Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Whatever the anthesis of “cynical” might be – earnest, genuine, or just plain optimistic – Wonder Woman 1984 is that. It’s a bit less prestige than its first-rate predecessor, using the 1980s as lavish set decoration rather than World War I as historical fiction, but it’s no less engaging, even as it goes for broke in the direction of a bit more silly. Indeed, WW84 is possessing of the kind of idiosyncratic confidence that comes when a filmmaker like Patty Jenkins has made the film she truly wants to make, rather than bow to studio meddling (as we have since learned happened in Wonder Woman’s climactic third act).

It’s 1984, and Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) has made her way to Washington, D.C., where her job at the Smithsonian brings her into contact with the Dreamstone, a veritable monkey’s paw that grants a wish to anyone who wields it. In ways you might and might not expect, the Dreamstone entangles Diana’s coworker Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), infomercial huckster Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), and Diana’s late lover Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), giving lie to the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for...”

 

I truly loved WW84, breathlessly exclaiming once or twice, “That’s terrific.” I’m aware that not everyone did love it – its fortunes are in decline over on Rotten Tomatoes, for one – and I can’t speculate as to whether the streaming service simulcast does WW84 a disservice, whether the spectacle plays better on a more impressive theater setup. (The Cinema King has no complaints on that front.) What I can say is that I was captivated by the film’s earnest whimsy, its confident suspension of disbelief, and its certainty in its own moral position. There is not much hemming and hawing over the right thing to do, and there is seldom any question that Diana has the strength to do it. Nor is there much self-reflexivity or embarrassment about the inherent silliness of the MacGuffin and the source material, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I’ve long since grown bored with comic book movies that have to point a mocking finger at the comic books. Of course they’re silly; all of this is silly, and yet Jenkins and Gadot are having a blast with it.

 

At its peak, WW84 reminds one of Richard Donner’s Superman movies, leavened with a bit of Indiana Jones, none of it too worried about how the film fits into a larger cinematic universe. As much as I’m a fan of the Zack Snyder DC Extended Universe – and as breathless as I am for Zack Snyder’s Justice League (now rumored for March 2021) – there is something delightfully un-corporate about WW84, by which I mean the film is largely unconcerned with setting up sequels or homaging past films. It’s very much its own thing, content merely to deliver up the continuing adventures of Diana Prince. In fact, the film buckles a bit when it gestures toward Snyder’s “Wonder Woman walked away” metanarrative, as when Diana takes care to dismantle security cameras. It’s a quick perfunctory note, and one senses that Jenkins dispenses with it as quickly as she can at the top of the film because she has her own things to say about Diana.

 

Of course, none of WW84 would work if Gal Gadot weren’t an inspired vision as Wonder Woman. She plays the character with such sincerity that you believe she stepped out of a comic book and onto the silver screen. She continues the bravura work she began in Batman v Superman with the full emotional range we saw in Wonder Woman; Diana Prince can believably swing from dread and resolve into elation over the existence of ice cream. Pedro Pascal, who’s done so much with only his voice over on The Mandalorian, makes a veritable three-course meal out of the scenery as a surprisingly topical Max Lord, while Kristen Wiig’s Barbara Minerva is the sort of antagonist you’d love to see recur in the franchise.

 

I’ve seen a lot of reviews talk about WW84 as exactly the kind of movie we need to clear the cobwebs from this wretched year. I don’t know that I’d take it quite that far – it’s not a perfect movie, but it is a breezy confident romp that does justice to its inspirational main character while not shortchanging an audience who’s coming for thrills and good cheer. For moviegoers who demanded that Zack Snyder’s DC universe lighten up, be careful what you wish for – bright colors and super-camp and parachute pants abound. For me, it’s almost as if Wonder Woman stepped into Zack Snyder’s Watchmen with a smile, and it’s hard to imagine a movie that could be more up my alley than that one.

 

Wonder Woman 1984 is rated PG-13 for “sequences of action and violence.” Directed by Patty Jenkins. Written by Patty Jenkins, Geoff Johns, and Dave Callaham. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, Robin Wright, Connie Nielsen, and Lilly Aspell.

The Equalizer 2 (2018)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

Though my original review was perhaps a little more even-tempered than I initially recalled, I look back on Kingsman: The Secret Service with great fondness, cringing at some of the bawdier moments but overall greatly sympathizing with director Matthew Vaughn’s appreciation for the 1960s era of spy films (particularly James Bond, though – as the characters are fond of reminding you – “dis ain’t dat kinda film, bruv”). While its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, is an enthusiastic action film with more than a few decent thrills, I was not transported in the way I was with the first film; that is, if the original were Skyfall, The Golden Circle is more Spectre, a sequel that doesn’t misstep but doesn’t transcend like its predecessor did.

After a coordinated attack on Kingsman, secret agent Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and gadget guy Merlin (Mark Strong) link up with their “American cousins” (Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, and Pedro Pascal) at Statesman to avenge their fallen comrades. As the trailers have revealed, however, a comrade also rises – Harry Hart (Colin Firth) returns to the service for the fight against the cartel leader Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore), who controls the worldwide drug trade from her 1950s-infused lair.

As I was watching The Golden Circle, I couldn’t help but think of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, a sequel to a similarly inventive and strong first outing. Though the two sequels do have a similar “more of the same” quality to them, never triumphing as their predecessors might have led one to expect, I can safely say that Golden Circle is unlike A Dame in that it’s not boring. Where A Dame felt almost sleepily safe and content merely to reproduce what had gone before, Golden Circle shakes up the script and goes to places one wouldn’t expect. Though slickly devised, Harry’s return is anything but smooth, and it leads to an interesting new dynamic with Eggsy. It’s a real treat also to see a British stereotype of Americans; if The Secret Service satirized Britain’s vision of itself, Golden Circle is a dashing wink of a cliché of the United States, with its cowboy whiskey peddlers and honky-tonk bars.

The Golden Circle is not, as the trailers might have led you to believe, a film about the Statesman agents (though apparently Vaughn wants to make that spinoff). Aside from Pascal, who participates in the film’s rousingly thrilling Spy Who Loved Me by way of OHMSS action setpiece, the Statesman cast amounts to an extended cameo. The focus is squarely – rightly, as fun watching Statesman can be – on the Kingsman agents and the high-octane action that follows them. The film opens with an extensive (and, in IMAX, quite loud) taxi chase through London; you’ve also got the ski chase sequence, a snowy shootout, and the raid on Poppy’s HQ, all of which feel substantively different than what we saw in the first Kingsman film.

This Kingsman is about twenty minutes longer than the first one, and I have to say it does feel it. There’s a recurring gag about Elton John that overstays its welcome, and this film does feel a bit bogged down by laddish humor, perhaps more so than before (but mercifully not as bad as in Kick-Ass 2, which actively suffered from this). The first Kingsman famously ends (no spoilers) with an unconventional send-up of Bond’s get-the-girl closer, and while it’s tonally off-putting it wasn’t as cringingly gross as Eggsy’s encounter at the Glastonbury Music Festival, which does leave a bad taste on the film for a while. Perhaps overall the film needs more of what Colin Firth brought to the first film and to Eggsy’s training – a Pygmalion for the surveillance crowd, polishing up the rough bits and reminding us to stand a little straighter. (Put another way, “Manners maketh man.”)

Back in 2015, Kingsman: The Secret Service was better than most of us were expecting it to be, especially since it was pitted (you’ll recall) against the guaranteed box-office winner 50 Shades of Gray. The Golden Circle, however, is not as good as it should have been, though neither is it as bad as it could have been. It’s not as impressive as the first, which is a tragedy, but it’s a fine second entry and a cheering diversion at its best.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is rated R for “sequences of strong violence, drug content, language throughout, and some sexual material.” Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. Based on the comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Starring Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, and Julianne Moore.