in this selfsame orphanage. (There’s even a pointed cameo from Luke Roessler, who plays the young David Haller on Legion, implying a backdoor connection with the TV series.) Was Mister Sinister poised to be the next big baddie of the X-Men franchise, with a fertile story reason to introduce, oh, perhaps some “new mutants’?
5. Zip it, Thanos! As I watched Josh Brolin play Cable (perfect casting, really, even as the movie hangs a lantern on the difference in stature), I flashed back to all the doubling and recasts we’ve seen in the MCU so far. Gemma Chan, Alfre Woodard, Patton Oswalt, Michelle Yeoh... and that’s not even counting folks like Tara Strong who’ve voiced multiple roles. Is it inconceivable that Brolin – notorious for playing franchise archvillain Thanos – might reprise the part of Cable once the mutants make the jump to Marvel proper? Deadpool’s already made “the” joke, and Thanos being fully CGI probably helps; plus, the older Cable gets, the more the character works in opposition to meeting his parents in his past (spoilers, he’s Nathan Summers, the son of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey). You could even have some fun with the fact that he’s a refugee from a dead timeline; his present no longer exists, especially if the Fox timeline is walled off, destroyed, or pruned at the end of Deadpool & Wolverine. At the very least, it’d be a shame not to see him one last time, given that he’s heretofore unaware that Deadpool repaired (and abused) his technology. 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: what’s a Deadpool to do when the TVA turns up at his door? Up next, the phoenix rises one more time for an X-sunset, a metaphor that’s holding together about as well as the rest of Dark Phoenix.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

Between Atomic Blonde and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I’m really digging the “retro spy” genre – and I’m including throwback spy flicks like Kingsman. There’s something very satisfying about the technological limits placed on the story, which must proceed without the advantages of cell phones and Wi-Fi; usually that careful crafting leads to a more cerebral script – something I always appreciate – and ends up having a trickle-down effect on the rest of the creative process. Going into the theater, I hadn’t known that Atomic Blonde was a period piece, nor had I realized quite how much I’d like the film – both of which were welcome surprises.

It’s 1989. The Berlin Wall is about to come down, and MI6 sends Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) behind the Iron Curtain to find a list of operatives stolen from a dead agent. Berlin station chief Percival (James McAvoy) helps her into East Berlin and enlists her help with East German defector Spyglass (Eddie Marsan), who’s stolen the list. While Lorraine looks for the truth amid a dalliance with French operative Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella), she begins to wonder who she can trust.

I was exhausted after Atomic Blonde – not because the movie was overlong or boring to the point that my hindquarters went numb, but because I’d had to keep up with the film’s sneaky storytelling while enduring the intense and enervating action sequences. Atomic Blonde is not a film that goes for easy moments; none of it looks effortless, and the audience has to work just as hard as Lorraine to discover the identity of Satchel, a traitor in the ranks of MI6. But at least we have the good fortune not to get in the middle of those fight scenes, because they’re incredibly vicious.

Director David Leitch has done a fair job of staging his action scenes like single takes; there’s some digital trickery, to be sure, but in the moment it looks as though these long fights are all done in a straight cinematic line. We’ve got two long and arresting fights staged in apartment buildings – one in the living room, one on the stairs – that most other directors might have done in forty-cuts-per-second shakycam, but Leitch’s patient attention to the intensity of the fights allows them to exhaust the moviegoer and the characters, whose breathy pauses and stumbles make the combat even more real. Brownie points are due to the storytellers who devised Lorraine’s creative uses of an extension cord, a record player, and a doorframe.

In the interminable wait for Bond 25 and the ever-present question of whether Daniel Craig will suit up once or twice more, Charlize Theron proves herself a capable “Lady Bond,” although that does a disservice to Lorraine Broughton. There are certain similarities – their capabilities in close combat, their equal dexterity in the art of seduction – but Lorraine almost feels more of a piece with Bryan Mills in Taken, possessed of a “certain set of skills” that make her unstoppable, even as the odds against her increase. She’s more vulnerable than Mills, though, emotionally and physically; her stake in this fight is personal, and her fling with Delphine seems more genuine than any Bond girl’s. Moreover, those moments where she picks herself off the floor and continues to fight, even as she’s bruised and short of breath, give the character a smartly-crafted strength.

The soundtrack to the film is a smashing mix tape of 80s tracks, and the cinematography is as unforgivingly fluorescent as I imagine the 1980s would have been. It all adds up to a nicely unified experience, where the stark white lights of an interrogation room echo the neon pipes of a Berlin hotel room. Amid it all, there is the brainy sense of needing to keep up and the fervent hope that, as the credits roll, this won’t be the last time we see Lorraine Broughton. I’m ready to enroll her in the same camp as Wonder Woman, welcome alternatives to the same-old/same-old dudes who have run these genres for fifty years. Roll on the new, but please give me a moment to catch my breath.

Atomic Blonde is rated R for “sequences of strong violence, language throughout, and some sexuality/nudity.” Directed by David Leitch. Written by Kurt Johnstad. Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart. Starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, Sofia Boutella, Eddie Marsan, John Goodman, and Toby Jones.

The World's End (2013)

With The World’s End, we close the door on Edgar Wright’s “Cornetto Trilogy,” a thematic trio held together by blood and ice cream, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, as well as some fun genre-bending madcap antics.  Surprisingly earnest but never forgetting to have loads of fun with the sci-fi satire, The World’s End is a worthy successor to the inspired Shaun of the Dead and its clever brother Hot Fuzz.

The World’s End finds Gary King (Pegg) “puttin’ the band back together” in an attempt to recreate an abortive pub crawl twenty years earlier, though he encounters resistance from his old mates (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan), who have all grown up and left their childish ways behind them.  Gary’s quest is complicated when he discovers that many of his hometown’s residents have been replaced by alien robot doppelgangers.

I’ll admit to a certain degree of apprehension about this movie after Wright’s last directorial outing, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which had the fun quotient I had come to expect but literalized its video-game roots with a distancing lack of irony.  But in Wright’s filmic homecoming (he’s been making movies with Pegg & Frost for almost ten years, and their Spaced collaboration on TV goes back even further), he recovers his unique directorial voice with a project that’s equal parts heartwarming and hilarious.

The key is Wright’s deft ability (with cowriter Pegg) to navigate tonal shifts without compromising his film’s own unique identity.  In a summer blockbuster season that’s seen empty characterization (Pacific Rim) and tonally schizophrenic tilt-a-whirls (Kick-Ass 2), it’s a relief to see a film like The World’s End, which manages to juggle satire, spoof, comedy, nostalgia, genuine science-fiction, and moving character drama all in one bundle.  As scene-stealers go, it’s hard to do better than Eddie Marsan’s turn as Peter Page, who handles his sad sack role with aplomb; in a key bathetic monologue, he reveals his feelings of finitude, but his giddy one-liners fit perfectly within the bounds of his character because the film takes the time to get us to care about him before making him narratively significant.

It’s a weird, almost perfunctory moment when the film switches from beer-guzzling comedy to ooky sci-fi, as though Wright remembered halfway through editing that he needed to satirize a film genre as he had in Shaun and Fuzz.  But it’s not a requirement that impinges on the film; indeed, Wright’s greatest success is convincing us to care about his characters long before asking us to follow them on an insane journey.  He’s given an assist by some really capable performances; Pegg and Frost switch roles for this film, with Pegg as the loser and Frost as the blue-collar worker, and it’s a role reversal that works better than expected, allowing each actor to remain fresh in a new role.

It doesn’t quite pass the Bechdel test, but The World’s End manages to be tons of fun with an equal serving of well-written heart.  There are plenty of winks and nods to devotees of the genre or just to Cornetto Trilogy aficionados (the ice cream appears, as does the fence), but even taken solely on its own The World’s End is really just a solid movie all the way around.  It does everything a movie ought to do – entertain, amuse, move, provoke – and is a much finer cap to the summer movie season than I was expecting.  If this is how the world ends, bring on the afterlife.

The World’s End is rated R for “pervasive language including sexual references.”  You know the drill:  it’s comparable to Shaun and Fuzz in quantity of F- and C-bombs dropped.  The blood in this one is almost entirely blue (literally, the color blue) and played for comic effect.  We see a man’s bare buttocks once, and the men describe offbeat sexual acts in-depth (the “marmalade sandwich” – two blondes and a redhead – being a tame example).