The Nice Guys (2016)

After two Iron Man films, Jon Favreau retired to a more personal film with Chef, which seems to have rejuvenated his creative batteries while remaining an entertaining movie in its own right. Likewise, three years after Iron Man 3 it’s Shane Black’s turn to scale back for a smaller film – misplaced, perhaps, in the summer blockbuster season (I can’t help thinking it’d have performed better financially in, say, October), but right up there with Hail, Caesar! in terms of laughs per minute.

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling star as errant private eyes whose paths cross on a missing persons case before the case turns into an apparent murder (or, as it turns out, murders) reaching as high as the head of the Department of Justice (Kim Basinger). It’s a 1970s extravaganza, from the music and locations to the politics and pornography; hat-tip to Angourie Rice as Gosling’s daughter, overeager and spirited despite her father’s protestations.

I’ve been a fan of Shane Black’s going as far back as my first viewing of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and his clever screenplay on The Monster Squad. Of course, the former had a lot to do with Robert Downey Jr. in a starring role, but that has a lot to do with the fact that RDJ is naturally adept at delivering the kind of lines that Black writers – quick-witted, dryly sarcastic, and unapologetically buffoonish when need be. Throw in the buddy cop element (lest we forget, Black screenwrote Lethal Weapon), and you’re well on your way to The Nice Guys.

Another way to put it would be to think of The Nice Guys as “Thomas Pynchon’s Big Lebowski,” juxtaposing the neo-noir aesthetics of the Coen Brothers with Pynchon’s penchant for the absurd, Inherent Vice if it starred a pair of detectives. Yet for all the twists and turns that analogy might lead you to expect, The Nice Guys is never less than straightforward, its mystery meandering but never straying while wrinkling in a nice bit of ambiguity just because the final reel (in brief, is someone lying about the truth of the case?).

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a success because of the unlikely chemistry between the extreme personalities of RDJ and Val Kilmer (the latter in an uproarious turn as Gay Perry), and The Nice Guys continues that pattern by joining Crowe and Gosling in a successful combination of thuggish straight man Crowe and waggish clown Gosling. While Crowe gets in his fair share of punchlines and confident one-liners, it’s Gosling who runs away with the film’s funniest moments (some playing off his daughter, in an entry for “World’s Nuttiest Approach to Parenting”).

Unfortunately, it seems that The Nice Guys is flying under the commercial radar, though critically it’s hovering around 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps The Nice Guys will find its audience on DVD, and hopefully so because this is a film that is a guaranteed bad-mood-killer. Hail, Caesar! gave me an unending grin on my face, but The Nice Guys goes for the comedic jugular and left me wheezing with laughter throughout much of the picture.

The Nice Guys is rated R for “violence, sexuality, nudity, language and brief drug use.” Definitely a hard R between the violence (gunfights, fistfights, people getting hit with cars and falling off buildings), profanity (F-bombs aplenty), and nudity (topless and nude women in the opening scene and in an extended party scene).

The Grand Marvel Rewatch: Iron Man 3

Face front, true believers! Welcome to the next astonishing addition to “The Grand Marvel Rewatch,” designed to get us all sufficiently amped up for Captain America: Civil War, which comes out May 6, 2016. Each Wednesday, The Cinema King casts his eye back upon the twelve films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and offers five salient observations about the caliber of the films and the way they might play into Marvel’s latest installment in America’s favorite franchise.

Today’s fantastic feature film takes us to 2013 for Iron Man 3, kicking off Phase Two of the MCU with an old favorite and some new PTSD.

1. Where is everybody? In a comic book world, it’s so easy to have characters meet up for an issue or two – you just check with your editor to make sure the character isn’t dead and then draw them in. Cinematically, with budgets and contracts, that’s tougher, so you get a case like Iron Man 3 where the intervention of SHIELD might have been helpful. I understand that the point is that Tony is a loner, and he’s pretty detached from the world for most of the film, but the fact that this issue never pops up in the film feels a bit like a gaping hole.
2. Speaking of wormholes... The sense of absent Avengers (Bruce Banner’s post-credits cameo aside) is compounded by the fact that the film very self-consciously lives in the shadow of The Avengers and the Battle of New York. This I very much appreciate – someone as grounded and self-centered as Tony Stark would necessarily be very shaken by a near-death experience battling aliens through a giant wormhole in the sky above New York City. And I can’t help but feel that all the questions Tony fields about New York are some meta-commentary from director Shane Black, who very self-consciously enters into a narrative six films in the making and feels the pressure of everyone asking how he’s going to tie it all together.
3. Manda-wrong. It’s been long enough that we can talk about the big Mandarin reveal, right? Namely that Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin is actually a patsy, a persona put on by addict actor Trevor Slattery in service to Aldrich Killian’s master plan. To add insult to injury, the plot twist is accompanied by a few fart jokes. Look, I totally understand why Iron Man 3 goes this way, but I would have much rather seen Iron Man go head-to-head with a terrifying and surprisingly not-racist interpretation of the Mandarin. Instead, the main villain is another well-dressed white guy. (“All Hail the King,” a short on the Thor: The Dark World DVD, suggests that there’s a real Mandarin out there, as well, but the Kingsley interpretation promised so much more than we got.)
4. He is Iron Man. I very much enjoyed the film, and it’s because Shane Black makes a film that is very consistent with the tone of the previous films and the MCU as a whole. That’s predicated largely on the performance of Robert Downey Jr., who treats Tony Stark like a comfortable suit. The film’s closing line, “I am Iron Man,” harkens back to the first film, tells us something about the character’s growth beyond reliance on the metal suits, and tells us that this whole franchise succeeds because of the attitude struck by RDJ back in 2008.
5. Music to my ears. Longtime readers of the blog know I’m a big fan of musical scores; when done right, like in the Star Wars series, the score becomes a character unto itself (or, in the case of Tomorrowland, does more work than the film itself). For all the connective tissue between the films, musically they’ve been somewhat piecemeal. Iron Man 3 is the fourth film starring Tony Stark, with four different composers along the way. Finally, though, Brian Tyler’s Iron Man theme seems to have stuck (due in no small part to Tyler’s work scoring Age of Ultron). Will we hear it in Civil War as well? I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

There’s so much more to be said about Iron Man 3, so be sure to check out my original review. Join me in the Grand Marvel Rewatch over the coming weeks, and hit the comments to share your thoughts about the MCU. And don’t forget to tune in next Wednesday for the next installment, in which we take a closer look at 2013’s Thor: The Dark World. Excelsior!

Top 10 Marvel Cinematic Universe Films - #6-5

With Guardians of the Galaxy, the Marvel Cinematic Universe enters the double-digits club.  The job of a Top 10 list in this case is especially difficult because I knew precisely which would be #1 and which would be #10, but the rest I don’t have much complaint about.  The Marvel brand has been very reliable, so assigning ranks becomes a somewhat arbitrary game of quibbling and comparing.  That said, I feel fairly confident in assessing “The Top 10 Marvel Cinematic Universe Films!”

6 (tie).  Thor (2011)

“Branagh brings his background in Shakespeare to bear in Thor, which blends perfectly the high theology and overwhelming pride of Asgard and the Norse deities with the restrained and comic scenes on planet Earth.” 

Released the same year as Captain America, Thor is a fantastic example of how effortlessly Marvel can render the incredible, thanks largely to Kenneth Branagh’s directorial hand, which deftly juggles gods and mortals in a film that never feels unbalanced.  The sweeping Shakespearean quality of Asgard is so impressively crafted that we could spend a whole movie there, but the fish-out-of-water plotline which finds Thor exiled to earth is correspondingly mesmerizing, heavier on the humor but no less aware of the mythic quality of the narrative.  As noted earlier in the countdown, Tom Hiddleston delivers a star-making performance as the trickster Loki, but Chris Hemsworth is no slouch as the swaggeringly confident God of Thunder.  It edges out Captain America only ever so slightly, solely by virtue of remaining self-contained, but the entertainment value between the two movies is almost indistinguishable; filmgoers will have an equally fantastic time with either. 

As we enter the Top Five, not to disparage the preceding five films too much, we’re headed into a higher caliber of film.  The earlier five films are fun enough, diverting enough, but the five films to follow are truly remarkable – not just as Marvel films, not even just as superhero films, but as films in their own right.  It’s especially true of the #1 choice on this list, but we’ll get there in due time... on with the show!

5.  Iron Man 3 (2013)

“It evolves the character of Tony Stark in a number of intriguing ways, and the promise that “Tony Stark will return” (shades of James Bond?) was never more fascinating.”

Tony Stark famously remarked in the second film in the trilogy, “Oh, it’s good to be back!”  But it’s not until the third film that the Iron Man franchise really lives up to its inaugural installment.  RDJ is joined by writer-director Shane Black, who had collaborated with him on the downright fabulous sleuth/caper flick Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and the result is everything that worked about KKBB with a heavy dose of everything that works about a Marvel movie.  The Christmas setting is inspired, and I particularly love the way the story takes Tony Stark to rock bottom, builds him back up, only to reveal that (no spoilers) the only reason he was able to become Iron Man in the first place was because he has always been Iron Man.  If this is RDJ’s final solo outing as Tony Stark, it’s a fitting farewell, but here’s hoping (Avengers aside) we haven’t seen the last of this iteration of Iron Man.

Come back on Monday, true believers, as the countdown continues into the Final Four!

Iron Man 3 (2013)

It’s a brave new world, folks.  We’re post-Avengers and entering solidly into what’s been called “Phase 2” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  And with a new director at the helm of the centerpiece franchise, how does Iron Man fare against cinema’s greatest enemy – the dreaded threequel?

Come on, it’s Robert Downey, Jr.  Of course it’s fantastic.

Iron Man 3 picks up after The Avengers, with a PTSD Tony Stark (RDJ) tinkering with his metal men in lieu of sleeping.  The suits are all quite fantastic, but Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is worried, especially after a few close encounters with empty suits.  Speaking of empty suits, blast from the past Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) arrives at Stark Enterprises with an offer that’s too dangerous to be good – hacking into the human brain to augment natural genetics.  And when Tony Stark calls out top terrorist The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), the Invincible Iron Man finds himself vulnerable and pondering the viability of his very existence.

It’s heavy stuff, vaguely reminiscent of the rock-bottom approach of The Dark Knight Rises.  But make no mistake – RDJ and new writer/director Shane Black maintain all the fun that ought to be the governing spirit of an Iron Man film.  Even the panic attack sequences aren’t deadly serious, deflated by RDJ’s speedy comedic delivery and the script’s wise refusal to submit to cliché; case in point, Tony Stark’s second-act encounter with a young child who helps him out.  It’s an initial eye-roll, but our incredulity is assuaged once we realize that Stark refuses to “learn a lesson” from the kid and indeed willfully disregards the boy’s guilt-trip backstory in favor of a sandwich.

It’s a credit to Black that the film doesn’t feel tonally different from its two Jon Favreau-helmed predecessors.  In fact, Iron Man 3 is equally consistent with the last Black/RDJ team-up, 2005’s brilliant Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.  It’s not just the Christmas setting or the narration (which pays off beautifully in the incredible post-credits sequence), but it’s a consistency of tone, of snappy dialogue, of confident fun that runs through both films.

I can’t emphasize enough how much of this is thanks to another fabulous central performance by RDJ; in fact, most of the other roles are essentially cameos, though no one drops the ball in their smaller parts.  (It’s a shame, though, that we don’t get more Pepper, since her scene in The Avengers was among the best.)  Our two big villains here, Pearce and Kingsley, are right at home in the trappings of a comic book film, though comics fans may wrinkle their nose at liberties taken with each character (Pearce’s role is bigger than Killian’s ever was, while the Mandarin’s presence is reduced).  As Killian, Pearce is reminiscent of Sam Rockwell’s turn as Justin Hammer in Iron Man 2, but without the schlock and quirkiness; Aldrich Killian is deadly menacing, a near-perfect match for Tony Stark (though I still think Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane was the best nemesis).  As for Kingsley, his Mandarin isn’t your granddaddy’s Oriental wizard; updated for the film as the new face of terrorism, Kingsley brings in his trademark any-ethnicity-goes approach and drawls out threats that downright drip doom.

And as War Machine/Iron Patriot, Don Cheadle gets more action sequences than last time, both in and out of the suit.  The case of Iron Patriot raises a key point about the film; where The Dark Knight Rises spent so much time working toward the symbolic significance of the costume, Iron Man 3 revisits the first film’s closing line – “I am Iron Man” – in search of some greater truth about its protagonists.  It almost seems like an effective metaphor for changing creative teams:  you can paint the suit any color you like, you can strap on any number of accoutrements, and you can even blow up as much of the trappings as you like.  Because what really matters is the person inside the suit.  You need to get the character right for any of the rest of it to work.

And in that respect, Iron Man 3 succeeds.  It evolves the character of Tony Stark in a number of intriguing ways, and the promise that “Tony Stark will return” (shades of James Bond?) was never more fascinating.  See you in Avengers 2, Tony.

Iron Man 3 is rated PG-13 “for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence throughout, and brief suggestive content.”  There’s a modest amount of blood in scenes that involve iron-suited fisticuffs, as well as an unsettling heat signature around most of the enemies in the movie; as for suggestive content, Tony Stark meets women, some of them in bikinis.  You can imagine how that conversation goes.

Don’t forget tomorrow is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month, and you know what that means...