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.

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.

Flesh is Weak: TRANSCENDENCE

In Transcendence, Johnny Depp plays a brilliant computer scientist who, given only weeks to live, agrees to try to upload his consciousness into his artificial intelligence experiment, thus creating the world’s first truly self-aware computer. The primary side effect – immortality – is just a nice bonus. The movie uses that hook as a reason to grapple with fascinating thematic questions of the kind Ray Kurzweil might enjoy. If a person’s thoughts, feelings, memories, and cognitive abilities can be copied into a bank of hard drives, is that person still alive? The scientist’s wife (Rebecca Hall) would like to think so. An accomplished tech theorist in her own right, she was the one who came up with the designs to upload him in the first place. Their colleagues (Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman) are a little more skeptical.

When the man is gone, all that’s left are the lines of code bleeping across monitors, digitally reconstructing the voice of the dead man. Give me more power, it pleads. Connect me to the Internet. Does that sound like something a person wants? What does it mean to be whatever that thing is? How integrated with tech can you be and still be yourself? If HAL 9000 had all the memories of and sounded like the love of your life, would you believe him? The film is best when it’s asking these questions, but it’s woefully unprepared to engage with them in any meaningful way. It’s primed for pulpy eggheaded pleasures and turns up only shrugs.

What is at times fun about Transcendence is watching the slow creation of an accidental supervillain. If you ever wondered how one of those cavernous lairs full of whirring computers and mindless worker bees gets started, look no further. Hall, full of mostly good intentions and racing to beat an anti-tech terrorist organization led by a bleach-blonde Kate Mara, connects the digital Depp to the Internet. Off he zooms – a goofily nifty visual zips through a literal web of information and screenshots – building in power and intelligence until he has his wife constructing a giant data center in the middle of the desert, the better to house his massive potential for good. Of course, if you’ve seen any movie about a supercomputer from Demon Seed to Smart House, you know he has a massive potential for evil and destruction as well. You can probably guess where it goes from there.

The movie is at once smarter than that sounds and dumber than it looks. It’s the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer behind such beautiful-looking filmic efforts as Inception, Moneyball, and The Dark Knight. He and Jess Hall, his director of photography, create handsome compositions that use stillness and simplicity to great effect. Clean, empty corridors seem so ominous. Shots of wide open spaces seem gorgeously, creepily vast. The spaces in which the technophobia parable plays out echo with dread and possibility. There’s a throwback appeal to the imagery, reminiscent of early Spielberg in its insistent energy, yet locked-down patience that represents a willingness to let the situation unfold crisply and inevitably. It’s a visual confidence that carries the picture far.

What’s less satisfying by far is the way the film drops the thematic juggling act by letting the characters remain fuzzy, defined only by the dictates of the plot. That’s not necessarily a problem, but when the climactic resolution hinges on our investment in the characters it’d be nice to know them a little better. We don’t, and the plot isn’t cold or tight enough to work without them. There are terrific actors in every role – like Cillian Murphy, who does what he can with a one-note FBI agent – but no one ever rings true. Hall is the stand out, doing solid work playing a woman who is mourning her husband by obeying his simulacrum. It’s like an amped-up gender-swapped thriller version of Spike Jonze’s Her, steering forcefully into the creep factor. But her character is made to bend so fully to the will of the plotting that she hardly registers as a person let alone a genre archetype. The idea she inhabits is provocative, but her character is a shambles, able to shift from totally devoted to skeptical and back again in the span of a scene.

Jack Paglen’s screenplay feels like a Michael Crichton novel, full of jargon that sounds half-plausible to an amateur ear and futurist paranoia convinced tech evolutions will inevitably end disastrously for humanity. Pfister directs it capably, finding the thrills where it counts and finding some nice shots – like a sun-dappled window in which hangs a circuit chip in the center of a dreamcatcher – to cut into the flow of mood and contemplation. It’s a sci-fi thriller that’s moseying around, overtly turning over ideas with great care and wonder without getting much below the surface of it all. Transcendence transcends nothing. Without humor or personality to speak of, it feels inert and underdeveloped, content to throw out provocative questions and let them dissipate before resolving, let alone following, those lines of inquiry.

A Company on the Verge of a Breakdown: MARGIN CALL

The entirety of J.C. Chandor’s debut feature Margin Call plays like the first act of a disaster movie, the moments when the experts slowly become aware that things are about to go very wrong, that the world of the film is about to explode. In this case, the disaster is all too real, has already occurred, and we’re still living in its aftermath. Set in the fall of 2008, the film takes place over 24 hours in a big financial firm as one analyst figures out just how bad things are going to get. The shocking truth he discovers is that risky bets on mortgage-backed securities and the like are about to come up for big losses. The company is over leveraged. The decisions that are made this night will mean the difference between the life and death of the company, of its workers’ and their families’ finances, and probably for the entire American economy, if not the world’s. Sound familiar?

The film starts with a fired risk analyst (Stanley Tucci) giving a flash drive to one of his youngish employees (Zachary Quinto). It contains the formulas that predict impending devastation, the keys to understanding the suddenly very real possibility of complete and total financial ruin for the firm. He passes this information along to his boss (Paul Bettany), who passes it along to his boss (Kevin Spacey), who gives it to analysts (Demi Moore and Aasif Mandvi), who give it to their boss (Simon Baker), who calls in the CEO (Jeremy Irons). It’s an all-star cast (or a close-enough approximation of all-star) ready and waiting for the disaster to strike, repetitively going over their options and weighing consequences. They can see it coming, they can try and slow its approach, but this thing is going to hit and hit hard.

Chandor fills the film with tense boardroom scenes and jargon-filled power plays, along with brief moments that play almost like asides, sketching themes too concretely. At one point, during a rooftop smoke break, one suit actually peers over the edge and says, “It’s a long way down.” What this screenplay could have used was characters who were more than just symbols and with more bluntly clever macho Mametian rat race rat-a-tat in their dialogue. (Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin are further good examples of the kind of character-driven satirical spark technical talk can sometimes have). The actors – most of them pretty great – are ready to sink their teeth into meatier roles than are provided.

This is a film that tries to create characters that are understandable, relatable even, in a film that looks to find empathy but not excuses. It gets there, but it’s all so heavy handed. I believed these actors were the kinds of serious suits who would soberly and gravely use bursts of business speak to tersely and tensely discuss risky financial deals. What I didn’t believe were the moments like the ones when Bettany gives a remorseless little monologue about how people say they want a fair world but “nobody actually wants that,” when Tucci trots out a wistful bridge-building anecdote to make the point that Wall Street produces nothing of tangible value, or when Spacey reveals he has a symbolically significant dying dog at home. The small details of the film are so convincing – the jargon, the drab gray production design, and the simple modern costumes – but the words spoken are so often flat that, try as I might, I simply couldn’t believe the big picture.

They Know Not What They Do: PRIEST

The strange thing about failed would-be cult-hit B-movies is the consistent way they have of casting one or two people who seem to be in on the joke, so to speak. In the case of Priest, a bad post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi vampire western from Scott Stewart, the director of Legion, last year’s bad fallen-angel western siege picture, Christopher Plummer, Alan Dale and Karl Urban do a good job of splitting the difference between earnestly stylized and overtly conscious scenery-chewing. They’re on the right half-goofy vibe but only appear in a handful of scenes and it’s a shame no one else involved in the production could join them.

This is a movie that takes place in a future aftermath of a war between humans and animalistic vampires that is neatly, quickly summarized in a nifty animated prologue from Genndy Tartakovsky. It tells us that The Church (presumably Catholic, but they never say so you never know) sent out priest warriors that beat back the vampires with their crucifix-throwing-stars and rounded them up into prison camps in the wilds of wherever they are. Now, however, the priests are disbanded outcasts. Maybe that’s because their faces are covered forehead to the tip of the nose are tattooed with blood-red crosses. You’d think the society would have more respect for the people who saved them, but there you have it.

The story proper opens on one particular Priest (Paul Bettany) who discovers that his brother and his wife, dirt farmers in the middle of nowhere, have been attacked by vampires. What’s more, their daughter (Lily Collins) has been kidnapped. Unfortunately the head clergy (Christopher Plummer and Alan Dale) won’t allow the citizens of their world to know that there are still some active vampires and therefore cannot allow the kind of person who knows all about fighting these monsters to investigate. No, it’s much better to leave that task up to the in-over-his-head local small-town sheriff (Cam Gigandet, who continues his habit of appearing in the worst projects he can find).

So, surprise, Bettany disobeys his orders and heads out to find his niece. Yes, this clumsy little effects picture is a covert remake of the all-time great western The Searchers that replaces all of the moral dilemmas and rich characterization with CGI vampire beasts and empty exposition. It’s so backwards looking, keeping an eye on its inspirations (not just the most direct plot lift, but also a little Blade Runner here, a little Star Wars there), and also so forwards looking, staring off at its own sequel on the imagined horizon, that it forgets to get down to the business of being its own thing. It's altogether mostly dull.

In the gray, monotonous unraveling of this yarn, it turns out that the monstrous vampires didn’t do the kidnapping. See, it was Karl Urban, this world’s first human vampire who once worked with Paul Bettany as a priest but now, something something revenge something. Somehow a big black train is involved. Also, Maggie Q shows up as another priest who kind of likes Bettany but they kind of sort of have to be celibate even though they’re already disobeying their higher-ups. So, yeah, it’s that kind of movie, violent, confused, and oddly routine.

I lost track of the amount of times characters scowled or tore off across the desert in a motorcycle. At only 87 minutes, the plot seems awfully repetitive and, for the amount of enjoyment I got out of it, it feels about 81 minutes too long. Even the vampire fighting, the supposed reason for the movie’s existence is dull and confused. There’s some striking imagery to be found here and there throughout the picture; it’s stolen completely from other, better, movies but when it works it works. There’s also those halfway fun turns from Plummer and Dale, who turn up once at the beginning and then again at the end. Urban has a bit more time, but not much. He hams it up whenever possible, though. It hardly matters. By the time the movie wraps up hinting strongly about a sequel it feels less like a promise and more like a threat.

Quick Look: THE TOURIST

Glamour should rarely be the sole purpose of a film, but in the case of The Tourist it’s very nearly enough. This is a laid back comic thriller with beautiful people in beautiful places. There’s Angelina Jolie as some kind of stylish criminal and Johnny Depp as a seemingly bumbling everyman. (There are also some nice supporting roles for the likes of Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton). Together they become entangled, perhaps purposefully so, in all kinds of international espionage that takes place against the backdrop of stunning European scenery starting in Paris and ending up in Venice. Following up his heavy 2006 Oscar winning Stasi thriller The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck capably directs with light professionalism. He’s a solid craftsman who should direct more often, if only for the pleasure of seeing his lengthy credit stretch out across the entire wide screen. The Tourist is all fizz, but it’s prime fizz. The screenplay by von Donnersmarck, Christopher McQuarrie, and Julian Fellowes, Oscar winners all, is a bit of a prestige-hued mess, but it’s on the whole a delightful throwback, perhaps even homage, to the lighter side of Hitchcock. I was reminded not entirely unfavorably of To Catch a Thief, a similarly enjoyably thin exercise in style, star power and glamour. When The Tourist arrived last December, it was generally derided by critics and considered a flop domestically (though it’s been quite the hit in international markets), but now it’s easier to see that all the fuss was misguided. This is not, by any means, a great movie, but it has enough diverting pleasure to entertain. It’s a classy popcorn star vehicle with plenty of beauty and surface contentment. The last shot is a nice Freudian sight gag served up with a line that could be seen, with a wink and a shrug, as the film’s summation of its own quality: “It’ll do.”

Quick Look: The Young Victoria (2009)

Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria is the kind of period-piece costume drama that is stuffed and mounted, often beautiful to regard but emotionally immobile. It’s not exactly airless, but it’s definitely stuffy. This is a facile telling of the early months of Queen Victoria’s reign, with scenes of splendor continually clipped, denying full enjoyment of the film’s best assets. The coronation scene is especially awkward in the way it is chopped off right when it’s getting good. The film is a great excuse to gather great actors with British accents (Jim Broadbent, Mark Strong, Paul Bettany, and Emily Blunt, who has the title role) and let them play dress up in Victorian clothes and romp about chewing the ornate scenery wherever and whenever the script allows. The film strands its cast leaving only a sad little whiff of underexploited potential. This is a dry and flavorless film. Worse than bad, it simply leaves no impact.