Great Power: SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

Plunging head first into the tangled webs of superhero canon, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse tells, improbably, the best superhero story the big screen has seen in ages. It does so by turning around and directly confronting the very nature of its telling. It features one of its antagonists sounding a lot like one of those whiny fandoms that complains about every deviation from the formula, and every divergence from the previously established canon. This guy gives a serious, glowering monologue in which he lays out the idea that certain characters simply must die, because that’s the way these stories are supposed to go. They die in every story, in every timeline, to serve the same purpose. In our world, that satisfies the conservative fanboy in the audience, and, indeed, a middling serving of cameos and connections is enough to keep the whole machinery of these franchises turning. But this group of filmmakers, including screenwriters Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The LEGO Movie) and co-director Kemp Powers (Soul) among dozens of talented collaborators, are thinking beyond that here. What Across the Spider-Verse does by placing this idea at the center of its conflict is stirring stuff—and the kind of bold, inventive, imaginative storytelling that these sorts of stories are supposed to be about in the first place.

This clever eruption of animation and excitement builds beautifully off the distinctive pleasures of its predecessor, Into the Spider-Verse, that introduced us to dimension-hopping Spider-Men through the eyes of Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a Brooklyn teenager bit by a radioactive spider. So far, so familiar to the Peter Parkers we’ve known, albeit with a cool cultural specificity that is a modern-day, teenaged, half-Black, half-Puerto Rican New Yorker. But because his special spider fell through a hole between parallel universes, it immediately involved him meeting a selection of alternate Spideys—a Peter Parker (Jake Johnson), an anthropomorphic pig, a Japanese mech suit, and so on, including a crush-worthy spider-powered Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld). That movie had its instantly lovable and sympathetic hero in Miles—as at home in his sleek form-fitting black suit as he is in Nikes and a hoodie—fitted in a stylish animated world that had a fluid hand-drawn-over-CG aesthetic complete with comic book affectations like faded overlapped multi-dot colors and zippy split-screen and text boxes with narration and onomatopoetic emphasis. The Spider-people from other worlds came trailing their own distinct styles—jagged CG and jumpy anime and inky black and white and so on. The sequel starts with Miles alone in his own universe, where he has plenty of quotidian Spidey troubles juggling school, family, and his secret identity. Soon enough, though, a seemingly dopey villain—voice with blasé nefariousness by Jason Schwartzman—opens damaging portals between universes, and it all tumbles into potential chaos again. The story quickly bests the original vision in two directions at once—digging deeper into Miles’ world and inner life, while exploding out in a dazzling variety, swirling with inventive style and cultural melange as a secret inter-dimensional squad (led by Oscar Isaac and Issa Rae) senses trouble in the multiverse.  

The result is a movie that’s a non-stop visual delight surrounding its sympathetic core. Each new world feels pulled from a different designer. There’s a scratchy parchment renaissance character, a Brit punk Spidey sketched on rumpled paper and traveling via collage, stiff-armed Hanna-Barbera style vintage beings, brief glimpses of stop-motion and even live-action worlds, and, my favorites, a dazzlingly detailed Indian metropolis and a world where wet watercolor backgrounds drip expressionistically as characters try not to cry. But at the center of it is one kid, trying his best to do right for his family, his friends, his crush, and his city. And isn’t that so authentically Spider-Man? There’s genuine capital-R Romance here, in all the outsized adolescent emotions that this particular superhero has always done so well. Think about the best moments in any previous Spider-Man movie. It’s not the action, per se. It’s the beats between, where characters really matter, and the stakes are built, not out of the world ending, but about a particular person’s place in the world. This movie knows that deeply—allowing for long scenes to breathe and accumulate real investment in the relationships on display in voice performances that are universally warm and committed. For all its wild and creative action—and there’s more here in even the first sequence than we get in most full length spectacles of this size—there’s the beating heart yearning for connections. Every twist and complication as the story expands and explodes earns its weight from this source—a boy who wants to make his parents proud, impress the girl, and save, not the world, but his world. This is Spider-Man storytelling at its finest, including a great cliffhanger that left me eager for the next issue.

Going Battty: THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE

The best joke in The LEGO Batman Movie is an admission that Batman is bad at his job. This LEGO Movie spinoff is set in a candy-colored brick-laden Gotham City where the residents live in a time bubble of continuity, leaving them a been-there-done-that populace yawning with memories of tonal whiplash (aware of every iteration, from Snyder to Nolan, Schumacher, Burton, the Animated Series, 60’s camp and so on back to the original pulp comics and serials). This gives the residents a blasé attitude to the latest supervillain eruption from Arkham Asylum. Batman, you’ve been at this for nearly 80 years, they say. And Gotham is still the most crime-ridden city in the fictional world. Isn’t it time to hang up the cape and cowl and let someone else try to fix the problem? The fun in this silly whirligig is watching Batman realize he should work with the people of Gotham instead of showboating with gadgets before hiding out in his cave for the next call on the bat-phone. In the words of Barbara Gordon, the new police commissioner fresh from “Harvard for Cops,” ”We don’t need a billionaire vigilante karate-chopping poor people.”

A manic tumble of in-jokes, meta-winks, and hectic LEGO action, this everything-is-awesome approach is continually cranked up to eleven. It’s a cute conceit. At best, the whole project has a loose goofy charm rat-a-tat-tat-ing silly voices and quick quips. Will Arnett returns with a narcissist’s growl as a Batman craving attention, but shrinking from connection. He’s surrounded in the soundscape by a who’s-who of distinctive, warm voices in iconic comic book roles – Michael Cera as naïve Robin, Ralph Fiennes as dry Alfred, Zach Galifianakis as needy Joker, and Rosario Dawson as Batgirl. The movie blasts forward on pep and cleverness, piling on neat commentary about Batman’s most boring plot ticks and thematic obsessions in between drooling geek deep cut references and kids’ movie bright colors and careening sentimentality. The style, a breakneck faux-stop-motion CG swoosh, stops for nothing: no emotion, no thought, no moment to catch a breath or your bearings. The cuts are fast. The pop music is loud. The explosions are plumes of colorful blocks. The guns go “pew pew pew.” For a giddy hour and change in a movie theater, you could do far worse.

Still, there’s something a little off-putting about the mechanized joy of the enterprise. Director Chris McKay (Robot Chicken) and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) aren’t Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the man-boyish kings of threading the needle between product and meta-product in their string of unlikely successes: not just LEGO Movie (in which everything really was awesome, or near enough) but the stoopid/clever Jump Streets and their comic masterpiece Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, as well. They have the alchemy, the gee-whiz earnest commitment to serving up corporate brand deposits with winning grins. Here, though, we have their imitators making a double product placement: for a comic book franchise and for a toy company. The whole thing is plastered from beginning to end with reminders of the ledger sheets and advertising budgets at play behind the brisk bright nonsense. Think of it as feature length LEGO commercial also working as a calculated pressure valve for DC’s dour live-action slogs. Sure, it’s basically fun, and a reasonably good time, but the hollow production’s highs fade fast and leave little worth lingering over.

Do It All Again: 22 JUMP STREET

Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s 21 Jump Street reboot knew you’d be skeptical. The 2012 comedy based on the late-80’s TV series has an early scene in which the police captain (Nick Offerman) tells his new undercover cops (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum) that the department is out of ideas and is recycling old ones in the hope no one really cares. Once again, two young cops will go undercover in a high school. From there, Lord and Miller surprised with a movie that’s funnier and smarter than you’d expect. It didn’t care too much for its detective plot, which is transparently simple and resolved too bloodily for laughs. But it was a fun movie with some funny lines, a perfect pair of cameos, smart observation about how quickly high school changes as you leave it behind, and a charming buddy-cop pairing in Hill and Tatum. That’s the kind of short/tall, chubby/fit, motormouth/lunkhead pairing that sounds like it might work on paper, and then wildly exceeds expectations on screen. Together they were better than either would’ve been alone. It was a pleasant surprise.

And now here’s 22 Jump Street, a sequel fully aware that sequels are usually inevitably worse than the first, especially when it comes to comedies. It has Offerman state the problem right off the bat. He wants his undercover cops to team up and infiltrate a new school, a college this time, and root out the source of a deadly new designer drug. He wants them to just do what they did last time. And so the movie sets out to skewer blockbuster sequels’ competing tendencies to A.) go bigger, louder, longer, and more spectacular, and B.) repeat everything that worked the first time around. The plot literalizes this dilemma by having Hill and Tatum’s direct superior (Ice Cube) show off their flashier, more expensive – “for no reason” – resources while telling them to do what they did before. Like Gremlins 2 and Ocean's Twelve, this is a movie that makes its sequel struggle part of the narrative in amusing ways.

Nerdy Hill and jock Tatum are again posing as brothers, now pretending to be college freshmen. Hill gets drawn into the art students’ circle while Tatum pledges at a fraternity and wants to join the football team. Though they became best friends and good partners last time, here they’re drawn apart, only to rediscover and reaffirm what a great team they make together. In between are parties, petty jealousies, a drug trip, slapstick, dirty jokes, homosocial bonding, a couple great cameos, and a token amount of police work. The screenplay by Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman lays out the pitfalls of sequels repeating the same character beats and riffing on similar scenarios right up front and then does them anyway, winking at its self-referential tendencies. Do it just like last time, our heroes are told. That’s what keeps people happy.

Hill and Tatum’s performances are sharp and consistently on-point. You have to be smart to play dumb so well and without losing audience sympathy. Improbably, in a film so silly and frivolous, I cared about their friendship and wanted them to catch the bad guys. They have great underdog chemistry, approaching the material from opposite directions and meeting expertly in the middle. They really do love each other and cherish their time together, holding back tears whenever they hash out the state of their friendship. It’s sweet. Hill and Tatum’s relationship feels more intense and charming even as the movie gets looser, goofier, and stranger as it steers into the skid, getting around sequel traps by playing them up. They’re terrific anchors for the silliness in which they find themselves. Because the central duo has such considerable charm, Lord and Miller are free to experiment around them.

The directors have clear movie love, an inside-out understanding of how blockbusters work and what makes their tropes so ridiculous(ly charming). Their hugely enjoyable, hard-working films - the Jump Streets, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie - are so packed with imaginative jokes and concepts that you can almost hear them snickering behind the camera, “Can you believe we get to make a movie!?” What makes 22 Jump Street so funny is the filmmaking breaking the fourth wall without quite letting its characters get through. The movie starts with a rapid-fire “Previously On” montage that somehow manages to reference Annie Hall, then hurtles through its self-aware sequel plotting, ending up in end credits that imagine the franchise’s future in a series of jokes so fast and dense I need to see the movie again just to catch them all.

Lord and Miller, with a more accomplished visual style that gets close to the visual density of their superior animated efforts, shoot the action in a Hot Fuzz-style parody of the Michael Bay style (minus most of his uglier tendencies). With explicit nods to Bad Boys specifically, this movie has low-angle hero shots, emphatic circling cameras, and saturated magic-hour lighting. Then they throw in a dash of split-screen foolishness, like Looney Tunes directed by DePalma, that doubles down on the doubling effect of sequels, a motif carried through by two sets of twins in the supporting cast. (“Twins again?” Tatum groans late in the picture.)

Meanwhile, the college plots are shot and played as typical collegiate comedy, with everything from soft-focus campus romance and vulgar hazing. There are funny scenes with an earnest art major (Amber Stevens), her sarcastic insult-comic of a roommate (scene-stealer Jillian Bell), and a doofy frat boy football player (Wyatt Russell). The movie is constantly drawing attention to its own implausibilities, but the various genre elements in the plot are played somewhat straight, allowing plenty of room for the inherent humor of a goofy pair of undercover cops trying desperately to blend in and solve a crime while working through their own problems.

All of that is complicated and made funnier by the mystery plot always lingering in the back of our leads’ minds. It’s more smoothly threaded through the comedy than last time. There’s a literal red herring symbol. A car chase is sped up as the vehicles zip around the “Benjamin Hill Department of Film Studies.”  It’s somehow thrilling and silly, thrillingly silly. Everything is both serious and a joke. It’s a messy mockery of the same formulaic arcs just barely holding it all together, like a Marx Brothers movie where the very structure of the plot itself is the chaos accelerant.

The film manages to be wild, raucous, self-critical, and often very funny. It has a handful of scenes that had me laughing the hard, short-of-breath, aching-sides laughter that can’t be denied. 22 can’t have the surprise of its first outing, but the filmmakers more than make up for it by energetically and excitingly goofing around the very struggle of doing a sequel. It’s bigger, louder, longer, with meta tricks that start clever, get too clever, and then circle back around again. In the process, the filmmakers made a sequel that captures a different sense of surprise. It’s sloppily satisfying.

Playtime: THE LEGO MOVIE

You’d think by now I’d have more trust in writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Instead, I’ve gone into each and every one of their films suspicious of the entire project and left feeling pleasantly surprised, won over by their manic energy and thoughtful thematic playfulness. Who would’ve guessed their Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a feature-length expansion of a slight, whimsical picture book, would be one of the funniest movies of any kind in recent years? Or that their reboot of musty old TV series 21 Jump Street would be a jocular undercover-cop comedy perceptive about shifting teen mores and feature one of the best cameos I’ve ever seen?  Now they’ve tackled The Lego Movie. That’s right. It’s a movie based on the tiny bricks with instructions on how to build them into vehicles and buildings that come with square, stiff yellow people to put inside. I don’t see the story in it, although Lego has tried some original fantasy brands and media-tie-in parodies for TV on occasion to move product. Thankfully Lord and Miller found a way to make more than an advertisement. Under their direction, The Lego Movie is a freewheeling and clever family film.

Making terrific use out of the mix-and-match ability of Lego, the filmmakers have thrown out the instruction book. Actually, that’s the crux of the film, a conflict between the two basic ways one can use the product. Computer animation that looks like the expensive Hollywood version of what you’d get making stop-motion Lego movies on your bedroom floor (a quick YouTube search reveals this a popular subgenre of amateur filmmaking) builds a world built entirely out of these multicolor bricks. It’s a generic metropolis filled with generic Lego people: construction workers, police, cat ladies, surfers, coffee shop patrons. They all follow the rules, the same homogenous lifestyle that uses each and every brick in exactly the way the manufacture intended. Disruption comes when an average Lego man (Chris Pratt) finds a legendary brick and falls in with a motley group of assorted outcast Lego people, Master Builders who insist that the bricks can be used to make anything you could dream up. Ostentatiously evil President Business (Will Ferrell) wants to keep the masses oppressed and in line, but our hero teams up with the Master Builders in a last-ditch effort to save their Lego-world by opening it up to be played with however they want.

The film moves at a breakneck pace through colorful madness that spoofs the usual three-act structure of big sci-fi fantasy spectacle. There’s our naive Chosen One who finds the piece and is told by a wise old bearded Master Builder (Morgan Freeman) that he’s the fulfillment of prophecy and the savior Lego-world needs. That this is obviously phony makes for a fun, adaptable running joke. Their allies include a funny mix of characters from various Lego product lines – a punk woman (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), a pirate (Nick Offerman), a unicorn kitten (Alison Brie), and an astronaut (Charlie Day). Their goals are typical stuff – find this crucial object and use it to shut down a superweapon – but it’s treated with a wink and a sly sense of humor. At one point, a character explains backstory most movies of this kind would take very seriously indeed, but here it literally devolves into “blah, blah, blah.” All we need to know is that our heroes are being pursued by President Business’s henchman Bad Cop (Liam Neeson) and his robots in elaborate, endlessly clever action sequences that hop through a variety of Lego worlds like a wild west set, a pseudo-medieval land, and a hodgepodge oasis of secret imagination.

The Lego nature of everything from the clouds in the sky to the water in the oceans, down to even the explosions and dust plumes, is put to good use. Good guys frantically rebuild the necessary equipment on the fly, while the baddies march forward mercilessly rule-bound. Cameos from all sorts of Lego types litter this high energy romp through relentless action and invention, from Shakespeare and Shaq to Wonder Woman and C-3PO, all cracking a joke or two before falling back into the big picture. It’s all such an exuberant sense of childlike play, the characters and setting deconstructing themselves and building new fanciful wonders before our eyes with delightful speed and complexity in the rapid-fire action slapstick. Imagine those charming moments in Toy Story when we watch Andy act out scenarios with his toys stretched to fill 90 minutes and you’ll get a sense of the tone here. This exceptionally, endlessly cute and quick film isn’t afraid to go very silly and step out of its narrative. The villain hoards mystical objects, like a massive used Band-Aid he calls the Shroud of Bahnd-Aieed. In the climax, his giant evil machine sounds exactly like a little kid making a growling engine noise.

For the longest time, I was simply charmed by what was an awesomely high-functioning technical exercise. But in its final moments, Lord and Miller take the film a step towards brilliance, pulling back the focus and revealing new information that moves away from thin genre play and towards something deeper, but no less hilarious. I won’t spoil it for you, but it says something almost profound about the way the act of creativity can bring people together. There’s also something in there about free will and a higher power. One character we meet late in the game is literally named The Man Upstairs. But it’s all folded into a sugary blast of entertainment. It’s amazing how a movie so light on the surface opens up bigger questions effortlessly. Just as amazing is that this multi-million dollar corporate advertisement doubles as an anti-corporate call to individuality in the face of crushing conformity, that this blockbuster movie doubles as a commentary on how blockbuster plots are built out of material as generic and interchangeable as Lego blocks. Lord and Miller are masters of having it both ways and getting away with it too.

Held Back: 21 JUMP STREET

Being forced to repeat high school would be something of a waking nightmare for many of us. But isn’t it even the slightest bit tempting to get a second chance at what is, let’s face it, an important, but not that important, part of life? Surely everyone at least entertains the idea of a do-over for some piece of his or her past. To be forced back into the halls of high school would basically be a rubber-stamped approval for extended adolescence, or at least that’s what happens to the undercover cops in the movie remake of the late-80’s high concept cop show 21 Jump Street. They may be immature, but that’s kind of their job now, right?

The series ran on Fox from 1987 to 1991 and starred Johnny Depp as a fresh-faced cop assigned to go undercover as a high school student. The new big budget R-rated Hollywood comedy keeps the show’s high concept and plays it louder and faster, in a way that's more blatantly goofy, vulgar, and violent (sometimes shockingly so). And it works. It’s a slick, competent, surface-level entertainment, a smart adaptation that turns the basic plot hooks into a loving homage to buddy cop movies driven straight through a raunchy high school comedy. If the series was Miami Vice by way of Square Pegs, than the movie remake is Bad Boys in Superbad.

It starts in 2005, a time when a dweeb (Jonah Hill) and jock (Channing Tatum) barely interacted except for the times when the jock laughed at the dweeb for getting a brutal rejection from a pretty girl. They weren’t enemies; they just moved in vastly different circles. But now it’s present day and they’re both in the same police academy. They find they actually get along now. The dweeb helps the jock with the written work and the jock helps the dweeb with his physical trials and marksmanship. They’re so very excited to be cops that when their boring, low-stakes park patrol turns into a bungled drug bust, they’re dismayed to find themselves passed off into a secret program run by a mean stereotype of a commanding officer (Ice Cube) who informs them that they’re going undercover as high school students to track down a new drug ring.

To make matters worse, they’re posing as brothers. They’re a little too old. They’re a little too dissimilar. Yet pass themselves off as teen brothers they must. It’s a rich set-up for comedy and the script from Michael Bacall and Jonah Hill takes funny zigs and zags through a teen comedy terrain that is rife with youthful temptations for the rookie cops. They can’t help but fall back into their own petty high school mentalities but find themselves in an odd type of culture shock. As one who actually was in high school in 2005, I found myself gripped with a kind of mild terror. Could things be that different already? It hasn’t been that many years, has it? Time flies.

Suddenly Tatum’s cool jock style won’t fly and the nervous dorkiness of Hill is oddly appealing. You see, bullying, even of the mild variety, isn’t a surefire ticket to popularity that Tatum seems to think it is. Hill, on the other hand, marvels that the cool crowd is all about caring for the environment. Kids these days. So the two guys are startled to find themselves at the opposite ends of the teenage totem pole. The jock hangs with the chemistry nerds while the dweeb gets closer to the popular kids, especially a sweet girl (Brie Larson) who happens to be in a relationship with the main pusher (Dave Franco, James’s younger brother).

That the two undercover cops are opposites is a typical buddy cop trope. That they’re in a high school, forced to work out old differences and form new ways of social navigation, not to mention learn how to get along and how to be good at their fairly new jobs, creates a fun tension. Of course, it wouldn’t work at all without the winning chemistry between Tatum and Hill who have such a terrific brotherly rapport that they ping off each other with equal parts simpatico bluster and clashing competitiveness, an aggressive but loving friendship that develops in convincing ways. They’re both so game and eager to please that their timing develops the satisfying snap of an agreeable, comfortable comic partnership. I wish the supporting cast could have been used more memorably – Nick Offerman, Parks & Rec’s great Ron Swanson himself, appears in a single scene – but the main protagonists are wonderful anchors.

The plot is basic cop stuff complete with a couple of well-deployed twists, some mostly routine car chases and shootouts, and some perfect, absolutely perfect, cameos. The high school jokes are sometimes obvious – of course parents turn around and interrupt a raucous party – but they too are filled out with such specific and odd details amongst the students and faculty that it transcends its obviousness and finds new funny details in the corners of the hurtling pace of the rough detective through line. I especially liked the exasperated principal (Jake Johnson), the giggly chemistry teacher (Ellie Kemper), and the small gang of science geeks who have permission to go to the chemistry lab early in order to play Bakugan. I’m not sure what that is, but I know it’s some kind of game, which is better than Tatum, who angrily demands to know if it’s drugs.

This is hardly a perfect film – it’s lumpy and shambling in spots and fairly thin overall – but there’s an incredible energy to the way it’s put together. The script joins the two main threads in a self-aware way that draws out the implausibilities to often-great comedic effect. Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, they bring some of the same inventiveness and willingness to variously reject and embrace cliché for laughs that they displayed in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. They know sometimes the funniest thing is to do just what’s expected only to pull back at the last second. Yes, the directors behind the most hilarious animated family film in recent memory have created a pretty good live-action R-rated romp of an action-comedy. 21 Jump Street may not be as polished or dense with jokes (and certainly not as family friendly) as Cloudy, but it’s still a stylish, fast-paced entertainment of its own