Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

When Venom came out in 2018, I remember the world freaking out. Was it good? Could a bad movie make that much money? With its late-90s vibe and gleefully cheesy mentality, was Venom the future of superhero movies? I vividly remember insisting, “Venom is fine.” It certainly wasn’t worth the consternation into which so many comics fans lathered themselves. (Then again, nothing usually is.)

On the other hand, its sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, is not fine. It’s dire. It’s nearly unwatchable. Its only saving grace is that it’s only ninety minutes long, and you will want to run to the nearest comic book to cleanse your palate.

 

Possessed by the man-eating alien symbiote Venom, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) has found himself the only reporter to whom serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) will make his confessions. Kasady’s time on death row is short-lived, though, once he too becomes infected with a symbiote that transforms him into the murderous Carnage. While Carnage scampers off to free his equally homicidal lover Shriek (Naomie Harris), Eddie must mend his fractured relationship with Venom before San Francisco burns.

 

Somehow, at 97 minutes, Let There Be Carnage still feels like it’s too long. The plot meanders and dithers until Kasady becomes Carnage, as though we need ample exposition to make us believe that Woody Harrelson is playing a crazy person. Between his manic eyes and the insane red wig he was sporting in the previous film’s mid-credits scene (a bonkers creative decision that is, alas, ignored in this film), I don’t think we need to wait more than thirty minutes before Kasady transforms into Carnage, especially when the film is already this brief. The showdown between these two characters, which ought to be a hallmark feature of the film, is limited to the climactic third-act setpiece. Compare to the comics, which made Carnage the star of a 14-issue crossover series, “Maximum Carnage.” For a villain this iconic, with a performer as significant as Harrelson, it seems almost a waste not to use him more.

 

The film is, like its twin protagonist and antagonist, bifurcated between identities. On the one hand, it is a superhero sequel in which the stakes are raised with a high-profile villain from the comics. On the other hand, Let There Be Carnage may as well be a CGI remake of The Odd Couple, in which Tom Hardy is forced to share an apartment with his own gooey anthropomorphized voice. You might charitably view this as a satirical riff on the standard sequel, in which the superhero wrestles with his chosen path and contemplates abandoning the heroic path (cf., Spider-Man 2). But it’s hard to be charitable to a movie in which Tom Hardy is keeping live chickens in his apartment to stop himself from cannibalizing muggers and hobos. At every turn, there are glimmers of a less deranged film, but time after time Venom takes the manic path. If you’re a filmgoer who likes the volume at eleven, though, perhaps Let There Be Carnage is the Venom for you.

 

Throughout Let There Be Carnage, one thing is abundantly clear – everyone who made the film was clearly having a ball, serving up plate after plate of ham. Indeed, some of this fun must have come from the fact that, yes, the studio let them make a movie so unhinged, so eccentric. It’s the sort of blank check creative recklessness that comes with recouping eight times your budget, but the first film was already abundantly nutty; Let There Be Carnage is like giving cotton candy to a caffeinated toddler at a theme park’s last call. And I’m sure there are moviegoers for whom this is the perfect flavor of superhero movie, madcap and ludicrous. To them I say, God bless. I look at this film, having forgotten what I actually liked about the first Venom, and I realize that Let There Be Carnage is simply not on my wavelength. It is difficult even to recognize it as residing on the same planet as I do. 

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, some strong language, disturbing material and suggestive references.” Directed by Andy Serkis. Written by Tom Hardy and Kelly Marcel. Starring Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Naomie Harris, Reid Scott, Stephen Graham, and Woody Harrelson.

Venom (2018)

I’ll not bury the lead here: guys, Venom is fine. It’s a movie about Tom Hardy and his relationship with his weird voice, personified by a giant blob monster that wants to make as much of a mess as he can. The movie is clunky and basic, but it knows that it’s not going to change the world. Even though it feels at times overlong, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Put another way, it’s fun enough that I don’t begrudge it the $6 I paid to see it.

Hardy stars as Eddie Brock, an investigative reporter with a chip on his shoulder. Assigned to a puff piece on one-percenter Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), Eddie discovers that Drake’s Life Foundation is preying on vulnerable members of society for shady experimental tests. One such test involves Drake’s acquisition of several symbiotes, gooey space aliens that bond with other lifeforms – and soon one bonds with Eddie, transforming him into the hulking Venom.

The principal thing to get out of the way is that this isn’t a Spider-Man film, and that’s upset a lot of people. But here’s my hot take – I don’t think that Spider-Man would actually fix anything that’s wrong with the film, and anyone who thinks otherwise is actually still sore over the third act of Spider-Man 3 eleven (yes, eleven) years ago. The trouble with putting Spider-Man and Venom in a movie together is that it’s a lot of ground to cover; you’ve got to do Spider-Man’s black costume, Spidey ditching the suit, and Eddie Brock becoming Venom first as a villain before somewhat reforming. But wait, you say, this is why God (or Stan Lee) invented a shared universe, to make this story over the course of a few films! To which I reply, yes, but who has the patience to see that story again, only this time spread out across several years? No, better to try something new, and since superheroes are our modern mythology it’s perfectly fine to reinterpret them every once in a while and try something new.

The first act, as I mentioned above, is somewhat heavyhanded. It’s full of characters who speak their motivation rather than show us, with a villain who’s only evil because he’s evil and rich. Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams, who’s all but admitted she turned up for the paycheck, has very little to do as Brock’s fiancée, a kind of obligatory character who reminds one of the narratively inert love interests from late-90s Batman movies. Indeed, her most interesting scene is quickly brushed aside, in a way that feels very much like the film saying, “No, no, a final setpiece is no place for a lady.” In that vein, the film sweats at each turn in the story, baldly showing the effort needed to pivot from one plotline to the next. Once the film establishes what Drake is up to, for example, it quickly swerves by having one character explain that, actually, never mind, what’s he’s really doing is something more sinister, which requires a bigger setpiece to resolve.

The seams on the film are so readily apparent that it’s a marvel the film works at all. However, what it stitches together is actually quite interesting, governed by the most watchably peculiar performance from Tom Hardy whose dialogue, in a rare departure for Hardy, is rather easy to understand. Hardy makes the peculiar choice to play Eddie Brock like a folksy huckster of a reporter, distracted and fidgety; his Venom voice, on the other hand, is classic Hardy, all snarls and grunts with more digital filter than a Daft Punk greatest hits album. This dichotomy, with Hardy playing both to his strength and at once wildly against type, is riveting, and while most of the movie seems to be phoning it in, Hardy is singlehandedly making the best case for more movies in a Venom Cinematic Universe.

So too is a wildly optimistic mid-credits sequence – optimistic in its swing-for-the-bleachers bid for a sequel co-starring a real surprise. No spoilers, but it’s a moment that led at least one man in my audience to holler incredulously, “Wait, is that [name redacted]?!” But it’s emblematic of the movie writ large – nuts and silly and a little ill-advised, but wholly confident and earnest in a way that I think resonated with $80 million or so worth of moviegoers this weekend. It’s a throwback to a simpler era of comic book movies, which ended without the necessity of a sequel to build the narrative world. Even the Eminem track that plays over the credits, written especially for this movie, feels like a relic of a bygone era. But I won’t deny that the clunky first act reminded me a lot of the equally unwieldy first act of Ant-Man, which ended up being a sleeper hit. I won’t say that Venom is as objectively good as Ant-Man, and I can’t say that I’m in a terrific hurry to see it again, but it’s at least as fun as a pint-sized Ant-Man.

Venom is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for language.” Directed by Ruben Fleischer. Written by Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, and Kelly Marcel. Based on the Marvel Comics by Todd McFarlane and David Michelinie. Starring Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Scott Haze, Reid Scott, and Jenny Slate.

Dunkirk (2017)

For a while there, Dunkirk ruined more than a few movies for me. The trailer for this movie, particularly the seven-minute IMAX preview, is so good that every time I saw it, I thought to myself, “Well, forget this movie. I want to see more of Dunkirk!” Thank heavens it’s finally here, so I can get back to my regularly scheduled programming, and thank heavens it was worth the wait because it shall come as no surprise that this Christopher Nolan disciple found much to love in the master’s latest work.

Dunkirk is the true story of the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk, France, in the midst of World War II, told across three intersecting narratives – the land evacuation (starring Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles, and Kenneth Branagh), the civilian boats recruited to aid the effort (starring Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy), and the air cover provided by British fighter pilots (starring Tom Hardy).

With Interstellar in 2014, Nolan drew more than his fair share of comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – including from myself when I said that Interstellar “combin[ed] Kubrick’s science-fictional aesthetics with Nolan’s knack for tight and highly personal storytelling.” Surprisingly, though, Dunkirk also feels a bit like 2001, with its trio of timelines looking at what it means – and takes – to be human in a time of crisis, but Nolan out-Kubricks Kubrick by intermingling the timelines (one week, one day, and one hour) and playing them off against each other in a cerebral way that takes for granted an audience’s ability to keep up. For those of us who didn’t need navigational charts for Inception and Interstellar, Dunkirk is similarly smart, though it is less self-reflexively clever than past Nolan ventures; where Inception had occasional bouts of exposition and Interstellar made the MacGuffin of time travel a function of the plot, Dunkirk proceeds with its narrative play as a matter of course, again cycling back to the classic Nolan theme of the subjective experience of the time and the way we form communities around common goals.

Nolan veterans like Tom Hardy (playing to type as an unintelligible masked man) and Cillian Murphy (playing against type as a shell-shocked soldier) turn up and do the good work we expect of them, while Nolan newcomers like Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance – the closest we get to expositional figures – appear as sobering reminders of the moral challenge presented by Dunkirk, gifted actors prepared for the subtle challenges of their sophisticated roles. Dunkirk is largely, however, fleshed out by fresh and nameless faces who don’t have long and recognizable filmic pedigrees like their named counterparts, but there is something even more humanizing about a nameless sea of evacuees, and these actors are remarkable for their abilities, like Keaton or Chaplin, to evoke a range of emotions in largely silent stretches of the film.

In this way, too, Dunkirk evokes 2001 with its extended, silent, balletic scenes of aerial combat, of divebombing and running along the beach. 2001 began and ended sans dialogue, and there are similarly few conversations in Dunkirk, opportunities for Nolan and his performers to show off their command of the visual language of film. And again Dunkirk steps beyond 2001 with a dynamite score by Hans Zimmer; 2001 included the “Blue Danube Waltz” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” but by and large didn’t carry the auditory weight that Dunkirk does. Like Inception before it, Dunkirk succeeds largely on the shoulders of Zimmer’s score, which is masterfully, unrelentingly, elegiacally tense.

“Unrelenting” is probably the best word for Dunkirk. From its first scene, the film grabs the audience by the shoulders and demands attention until the film is over. There are moments when that ending seems to come sooner than expected – even without noting that the film is, at 1:46, much shorter than most Nolan fare – doubtless mirroring the false hopes given throughout the Dunkirk evacuation, but Nolan’s actual finale grounds the film in a surprising way, a kind of echo of Inception’s last-frame fakeout but with more heart than Nolan is often acknowledged as having. It is an affirmation of Nolan’s continued status as a master filmmaker and – and I do not throw this word around lightly – a true genius.

Dunkirk is rated PG-13 for “intense war experience and some language.” Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Based on a true story. Starring Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard, Barry Keoghan, Harry Styles, James D’Arcy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Hardy.

The Revenant (2015)

2016 is shaping up to be the year of “Is it just me?” I’m closer to thirty now than I’ve ever been before, and I’m increasingly feeling out of touch with the critical community; I still love a good Marvel superhero flick, more inclined as I am to forgive/overlook their failings. Meanwhile, critical darlings are drifting past me in severely underwhelming fashion. I sniffed at Mad Max: Fury Road, which now has a Best Picture nomination to its name, and I couldn’t disagree more with those who said The Hateful Eight was the work of a mature Tarantino.

Now here I am at The Revenant, “Certified Fresh” by Rotten Tomatoes and lauded with Oscar nominations and Golden Globes victories aplenty. And again I’m asking the question that seems poised to be on my lips for the rest of the year – did we all see the same movie? For my money, The Revenant was more than a little boring, containing as it does a few viscerally composed memorable moments punctuated by long reels of punishment that border closer to cinematic sadism than awards bait.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in the role which will likely win him his first Oscar (about which, more later), stars as Hugh Glass, a frontiersman left for dead by his comrades (Tom Hardy and Will Poulter). Amid an unremitting landscape and every possible way to die in the wilderness, Glass stumbles, bleeds, and inches his way back to civilization – and his revenge.

I’m a bit of a newcomer when it comes to director Alejandro González Iñárritu, but I thought Birdman was a masterpiece, brilliantly anchored by Michael Keaton’s commanding lead performance with a delightful ensemble cast backing him up. And after The Revenant, I was reminded just how good Birdman was, because The Revenant lacks most of what made Birdman so compelling. Instead of a snappy script with snappier performances and a directorial eye that knows to keep the film moving, The Revenant has one strong performance that plays out its one-note fairly quickly, while the supporting cast is given short shrift in favor of long – and I mean gruelingly long – wide takes of landscape, the likes of which perhaps more properly belonged in an ode to 70mm like The Hateful Eight.

“Belabored” is the word I’d use most for The Revenant. DiCaprio is bludgeoned by the weight of survival, and he does an adequate job portraying a man at the limits of his capacity to survive, but more than two and a half hours it’s excruciating only to a point, at which moment the viewer becomes dulled to the horror of the wilderness, moving instead in the “Well, what else did you expect? Of course [insert tragedy here] was bound to happen at this rate.” Ditto for the unforgiving landscape, which at first seems horrifyingly blank but soon becomes commonplace, painful to the retinas more than to the soul.

And speaking of souls, I sense that The Revenant is going for spiritual commentary in its dreamlike editing, but there is not the thickness of narrative needed to support such intuited depth. The motivations of all the protagonists are, frankly, still somewhat baffling, and the political climate of the time isn’t adequately fleshed out. All the time that could have been devoted to these plots is instead exhausted on calamity and bloodshed and struggling, leading the audience to feel that the point was more about punishment than any narrative arc. One must recognize that there is something much deeper in Hardy’s character than the film permits him to display, and I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to see more of Domhnall Gleeson’s Captain Henry, or perhaps that’s just a reflection of how much I liked his understated sneer of a villain in The Force Awakens.

There are things enjoyable in the film, predominantly the most violent bits in which the plot moves forward and the languorous quality of the film pays off. The bear scene, about which much ado has been made, is brutal in a technically sound way, and the final confrontation between DiCaprio and Hardy does justice to the relationship between the two characters. At the end of the day, The Revenant tries to overwhelm but ends up underwhelming. Though DiCaprio is good enough in the film, he’s not overpoweringly commanding, leading this reviewer to suspect that his Oscar win next month (which is all but assured – or so I predicted about Keaton in Birdman last year) will be more a lifetime achievement award than a recognition that this is as good as it got this year. The same happened to Denzel Washington for Training Day, which was good but not his career best (that honor goes to Malcolm X or John Q).

Or maybe I’m just out of the loop. But I can’t say that I’d put The Revenant on my Top 10 of 2015.

The Revenant is rated R for “strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity.” This thing is intense, as I’ve said, and Iñárritu is unapologetic in his depiction of blood. There’s a rape sequence in which nothing is shown, though in another scene a dead man is seen naked from a moderate distance.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Upon receiving word of his wife’s death and the army marching on his gates, Macbeth famously lamented that life itself was nothing more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” I return to this quotation every once in a while because it is, as so much of Shakespeare’s dialogue, incredibly poetic and deftly precise in expressing something ineffable about the human condition. And I can’t help feeling that Macbeth might have had a similar – if pronouncedly less fatalistic – reaction to George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which has heretofore been hailed as one of the greatest action films of the past year, if not of all time.

To which I have to ask – did we all see the same movie? Because I didn’t see a movie that merits being labeled the #1 film of 2015, as more than a dozen critics have done. The movie I saw was a tale competently told by a very capable director, full of so much sound and fury they put it in the title and the name of a main character, ultimately signifying very little beyond its surface. It is far from distressingly poor, but it is certainly underwhelming after all of the hype.

Carrying a negligible connection to the Mel Gibson trilogy of yesteryear, the film finds the eponymous Max (Tom Hardy) along for the ride when Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) stages a breakout for the wives of warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). What ensues is a chaotic, frenetic, and seemingly endless chase across the barren wasteland of the apocalypse.

First of all, I don’t mind that the film is an extended chase sequence. As I said at the top of the review, the action scenes are very competently directed, and I give Miller a tip of the hat for managing to do much of it with practical effects and to keep a suitable level of tension even when the scenes become a tad protracted. (Kudos also to Junkie XL, who wears his Hans Zimmer homage on his sleeve with a score that smacks of Man of Steel.) The problem I have with the action sequences is that there really are too many of them at the same level of intensity to the point where I became desensitized fairly quickly. I wasn’t bored, although I did feel a certain languorous sensation after seeing someone run over by enormous tires for the ninth time. Miller has a wonderful bag of tricks in the first few “episodes” of car chases, but as the film continues to do the same stunts Fury Road loses something of its original feeling.

The film has a very specific rhythm, episodic in its approach to narrative repetition but ultimately cyclical because, yes, at one point in the chase they do turn around and head back the way they came, which maybe feels more like a metaphor for the film than Miller intended. We’re driving and we’re stopping, then we’re driving and we’re stopping, and by about the third go-round of this pattern Fury Road felt a bit like its own greatest-hits compilation.

Two comparisons here, the first of which is to the superlative Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, particularly the tank chase sequence. The reason that sequence stands out is because it’s unique; it does a number of things that the film hadn’t done and wouldn’t do again, and it does them all particularly well with a fantastic sense of peril even though we know there’s really no chance that Indy will meet a crunchy fate. Imagine, though, a film comprised of four or five tank sequences, turned up way past eleven, and with Tom Hardy’s monosyllabic grunts in lieu of the charisma of Harrison Ford, and you have something approximately like Fury Road. Again, there’s something to enjoy there, but I’m flabbergasted at the number of critics who put this at #1 of all of 2015.

Next, Pacific Rim. Now I know what you’re going to say – “This again?” Well, yes, and Mad Max: Fury Road is decidedly not Pacific Rim, thank heavens. But it does many things in common with Pacific Rim, which I find problematic in terms of getting me engaged as an audience member. Fury Road’s characters are largely archetypical, compared to Pacific Rim’s gross stereotypical figures. You have Max, who’s the good guy because he’s the good guy; Furiosa, the Strong Female Character whose motivations are to do the right thing because It’s The Right Thing; and Immortan Joe, the evil one-percenter who’s bad because he’s Bad. (Compare to Pacific Rim’s cliché Mako Mori, a Japanese woman skilled in the art of war to avenge her family, or the pigeonholed effete British scientist with a limp.) What I think resonates with Fury Road more than Pacific Rim, though both are essentially onomatopoetic, is that primal storytelling which relies on archetypes (the same reason The Force Awakens struck a chord). It is, however, extremely thin archetypal storytelling.

Why is it, though, that I felt physically enervated at the end of Whiplash but otherwise emotionless when the credits rolled on Fury Road? Again, I wasn’t as invested in Max and Furiosa as some of my friends and fellow critics have become. It was very much a sense of, “Oh, that’s it?” Quite honestly, I got quantitatively the same emotional rush from the trailer for Fury Road as I did from the full film, in about a single percentage of the time. It left me feeling a bit empty, as if Miller had relied on my complicity in the mutually agreed-upon coolness of the film. Yes, things do blow up, and I’m as big a fan of explosions as the next guy (who happens to be my father, in this case), but the charm wears off after the fourteenth car explodes after flipping over an indecent amount of times.

It’s competently made, but let’s not fall over ourselves in praising Mad Max: Fury Road. There is something very alchemical when a movie works and when it doesn’t, and for me Fury Road just wasn’t the transcendent experience I’d been led to expect. If we can revise a phrase from Shakespeare once more, it’s not exactly much ado about nothing, but it strikes me that Fury Road is a very loud amount of ado about very little.

Mad Max: Fury Road is rated R for “intense sequences of violence throughout, and for disturbing images.” Being that the film is essentially an extended post-apocalyptic car chase, there are numerous explosions and vehicular injuries, including people getting run over by tires. Several characters have what appear to be radiation burns and other deformities. While many of the women wear skimpy outfits throughout the film, one woman is seen fully naked, but from behind and at a great distance.

The Dark Knight Rises - EPIC Review

Enough time has passed, I believe, that a more extensive and more specific look may be taken at Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises.  In the tradition of 2008’s “Epic Review” of The Dark Knight, I’ll be discussing more in depth what I enjoyed about the film, which will inevitably entail spoilers of both general plotlines and specific dialogue which I’ll invoke.  The goal is, I hope, to provide a more detailed assessment of the film beyond my earlier review which gushed over the technical aspects of the film but could only allude to the story and its effect on me.  For safety’s sake, the bulk of the review can be found after the jump; those reading this review from anywhere other than the front page will be advised that spoilers begin below the first image in this review.

I cannot stress this enough:  if you have not seen The Dark Knight Rises yet, do not read any further.  The success of the film depends wholly on allowing it to develop at its own pace; any spoilers therein would detract from the overall experience.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) -- Spoiler Free

I mused yesterday about whether or not Christopher Nolan could create a successful and fully realized trilogy – something no superhero director, for one reason or another, has been able to do.  After attending a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, the verdict is in.

He has.

In many ways, I would have been able to write the bulk of this review without ever having seen the film.  I was expecting to gush.  I was anticipating that feeling of being blown away.  I had few (if any) doubts in the back of my mind.  And ordinarily a film which fulfills expectations might ultimately be a disappointment.  But when expectations are this high, merely meeting them is worth the price of admission.

And The Dark Knight Rises, impossible as it may seem, even exceeds expectations.  One might even say it “rises” to the challenge.

I’ll forego the usual plot summary in deference to the cloud of secrecy and spoiler embargoes necessitated by our digital age (even our late night talk shows were thought to be dangerous).  Suffice it to say that The Dark Knight Rises joins Gotham eight years after the death of Harvey Dent, eight years after Batman entered a self-imposed exile, and just as new foes are rising to threaten the very foundations of Gotham City and its new era of peace.

Of the performances, I can only quote the words of Stan Lee – “Excelsior!”  Bale bears the bulk of the film – no surprise here, since he’s playing the eponymous Knight; as has been the case with the past two films in “The Dark Knight Trilogy,” the focus is as much (if not more so) on Bruce Wayne as on Batman.  His character evolves without ever feeling forced to do so, his quest both understandable and relatable, and his return to the Batsuit a welcome and applause-worthy moment.

Bale’s backed by a cast that doesn’t disappoint.  The old favorites – Michael Caine as Alfred, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, and Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon – continue to turn in solid performances.  Bonus credit to Caine, who manages to do create (particularly in two specific scenes) a real and accessible version of the trusty butler that hasn’t been reached in the character’s seventy-year history.  More than just the snarky chauffeur or stolid voice of reason, Caine’s Alfred is a friend first, as much a father as Thomas Wayne was, and we feel his agony when he sees what Bruce has allowed himself to become.

As for the new faces, they’re welcome additions to the cast.  I see now why we needed so many new faces, and I’m glad especially that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was among them.  His John Blake is easily the most interesting new protagonist (more on the villains later), embodying many of the film’s – and trilogy’s – main themes without ever feeling shoehorned into an already full film.  I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again:  JGL is bound for stardom (if he’s not there already), and The Dark Knight Rises is another fantastic line on the résumé.

But after Heath Ledger’s unforgettable turn as The Joker, can the film’s villains surpass the decade’s most iconic force of evil?  Honestly, probably not, but Tom Hardy’s Bane and Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle (note that the name “Catwoman” is surprisingly never invoked) aren’t trying to outdo their predecessor.  Rather, they create entirely new – and gratefully fresh – versions of significant members of the Batman mythos.  More surprising than Hardy’s Bane is what Anne Hathaway manages to do with Selina; it’s a performance I didn’t quite know she had in her, managing to distinguish herself from the Catwomen before her with breathy intonations and evident internal conflict.  Bane, however, is head-to-toe conviction; though he’s given the unenviable task of emoting with much of his face obscured, Hardy manages to convey through his body language the smug self-satisfaction and confident physical dexterity for which his character is known.  (A fuller take on his voice remains to be seen; though it has been lampooned ad infinitum, I suspect my theater’s audio system wasn’t equipped for the booming bass of the film, and so I’ll have more thoughts on that later.)

But what’s most remarkable about The Dark Knight Rises is not the able work delivered by qualified thespians.  The greatest compliment I can pay the film is to repeat what I’ve already said time and time again – Christopher Nolan is a master storyteller who wastes not a frame of film in delivering his definitive statement on the character and what he means.  As before, The Dark Knight Rises is filled with moments that tie together and layer new meaning on important scenes; conversely, perhaps the worst thing I can say about the film is that it doesn’t stand on its own as well as The Dark Knight did.  Indeed, The Dark Knight Rises is very closely related to Batman Begins, revisiting moments and referencing plot beats in a way that echoes without plagiarizing.  But as the final installment in the trilogy (and not just a sequel, as The Dark Knight was initially envisioned), Nolan rewards his viewers just as Lucius Fox was rewarded in The Dark Knight for his faith in Batman’s mission.

If Batman Begins could be distilled to a meditation on overcoming fear, and if The Dark Knight can be said to be a film about defeating the forces of chaos and conquering fear which has escalated into weaponized terror, The Dark Knight Rises is about precisely that – about rising, about overcoming once more.  But here Nolan makes explicit what’s been suggested all along:  the greatest heroism in the world is born through hope, both the hope that an individual can make a difference and that that difference will be a positive one.  And though I’m much more attached to films which engage me on a cerebral level – which this film does, unequivocally – The Dark Knight Rises also makes me feel, deep inside of me, that there is always hope.  It’s a film that made me shed a few tears for a variety of reasons – finality, sorrow, ecstasy, unrestrained jubilation – and it’s a credit to Christopher Nolan that I do not begrudge him a single salty drop.  He has earned it.

The Dark Knight Rises is rated PG-13 “for intense sequences of violence and action, some sensuality and language.”  Violence and all-out action sequences are prevalent as before but are almost entirely bloodless, though Bane’s methods and physicality are more brutal than we’ve seen in the trilogy thus far.  There is one clearly implied sexual encounter, with no more than bare shoulders, while another character is implied to be a prostitute; Selina is extremely sultry and uses that to her advantage, without transgressing beyond an astonishingly tight suit.  Language is mostly tame and is probably PG-quality taken on its own.

Rest assured, loyal readers, I haven’t said my last words on The Dark Knight Rises.  I saw The Dark Knight eight times in theaters, and I am certain repeat viewings of this film will come in the days to follow.  And once the statute of limitations on spoilers has been lifted, I’ll give more in-depth comments on specific moments in the film and the thematic importance of the trilogy as a whole.  Stay tuned, loyal readers – we return on Monday with our regularly-scheduled “Monday at the Movies” post!

Monday at the Movies - January 9, 2012

Welcome to Week Two of "Monday at the Movies." On the docket for this week, four films adapted from popular novels (an unintentional link), including one where The Cinema King reverses a decade-long antipathy toward a particular fantasy film!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011) – I’ve never been overly captivated by the Harry Potter franchise. That is, I’ve never fallen head over heels in love with the movies, but I’ve taken them for what they are – well-done and imaginative but otherwise unremarkable fantasy adaptation films. And this film (affectionately dubbed 7B by myself and others) had to do a lot to win me over, mostly because I couldn’t approve of paying to see it after my now-legendary attempt at a midnight show of 7A. Now that I’ve rented it (for free), I’m ready to say that 7B was a well-done close to the franchise, but I think a lot of reviewers fell over this movie in a dead faint by overstating the film’s good attributes – chief among them a strong cast of England’s Finest (including a great turn from Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort) and exciting action sequences. This is an effective second half of a film, but as a film in its own right 7B doesn’t quite work. There were plenty of moments where the film faltered by standing on its own, including moments where a quick expositional memory jog would have filled in gaps or even moments where the film didn’t clearly articulate what was happening (i.e., the moment when one character dies – but it’s not clear which of two characters). I liked it, and I wouldn’t unsee it, but it didn’t quite live up to the hype. Fans and devotees, though, will gobble this up.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) – Mark it, loyal readers. The Cinema King has to reverse policy. The first time I saw Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Tolkien series, I fell asleep. After a rousing introduction narrated by Cate Blanchett, the film faltered for me. But after ten years of decrying the film as “The Wizard of Oz without ever actually getting to Oz,” the browbeating of literally everyone else who saw it induced me to give it a second shot. And honestly, I’m kind of glad I did. Fellowship is much more exciting then I remember, with plenty of great cast members and a plethora of well-directed rousing battle scenes. I’ve also tried reading the Tolkien novels, but those I find completely impenetrable because the story takes a backseat to the mythology and the linguistics; fortunately, Jackson makes knowledge of each creature’s name nonessential and wisely prizes the narrative and character interactions. The best of these is Sean Astin’s level-red dedication to and compassion for his friend Frodo (Elijah Wood, who’s nowhere near as amiable as his traveling companion). I was glad that I opted to rewatch this film and moved toward the second one with eager anticipation.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) – After a good experience with the first film, I was incredibly disappointed with The Two Towers. Here is the glacial pace I remember, the problems of divergent focus, the not-much-happening mood pervading most of the whole film. After a promising first installment, the Lord of the Rings franchise starts to fall apart for me. Where the first film had strong character interaction, here Peter Jackson loses track of many of his key players every so often without a thematic link to bind them together. The film’s only significant action sequence comes at the end, much like in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End; here, though, the two hours of buildup are nowhere near intriguing enough to merit a three-hour runtime. While new characters Gollum and the Ents are entertaining and well-performed, they’re not given much to do other than tease things to come in the third installment. And my problems with Frodo continue here; he’s generally unlikeable, frequently misled, and more than a bit condescending. And a closing monologue about the nature of endings alludes to the problems of this film as a story – there isn’t one. But the promise of an ending is enough, I believe me, to do something I never thought I'd do - watch the third film.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) – Knowledge of the cast alone (Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong, and John Hurt) was enough for me to pick up the John le Carré novel before even seeing a trailer, and I’m pleased to report that the film lives up to the book’s reputation and does a classy, thorough job of adapting the source material. Gary Oldman plays the uber-collected mole-hunter George Smiley, pursuing a double agent at the top of British intelligence during the height of the Cold War. The performances here are solid, as expected, although the atypical nature of this spy story (nothing blows up, and more relies on what is not said than what is actually done) might alienate some. Additionally, the plot is obtuse, although like Inception the right amount of mental calisthenics will prevent audiences from getting too lost in the details. But director Tomas Alfredson does an extremely solid job creating a very 1970s vibe throughout the whole movie, juggling flashbacks and multiple settings with great visual cues (such as the color of Smiley’s trademark specs). If Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy doesn’t net Oldman the Oscar he’s deserved for so many years, it might be time to hang it up as far as the little gold man is concerned.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!