Take Two Tuesday: Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) ... or, look out, here comes (another) Spider-Man

I haven’t done a lot of “Take Two Tuesdays,” but when I started back in May 2014, I set my sights on The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and found that I liked it better than I thought. How appropriate, then, that I’m revisiting the “Take Two” premise with another Spider-Man film.

I’ve seen Spider-Man: No Way Home twice now on home video. With a 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes, nearly $2 billion in worldwide box office, and legions of fans declaring that it’s the best Marvel movie ever, Spider-Man: No Way Home isn’t actually very good. It’s entertaining enough, with flashes of brilliance, but it’s over-reliant on nostalgia with a story that doesn’t hang together. And were it not for the pure unadulterated charisma of its leading performers, No Way Home would be an unabashed flop. 

You’re going to need to have seen the film for me to talk about why it doesn’t work, so spoilers follow for No Way Home (and, really, every Spider-Man film that came before it). I compared No Way Home to Avengers: Endgame, in that “No Way Home finds itself as the unlikely apogee of the eight Spider-Man films that preceded it.” And I’ve thought about this idea a lot over the last five months, mulling the difference between Endgame (which was built as a climax) and No Way Home (which is merely masquerading as one). I think No Way Home tries very hard to be the next Endgame, especially if you’ve seen every Spider-Man movie in the last twenty years.

Baby Driver (2017)

Poor Edgar Wright – he’s made his first film since The World’s End in 2013, and all anyone wants to talk about is why he famously walked away from 2015’s Ant-Man. Never mind that Baby Driver is in a sense the anti-Ant-Man, a sharp, original, standalone action flick with nary an Avenger in sight (though Jon Bernthal, soon to grace Netflix in a Punisher series, does turn up for the film’s first heist), or that star Ansel Elgort is a kind of anti-Paul Rudd, terse-lipped and fairly fresh to audiences who sat out young-adult fare like The Fault in Our Stars or Divergent. For my money, Baby Driver is the anti-Fury Road, an automotive action film that gets the audience to care about the characters and their world without once repeating a trick from its arsenal amid a series of high-octane, motor-revving driving sequences.

Ansel Elgort stars as the eponymous Baby, a getaway driver in the employ of heist meister Doc (Kevin Spacey), who’s teeing up the trademark “one last job” for Baby. Baby has driven for bank robbers with the unlikely names of Buddy and Darling (Jon Hamm and Eiza González) and for manic muggers like Bats (Jamie Foxx), but his true passion is his music – piped through his iPod and a standout soundtrack – and his girl, waitress Debora (Lily James).

Baby Driver starts out with a bang-up bank robbery, the particulars of which are never seen; Wright instead focuses his cinematic eye on Baby grooving to his tunes and scoping out the landscape before throwing the car into gear and speeding away to the tune of “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. It’s a clever approach to the scene, which most other directors would have set inside the bank, but Wright wisely takes this moment to introduce us to our protagonist, his methods and movements, before opening up his cinematic toolbox and showing us just what he can do with a barrage of edits, practical driving effects, and some first-rate sound design. It’s an opener that aligns us both with Baby and with Wright; having seen the ample capabilities of both, the audience is primed to care about what they do next.

Wright has always been a master of characterization; Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz created exceptionally memorable characters (aided, I grant you, by the superfluously talented Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), and even Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, though I didn’t much care for it, had a cast of strange rangers that I’ve had difficulty forgetting altogether. The good work continues in Baby Driver, with each “debut” giving us a very clear sense of who the character is and how they’ll fit into the larger world of the story. The exception, though, is Debora, who’s put into a kind of trope role of the pretty love interest until she takes a more active role in the film’s third act; I’d love to see Wright make a film that passes the Bechdel Test, for one, because it’s just about the only thing missing from Baby Driver.

One thing that isn’t lacking in Baby Driver is surprise and the visceral charge that goes with it. The screenplay takes a few unexpected turns, such that my plot summary above only scratches the surface of the places Baby Driver goes. Like the sharpest scripts, Baby Driver winds its pieces back together at the end in surprising ways, resurrecting plot elements long forgotten in order to throw the conclusion into sharper relief, and as we might have come to expect from Wright, lines of dialogue recur and accrue meaning, even if it’s just a sly wink to the audience as characters catch up to the references.

I watch a lot of movies; I tend to like a good deal of them, and I’m perhaps too forgiving of ones too close to my heart. As much as I loved Guardians, Vol. 2 and Wonder Woman, Baby Driver is probably the first must-see movie of the summer by sheer dint of its originality; a superhero movie is almost always kin to every other superhero movie, but Baby Driver feels fresher by being unfettered of any genre conventions. Like La La Land, which toyed with the conventions of a musical romance but never allied fully with that genre, Baby Driver orbits the heist/crime film but inflects it with all sorts of other things for a unique and exhilarating experience. The true mark of a film’s success is the reaction it provokes in an audience, and Baby Driver had me gasping, chuckling, and breathless.

Baby Driver is rated R for “violence and language throughout.” Written and directed by Edgar Wright. Starring Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza González, and Kevin Spacey.

Take Two Tuesday: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) ...or, how I learned to stop worrying and love comic book movies that aren't Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Well, this is a first.  “Take Two Tuesdays” is a series that I hope I won’t have to use too much, because the goal of a “Take Two” review is to reevaluate a film I’ve already reviewed here – put another way, backpedal on a review.  I’m usually pretty consistent in terms of my opinions on movies, but every once in a while I’ve been egregiously wrong.  A few examples that come to mind are The Shining and Anchorman, both of which I appreciated much more the second time around; on the flip side, my recent excursion through the Star Wars prequel trilogy proved to be way less fun without my childhood lenses in place.  So in those rare moments when my current opinion contradicts a review I’ve already published, “Take Two Tuesdays” will be my chance to set the record straight.

In this installment, it’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  The headline here?  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is better than I gave it credit.

In my earlier review of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I bemoaned the overfull quality of the film, calling it “a more sprawling narrative that feels inflated by the demands of producers who want to lay groundwork for future films rather than let those films develop organically.”  The kindest word I had for the film was “serviceable,” but I lamented, “‘serviceable’ just isn’t good enough any more.”

I’ll be honest:  in the wake of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, my comic book movie radar needs some serious readjusting.  It’s probably my second favorite comic book movie of all time at this point (you know the first), but it’s making the others look bad.  I noticed this problem after seeing X-Men: Days of Future Past.  While I waited for the inevitable postcredits stinger, my first thought was, “Eh.”  Immediately, I checked my premises; aside from one or two very small bits, I hadn’t had an unkind thought during the film itself.  The only thought I could rally behind that lukewarm off-the-cuff reaction was, “It wasn’t Winter Soldier.”

And that’s no way to review a movie.  On its own merits, X-Men: Days of Future Past was a smash success for me, and that’s the review I wrote.  Reapproaching The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with a similar sensibility (and a clearer sense of how all the moving pieces fit together) yielded comparable results.  It is, perhaps, the sequel I was waiting for after The Amazing Spider-Man.

The positives I cited still stand – Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone have extraordinary chemistry together, Jamie Foxx’s Electro is a vastly original and highly entertaining nemesis.  And I have better things to say about Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn; I love that the film takes him down a different path than James Franco’s, and his character arc is much more compelling the second time around.

I remain, however, disgruntled about two pieces, though in revisiting the film they loom less large than I had perceived.  On the subject of DeHaan, I’m still miffed that the film doesn’t spend as much time developing his third-act twist, and I’m still sore about the “I’ll be back” cliffhanger.  I would have much rather spent more time with him than on my second grievance:  I still maintain that the subplot surrounding Peter’s parents is mishandled in the film.  These scenes don’t contribute anything to the narrative, don’t bear logically on the plot at hand, and ultimately don’t even resolve themselves.  Either the film needs to foreground this subplot – it is, after all, the opening scene of two films now – or drop it in favor of something more closely connected to the central story.  If it doesn’t pay off in The Inevitable Amazing Spider-Man 3, I think we all know when to get our popcorn refill.

In hindsight/retrospect (not sure which one), these are much smaller issues than I had initially felt.  I had a blast with The Amazing Spider-Man 2, especially the first hour (I know, because I got my refill at the moment when Peter digs out his father’s briefcase).  But the rest of it didn’t disappoint; I found myself laughing, caught up in the entertaining parts of the film and asking myself, “When exactly did I space out the last time?”  I couldn’t find that moment.

I feel the same way now about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as I do about X-Men: Days of Future Past.  It doesn’t revolutionize the genre, and it isn’t The Winter Soldier.  But it doesn’t have to be.  I had forgotten that a film needs only to entertain and, time permitting, say something important.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 more than succeeds at the former.  And the bits about hope at the very end tickle the Dark Knight Rises enthusiast in me just fine.

In short, I’ve upgraded this one to “buy on DVD.”  (That’s high praise coming from someone who still doesn’t own The Amazing Spider-Man.)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

If I ever get accused of making up my mind about a movie before I see it, I’ll point to The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  I desperately wanted to love this film, even after and in spite of the disappointment I faced with the first film in the reboot franchise.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is not a catastrophe by any stretch of the imagination; there are things it does quite well, things that might have made the film an unqualified success, but the parts that don’t work did impede my enjoyment enough.

Fraught over his promise to her father, Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) doesn’t know where his relationship with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) is going, nor does he know what to make of his former best friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returning to New York to inherit his father’s company.  What’s more, Peter is still wrestling with the mysterious disappearance of his parents all those years ago.  As Spider-Man, though, he knows that the arrival of the demigodly Electro (Jamie Foxx) spells bad news for the city.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s greatest undoing is its obvious ambition; like an overeager patron of a fifty-year buffet, director Marc Webb and a quartet of screenwriters load up their plate with no fewer than seven running subplots, borrowing from wide stretches of Spidey’s comic book mythology.  And like at any buffet, there are entrees that taste great and other dishes that add only empty filler to the meal.

Let’s start with the bad news.  A lot of my complaints about the first film still stand, particularly about the subplot regarding Peter’s parents.  In a film that has so much going on, a subplot that has no direct link to the main plot should have been excised or made more relevant; it does serve to tie up a loose end from the first film, but it’s a conversation-closer rather than a motivator for the characters.  Furthermore, it’s the focus of much of the film’s middle, which means that the plot of the film screeches to a halt while Peter looks at computers until he finds the right file.

The Parkers subplot is the only thing that Amazing Spider-Man 2 has too much of, and it certainly interferes with the pacing of the film because nearly everything else feels underrepresented and rushed.  While DeHaan is quite good as a Harry Osborn vastly different from James Franco’s interpretation, the script pushes him through one too many character transformations and then bails on him with the knowledge that he’ll be back for another film.  Similarly, Foxx is – pardon the pun – electrifying as Electro, an iconoclast whose hero worship collapses when Spider-Man forgets his name, but the film shuffles him offstage so that the aforementioned computer scenes can take precedence.

It bears comparison to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, which juggled a healthy amount of subplots and struck a commendable balance between Peter Parker’s angst and his superheroic struggle against Doctor Octopus (played brilliantly by Alfred Molina).  Raimi knew where to draw the line between plots and came out with a fantastically tight narrative; Webb’s is a more sprawling narrative that feels inflated by the demands of producers who want to lay groundwork for future films rather than let those films develop organically.

I don’t, however, object to the brief treatment of Paul Giamatti as The Rhino.  His scenes are fun bookends that get us in and out of the film rather deftly, and they’re cleverly scripted to tell us exactly what we need to know about Spider-Man at those moments.  He might be back for future sequels, but if not this is a perfectly fine way for movies to acknowledge the wider comics mythology without getting bogged down.  (See also Batroc in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Scarecrow in The Dark Knight.)

One thing that Amazing Spider-Man 2 does especially well, though, is the relationship between Peter and Gwen.  Perhaps because of the real-life relationship between Garfield and Stone, these scenes are the most genuine and the most compelling in the entire film.  Garfield is pitch-perfect as the tormented teen, truly conflicted about the tension between his feelings and his dangerous lifestyle; he downright masters the chatty Web-Slinger persona, too, giving Spidey a New York edge to his wit that Tobey Maguire seemed to lack.  And Stone – well, you’ve probably read my blog long enough to know that I think she can do no wrong, and she continues to ace it here; we can feel her frustrations with Peter but also know from whence those feelings arise.

And I’ve spoken well of Foxx’s performance as Electro, and the scenes with him are honestly among the best in the film.  Webb, previously best known for his eloquently beautiful (500) Days of Summer, proves himself a solidly capable action director to boot.  I’m not sure quite what to make of Hans Zimmer’s dubstep-inflected score, but the action sequences in which the bass line drops and Electro pummels Spidey are probably the best such scenes in any Spider-Man film, realistic without a fanboy-tongue-in-cheek wink (as the Raimi films always seemed to do).  Or maybe it’s just that they’re set at night? 

Either way, in these moments Webb gives us the Spider-Man film we want.  And if the film had been a little more focused on these pieces instead of pushing toward too many finish lines, it might have even exceeded Spider-Man 2 in the realm of comic book films.  But your mileage, true believers, may vary.  Perhaps this is the future of the Spider-Man franchise, and I’m wrong about its misdirection.  Maybe I’m stubbornly clinging to a previous generation’s Spider-films, but I sense from the critical reception that the problem isn’t with me.  

I'm willing to be wrong - I want desperately to be wrong about this film, but the problem is that this Spider-Man just isn’t amazing enough.  It’s serviceable, but in a world where Captain America: The Winter Soldier is playing a few screens away, “serviceable” just isn’t good enough any more.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action/violence.”  We have a lot of zapping, kicking, and punching, with a little bit of burning and exploding; one character death might be traumatic and certainly ups the angst quota for the film.

Come back on Wednesday for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month as Timothy Dalton makes his curtain call as James Bond in Licence to Kill!

Django Unchained (2012)

It’s all been building to this:  I’ve spent the last few months revisiting the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino here at The Cinema King, all in preparation for Django Unchained – Tarantino’s eighth directorial feature.  Django Unchained is, at worst, an odd film; at best, it’s another wickedly entertaining entry from one of this generation’s most vivid and unique filmmakers.

Django Unchained stars Jamie Foxx as the eponymous freeman, liberated from slavery in order to assist the theatrical bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) in tracking his prey.  Django and Schultz make a deal:  if Django helps Schultz track the nefarious Brittle Brothers, Schultz will help Django free his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), a promise which leads the pair to the plantation of Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).  At Candieland, Django and Schultz pretend they are shopping for slaves, though Candie’s house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson, by way of Uncle Ben) suspects the pair are being less than honest.

In many ways, Django is a kind of departure for Tarantino.  For one, the film isn’t littered with blood and guts like some of his earlier works, though there’s still enough of the old ultra-violence (especially at the end) to interest even Alex DeLarge.  Moreover, the film is told in a straightforward linear fashion, without the temporal hijinks we’ve come to expect since Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill.  Finally, and possibly most surprisingly, Django is the first Tarantino film to deal with “serious” issues like slavery instead of stopping short at visceral themes like revenge (an overarching theme, though, of all Tarantino films).

All of this, however, is to say what the film doesn’t do.  What the film does do is provide a snappy and engaging romp through a dark chapter in American history, a kind of Gone With the Wind for our generation.  As with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino explodes his setting, touring the entirety of the antebellum South (circa 1858) with Foxx and Waltz as our tour guides.  Django is a “spaghetti southern” in this regard, as we follow two eclectic protagonists on a deeply personal quest through a perilous landscape.

Of these two protagonists, Waltz is (perhaps unexpectedly) the far more compelling.  Foxx is serviceable as Django; his determination to save his wife is tangible, but his deeper personality is never really accessible (a subplot about his humanity ebbing while he impersonates a black slaver, for example, never really pans out).  As Schultz, though, Waltz steals the show with his garrulous and gregarious performance; much as he did as Hans Landa in Basterds, Waltz brings this character to explosive life, deftly handling Tarantino’s tricky dialogue and humanizing Schultz’s contempt for the institution of slavery in the way that I wanted to see done in Lincoln.  (In this respect, then, Django is more honest with its audience than Lincoln was – a sentence I never thought I’d write!)

The third trademark of a Tarantino film, aside from extreme violence and peppy prose, is a solid supporting cast.  And in this Django does not disappoint.  We’ve got the “unlikely choice” – Don Johnson as a slaveowner a la Colonel Sanders.  We’ve got the “big name” – DiCaprio, who drips detestability as the film’s ostensible antagonist.  Though his Southern accent seems a garish caricature, I suspect that’s the point; Tarantino villains are seldom subtle, and the broad strokes surrounding Calvin J. Candie make it all the easier for us to hate him.  Finally, there’s the “veteran collaborator” – Samuel L. Jackson as Stephen.  If Waltz steals the show from Foxx, Jackson steals it right back in the film’s third act, making Stephen a nuanced menace somewhere between Stepin Fetchit and Darth Vader.  The gross stereotyping in his early scenes may elicit laughs, but those laughs quickly give way to fear when we see the true cruel danger he poses.  Jackson handles both aspects well and doesn’t forget to chew the scenery along the way.

Indeed, Foxx aside, most of the players in the film seem to be having a great deal of fun with the picture, which helps the audience have fun, too.  Django is probably not the “important film” Tarantino hoped it would be by tackling such a weighty issue as slavery, but it does so in a mature way without preaching a sermon the audience already believes.  Instead, Tarantino tries to have some fun with the material, and the film he’s created steps far enough out of the boundaries of realism that the audience can have an uncomplicatedly good time.

Django Unchained is rated R “for strong graphic violence throughout, a vicious fight, language and some nudity.”  There are several cartoonishly bloody shootouts, a scene of two slaves being forced to fight to the death, F-bombs and N-words galore, and two fleeting glimpses of naked slaves being tortured.