Dark City: THE BATMAN

Even after all these years of superhero movies, Batman remains perhaps the most uniquely cinematic. Take Bruce Wayne, the Caped Crusader, striking fear in the hearts of Gotham City’s villainy, all the way back to his early comic book origins. He’s always been at the intersection—thematically, visually, tonally—of gangster pictures, German expressionism, and film noir. He’s accrued Art Deco shadows and grungy urban doom. It’s sometimes dialed up to goofy midcentury camp (hello, Adam West), sometimes dialed down to mumbling Michael Mann skyscraper canyons (howdy, Christian Bale), sometimes drawn out in luxuriously complicated Saturday morning cartoons (the Animated Series and Beyond) or stretched out in gargantuan backlot artifice (holy Tim Burton, Batman!). But it’s always recognizably this stew of influences, plus his costume a simple silhouette with silent film recognizability. His gadgets and gumshoe approach to avoiding the pain of the orphaned billionaire boy grown up collide with the sick and sicker in his crumbling home metropolis. Even the bad Batman movies are still often fun visions of this world, engaging as pulpy interiority blown out to blockbuster dimensions. The latest, directed and co-written by Matt Reeves, and starring Robert Pattinson as the angular chin and brooding eyes hidden within the cape and cowl, is maybe the most downbeat and dreary version yet, once again stumbling down dark alleys in pursuit of something like justice that’s forever out of reach.

There’s something pessimistic at the core of this hero. When talking DC’s icons, Superman is what we hope America can be. Batman is who we fear America is. No high-flying truth and justice here. Bruce Wayne and his alter ego can suit up and punch villains every night, but the sad truth of capitalist corruption and crime—a city where the cops and robbers are often one and the same, and everyone from the Mayor to the District Attorney to the mob bosses are all part of the same pool of dark money and influence—just won’t budge. So Reeves, an intelligent big budget filmmaker coming off of two interestingly textured and thoughtful Planet of the Apes pictures, visualizes these ideas by making his Gotham constantly overcast, usually raining, generally nocturnal. (It has to be a close cousin to the unnamed city in Fincher’s compellingly gross serial killer thriller Se7en.) There’s always a cloud hanging over the scenes, and the slow, patient drip of detective information about the central mystery takes precedence over slam-bang action. That makes the one fun car chase all the more thrilling, a welcome sparking rattling roar of an engine revving to life as the Batmobile makes its long-awaited appearance tearing off after a slimy bad guy. And it leaves the proceedings to move at a steady trudge, resisting the usual fanfare. To its credit, this downbeat affair that creaks by at a long three-hour run time, is trying for something genuinely wiggly and unsettling in the middle of so much iconography and cliche.

The whole thing kicks off with the murder of the mayor by a mysterious killer known only as The Riddler (Paul Dano). More victims follow. At each, he’s recording viral videos and leaving taunting clues in greeting cards at the scene for lead detective Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) to give to The Batman. Together, the two men hunt for clues and chase down leads. Sometimes they cross paths with a slinky nightclub waitress Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), whose cat burglar outfit is the best since Pfeiffer’s. She has her own reasons to investigate the goings-on at a club run by the town’s top gangster (John Turturro) and his waddling underling (Colin Farrell buried in a fat suit). Reeves leans into the tight-lipped pathos of these pathetic, wounded characters creeping around the shadows of society, looking for leverage over each other in an attempt to make things a little brighter by any means necessary. Unlike the usual comic book dichotomy—or pat mirroring that leads villains to the inevitable “we’re two sides of the same coin” monologuing—this movie makes clear that everyone’s inevitably shaped by societal forces beyond their control. Batman, Catwoman, The Riddler, Detective Gordon—all are willing to bend rules and skulk around to reshape Gotham toward their ends, some for slightly better, some for way worse. There’s never a sense anyone will actually unambiguously triumph. Michael Giacchino’s pounding score takes that cue, edging along Elfman horns while plucking some “Tubular Bells.”

Here’s a city possessed with an urban rot that no one can escape. This makes for a brooding, brutal, cynical, ice-cold, paranoid and conspiratorial picture. It’s not fun, exactly, but from its opening montage of vandals and muggers spooked by the sight of the Bat-signal in the sky, to an ending where Gotham is significantly worse off than before the movie started, there’s a grimly compelling fatalism that gets its hooks in, even as the plot dwindles to a hesitant close. It’s all of a piece—a mumbled noir narration, a dimly fuzzy filmic-by-way-of-digital-and-back-again look, a sumptuously gaunt color palate, a murmuring collection of careful performances, a superhero movie that resists the overfamiliar spectacular climaxes we’ve come to expect. Like Pattinson’s sunken performance—a rare Wayne that’s not even a little sparkling—The Batman is obsessive, haunting, and unresolved. Sure, that’s partly the usual superhero move of making one feel like a first entry is so much prologue for promised future story. (And, sure, I’ll take another one with this cast and vibe.) But here that lack of resolution has tonal and thematic sense, too. Gotham, as we’ve long known, has deeply rooted systematic problems. No wonder its citizens, good and bad alike, are going mad. Who can relate?

Here Comes the Boom:TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT

Now five films deep, it’s hard to call the Transformers series anything more than “barely narrative.” Sure, there are recurring motifs and a familiar ensemble of returning characters, but any sense of a coherent story or mythology capable of being grokked stopped in the end credits of the first – and best – installment. With Transformers: The Last Knight, director Michael Bay seems more than ever invested in the movie only insofar as it allows and affords him the ability to stage whatever kind of bombastic set piece he wants. This is franchise filmmaking as a bajillion-dollar playground where he can build, play with, and blow up anything: a submarine, a castle, a small town, Stonehenge. Why not? He can get away with this because he’s such a great imagemaker. There’s nothing like seeing his brand of spectacle – the grade-A Bayhem – carted on screen by the metric ton. Frame by frame this movie sparkles with sunsets and vast vistas and impressive effects and awestruck hero shots. But, of course, it’s also in service of a series that’s long since passed into irretrievably convoluted gobbledygook. This iteration doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessors, but it doesn’t scrape the barrel’s bottom like their lows, either. A middle of the road Transformers it is then.

At least the screenplay cobbled together by four writers recognizes that the Transformer destruction playing out over the last four films would leave the world rattled. We join the story in progress, with the world terrorized by all the gigantic alien shapeshifting automotive robots who have landed and continue to arrive on a seemingly unstoppable basis. With Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) missing, the Autobots just roam the planet doing whatever, getting into scrapes with Decepticons who still have their leader, Megatron (Frank Welker). That Transformers are sufficiently mindless to need their strong leaders to give them purpose is certainly strange, and makes them dangerous. Humans have decreed them illegal, and deputized an international paramilitary force to hunt them and anyone helping them. The conflict is that, once again, there’s a world-ending calamity coming, provoked by bad ‘bots, and the humans must allow the Transformers to fight it out for the fate of the planet. Tagging along with the junkpiles gurgling crass one-liners in the voices of beloved character actors (John Goodman, Ken Watanabe, Steve Buscemi, Jim Carter) are the token humans: last movie’s hero (Mark Wahlberg’s hilariously named Cade Yeager), the military liaison from the first three movies (Josh Duhamel), and new characters like a scrappy orphan teen (Isabela Moner), a scatterbrained Englishman (Anthony Hopkins), and a supermodel, in good looks and frequent inexplicable wardrobe changes, historian (Laura Haddock). Bay needs these human-sized caricatures to sell the plot’s stakes and scale.

There’s no need to recap the nonsense except to say it hurtles through frantic globe-trotting (Chicago! South Dakota! England! Cuba! Africa!) and alternative history digressions (Bay squeezes in a lengthy King Arthur prologue and a World War II flashback) on its way to the expected oversized explosive finale with alien floating weapons and enormous energy pulses and endlessly complicated competing schemes to destroy and/or save the planet. It’s cut together with manic editing and an eardrum-quaking sound design. Get Bill Hader’s Stefon to describe it. This Transformers has everything: fire-breathing baby dino-bots, a potty-mouthed steampunk robo-butler, a floating alien tech witch, comic relief characters played by funny guys (like Jarrod Carmichael and Tony Hale) for whom no one wrote jokes, the United States freeing evil robots on a Dirty Dozen work program, bean-bag-shooting drones, a three-headed dragon built from a dozen interlocking mechanical Knights of the Round Table, John Turturro. Any movie that starts with Stanley Tucci playing Merlin (and yet he’s not an ancestor of the character Tucci played in the last movie?) and gets to Mark Wahlberg sword-fighting a Transformer (and that’s before Stonehenge blows up as the nexus of ancient robot evil) is certainly following its own bizarre id. The movie is all hollering and hurtling, cleavage and calamities, in between Bay’s usual aggressive humor and loud exposition and leering camera ramping up even small dialogue scenes as concussive clattering exertions. 

By the end I stumbled out dazed, deafened, and defeated by the volume (in noise and dimension) of the experience. But it was not entirely unenjoyable to sit back and allow the pummeling. Bay’s genius, and it is genius, is as one of the only modern blockbuster filmmakers who has figured out how to make digital and physical effects work together to create a sense of weight and scale. (Just look at any given Marvel movie, which will be competently handled, and maybe even a better coherent story most of the time, but will have all the tangible qualities of a CG laser light show.) Bay places figures – or spinning bodies, clouds of debris, blasts of fire, and so on – in frames arranged to provide contrasts, to accentuate size and scope, to emphasize motion and speed. Then he sets out sealing the deal with stomach-churning heights and dips, awe-filled low-angle shots of towering monstrosities, precision chaos. He makes the IMAX screen a massive mural tribute to action cinema. A car chase is filmed from as low to the pavement as possible, feeling the grit of the roadway as a character hangs out the door while Bumblebee shoots an evil cop car. A squadron of drones are placed just so to allow a character to leap from one to another, saving himself after getting thrown out the glass back panel of an elevator. A massive structure rising from the ocean drips waterfalls human figures must dodge as they, soaked, run to the aid of their robotic allies. Though not as memorable as the series’ high-water marks, these are sights you might find worth seeing and feeling, but only if you’ve already committed to sitting through the whole jumbled pandemonium anyway.

Let My People Go: EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS

Only a third of the way into Ridley Scott’s 150-minute Exodus: Gods and Kings, I was already feeling like Mort Sahl who, legend has it, impatiently stood up in the middle of the 1960 premiere of Otto Preminger’s 208-minute Exodus and shouted, “Let my people go!” Gods and Kings takes one of the most vital enduring stories in all of world history and literature and tells it in a manner that’s dull beyond belief. It hits familiar beats – Moses’ secret identity, exile, encounter with a burning bush, plagues of Egypt, and parting the Red Sea. But the telling is drained of passion, wonder, or intrigue. The flavorless screenplay is depressingly literal minded, and the characters are flat and thin. Nothing makes an impact, or follows an inner drive. It’s simply one boring sequence after another, not even rising to the level of kitsch DeMille’s Ten Commandments musters at its worst.

Scott is often associated with period epics, but he’s rarely made good ones. When you get right down to it, his best films are either sci-fi pictures (Alien, Blade Runner, Prometheus) or thrillers (American Gangster, Matchstick Men, The Counselor). For some reason, the canvas of historical sweep makes his usually striking set design go flat, even ugly. Worse, he often takes our interest in the main character for granted, as if content with the knowledge most will arrive well aware of who he is and what he did. Scott’s Christopher Columbus and Robin Hood movies suffer the same problem, and Gods and Kings follows suit. It provides cold shots of CGI crowds and crane shots devoid of personality, filling in ancient Egypt without stopping to make us care about what’s happening in it. Every bit of this film is perfunctory, almost apologetically shrugging about its source material’s familiarity.

Playing dress up amidst this boredom is a cast that’s to a person ill suited for what’s asked of them. As Moses we have Christian Bale, who behaves constipated throughout, gritting his teeth and staring in mock awe at the enormity of his situation. Pharaoh Ramses, the man raised with Moses and is now the stubborn ruler who won’t free the slaves at his former brother’s request, is played by a shaved, heavily made-up Joel Edgerton, who appears visibly uncomfortable most of the time. The supporting players are familiar faces (John Turturro, Aaron Paul, Ben Kingsley, Hiam Abbass, Sigourney Weaver) who pose in Egyptian dress and speak maybe two or three dozen lines combined. Funniest is Ben Mendelsohn, whose look here appears vaguely inspired by Michael Palin in Life of Brian. I just felt bad for everyone involved as I felt the pull of sleep tug me lower in my seat.

The screenplay, credited to four writers who’ve done good work in the past, clunks along with dismaying thuds where the drama, the emotion, the excitement, and rooting interest should be. Dialogue is painfully surface level exposition. There’s no “let my people go!” But its equivalent is met by Ramses saying, “From an economic standpoint what you’re asking is problematic.” See what I mean about the boredom? The film attempts to put new spins on old moments and iconography. Instead of talking to a burning bush, Moses gets knocked on the head in an avalanche, and then sits in the mud hallucinating a little boy speaking on the bush’s behalf. It’s certainly different, but I hesitate to call it an improvement. Also reimagined are the gross plagues, now presented in a moderately more realistic manner. Crocodiles attack, filling the Nile with blood, which drives out the frogs, who die and attract flies, which draw the locusts, and so on and so forth.

Scott and his writers get too tangled up in wanting to make gritty origin story detail out of broad archetypes and oft told legend, a blend of modern 3D pyrotechnics and reverent Bible Movie earnestness. What they end up with is neither here nor there, a big waste of time with no sense of character, pace, or atmosphere. There’s just no sense of perspective. They didn’t find a great new angle with which to tell the old story, or have a good handle on some point of view or clear throughline. Character relationships remain half-formed, setpieces are on auto-pilot, and the plot develops for no clear reason other than that’s the way it’s supposed to go. The Bible told them so, except for the parts where the swords and arrows come out and goose the action elements. It’s one big, phony faux-gravitas machine whirring away at one droning pitch for so long it simply sounds like white (very white) noise after awhile. I struggled to pay attention, stay awake, and keep my eyes from glazing over. It doesn’t work as drama. It doesn’t work as spectacle. It just doesn’t work.

Loud Noises: TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON

At the center of these Transformers movies are the perfect metaphors for describing them, huge incompressible shape shifting junk heaps that occasionally assemble into aesthetically pleasing vehicles. Aren’t these movies essential just that, occasionally pleasing junk? Directed by Michael Bay at his what was then his most excessive, the first movie, from 2007, might be his best movie. It’s a triumph of machinery, both the creatures and the Hollywood mechanisms of their birth, the kinds of gleaming metal and kinetic action that Bay has always focused on. Here they become the goofiest, most explosive expression of his style, his canted angles and saturated colors that turn every shot into a music-video/advertisement hybrid, popping each shot with the crisp vibrancy of slick commercialism. The controlled chaos fell into disproportionate anarchy with the sequel, 2009’s Revenge of the Fallen. That film, though still capable of fleeting moments that are visually striking, was tonally incoherent and offensively stereotypical on most every level.

Here we go again, with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which splits the difference between the two approaches to the same material. This time, it’s in 3D, which at least serves to slow down Bay’s typically rapid-fire editing, if only by a few blinks per shot. The spectacle has to wait, though. For a good hour, perhaps even 90 minutes, Bay spins his wheels with crude humor, offensive stereotypes, and endless, elaborate setup.

Shia LaBeouf, having saved the world twice, is out looking for a job, jealous that his glamorous girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a former Victoria’s Secret model in her first acting job) is getting so much attention from her sleazy boss (Patrick Dempsey). The job search is a bit of a stall while the robots gather up the plot points that will lead to eventual mayhem, though it gives screen time to a self-amused John Malkovich, and a small role for Ken Jeong that is both racist and homophobic at the same time. As for the elaborate romantic setup, it never really pays off, unless you’re so inclined to count the huge close-up 3D shot of Huntington-Whiteley’s rear end walking up a flight of stairs that serves as her first appearance.

Meanwhile, the Autobots (those are the good guys) are still working with the military, led by Josh Duhamel, to sniff out Decepticons (those are the bad guys) but also blow up terrorists for some reason. The movie joylessly gives us an unintentionally hilarious description of said terrorists’ hideout as “Illegal Middle Eastern Nuclear Site.” Phew. As long as it’s illegal. That’s a sequence that wouldn’t look too out-of-place in Team America: World Police.

Taking a break from working for America, the Autobots just uncovered some top-secret stuff about the true reasons behind the U.S./Russian space race of the 60’s and the nuclear meltdown of Chernobyl. I’m normally untroubled by seeing alternate history in pop sci-fi (this summer’s X-Men uses the Cuban Missile Crisis to good effect) but here it comes off sleazy and uncomfortable, especially with waxy CGI presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and even Obama) mixed in with the tweaked historical footage. Later, the movie will take visual cues from the Challenger disaster and 9/11. Ugh.

Moving on, there’s a lot to slog through. Buzz Aldrin cameos playing himself, staring up at Optimis Prime, the leader of the Autobots while admitting that, yes, there is indeed an ancient hibernating transformer (Leonard Nimoy) buried on the moon. Bill O’Reily has an interminably smug cameo needling John Turturro’s grating ex-government official. (I pause here to note that the reliably funny Alan Tudyk plays Turturro’s assistant). Frances McDormand collects a paycheck as an Intelligence chief interested in letting the ‘bots find and collect the long-dormant tech off of the moon. In a movie called Transformers: Dark of the Moon we get far too few Transformers and very little moon for all of this time. The movie is scene after scene of humans setting up what we all really want to see: stuff blowing up real good. The first film was actually a competent teen comedy that shifted effortlessly into a goofy sci-fi explosion of action, but after those giant robots have been slamming around writer Ehren Kruger has had no idea how to make just normal people interesting. To be fair he didn’t write the first movie, just the bad second two. All this human setup would be excusable in smaller, more economical doses, or if the robots’ plots made any sense whatsoever.

I won’t take this opportunity to dissect the many ways the logic of the various robot plans do not work. Instead, I will reflect on the fact that giant, largely indistinguishable robots are roaming the planet causing all kinds of ruckus and they’re still supposedly a secret. These creatures are also apparently intuitive geniuses, able to predict the plans of their enemies to an astonishingly accurate level. Take a scene wherein some rolling metal robots emerge to attack Shia on a highway, which leads to a striking 3D composition in which a car unfolds into a Transformer from around its passenger, beats back debris, then turns back into a car with the passenger returned safely to his seat. It makes not a lick of sense and I couldn’t tell you what this brief action sequence accomplishes in terms of plot or who did what to who and why, but it sure looked good for that brief moment.

For all I really disliked about the endless set-up, I was shocked to find that the pay-off almost, almost, made up for it. The action in the last hour or so moves to Chicago where Decepticons are taking over the city for some reason. Humans, after standing by powerless, and Autobots, after cowardly hiding while humans were massacred, roll into town to fight back. The resulting distended urban warfare action set piece is surprisingly effective. It’s well paced and mostly comprehensible, or at least there are clear goals that must be accomplished for the good guys to win. Chicago is thoroughly cluttered in the process. There’s a nifty Decepticon that’s like a metal Sarlacc pit on wheels. There’s good use of 3D to enhance huge drops and dips between skyscrapers. It’s dumb, loud summery sound and fury, and it works on a brute force level. One nearly great sequence with a teetering skyscraper, for example, has nice cliffhanger inventiveness. Bay may often make awkward, frighteningly tone-deaf films, but, when he’s using his eye for forcefully effective action imagery, I’d rather see a pure Michael Bay film than someone else trying to crib from his bag of tricks, like the thoroughly awful Battle: Los Angeles from earlier this year.

I didn’t end up leaving the theater completely hating Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but it’s only because the last hour distracted me from the opening 90 minutes. Upon reflection, dissatisfaction settles in along with the convoluted plot’s sheer idiocy and memory of the horrendous human plot with its endless failed attempts at humor. So, just good enough to very nearly distract from how bad it is, there’s a backhanded compliment for you.

Downshift: CARS 2

It is a testament to Pixar’s consistent level of excellence that their Cars 2, a movie I more or less enjoyed watching, feels like a disappointment. It’s a movie that’s fast, colorful, frenetic, and funny, but gone is the deeper feeling we’ve come to expect of productions from this company. This is all surface level whiz-bang silliness, highly watchable and fairly entertaining but also Pixar’s worst effort thus far.

It’s all in what you compare it to, I suppose. After an impressive string of masterworks (Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up among them), broken only by some relatively weaker entries that were merely pretty great (A Bug’s Life, Cars), Pixar has built a reputation for consummate craftsmanship, movies that entertain with great flair and originality while also managing to emote with a precision built on surprising grace and beauty. They’re gorgeously animated and layered films with heavy emotional content – a post-apocalyptic romance, a widower fighting the march of time, abandonment – handled tactfully and powerfully.

The first Cars wasn’t one of Pixar’s crowning achievements but it sure was fun. It takes place in a world much like our own but instead of a human populace there are fleets of vehicles with wide eyes staring out of clear windshields and bumpers twisting about like lips. It’s odd and off-putting at first, but in motion and in an involving plot, it all seems so natural. When I pushed toy cars across my childhood bedroom did I ever imagine people inside them? I don’t think so. For all I know, the cars themselves were racing each other all on their own. Cars has an egotistical racecar Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) zoom into Radiator Springs, a crumbling small town, and discover the slower pleasures of roadside Americana. It’s a movie about nostalgia versus modernity that comes down on the side of progress while still arguing for embracing what got us there.

Cars 2 has no deeper ambitions. If anything, it works to refute the stop-and-smell-the-roses relaxed pace of its predecessor. This film is proudly childish as it slams cars around in zippy action sequences driven by a silly round-the-world spy story. Surprisingly satisfying in its dizzying tangles of plot, events are kicked off by British secret agent car Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) dangerously and daringly discovering something of grave import aboard a menacing oil rig in the middle of the ocean. Soon enough, we learn that an eccentric billionaire (Eddie Izzard) has decided to promote his new alternative fuel by throwing a World Grand Prix, inviting the best racers from around the world. The race is on, which gets Lightning McQueen and his best friend, hick tow-truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), out of town and circling the globe.

Stops in Japan, France, Italy, and England provide the backbone of the plot, which is mostly an excuse for a diversity of deeply detailed backgrounds. Japan’s Tokyo is rendered as a world of little Hondas zipping around a bustling neon metropolis. A coastal village in Italy is a lush town where a little car speaks with the big voice of legendary Italian actor Franco Nero (!) and the boats in the harbor sit there pleasantly bobbing and blinking. In Paris, Notre Dame is encrusted with winged cars for saints and gargoyles, while in London the royal car family rolls up with their Land Rover bodyguards. It’s so very weird. Unlike the first film, during which I found myself unquestioningly accepting vehicular anthropomorphism, this time around I found myself wondering how cars managed to do just about anything, from building cathedrals to writing with pencils. And why would cars have to go through a metal detector in an airport? It’s a tribute to the nutty mise en scène, the total commitment to a truly strange concept, that endless unanswerable questions encroach every shot from all angles.

At each stop on the world tour, antics and action are around every corner. McQueen deals with his competition, like a hotshot Italian racecar (with a zooming, motor-mouth patter from a crazed and goofy John Turturro) in what ultimately becomes a glorified subplot. Meanwhile, in the main plot McMissile and his curvy assistant Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) mistake sweet, dumb Mater for a fellow spy. The plot’s strictly pro forma, not much more or less than an adequate Bond picture when you get down too it, though I liked the evil cabal made up of, well, I guess I won’t spoil it, but the makes and models of the villains are a fun concept. As the story zooms along, the spies take precedence over the racers.

Mater, with his deep accent and unfortunate misunderstandings, gets increasingly wearing the more the film gets tied to his character and sidelines the infinitely more charming McQueen for far too long. Good in small doses, like his moments of comic relief in the first Cars, Mater is overused here. As much fun as the detail and speed of the humor, the action, and the locations are, less enjoyable are the few attempts to make it all mean something. We’re supposed to laugh at Mater and feel bad about it too. There’s a Life Lesson here, but it feels forced and unconvincing. Nevertheless, Cars 2 has a fast pace and it goes down smoothly. It’s a pleasant diversion. Lots of gags hit their marks, though countless others miss entirely, and the gun-toting, bomb-throwing cars make for unlikely, but often awfully satisfying, action heroes.

After churning out so many outstanding movies it’s a shame to see that here Pixar has slipped in overall quality, but it’s clear from what’s seen on screen that it’s not for lack of trying. It’s incredibly detailed animation with meticulous sound design and mostly fantastic voice work; in typical Pixar fashion it looks and sounds absolutely wonderful. It’s light, inconsequential fun. It feels somewhat difficult to criticize Pixar’s team for trying something different, using their technical skills for something less meaningful. If it seems like I’m holding Pixar to a higher standard than I would any other animated company, it’s only because they’ve conditioned me to expect so much more than they offer here. And yet Cars 2 feels very much like exactly the kind of movie that they wanted to make, a broad, silly, punny, busy kids’ movie. I simply had a passably fun time, is that so bad? In this case, it almost feels that way.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Despite being based on a line of action figures and a terrible 80s animated series, Transformers was a fast, fun summer movie with satisfying human comedy, a good grasp on its goofy tone, and cool special effects, even if the last twenty minutes devolved into a mess of incomprehensibility. With Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Michael Bay has created a film that expands every aspect of his first film, a move that destroys the precarious balance of the comedy, loses sight of the inherent goofiness of the concept, and uses its special effects so often that they become numbing. Not even an intense booming explosion that resonates with a deep bass kick in the climax of the movie could shake me out of my bludgeoned state. I guess the creators thought audiences liked the incomprehensibility the best. The experience of watching the movie is not unlike untangling blinking Christmas lights while listening to all of your dishes fall out of the cupboards.

Once again there are human actors stranded amidst the vehicles that turn into giant robots, but this time they can’t hold their own against the mostly-indistinguishable clanging CGI monstrosities. Where’s someone like Jon Voight or Anthony Anderson from the first movie? They both played the material with just the right amount of winking but are missing here. Why do other similarly lighthearted performers from before – John Turturro, Josh Duhamel, and Tyrese Gibson – get swallowed up by bad writing and self-importance? (Don’t even get me started on Julie White and Kevin Dunn, for whom I’m just embarrassed). Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox are also in the movie but make so little impact – neither is given any great distinct moments – that they are hardly worth mentioning despite being the ostensible stars of the thing.

The plot involves giant bad robot people who want to find this other big machine to kill humans and the giant good robot people that try to stop them, but even that, believe it or not, takes a back seat to the mindless action that’s little more than militaristic fetishism and rampant misogyny, ethnocentricity, and racism. The only thing Bay’s camera lingers on more than cleavage and explosions are the gleaming weaponry of robot and man alike. All women are either excessively emotional or cold-hearted man-killers (or maybe even robots in disguise). All scenes that take place in foreign countries showcase a startling condescension, using natives for comedic effect or background props and using the basest shorthand for displaying foreign cultures. And then there’s the matter of the two shuffling, illiterate, exaggeratedly incompetent and idiotic, jive-talking Transformers who are practically blackface robots. Need I say more?

I could barely tell the robots apart, could barely understand what most of them were saying, and barely cared about the exposition that both they and the humans were force to spell out. There’s no scene to match the first film’s great comedy of the exposition that reveals the true nature of the Hoover Dam. To say that the script was written with a tin-ear would insult all the great hacks out there who use their tin-ears to competent effect. What went wrong with this script? Two of the writers are Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who have written fine popcorn flicks like the first Transformers and the great recent Star Trek. I hesitate to lay the blame with them since their record has been so spotless. What about the third credited writer, Ehren Kruger? He’s mostly written horror movies (some of them bad) but I think his influence is felt mostly in the creepy scenes of mechanical intrusions, like when LeBeouf finds himself with an itty-bitty robot crawling up his nostrils. Is the blame then to lie with Michael Bay, who supposedly did some work during the Writers’ strike? It’s possible. Or maybe the script is a result of clashing styles and tones and a rushed schedule which resulted in no ideas being thrown out? It certainly feels at times like a filmed brainstorming session. It’s a total mess.

There are two kinds of Michael Bay movies: dumb fun and just dumb. Can you guess which one this is by now? The movie is everything that is wrong with big-budget sequels. It’s long, formless, and indigestible. It’s scenes of endless noisy nonsense punctuated only by more scenes of endless noisy nonsense, and then it goes on for over two-and-a-half hours. I left with nothing more than a headache.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009)

In 1974, journeyman director Joseph Sargent pumped out the lean, gritty, hijacked-subway B-movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, with a sardonic, sarcastic Walter Matthau going up against the crisp and creepy Robert Shaw in a battle of the wills fleshed out with eccentric supporting characters and local color with the grimy and goofy New York City (back when crime and bohemianism were high, civic pride and public services were low) a character in its own right. But that was thirty-five years ago. Now director Tony Scott has updated without besting the original concept – bringing to it his trademark restless but uncurious camera – and without finding a way to make the story relevant to how the city is today. Rather, Scott has created a movie that feels disconnected from our time and drums through its plot mechanics with a grim, unsatisfying sense of déjà vu. It’s more than the fact that it’s a remake that makes the movie feel generic. The bleary, numbing cinematography works in concert with the blandly clunking score to create a sense of tiring excitement where I felt commanded to be entertained.

Denzel Washington replaces Matthau and does a fine job with a role that, as written, is less than taxing. Anyone with sufficient screen presence could have pulled it off. This is no slight against Washington, a great actor, but rather against the script by Brian Helgeland (who’s done fine work in the past). This isn’t a distinctively written character. Like most of the characters, he’s given nothing distinct or interesting to say beyond tired thriller lines that have slid out of the thriller factory like clockwork for decades. Maybe he should be grateful, for when Helgeland attempts to write something different and distinct, it ends up sounding stupid like poor John Travolta (loudly hamming it up in the Shaw role) who is forced to punctuate nearly every sentence with an ill-fitting profanity. Treated even worse are the great character actors, like Luis Guzman and John Turturro, who are given next to nothing to do, or James Gandolfini who does so well with what he’s given (the one stab at current reflection that sticks) you wish he had more, and better, things to do.

Any suspense that does arise comes from the plot itself, but the inherent suspense in the story goes unexploited. The subway car is stuck underground. How will the hijackers escape? The plot’s central thrill comes from the lack of motion. The subway is gumming up the works and Matthau/Washington main goal is not saving the day, but getting things running again. But Scott doesn’t trust stillness to raise tension, nor is he interested in exploring the mundane goal of getting the subway system running. His camera zooms and spins in a desperate attempt to whip up extra tension but instead spins further and further away from tension.

The movie works on a superficial level. It’s an involving story and exceedingly watchable performers. I was even tricked into a mildly positive response upon exiting. I wasn’t blown away but could have been heard proclaiming it “alright” and “reasonably diverting” if “not as good as the original.” Now, having settled in my mind, the memory has curdled. It has sunk in my estimation, but not by much. This is a cold, mechanical movie, heartlessly calculated, loudly screaming “aren’t you thrilled?”