Kray Kray: LEGEND

It’s never a good idea to call time of death on an entire subgenre based on the evidence of one movie, but Legend sure makes it look like the gangster movie is on its last legs. The last gasp of a concept out of ideas, it takes the late-90’s Guy Ritchie-led British crime capers, themselves Tarantino-inspired take offs of Scorsese’s virtuosic R-rated updates of 30’s era Warner Bros gangster pictures, and pushes further into airless artifice. Writer-director Brian Helgeland, who sometimes makes good movies, like the anachronistic jousting comedy A Knight’s Tale and Jackie Robinson biopic 42, takes as his inspiration the real story of Reggie and Ronnie Kray, twin brothers who ran organized crime in the East End of London during the 1960s. Out of real conflict, violence, and crime, Helgeland spins a hyperbolic, stylized tale of colorful blood and scheming so tediously clunky and playing like lukewarm leftovers of gangster movies past, it might as well be completely disconnected from reality.

That’s the point, I suppose. It’s not named “legend” for no reason. It’s exaggerated with a self-satisfied swagger, beholden only to an outsized larger-than-life perspective. It opens on a blatantly false CGI skyline, before hopping straight into narration from a character we’ll eventually realize is speaking cheekily, and incongruously, from beyond the grave. She (Emily Browning) is the wife of a Kray, telling us the story of their rise – consolidating power through their violent tempers and a confluence of strategy and luck – and their fall – taken down by a combination of hubris and the law. Fitting a true story neatly into generic formula is a good way to strip specificities and eccentricities from the moments and individuals at play. We get tracking shots into nightclubs straight out of Goodfellas, macho posturing like Cagney lite, and random acts of violence tonally carbon copied out of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. All the while, the colors drip like a faded Technicolor musical, actors pose and chew, and the two-hour-plus runtime stretches forward with leisurely laziness.

Tom Hardy plays both Krays in a double role, showy for its variety of doubled positions and encounters it demands. The effects work is passable, but not nearly as convincing in look or performance as Armie Hammer in The Social Network, or even Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap (nearly 20 years ago!). Hardy doesn’t do much to differentiate between the men, other than Helgeland making sure one is wearing glasses and a bit more unhinged, while the other doesn’t need glasses and broods. One of them is gay, which the movie takes as an amusing side-detail instead of characterization, just one more affectation to saddle Hardy with, instead of a window into an actual person’s life. There’s never a sense that the movie has any perspective on the men, other than reciting biographical facts and reenacting moments from their criminal careers in conspicuously artificial and mildly winking style. At one point a Kray gets very upset an opponent brought a lead pipe to a fight, ruining his fantasy of getting in a shootout. “Like a Western!” he whines.

It’s annoying how much Legend knows it’s a movie. Most discouraging is how repugnantly cavalier all this falseness becomes. It takes a lot of pleasure in displaying violence, whether someone’s getting a beating, is stabbed to death, or tortured for information. Even the inevitable hand-to-hand rumble between the Krays – a clumsy feat of blocking and visual trickery – is treated as a lark, instead of a breaking point in a relationship. Collateral damage is breezed over with token cringes from onlookers. Stylish splashes of debris and blood are aesthetic displays more than narrative elements. Phony period detail and glossy slick visuals are one thing; it’s another entirely to use real pain and death as grist for goofy genre play so feather light and dull. Helgeland stocks the movie with interesting actors (Christopher Eccleston, David Thewlis, Chazz Palminteri, Paul Bettany, Taron Egerton) and flashy incident, but that none of it brings any spark of life or imagination to a routine and gratingly misjudged gangster picture makes it all the more disappointingly empty.

Hammer of Justice: THOR: THE DARK WORLD

Thor is an outlier in these interlocking Avengers franchises. He’s not a character who invents, like Iron Man, or is given, like Captain America, or is accidentally imbued, like the Hulk, with his powers. He may be supernaturally strong, wields a mighty hammer, and can fly, but that doesn’t make him just your average superhero. He was born that way. The first Thor movie was a funny little thing, part fish-out-of-water comedy with the title character stuck on Earth, part swooshing pseudo-Shakespearean drama back at his home where Norse Gods are stomping around their extraterrestrial kingdom of Asgard. It’s a film of bleeping sci-fi gewgaws and a glowing intergalactic rainbow bridge, a strange mix to be sure, but it’s precisely what I found so endearing about it. After all, it’s not everyday you see a superhero movie that’s modestly scaled, yet still ends with a robot terrorizing a one-stoplight New Mexico town and two God-like brothers punching each other atop a multicolor interdimensional portal.

Now the sequel, Thor: The Dark World, picking up the characters from the first film after the events of the crossover event that was The Avengers, is an across the board improvement, doubling down on the arch genre-bending of its predecessor and finding a winning groove by amplifying its every disparate aspect. It’s a fast-paced action adventure spectacle bubbling with unexpected wit and finding great pleasure in smashing its shiny toys together into one exciting jumble. Quipping sci-fi scientists like straight out of a Jack Kirby comic get swept up into an outer space conflict that has a visual style of Frank Frazetta fantasy and Ralph McQuarrie space opera. It’s all rippling muscles, flowing capes, gleaming weapons, and shiny mechanical detail. On Earth, love-struck scientist Natalie Portman is investigating, with her comic relief colleagues Kat Dennings, Stellan Skarsgård, and Jonathan Howard, strange gravitational disturbances when her boyfriend Thor (Chris Hemsworth) at long last reappears. With his glowing blonde locks and strapping physique, he spirits her to his homeworld, having sensed that she’s become infected with the film’s MacGuffin. It exists simply to propel all the characters into action either defending or upending the known universes.

The villains want the glop that’s wormed its way into her veins. They’re Dark Elves, who look like they’ve wandered in out of a Guillermo del Toro notebook or a well-financed Lord of the Rings cosplay club. Thought long extinct, they’ve been hibernating in an H.R. Giger-style spaceship for 5,000 years awaiting the convergence of the Nine Realms. That’s when their leader (Christopher Eccleston) knows it is the best time to unleash spindly clouds of evil red dust upon the denizens of the universes. Meanwhile, Anthony Hopkin’s Odin, king of Asgard and father of Thor, glowers ominously as he consults ancient manuscripts. He gravely informs his allies that he knows of no way to stop the Elves. Thor suspects his disgraced brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) might be able to help, despite all warnings that he’s been the villain in two of these movies already and thus locked up in the castle’s dungeon. How can he possibly be trusted? The film manages to add contentious buddy action comedy to its long list of genre influences as Thor and Loki bristle and snipe at each other, reluctantly helping or betraying the other as the film moves along.

Rich visual splendor makes the film stand out, its aesthetic influences synthesized into something that manages to largely skirt camp on its way to gloriously serious silliness. I love the way the fanciful designs make it look like a cast of pseudo-futuristic Ancient Romans with swords, shields, spears, and ray guns is holding court in a space castle. Taking the director’s chair is Alan Taylor, a longtime TV director who has recently done great work on HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones. He fills the screen with the best special effects and production design Marvel Studios has to offer. With them and within it he stages spectacular action setpieces, some of the best this whole Avengers behemoth has managed in any of the various films and franchises. Because they’re done up in fantastically gripping and wonderfully silly ways, with characters who sparkle with delightful up-tempo chemistry the whole way through, it manages to avoid collapsing into yet another superhero-whaling-on-a-giant-alien-contraption climax. It’s fun and funny, playing with its fantasy rules and sci-fi conceits in exuberant and at times unexpected ways.

The screenplay credited to Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely (with additional story credit to Don Payne and Robert Rodat) bristles with slam-bang setpieces: epic battles, one-on-one slugfests, shootouts, dogfights, and swooshing disruptions of time and space. Helpfully, the chirpy chemistry between the characters and the gleefully complicated mythology is threaded throughout. We’re not pausing for action and character. It’s intertwined in the best big bustling overstuffed blockbuster way. It’s beyond endearing. It ups the ante. Supporting characters who mostly stood on the sidelines in the first Thor here get to leap into the action, from Idris Elba and Rene Russo to Jaimie Alexander and Ray Stevenson. And the core characters retain their initial novelty while gaining a sense of fine actors settling even more comfortably into their roles. It’s a film full of big action and broad character moments that add up to a satisfying red-blooded adventure every step of the way.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

The storyline of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is so simple a four-year-old child could explain it to you. Lacking a four-year-old child, I will attempt to explain. You see, there are these elite military figures who work together in covert operations. They’re called the G.I. Joes. They’re the good guys. There are also these slimy scientists and weapons developers who are the bad guys. They want to use nanotechnology to, gee, I actually don’t know. Do they want to take over the world, or destroy the Joes, or impersonate the president (played here by Jonathan Pryce)? Maybe that four-year-old would know.

When I went to see the movie, I was handed a free starter pack of cards for a collectible card game called “Top Trumps” starring characters from the movie. I have these sitting next to my computer at the moment. Allow me to look at them and try to figure out what exactly is going on in this movie. As it played I could only tell that good people were fighting bad people and somehow that involved interchangeable nonsense names (like Ripcord and Snake-Eyes) and green super-missiles that release tiny metal-eating robots. I sure hope the cards help decode the film and I won’t have to Google my way to a G.I. Joe fan-site.

First up is General Hawk. He’s played by Dennis Quaid and I could tell he was the leader of the Joes. According to the card, he’s “infamous and inspirational” and also has “the skills and experience of a battle hardened warrior.” I couldn’t prove this by the evidence in the movie, but Quaid does talk with a commanding voice and often scowls.

Next, is something called Neo-Vipers. The card says these are super-soldiers. I remember now that they work for Cobra Commander (or is it just Cobra?) who’s played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Every time he came on screen, I would shake my head. What’s he doing? Collecting a paycheck, I suppose. Anyways, these Neo-Vipers are genetically modified. They’re the bad guys because they can’t feel pain or fear.

Now I’m looking at a card with a white-clad ninja and it looks like his name is Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee). He’s also a bad guy. In battle scenes, he’s usually paired up with Snake Eyes (Ray Park), a G.I. Joe who’s a black-clad ninja. Flashbacks tell us that they share a common history when they both – oh who am I kidding? I don’t care.

There’s a card for a G.I. Joe with the code name Covergirl. She dies early in the picture. Spoiler, I guess. There’s also a card for James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), a weapons developer who thinks he’s the main baddie. The movie starts in 1600s Scotland with one of his ancestors getting punished for selling weapons to both sides of a conflict. The card says McCullen wants revenge for this, but to the extent that I do understand the evil plot, I can’t see how it will accomplish that goal.

At last we arrive to a card with the main character, a new G.I. Joe recruit who goes by the name Duke. He’s played by Channing Tatum. His best friend and comedic relief is Ripcord (Marlon Wayons). He shares some past with the beautiful villainess played by Sienna Miller. He has a square jaw and, like Quaid, scowls his way through the picture. The card says he’s “the best of the best…or so he thinks.” I’ll take its word for it.

As you can see the movie’s fairly confusing, playing out like a bad cartoon, which is exactly what the movie becomes whenever the action sequences start. I’m not talking brilliantly cartoony, like Speed Racer; I’m talking terribly cartoony, the kind of cartoony that throws all logical plot construction out the window for the sake of pure noise and candy-colored blurs. Admittedly, G.I. Joe is a bit better than Transformers 2, but only because it didn’t give me a headache. It’s also marginally better to look at and, if I’m not mistaken, a little more understandable, if only because human beings with actual faces are easier to tell apart than moving junkyards. There’s an equal amount of cliché-chewing hooey to be found, though, from a plane that can only understand Celtic commands to an evil plot so simple yet so confusing (McCullen sells the missiles, then steals them back in order to shoot them at three major cities). At one point the president marvels that no demands have been made. Same here, buddy.

There was a time, early in the run time, where I thought the movie would actually turn out to be an agreeably goofy time with the kind of dumb fun that director Stephen Sommers has brought to his previous movies like The Mummy or even, yes, Van Helsing. The promise of a good time is there in a chase sequence through the streets of Paris that manages to be fun despite most of it having appeared in the previews. That one sequence is the only glimpse of the promise to be found amongst so much bland and sterile carbon copies of concepts from better popcorn movies, everything from X-Men to the Star Wars prequels. G.I. Joe isn’t exhilarating, it’s just exasperating.