Marvel Less: CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD

Marvel is still in its flop era, I fear. I’d love to like these again. When they were fresh and fun, telling reasonably coherent, colorful sci-fi action stories, they were breezy popcorn satisfaction. Even if rarely stylistically adventurous or thematically engaging, that initial couple dozen movies had a low ceiling for quality, but a pretty high floor for fun. Alas, they don’t make ‘em like they used to. Captain America: Brave New World is another widget marking time between projects. Used to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe would tell a story while teasing the next one. At worst it was an okay movie promising a better time next time. Now it’s all tease. This movie’s ostensibly a feature about Anthony Mackie taking over for Chris Evans as Captain America. Evans passed the shield to him at the end of Avengers Endgame, and the Disney+ mini-series The Falcon and the Winter Solider found Mackie tussling with the government about whether or not he could take on the official role. Brave New World could follow up on those threads, but instead decides to tie off some loose ends from 2008’s The Incredible Hulk set in the geopolitical backdrop of the aftermath from 2021’s Eternals. When the MCU was firing on all cylinders, there was a kind of enjoyment to be had from the unexpected call-back. But when a new movie is based entirely around gesturing vaguely in the direction of characters and plot lines that, in some cases, have gone unmentioned in nearly 20 years, at the expense of its own potentially interesting lead characters, I found it to be unusually empty stage setting. Even the post-credits teaser is atypically cryptic, in which a villain mumbles, almost verbatim: hey, um, maybe next time something big will happen.

Though under the direction of The Cloverfield Paradox’s Julius Onah the action is workmanlike and the personalities appealing, the whole endeavor is warped by its reversion to the blandest, least compelling way through a scene or sequence. The movie idles its engines, never finding a story or conflict to kick it into higher gear. Even the Big Climactic Action Sequence is a pretty small, predictable shrug. The way there involves Captain America investigating an assassination attempt while the President of the United States (Harrison Ford) tries to salvage a treaty as he edges closer to the line for proper POTUS conduct. What little energy the movie has comes to life when Ford—drifting off of his Clear and Present Danger and Air Force One throwback gravitas—and Mackie—bringing the charming MCU credibility—talk to each other. The performers generally are just likable enough to make the movie feel pleasant and frictionless—not exactly the goal in a conflict-oriented genre. Add to that, the plot's problem arises from the sequence of events around them having been so clearly pro forma slotted in and retooled—by five credited writers and rounds of reshoots—to be the least they could be. (Every scene could be a deleted scene to almost no change to the overall arcs.) The movie has the moves of a conspiracy thriller, but is too simple to be convoluted, and too obvious to be mysterious. It also desperately avoids politics of any sort. (Not even a Red Scare reference when there's a Red Hulk hiding in the government.) It must be pretty difficult to make an action movie set in the White House completely apolitical, but here we have it: a movie that goes nowhere and says nothing. Mission accomplished. In this movie about a president testing the limits of his authority, the fantasy isn’t who’s secretly a Hulk, but the fact that he can be stopped within minutes and no one much cares.

The Lady Grieve: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD

It’s a total fluke of Hollywood’s pandemic scheduling that brings to streaming this weekend two mid-budget studio thrillers with movie star turns for middle-aged actresses. That they both center on women drawn into strangers’ high-stakes dramas while suffering from their own near-debilitating flashbacks to past trauma is just another coincidence, I suppose. If only they were both terrific. Alas, Netflix got the short end of the stick there, having picked up The Woman in the Window as damaged goods when it was sold off to the highest bidder. (20th Century Fox made the adaptation of the bestselling mystery novel back in 2018 — we don’t even need to go into the even wilder story of how the author was later exposed as a habitual con artist and fraudster in a lengthy New Yorker piece — before getting acquired by Disney, which forced reshoots that delayed the release, at which point the theaters were closed and, well, here we are.) Even if you didn’t know it was a troubled picture, it’d be clear right away it’s a muddled one. Director Joe Wright (Atonement) and screenwriter Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) have been given a pretty junky piece of source material, a transparent Rear Window rip-off in which an agoraphobic child psychologist (Amy Adams) spies some suspicious behavior from her new neighbors. The filmmakers treat the set-up as an excuse to swoop through a creaky townhouse, peer out windows, and glide across dark rooms as reality gets slippery. Eventually we get a host of marquee actors (Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Anthony Mackie, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry) cycling through Adams’ home as she gets increasingly confused about what, exactly, is going on across the street.

With hysterical accusations, devious deceptions, potential psychosis and psychopathy, and convoluted conflicts, every scene could, and maybe should, be an excuse to chow down on ham, but the film somehow never delivers on that potential. The actors stand around waiting for the main course that never arrives. The whole thing is routine as can be, with dark and stormy nights, and gaslighting suspects, and circular arguments, pile-ups of red herrings, and boy, I wonder if Hitchcock himself could’ve made Google searches a compelling source of thrills. The picture looks as dim and muddy as its plotting. Wright doesn’t even bring his usual stylish flourishes with any consistency, which makes for a curiously restrained and sleepy spelunking into bloated paperback surprises. At best it’ll throw a clip from a Hitchcock movie on our lead’s TV, which might be a cute tip-of-the hat if it wasn’t merely a reminder of how far craft has fallen in a case like this. Even the big twists just meekly peek out and slide off, one more shrug before you go. At least Adams, much better served here than by the dismal Hillbilly Elegy, for whatever that’s worth, gets to put the entire lousy picture on her shoulders and nearly carry it solo to the finish line. She inhabits every loose nerve ending and boozy pill-popping distraction as her character’s unraveling unconvincingly brings her closer to actually leaving the house.

Much better is the straight shooter Those Who Wish Me Dead. Its opening act is a bow drawn simply back; the next 75 minutes or so are a direct flight of an arrow to a fiery conclusion. There’s something admirable about its easy confidence and sturdy execution. The thing delivers where it counts. The story starts with a boy and his father (Finn Little and Jake Weber) on the run from bad guys (Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen) who want them dead. They flee to Montana, where you just know they’ll cross paths with the small-town cop (Jon Bernthal) and the troubled forest service firefighter (Angelina Jolie) whose introductions have been cross-cut with the rising action. Directed and co-written by Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water), with author Michael Koryta from his novel, the quick blooded tension rises fast. Soon enough, the film becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse game — machine gun hunters and their vulnerable prey — stalking through the woods. Shades of fairy tale logic, perhaps, with a little boy lost in the forest, wolves on his heels, a woodsman caught in a trap, and a beautiful lady by a lake who just might be able to help him survive. But the thing is too much a grizzled non-nonsense snap of a genre effort to push overmuch on its potential fable qualities. Instead, it rests on Jolie as an engine of redemption, a woman given a desk job, of sorts, after a deadly fire outcome that weighs heavily on her mind. Now there’s a rattled child who needs rescue. It’s easy to root for them.

The movie is short and simple, and all the more effective for knowing just how to lean on its best elements. It helps that Jolie, one of our great modern movie stars, has rarely had a straightforward starring role in the last decade—just four times above the title in live action and two of them were as Maleficent. She commands the screen and exudes competence, even in a role that’s so thinly drawn that there’s nothing else but her star power to generate interest. The plot itself, too, is built from stock parts, but Sheridan knows how to stage his thrills with brutal efficiency. The tension — close up threats against the wide open national park spaces — builds on a steady upswing as the various participants try to keep their cool and their control through strategies that eventually lead to gun fights and, by the end, a raging forest fire. There are efficient thrills to the sturdy brutality of its inevitable violence, the quickly sketched sympathy for the victims, and the consistently well-timed escalations of danger. If the movie still finds time for some loose ends — what’s in the letter? and did that Big Name villain just drive off after his one scene in hopes of a sequel? — there’s pretty much nothing important that isn’t driven to its logical conclusion. We don’t get solid mid-level star vehicles often enough any more. At least this one’s pretty good.

War of Superhero Agression: CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR

Once more we return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where an ever expanding roster of superhero Avengers quip and spar and save the world across interlocking franchises and overlapping continuity. Captain America: Civil War is only the latest in this series to expend energy maneuvering the multicolored combatants around while teasing more stories to come. It’s nothing but sequels to a variety of its predecessors – in addition to the third Captain America it operates as Avengers 3 and Iron Man 4 – and setups for its own future entries, plus previews of coming attractions as a variety of new characters and conflicts crowd the screen. All MCU properties do this to some extent, but this one does it the most joylessly, playing out as a grinding plot conveyance system full of sound, motion, and incident, but little in the way of story. Much of grave import is muttered with flashes of dull wit and routine twists between blandly assembled and weirdly small-scale action sequences. And in the end, we’re basically right back where we started.

We pick up shortly after the events of last year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, a film criticized in some corners for its overstuffed qualities. I found it entertaining, carried over with a light tough by Joss Whedon. He, like Jon Favreau, who had the bright idea to play Iron Man and Iron Man 2 with the pace and charm of fizzy comedy, knew how to juggle the demands of these massive spectacles with something approaching relaxed ease. That’s largely gone here, as Civil War powers forward weighed down with something serious in mind. Captain America (Chris Evans) leads the new Avengers (Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, Anthony Mackie’s Falcon, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch, and Paul Bettany’s Vision), who, in an opening action beat, stop a villain, but accidentally blow up some civilians in the process. This is the last straw for many people around the world, so 117 nations sign accords demanding these super-beings be given governmental oversight. I mean, if you saw lawless beings smashing apart buildings to get at supervillains, you might be concerned, too.

When various characters from previous films gather to sit around a table and talk this out, the magic computer man Vision makes a good point. Since the Avengers have been public, calamitous world-threatening events have increased exponentially. Maybe they’re drawing this negative attention. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) agrees, and demands the others sign up to work under government supervision. Cap’s not so sure, and demands he be allowed to stay a free agent. This is the conflict, such as it is, amplified by Cap’s old pal Bucky (Sebastian Stan), the brainwashed supersoldier, who is framed for an explosion that kills several foreign leaders. Cap wants to go outside the law and save Buck to prevent him from taking responsibility for a crime he didn’t commit. Sure, he’s been assassinating and bombing plenty of people for decades, but he didn’t do this one. I get his loyalty to his scrambled friend, but this is some hard logic to follow. It creates one big misunderstanding the Captain and the Iron Man can’t seem to deescalate.

The first forty minutes or so are brisk enough, filled with colorful and loud conflict, as well as some mildly intriguing questions. What’s a superhero’s obligation to society? What happens when doing good means different things to different people? When is intervention more dangerous than helpful? There’s a certain amount of superhero melodrama as various players line up on different sides of the issue, straining relationships and casting doubt on tenuous friendships. But the whole operation grows monotonous as characters exchange increasingly hollow barbs, taking the whole thing Very Seriously even as we know the eventual fighting won’t be too consequential. There are too many sequels and spin-offs that need them. By the time we’ve been introduced to Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Spider-Man (Tom Holland) – pausing for extended sample scenes for their forthcoming features – it’s easy to know the Civil War will be more like a scrimmage, everyone simply stretching their powers before their next solo outings.

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo, sitcom vets who helmed the last Cap, keep things brightly lit and blandly staged, pulling up tight on good actors, some more invested than others, trying to put real feeling in phony dialogue and then bouncing into action that’s a jumble of frenzied editing and blurry effects. Curiously small – only a few brawls and a chase or two – for running well over two hours, it’s a movie with elaborate hand-to-hand choreography (John Wick’s directors worked second unit) photographed with shaking, swooping cameras cut together to often deemphasize the impact. Sure we have War Machine (Don Cheadle) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Ant Man (Paul Rudd) and the rest lining up to show off their moves, throwing balls of light and color at each other in ways that fleetingly resemble cool comic panels – Spidey crawling over a giant’s mask; Vision shooting light from the jewel in his forehead; Ant Man shrinking and enlarging. But there’s nothing here to get invested in. It’s just not the sort of movie that’ll allow its major figures to hurt one another, not when their hurt feelings animate only this slapstick-adjacent goof-around scuffle on the way to tearful revelations. It’s tediously busy.

With nods – more like thin posturing – to serious disagreement tossed aside in favor of colorful action and bad quips, the screenplay by series regulars Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely cops out by making it all about personal grudges. Instead of actually engaging with intriguing inciting ideas about power and authority, it becomes digital shadowboxing drawn out between endless empty rounds of the kind of double-talking political Rorschach test corporate spectacles are best at. The Marvel machinery can’t afford dislike of these characters, and unconvincingly lets the ones in the wrong off the hook. After a poorly developed plotter (Daniel Bruhl), I’d call Captain America the closest thing this movie has to an antagonist, pushing along the conflict by refusing to accept responsibility for his actions, but this sure isn’t the movie willing to take a stance like that. He embodies the movie’s fight against consequences and for the status quo, demanding we care about morality of hero work and then distracting us with so much movement marking time we’re to forget they ever brought it up, let alone fail to resolve it in any way. It’s all left dangling, just a big prelude for the next one, and the next, and the next.

Three Wise Guys: THE NIGHT BEFORE

An R-rated Christmas comedy, The Night Before is a festive After Hours party through New York City with a trio of buddies on their last carousing Christmas Eve. They started the holiday party tradition as teenagers when Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was unexpectedly orphaned and alone. His best friends wanted to give him some Yuletide cheer and help him mourn. But now, years later, they’re moving on without him. Isaac (Seth Rogen) is married with a kid on the way, and Chris (Anthony Mackie) is a big football star. Ethan’s still adrift, without steady employment and freshly broken up from his most recent, and most perfect, girlfriend (Lizzy Caplan). He has commitment issues to everything but his Christmas traditions, and is clinging to this one last great time.

He wants it to be a perfect night of drinking, karaoke, Chinese food, and fellowship. He even scored tickets to a legendary secret party, the best in town. Naturally, his clinging to an ideal night is part of what makes it all go wrong in a cavalcade of hilarious antics involving drugs, slapstick, misunderstandings, and the fumbling loose patter of modern comic dialogue. What follows is a terrific comedy, quick and charming even when it’s just dawdling around with its leads. The throughline is the amiable chummy spirit, a hangout vibe that lets each guy’s personality breathe and bounce off the others in amusing fashion, as the night gets progressively odder. They have great sociable chemistry, convincingly close, like longtime friends who know how to twist the knife of an observation, but care enough to look out for each other’s mistakes.

They’re growing apart and recognize that, but are willing to try to keep their relationships strong. As a result, they’re often great company as they try their best to have a good time. It’s funny enough and fast enough to make me forgive it for being yet another crude comedy about man-children who need to be indulged before finding a family and settling down makes them finally grow up. Director Jonathan Levine (50/50), who co-wrote with Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, and Evan Goldberg (Superbad), keeps the focus on the three guys and their problems. Because it’s rooted in real and understandable pain, and the movie’s narrative arc and comic engines are built on the unproductiveness of their partying lifestyle, it avoids certain bro-centric traps. The women's roles are underwritten, but there are none of the cheap shots found in other movies of this ilk. This is a basically kind movie, plenty of dirty banter but basically nothing in the way of cruelty.

It helps that they’re real characters, not punchline machines. One is struggling with adulthood, while his slightly more mature friends are worried about fame and babies and what their lives mean. A convincing grounding in real insecurities drives the emotions behind the silliness, a charming tension between the high emotional pressure of the holidays and the desire to cut loose and forget their troubles. Mackie’s jock is desperate to stay cool in the eyes of his fans, teammates, and sponsors. Rogen’s wife (Jillian Bell) gives him a box of drugs – a free pass to get high one last time before their baby arrives, a scary milestone he’s a total mess over. And Gordon-Levitt flashes his boyish charm, but you can see the fear of his economic and emotional instability bubbling underneath.

So they each have their problems to work out as around each corner they encounter drunken Santas, an excited limo driver, an oddball drug dealer, a homeless Grinch, surprise sexts, and other assorted comic scenarios (each involving a recognizable actor, each more unexpected than the last). It’s episodic, and therefore a little hit and miss, but I found the ratio to be fairly high as situations escalate to big laughs on a consistent basis. A highpoint is Rogen, sweaty, panicked, progressively higher, and almost-but-not-quite freaking out throughout in one of his very best performances, whether talking to a nativity scene, admiring another man’s equipment, or vomiting during a midnight mass. Levine balances the picture, though, letting each lead, and most of the supporting cast, have great little moments of surprise, humor, and warmth. Mackie gives chase to a groupie who stole his pot. Gordon-Levitt gets relationship advice from a drunk pop star. At one point, the guys stop to play Nintendo 64, for old time’s sake. They just want to have fun while they can.

A winning movie that had me smiling from beginning (with rhyming storybook narration) to end (with declarations of love), it’s filled with as much holiday spirit as raunch. Unlike a Hangover picture’s smutty cynicism, The Night Before breathes with genuine humane feeling behind its sweet and filthy jokes. It is, after all, a Christmas movie, filled with cozy messages of love, hope, self-improvement, togetherness, and the power of Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball.” Likable people learn valuable life lessons after an eruption of wackiness, deciding to stop clinging to a tradition’s specifics. Instead, they grow to appreciate embracing evolving relationships while maintaining the spirit of traditions. It’s a simple message that you could fit inside a Hallmark card, but good luck finding one that comes with glitter and tinsel, but also joints, booze, Run-DMC, bad sweaters, a car crash, and a fight or three. It’s a crackling one-crazy-night Christmas comedy more than earning its right to bust guts and warm cockles on a yearly rotation.

Holiday Schmaltz: LOVE THE COOPERS

The opening scene of Love the Coopers finds the Cooper family matriarch signing the last of her Christmas cards. “Love, The Coopers,” she writes with a flourish. The title of the movie, however, lacks the comma, making it less a warm present to us all, and more a demand to love the family we’ll be spending the next two hours with. This directive would go over easier if we were given sharply drawn characters who come into focus quickly. But we don’t. It’s a sprawling holiday dramedy dripping with sap and spreading its large ensemble amongst several connected plotlines, some far more interesting than others. It’s a sloppy Christmassy mess, but because a cast of likable charmers plays the characters, the movie has its moments anyway.

Opening on the morning of Christmas Eve, the screenplay by Steven Rogers (Stepmom) finds a large extended family all over Pittsburgh in a rush to get last minute holiday shopping and planning out of the way before the night’s big family dinner. It’s a belabored, scattered setup, hoping to gain some interest out of mystery, keeping the family connections murky until they crystallize as the people congregate around the cookbook-photo-spread Christmas supper. Overly expository narration (by Steve Martin, oddly drained of humor, and oozing storybook affect) tells us a lot, but illuminates little as we find a variety of small human dramas played broad. There’s a layer of schmaltz slathered all over an awkward mix of bad sitcom pacing and drooling manipulation.

There’s a divorced dad (Ed Helms) trying to hide his job loss from his ex-wife (Alex Borstein). Their painfully uncomfortable teen son (Timothée Chalamet) wants his first kiss, their youngest son (Maxwell Simkins) wants a bike, and their toddler daughter (Blake Baumgartner) has learned a curse word. There’s a kind old man (Alan Arkin) with a platonic crush on a sweet waitress (Amanda Seyfried). There’s a couple in their sixties (Diane Keaton and John Goodman) happy to host a family holiday for one last time, since they plan to use it to announce their impending divorce. There’s a lonely middle-aged woman (Marisa Tomei) who’s caught shoplifting (by cop Anthony Mackie) and so might be late for dinner. Finally, there’s a cynical liberal playwright (Olivia Wilde) who Meets Cute with a conservative soldier (Jake Lacy) in an airport bar. Between these stories are stock-footage-ready shots of snowy streets, Santas, and more carolers around every corner than I’ve ever seen in real life.

That’s quite a lot of plot to juggle, especially when it’s not all that deftly edited, and written with thin tin-eared stereotypes. (I didn’t even mention the elderly aunt (June Squibb) whose dementia is used exclusively for laughs.) It develops convolutedly, layered with flashing flashbacks to many characters’ pasts. You might think that’d bring extra heft to the emotional stakes, but it often confuses the issue, mistaking whats for whys when it comes to fleshing out the characters. Director Jessie Nelson (with her first directing credit since 2001’s I Am Sam) cross-cuts unevenly, allowing one character’s cross-town car trip to take as long as another’s grocery shopping, caroling, sledding, and cooking combined. This all could’ve benefited from a smoother approach to ensemble storytelling, more Altman-esque, or at least on the level of a Love Actually or The Best Man Holiday.

The movie spends its time lurching from storyline to storyline, haphazardly developed, largely unconvincing, tonally confused, both too calculated and weirdly adrift. And yet, as frazzled as this setup is, some of it works, and the predictable payoffs are rather sweet in their own ways. The talented cast is too good, especially when Nelson allows them real sensitive moments of connection, to let a sloppy script drag them down. When Keaton and Goodman argue, and when they wistfully reminisce about the good times and the bad they’ve shared over forty years of marriage, there’s real emotional weight. And in the airport scenes between Wilde and Lacy there develops a low-key romantic comedy that’s rather lovely in its chemistry and prickly warmth.

There’s almost enough gooey goodness in the moments that work to override the bad, like the final moments, which reveal the narrator is not omniscient, as has seemed to be the case, but instead a character we meet who has no possible way of knowing everything he’s been telling us. So it’s not a particularly good movie overall. It’s clumsy, obvious, full of clunky failed comedy and overtly telegraphed messages. (Could you guess it’ll be about valuing family togetherness and appreciating what you have right in front of you?) But it also has enough earnest sentiment to make it moderately effective on any big softies in the audience. I have to admit, from time to time, I was one of them. There’s no compelling reason to recommend Love the Coopers except the fleeting moments of button-pushing emotion, which might be enough if you’re willing to let yourself give in and be an easy target for that sort of thing. 

S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Up: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

What keeps the movies in Marvel’s Avengers multi-franchise franchise somewhat fresh is the way each film exists in a different setting and plays variations on different genres. They’re all shot in a bright house style, the tone always serious enough to generate suspense, but light enough to accommodate bantering between chummy characters. In other words, going into one of these movies you know exactly what you’re going to get, but not necessarily the way you’ll get it. Captain America: The First Avenger was a B-movie World War II picture with snarling Nazis, martyred scientists, and brave soldiers, with a square-jawed superpowered all-American hero in the center. Now its sequel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, finds the star spangled man dropped into a paranoid conspiracy actioner, danger from unexpected sources at every turn.

In this new film, the Captain is still the same old patriotic freedom fighter he always was. Captain America may not be the role Chris Evans was born to play, but, between his capacity for unsentimental earnestness and obvious classically handsome features, it’s certainly the superhero role he was born to play. After being frozen in a block of ice for 70 years, thawed out, welcomed into SHIELD (the fictional Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division), and sent out to fight off an alien invasion with the help of Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk, he’s finding himself borderline disillusioned. He asks Director Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) why the intelligence community is ramping up pervasive worldwide surveillance, building a massive apparatus to predict trouble and arrange preemptive strikes. Fury wearily tells him the world has grown dangerous, and they must be prepared for anything. Cold comfort, that.

The film smartly pivots from stars-and-stripes propaganda to clammy paranoia. In the first action scene Captain America and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) free hostages on a freighter in a fanfare of military might. But it’s not long before a high-ranking SHIELD official is gunned down by an assassin, men in suits force good spies on dubious missions, and Fury whispers to the Captain a stern warning:  “no one can be trusted.” It’s a surprisingly sharp – and totally on-the-nose – commentary on contemporary concerns over NSA surveillance and intelligence agency overreach. Though, shadowy governmental conspiracies aren’t exactly only current. Robert Redford, with a history of appearing in paranoid thrillers from Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men to Sneakers and Spy Game, appears as a suit, exuding gravitas in a fun echo of the genre’s past.

What follows is a tangle of twists and turns punctuated with exciting, lengthy action sequences all around Washington D.C. as loyal SHIELD agents reveal dark intent and showy conspiracies are yanked into the light. The blows land harder for the film’s mercilessness when it comes to mortally wounding characters and institutions you’d think the Marvel Cinematic Universe would want to keep around. The script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely moves quickly and coherently, dragging in familiar franchise faces (Sebastian Stan, Cobie Smulders, Hayley Atwell, and Jenny Agutter) while smoothly integrating new characters into the action. I particularly enjoyed Anthony Mackie as a former soldier who finds new reason to fight when Captain America calls upon him and quickly establishes an easy, warm friendship between them. It’s nice the movie takes time between the explosions and chaos to make new friends and keep the old, interested in some small way in relationships and how they play out through slam-bang rat-a-tat movement.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo, sitcom veterans who, Community paintball episodes aside, make a big action debut here, filming the action in a clean and comprehensible style. The early boat-set sequence includes plenty of shots that refreshingly reveal the entire action head-to-toe, sometimes for seconds at a time. In later car chases, gun battles, fisticuffs, and aerial commotions, they cut rather deftly between perspectives and don’t let chaotic close-up inserts confuse too badly. The majority of the action – a one-against-ten fistfight in an elevator, a man in a winged jetpack outsmarting heat-seeking missiles – is cleverly staged. It’s all so engaging and enjoyable that it’s a bit of a let down to admit it’s also all a tad exhausting in the end. It’s exciting and it wore me out. After over two hours with often pervasive rounds of gunfire – minions just shoot and shoot and shoot, the body count looming large – it grows wearying. By the time the movie is well into its big blowout finale, twists and surprises largely in its rearview, I was ready for the punching and shooting to reach their inevitable end. It’s fun, but I had my fill.

Still, reliable and dependable, this Marvel universe of interlocking franchises has dropped another quality product off of the assembly line. At worst, these films can feel slight and predictable, pinned in by the corporate dictates of the overarching narrative. Much as I’ve enjoyed all of these movies to some extent or another, I’m interested, but not overly invested in the big picture. In individual films, moments of straight-faced near-campiness (anything Asgardian in the Thor movies), side pleasures (the first Captain America’s unexpected and delightful musical number), and funny supporting performances (Tom Hiddleston, Sam Rockwell, Kat Dennings, Tommy Lee Jones), stick with me the most. So it is to the filmmakers’ credit that in Captain America: The Winter Soldier they shake things up, providing all the expected thrills and smiles along with a welcome modicum of complexity to the characters' primary-colors comic book world as it crumbles around them in entertaining explosiveness.

Dumbbells: PAIN & GAIN

Michael Bay is Hollywood’s preeminent vulgarian. With movies like Armageddon and Transformers, he specializes in slick imagery that turns a gleaming gaze on people and technology with the same slobbering glee, an objectification that turns everything into button-pushing jolts of spectacle, collateral damage, and queasy humor that leans on distasteful stereotypes more often than not. This sometimes leads to enjoyable movies, sometimes not, but it certainly makes him the right person to direct Pain & Gain, a based-on-a-true-story caper about some lunkheads with big small dreams who basically imagine themselves the heroes of their own Michael Bay movie. His proudly juvenile adrenaline machines in which an outsized id runs free through a glamorously ugly caricature world fits with a story so grotesque and unbelievable it simply must be true (or at least exaggerated from the truth).

The action takes place in Miami during 1994 and 1995. There at the time Bay was filming his feature debut, the cop buddy action comedy Bad Boys. So, alas, Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), the main character of this movie, instead cites Rocky, Scarface and The Godfather as his cinematic motivation. He, conveniently forgetting the ultimate fate of the protagonists of those films, thinks of them as good examples of guys who made something of themselves, something to aspire to as he prepares to chase his American dream: lots of money, lots of things, and lots of pretty women. He has what he thinks is a great get-rich-quick plan, a sure-fire all-American, get-what’s-coming-to-him windfall. When questioned about his scheme he says, “I’ve watched a lot of movies. I know what I’m doing.”

And what is Daniel's plot? He has happened to gain a new client, rich jerk Victor (Tony Shalhoub), who walked into Sun Gym looking for a personal trainer. He’s the kind of guy who says, “You know who invented salads? Poor people.” He’s not a nice guy. Daniel's idea is to recruit two of his co-workers, the steroidal Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and the born-again Paul (Dwayne Johnson), to help kidnap Victor, make him sign over all his assets blindfolded, and then return him to his routine unable to do anything about it. That sounds easy enough, if rather implausible and with countless details that need to be worked out. But Daniel doesn’t seem to notice those and his partners in crime don’t ask many questions. They all think they’re about to get rich beyond their wildest dreams. Here’s a group of guys smart enough to cook up a scheme, but too dumb to get away unscathed.

The script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely gives us overlapping narration from all three men and their victim, giving us four perspectives on the events as they unfold. The dissonance between the confidence they constantly speak to us and each other, the pumped-up sheen of Bay’s filmmaking, and the string of dumb decisions they proceed to make provides a recipe for a savage pitch black comedy. When things start to go wrong, as you know they must, it turns into a kind of humid, sun-baked Fargo. (There’s a nasty bit of business with a pile of dismembered limbs that rivals that film’s wood chipper scene.) Bay shoots it all with a smug satisfaction, snickering at these meatheads for buying so whole-heartedly into the American dream of having it all and getting away with it that they can’t see it’s a lie with which all truly successful people learn to compromise. Early on, Wahlberg attends a lecture from a transparently phony motivational speaker (Ken Jeong) and leaves feeling nothing but starry-eyed confidence. Yes, he thinks, even he can make his dreams of obscene wealth come true. That he should go about it in a brutal, haphazard, illegal way is a source of the humor, but in the insistence that perhaps he’s a fool to try anything at all, the film is cynical, nihilistic social satire to its core.

There are no heroes here. The criminals are misguided lugs impossible to root for. Their victim is a smarmy slimeball who’s impossible to wish victory upon. Bay puts the audience in the sometimes uncomfortable position of simply watching the gears of plot turn on these awful people. The late edition of a private eye played by Ed Harris as a weary pragmatist and the only person of professional competence in the whole movie and as such seems to be subtextually shaking his head at the sad weirdness of it all, like Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, does much to help cut through the ugliness. But what sometimes beautiful ugliness! Bay’s muscular showiness is put to good use here, laying out tawdry, glittery lifestyles of the almost rich and gaudily infamous-in-their-own-minds, lives that play out sadly in gyms, strip clubs, and on Floridian beaches.

There’s huge entertainment to be had in the rapid-fire montage that keeps the pace speedy throughout the entire two-hour-plus runtime and the collision of light performances with the heavy dark violence and vulgarity. Instead of risking the audience lose track of his satirical point, Bay makes it quite clear that he’s in on the joke. As brutish satire, it makes its jabs early and finds only ways to repeat them thereafter. Luckily the performers (I haven’t even mentioned fun supporting roles filled by Rob Corddry, Bar Paly and Rebel Wilson) are agile and funny and the story itself is strange and unpredictable enough to keep things interesting. It’s a credit to the great cast, twisty plot, and Bay’s aggressively watchable, just-shy-of garishly colorful style that I didn’t grow tired. I didn’t love it or loathe it, but I think I had fun.

Badfellas: GANGSTER SQUAD

Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad is a movie that’s, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Sarris, less than meets the eye. This period piece gangster picture is great looking, slickly costumed and impeccably production designed. The sharp cinematography is shiny and Fleischer has a nice eye for visual compositions that’s put to good, crisp use. The color timing gives it all a vivid Fiestaware palate that’s just south of Technicolor. It’s a recreation of 1949 Los Angeles that’s less realism and more a sense of movie realism with dapper movie stars running around town speaking with a rat-a-tat cadence similar to the gunfire they set off from time to time. Unfortunately, this handsomely mounted cinematic world is wasted on a thin script by Will Beall, a document made up of leathery clichés and characterization that leans back on star presence rather than creating anything worth caring about.

The plot’s a loose elaboration on a true story that follows a squad of police officers tasked with a secret vigilante mission to dismantle gangster Mickey Cohen’s criminal operation and free L.A. of organized crime. The grizzled police chief (Nick Nolte) puts Sergeant John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) in charge of this mission. The team comes together in quick montage fashion. It’s your typical collection of loose cannons, the charming youngster (Ryan Gosling), the aging gunslinger (Robert Patrick), the technical expert (Giovanni Ribisi), and the rest (Anthony Mackie and Michael Peña). I’d complain about how the script so undervalues those last two I couldn’t even explain them with a trope, but I can barely explain any these characters even with the simplest of terms. They’re all only here to look good in a suit and get into brutal shootouts with gangsters

Big bad Cohen, played by an exaggerated Sean Penn under a layer of makeup like he’s playing a Dick Tracy villain, grumbles and growls his way through the film, intimidating all he comes into contact with. We know he means bloody business when the opening scene features him drawing and quartering a Chicago rival between two automobiles, a gross moment that plays out fully in frame behind the Hollywoodland sign. This is a violent movie that quickly sets up its bad guy as very bad, as if that excuses the all out war that the gangster squad takes to him in endless sequences of destruction and death that play out in stylish, flashily filmed takes that sometimes slow into glamorizing slow motion. The squad is made up of guys that stand shoulder to shoulder in billowing trench coats and nice hats; they’re iconographically pleasing, but dramatically predictable.

Token romance brings the most dispiriting aspect of the movie’s wasteful approach to its ensemble, counting on charm alone to paper over lazy plotting and dull, routine character beats. And if anyone could do just that, you’d think it could be Emma Stone, so sparkling in every single movie in which she’s appeared. Not so here, playing Cohen’s girl who has a Gosling on the side. Although she fills her beautiful gowns with a sense of old school glamour, she can’t bring enough sparkle to spark life in predictable scenes in which she’s romantic, concerned, or in danger. Similarly misused is Mireille Enos as Brolin’s wife. She has the understandable yet all too typical scenes where the wife worries about her husband and tells him that his work’s important, but not as important as her. It’s the kind of role we’ve seen a thousand times over and here is nothing more than a blatant attempt to add rooting interest to a flat character.

All dressed up with nowhere to go, this broadly played gangster picture ends up well short of greatness, but since it’s not swinging for the fences it doesn’t quite backfire into terrible either. If anything, it’s a slight modulation away from parody, especially in a finale that ends in a laughably overwrought shootout followed by a credulity straining one-on-one fistfight. For something so stylishly handled, it’s so easily ignored as it plays, a big empty clattering homage to films far better, from similar genre revivals like De Palma’s The Untouchables all the way back to classic Warner Brothers crime pictures of the film’s time period and slightly before. (They could very well be playing a block away from any of the settings on screen here.) Fleischer is a director of great visual zing who burst onto the scene in 2009 with Zombieland, a funny genre riff that I found entertaining at the time, although I haven’t revisited it in the years since. With Gangster Squad, he has almost all the right pieces in place, but it’s a film that frustratingly resists becoming as good as it looks.

War Between the States (And Vampires): ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER

In theory, a big summer spectacle that posits fantastical secret information about a famous American president is a great idea. As a nation, we have no shortage of myths and fictions about our leaders, stories we tell to validate our own worldviews, to view our current political climate on a smooth, uncomplicated continuum with the past. In practice, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter can’t quite live up to its title. Just the idea of our sixteenth president, tall, bearded, and with a stovepipe hat perched on his head, is enough to make me smile, but this isn’t a comedy in any way shape or form.  This is a deathly self-serious production, a lumpy fictional biopic that devotes most of its runtime to young Mr. Lincoln’s increasing hidden knowledge about vampires and their insidious plots within our nation’s nineteenth-century borders, taking time out of its sloppy chronicling of Lincoln’s real-world rise to the presidency for setpieces of vampire-hunting action. It could have used a dash of wit to help it go down easier.

In Seth Grahame-Smith’s script (based on his novel, unread by me), Lincoln’s mother dies after an encounter with a vampire. Years later, looking for revenge, Abraham (Benjamin Walker) tries to shoot his mother’s killer in the head and is surprised to find the man pop back up baring fangs. The future president is saved and confronted by Henry (Dominic Cooper), a confident vampire hunter who agrees to help the young man learn the ways of destroying these creatures that roam the land, hiding in plain sight. So Lincoln, studying to become a lawyer, marrying Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and debating Stephen Douglas (Alan Tudyk) on his way up in a promising political career, happens to moonlight as a stone-cold killer of the undead. This is a future president played as action hero, as superhero. He spins an ax and hacks off the heads of vampires, usually after acrobatic scenes of kicking, spinning, and punching that slow down into stylish slow-mo to better appreciate just how much of a smackdown Lincoln’s giving these monsters.

Director Timur Bekmambetov first made a splash in Russia with his grimy, gory modern-day vampire action movies Night Watch and Day Watch, so it’s no real surprise that his focus in Vampire Hunter is mostly on the bloody spectacle. He thinks it’s fun to have vampires clashing with Abe Lincoln and his allies – like a shopkeeper (Jimmi Simpson) and an escaped slave (Anthony Mackie) who are loyal hangers-on – in one-on-one combat and in elaborately staged action sequences of a most modern kind. And it is, for a while. Lincoln’s first hunts are well staged and his enemies are well-designed, slobbering, blue-grey things. This is an action movie first and foremost, and so it wobbles around when it reaches for slightly more ambitious elements that come into play as the march of real-world time drags Lincoln and the film’s plot into the American Civil War.

Lincoln hangs up his vampire-slaying ax and focuses on being a president, but the leader of American vampires (Rufus Sewell), who happens to be a big-time slave-owner as well, ruling over his kind from a swampy plantation, strikes a deal with Jefferson Davis (John Rothman) to allow his unstoppable supernatural soldiers to join the Confederate army. And so, Lincoln is brought back into the business of killing vampires, using his knowledge to help provide the Union with a strategy to beat back these scary creatures. Of course, none of this has anything useful or insightful (or even slightly interesting) to say about Lincoln, or war, or slavery. Essentially, all of the above are just the plot points on which to hang marginally effective CGI action and destruction, as the whole vampire-as-metaphor-for-slavery thing never really comes into clear focus and the surprisingly clever use for Harriet Tubman (Jaqueline Fleming) and her involvement in all of this straight-faced goofiness is just a nice barely-there subplot.

I went into Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter expecting nothing more than a historical figure hunting vampires, and I suppose I got that, didn’t I? Lincoln definitely hacks away at some supernatural beings during the course of his lifetime as told by this particular fiction. But it’s all contained in such a well-made bore of a movie – a stiff, intermittently stylish dullness – that it’s hard to get too excited about much of anything that happens between the opening scene and the closing credits. The actors are all convincing and the special effects are about as good as you could expect, but the movie is starved for wow moments of any kind. It’s both too much and not enough.

You'd Better Shop Around: WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER?

What’s Your Number? is a safe, coarse, and standard romantic comedy trying mightily, and mostly succeeding, to reign in, sand down, and otherwise hide the impressive talent of its lead actress, Anna Faris. Otherwise, the film would float off into infinitely stranger and more delightful directions. With her big eyes, plucky physicality, and total commitment to potentially embarrassing concepts, she’s like a bodacious blonde second coming of Lucille Ball. There’s little wonder why her best role is as the lead in 2008’s The House Bunny, in which she gets to play a fired Playboy bunny who finds work as a sorority mother. It allows her to match the weirdness of a concept and then double down on a hugely appealing bobble-headed bizarreness.

Since the R-rated comedy has been abundant and largely terrible this year, I guess it’s some kind of refreshing that What’s Your Number? is only predictable and mushy instead of actively ugly or distressing. But Farris isn’t allowed to elevate the proceedings. The movie doesn’t insult your patience, only your intelligence and your expectations. It’s all so standard, but at least it’s kind of briskly laborious in its set up. Faris plays a woman we first meet getting brushed off by her latest beau. He was her nineteenth lover. Later that day, on a lonely subway ride after getting fired, she reads a magazine article that claims women who have been with twenty or more men will not get married. Since she’s going to her younger sister’s engagement party that night, marriage is on her mind. She heads out to a bar with her sister (Ari Graynor) and her gal pals to celebrate and after a night of tipsy talk about her nineteen exes, she goes home with number twenty.

The next morning, Farris kicks him out and realizes then and there that the magazine had to be right, so her future husband is one of the previous twenty. She runs into the man (Chris Evans) who lives across the hall and is instantly repulsed, although she agrees to help him hide out from his latest ex, still lingering in his apartment, in exchange for his help tracking down her many exes. It’s a strained circumstance that forces them together and it’s all too obvious how this story is going to end. They don’t seem to like each other very much, but whom are they fooling? They’re attractive, likable performers who are the two above-the-title leads of the film. How are they not going to end up together? It’s hardly a spoiler when the movie is practically spoiling itself.

On the predictable road to the big dramatic race to a conclusion in which they finally realize that they are just perfect for each other, we are presented a troupe of mostly recognizable faces as the exes. We briefly meet Chris Pratt, Mike Vogel, Martin Freeman, Andy Samberg, Thomas Lennon, and Anthony Mackie. They each get a little potentially funny moment or two but it usually passes by without the burden of laughter. Mackie gets one line that made me snicker a little and Pratt has a few as well, but the structure of the film discourages any real connection with the characters who are simply personified obstacles for the plot that keeps the two most likable people apart, denying their true feelings in true rom com fashion.

The relationships and circumstances of the various exes are ill defined, the central flaw in the picture. It doesn’t help that the direction of Mark Mylod is merely functional and the script by Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden feels a product of copious compromise. And though she’s thoroughly restrained by it all, Faris kept me interested. There’s a sense that at any moment she might break away from the clutches of mediocrity and surprise. She plays with accents in a fun scene. She slams into physical comedy with exuberance. She throws herself into the role. But the role, and the film, has far too little for her to work with. The film’s a pleasant but dull, predictable missed opportunity, nothing more, and nothing less.

Quick Look: THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU

Screenwriter George Nolfi, who has worked on a couple of superb genre films, namely The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean’s Twelve, makes his directorial debut with The Adjustment Bureau, a film that casts such a fragile spell that it could be easy to dismiss. After all, this is a movie that unashamedly declares itself to be about true love, free will, and destiny. Furthermore, it posits that Fate is controlled by a group of dapper men (in fedoras!) that takes orders from a mysterious “Chairman.” It’s a sincere romance with a light touch of sci-fi that’s perpetually poised on the brink of silliness, but it never quite topples over. I found it to be an involving film of modest charms. Matt Damon is an ambitious politician who has just lost his race for the U.S. Senate when he has a chance encounter with an alluring stranger, played by the lovely Emily Blunt. In this brief scene, Damon and Blunt set off crackling sparks of flirtation during their brief moment together. She’s a rising star in the dance scene. He’s an established politician. Their conversation is part debate, part duet. When they meet again the next day, the Adjustment Bureau (with members including Mad Men’s John Slattery, the underappreciated Anthony Mackie, and the distinguished, grave Terence Stamp) steps in. You see, this couple may have fallen instantly in love, but they aren’t meant to be together. When Damon stumbles upon the Bureau at work, they eventually let him in on the secret: if he sees that woman again, both of their dreams die. The movie’s plot unfolds as a romance with a rattling tinge of paranoia with crisp cinematography from the great John Toll. Damon and Blunt are charming, and the sight of noir heavies walking into a modern political romance tickled me. I also found myself enjoying the exploration of the notions of predetermination and free will, even though the ending feels like a cop out and the Bureau ends up being never more than vaguely menacing ciphers. Ultimately, disappointingly, it feels thoroughly disposable, with plenty of loose ends twisting in the breeze, but it’s also a comfortable way to pass the time with a little bit of romantic, philosophical, earnest sci-fi goofiness.

In Anticipation of Year's End Lists

I didn't get a chance to write about these movies when they were released this past summer so I'm taking this opportunity to briefly comment upon them before the deluge of Oscar titles arrives in my town. With the end of the year fast approaching you'll probably be hearing more about these titles through top-ten lists and Oscar nominations, so I'll waste no more time before throwing in my two cents about them.

By now, Miyazaki may as well be Japanese for magic, for magic is exactly what his films generate, in their layered beauty and easy fantasy that are totally absorbing. With Ponyo, Miyazaki has crafted another beautiful, fun, exciting, tender film. This time around, the plotting is so simple (it’s aimed at very young children) but the fantasy is so complex that there is a bit more of a wheeze to the exposition. But that’s almost secondary, and it doesn’t drastically distract, from the (typical for Miyazaki) effortless fluidity of the imagery positioned perfectly on the border between man and nature, real and unreal. The characters are adorable and the message is strong and sweet, making this perfect viewing for children and those charms aren’t lost on me either. There’s a magical trance-like quality to the exquisite minutia and vivid imagery that slowly draws me in. It’s confident, captivating filmmaking of the Miyazaki kind.

Armando Iannucci's In the Loop follows an eccentric ensemble of low-level political figures who may just decide to go to war if they ever stop endlessly circling the central debate with petty semantic parsing and furious flurries of insults, invective, and bile. It’s painfully familiar evil bureaucracy, but the movie is a non-stop laugh machine, sending wave after wave of quotable dialogue towards the audience in rapid-fire, profusely profane bouts of eloquent swearing. It’s not above a well-crafted sight gag either, like the sequence which follows a supposedly secret meeting that keeps growing in attendance, even after the committee switches to a larger room. The best of the consistently funny cast is Peter Capaldi as a spin doctor who storms through the movie insulting and complaining about anything that moves with the most creatively, wickedly hilarious vulgar metaphors I’ve ever heard. One of the most fascinating moments in the film arrives late in the plot when, in the U.N. meditation room, he stops talking and we get a chance to look at his face as he realizes, for the first and only time in the entire film, that he’s speechless, revealing most starkly that behind the flurry of words, there’s ultimately nothing. And that very nothing is what takes us to war.

There is so much suspense in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker that the further it went on, the longer the tension mounted, the more my stomach twisted in knots. By the time the movie was barely half over, I was sick to my stomach. The movie is so completely immersed in the day-to-day work of an American bomb squad in Iraq, with great performances (especially by Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie, who are in almost every scene) and set-pieces all the way through, that it adds weight to the skillful summoning of sickening dread. It’s by turns unexpected, exciting, chaotic, scary, violent, and eerily beautiful. We are only given one sequence, late in the picture, with the luxury of being on the home front, away from the chaos of war, and it arrives with the force of a rug being pulled out from underneath you. The jump cut from the shimmering sands of the desert to the sterile, flickering fluorescent lights of a grocery store is as disorienting a cinematic moment as I’ve felt all year, one that helps the film say much more about the effect of war on soldiers than any Iraq War movie to date.