Superman

Kal To Arms

Superman
Directed by James Gunn
USA/Canada/Australia/New Zealand 2025
Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print.

Okay... I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much from the new iteration of The Man of Steel at my local movie house. Firstly, I think DC have given up too quickly on their DCU, just when it was getting good enough to compete on an equal footing with Marvel’s MCU. Also, it means no more Gal Gadot/Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman films... which is pretty disasterous. 

As it happens, though, this new reboot under the name of Superman surprised me by actually being quite an entertaining, if somewhat muddled film. Now I’m going to list the bad things first because, they matter to me. One thing being what I just said about jettisoning the previous DCU (even though there is a cameo in this by one of them which... honestly... makes no sense whatsoever). 

Another thing... you DO NOT give me a curly headed Superman. Get out of here. 

Yet another thing... what a lot of modern iterations of the character seem to somehow forget or screw up, just as they do here... Superman has a kiss curl in the shape of an S. Don’t mess with the kiss curl, it’s iconic. 

And that’s most of the bad things. I’ll get on to the good stuff as I go. 

Okay, so... David Corenswet plays Kal El aka Superman aka Clark Kent in a film which completely dispenses with the origins of the character and fills the audience in on that stuff in brief snatches of text at the start of the movie. Good call. There is the back story of his Kryptonian parents which comes back to haunt him as an important plot point but, in this one he starts off already living with his girlfriend Lois Lane (played in this iteration by Rachel Brosnahan), works at the Daily Planet with her and Jimmy Olsen (played by Skyler Gisondo) and, occasionally helps out The Justice Gang... headed up by the Guy Gardner version of Green Lantern (played by Nathan Fillion), along with the second version of Mr. Terrific and ‘a version’ of Hawkgirl. But, due to the machinations of Lex Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult, Superman is questioned for his political motivations (after he stops a full scale invasion of one country by another... ripped from today’s headlines, folks) and locked up in a pocket universe created by Lex in which he is tortured and people are killed. And then it’s shenanigans as he fights for truth, justice and, in some political ways, the American way... to make matters right and to stop a temporal rift from pulling the Earth and surrounding universe apart. 

And it’s kind of throwing a whole load of plot elements in to the story and seeing how they land but, yeah, they’ve kind of made it work. 

And it’s nothing if not a postmodern movie. 

Now the homages to the 1970s Superman The Movie are obvious... from the opening and closing credits to the use of certain segments (repeated too often, without natural progression) of John Williams original 1978 theme. Also from the 1970s version of the mythos is the visual representation of the Fortress of Solitude, looking almost exactly as it did in that movie (which is totally not how it looked in the comics people... the comic book one looked like the one in the original Doc Savage pulps, which is where they stole the idea from) and we have characters like Eve Teschmacher and Otis Berg. 

However, for older Superman readers like myself, I found it leant more heavily into the Superman comics of the 1950s and early 1960s. You know, the days when every silly concept was worked through a number of the DC titles and the grittier 1930s/40s versions of the characters were somewhat jettisoned. So we have elements like the robot guardians in the Fortress of Solitude, Metamorpho and, most importantly... because he has a big role in the movie... we have the super-dog Krypto. Who, it has to be said, looks nothing like Krypto did in the comics as, instead, it’s based on James Gunn’s own dog. But Krypto does kind of steal every scene he’s in and, yeah, he’s thankfully in a lot of them. Causing lots of well observed doggy style chaos as he goes.

And that’s me done with Superman. Overall, I thought it was very entertaining and I think they definitely got the writing of the title character... who is a very difficult character to get right, for sure... pretty much in the ball park he’s supposed to be in. So, yeah, I didn’t hate this one, as I’d expected to and, I think this one deserves some good box office if it manages it (there were only about five other people in the screening I went to). Heads up... two end credits scenes in this one... one half way through and one right at the final knockings. Neither have much to say but, maybe they’ve not got the next DCU2 films planned out yet.  

Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special 2022

Christmas Bacon

Guardians Of The
Galaxy Holiday Special 2022
Directed by James Gunn
2022

A quick note... I’m writing this very brief review in  the last days of Christmas 2022 and so it’s probably bad timing to put this one up before 2023. I’m going to pre-empt myself here and say that, by the time this review is published in December 2023, I will have already seen and reviewed Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 3 for the site (right here). Therefore, any character arcs and terminations (which I suspect will be the case) are not yet known to me as I’m writing these words... so please read this in that context since, I’m sure some of the things in this might seem a little contradictory by the time this review sees the light of day.

Okay, so we have a specific Marvel Christmas special this year (as opposed to a Christmas TV miniseries such as Hawkeye... reviewed here). I have to say that I’m the only member of my household who actually thought this was any good and the only one who stuck with it properly until the end (even though it’s only 41 minutes long). There are a few bad things about it and also some good stuff. And this is going to be a fairly short review so, let’s look at the good stuff first.

Okay, so we have the film starting on a flashback sequence done in a late 1970s/early 1980s variant of rotoscoping animation, telling of how Yondu (played by Michael Rooker) ruined Peter Quill’s Christmas. So, yeah, the start looks deliberately cheap. Quill, aka Starlord, is once again played by Chris Pratt and he’s joined by series regulars Vin Diesel as Groot, David Bautista as Drax, Karen Gillan as Nebula, Bradley Cooper as Rocket Racoon, Pom Klementieff as Mantis and Sean Gunn as Kraglin. Once Mantis and Drax are told this story, it switches into live action and the two pledge to bring Christmas back into Starlord’s life... by travelling to Earth and kidnapping Peter’s longstanding childhood hero in the GOTG series of films... Kevin Bacon, in order to present him to Peter as a christmas present. Comedy shenanigans ensue and Bacon eventually finds himself hanging out with the Guardians on their newly acquired base on Knowwhere (following on from Avengers Endgame).

There are some nice jokes, some songs (mostly terrible, although I liked the first one... nobody else in the house did), some tiny comic action sequences and... a bit of sentiment here and there. It’s pleasant and mostly harmless fun and, yeah, I guess for me that’s fine but I think others in the household wanted a lot more from it.

There’s some bad stuff too, though... but the one thing I will bring up in that context is Groot. I mean... what? What happened to the CGI stuff? Did they use it or not because, frankly, if looks like someone wearing a bad Groot costume for most of the time. It just looks cheap and horrible and I can’t help but think that maybe more extensive use of CGI effects might have been planned but either money or, perhaps more likely, time... was not on the side of the crew here? Yeah, I don’t know why but it just felt wrong. I’m hoping this is not the same kind of effect/look they’re going to be going for in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 when it comes out... but if it is, you’ll certainly already know that by the time this review sees the light of day on this blog.

Countering that though, Mantis seemed a little less subdued as a character and given much more to do, asides from being revealed to Peter as being his half sister. She was great in this. I could have done with seeing a lot more of Nebula and Rocket though, truth be told.

And, yeah, that’s me done with Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special 2022... it was basically fine but, certainly in my household, I was in the minority. Most people here seemed to think it was pretty rubbish so, whatever, I certainly think it was by far the best of the stand alone Guardians Of The Galaxy adventures though*... which, to be fair, isn’t saying much but, no, again, it’s basically fine.

*Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 is better than all of them by a long chalk, it turned out.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3

Quill Life

Guardians Of
The Galaxy Vol. 3
Directed by James Gunn
United States/Canada/New Zealand  
2023 Marvel
UK cinema release print

Warning: There’s a spoiler in here in terms of regular character's mortality rate... you might want to steer clear if you don’t want to know.

Okay... the gang’s all here, again, for the third ‘stand alone’ installment of Marvel’s cosmic adventurers, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3. Well, I say ‘stand alone’ but, honestly, unless you’ve seen both Avengers Infinity War and Avengers End Game, you’re going to be totally lost on stuff like the relationship between Chris Pratt’s Peter ‘Star Lord’ Quill character and Zoe Saldana’s Gamora. Quick recap for those who missed it... after half the Guardians were temporarily lost to the Thanos blip, before which Gamora was killed by her adopted father, a version of her character from an earlier timeline was split off into the current ‘real’ timeline but before a time when she gelled with the group and became Quill’s girlfriend.

Joining Pratt and Saldana are the regulars like Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Bradley Cooper as Rocket Racoon, the brilliant Dave Bautista as Drax The Destroyer, Vin Diesel as Groot, Sean Gunn as Kraglin and, of course, the illustrious Karen Gillan as Gamora’s sister Nebula. Sylvester Stallone also returns in this one... and Will Pouter shows up as the long teased Adam Warlock character. They’ve also expanded the role of Cosmo... who everybody must realise (and it’s made even more implicit here) is the Marvel version of Laika, the first dog in space. She has a lot of good scenes in this one and I really enjoyed her character here.

And the whole film is... pretty good, actually.

My track record with the Guardians Of The Galaxy films is not so great. I kinda liked the first movie but, honestly, the second one was truly awful. I only properly warmed to them when they were absolutely great in Avengers Infinity War but, well, yeah, the less said about their Christmas special last year the better. I do have a review of that one but didn’t manage to get it up before the end of the 2022 Christmas season so, I’m holding that one for December this year. This one though is... pretty good. Not as good as thier Infinity War appearances but, of the three cinema released movies with their collective name in the title, I’d have to say this is easily the best one.

This one has a dark heart too, with an opening which leaves the Guardians in a tragic state of imbalance and going on a quest to try and save the life of Rocket, who is left in a coma. While he’s in that coma we get regular flashbacks to how he got from being a simple racoon from Earth to what he is now (think space vivisectionists). The film is full of the usual action, good dialogue and... yeah okay, the usual unfortunate needle dropped songs which show a certain taste on behalf of the production team that certainly doesn’t gel with my own, alas.

The stakes are high but, they’re not the usual ‘universe is in peril’ kind of stakes we usually see thrown at these characters. Instead, each of their missions as they occur are arrived at due to their personal jeopardy. They are all there for their friends in a way, due to Rocket’s back story, he couldn’t be. That being said, although the trailers teased Star Lord’s seemingly lifeless body being carried by Mantis (something which actually occurs pretty early on in the film’s running time), this film has none of the regular characters dying, despite the marketing saying this is the Guardian’s last outing... which I didn’t expect. I mean, they trailer teased it so it looks like we’d lose Peter Quill at some point... so I was pretty sure that wouldn’t be one the cards at all. But I was also expecting at least three of the other characters to die but, no, they’re all alive and well at the end and the actors are easily able to drop in en masse or individually in any future Marvel movies, should the wage packet be sufficiently convincing. Indeed the last of the post-credits scenes already stated that a certain character will definitely be returning at some point. so, yeah, there’s that.

All in all then, a short review for a movie with the only real problem* that, at two and a half hours, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 seems like it might have benefited from having a much leaner edit. But it’s just fine as it is and my favourite character here, by a country mile, was Cosmo (aka Laika) the Russian space dog. And, yes, for those who want to know, Howard The Duck gets another cameo in this one. 

* Actually, having slept on this review, I realise there is another BIG continuity problem with the film. Peter Quill left Earth with a boy and clearly hasn't kept up with Eath culture, as evidenced by him askeing Spider-Man if Footloose is still the greatest movie ever, in Avengers Infinity War. How come, then, he can throw an insult which includes a reference to Robocop, a film made long after he'd departed from Earth culture? Makes no sense! Bad writing.

The Suicide Squad

Starro Starro Night

The Suicide Squad
USA/Canada/UK 2021
Directed by James Gunn
Warner Brothers

Warning: This one has lots of spoilers so,
yeah, if you don’t want to know... don’t read.

Wow... it has to be said, in the long lineage of movies and theatrical serials based on DC comics characters going back to the 1940s, James Gunn’s sequel (ahem... sorry... I meant ‘soft reboot’... nah, it’s a sequel) to Suicide Squad (reviewed here), entitled The Suicide Squad, has to be somewhere within the top ten. Or if you’re counting just the modern DC Expanded Universe films... easily within the top three. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this film all that much, it has to be said but, when I saw it I was completely bowled over by just how brilliantly put together it is.

Okay, so the film stars a few actors reprising their roles from previous DCU movies... Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Joel Kinnaman as Rick Flag and Viola Davis as Amanda Waller. It also stars a huge amount of heavy weight actors in various roles, far too numerous for me to mention here but a quick taster would be Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher 2 (who really is the emotional heart of the movie), Idris Elba as Bloodsport, John Cena as Peacemaker, Peter Capaldi as Thinker and Sylvester Stallone as the voice of the wonderfully animated shark character, King Shark. They and all their co-stars are absolutely brilliant in a movie, which is as unpredictable (for the most part) as it is wildly entertaining and it’s one of those near perfect comic book movies where it gets almost everything right.

The film starts off before the opening logos have even started, with a Johnny Cash song which immediately ties into the opening prison scene. Most of the characters who make up the Suicide Squad this time around are newcomers (apart from Flag and Harley Quinn) and we have a very short introduction to the new characters in a kind of ‘fast forward’ through the recruitment process, including the Escape From New York style bombs implanted in the necks of the majority of the squad (and we also get to see what happens when one of those goes off). We then get the squad sent to the island of Corto Maltese, which of course is named after a character in a famous European comic book. If you remember, Kim Basinger’s Vicky Vale character in Tim Burton’s first Batman movie (reviewed here) was also known for her war torn photographs taken on the fictional island of Corto Maltese.

Anyway, I said this review contained spoilers and I’ll reveal now that, in a serious rug pulling exercise, of all the characters you meet in the early scenes, only two of the squad make it off the beach of Corto Maltese alive. It’s an explosive and incredibly violent scene which finishes most of them off before they’ve even started and... then we get the opening credits and find that Viola Davis’ character has been hedging her bets, with the first team being just a distraction to keep the military busy while another team landed on another part of the island. And then, as we get to know them, more hilarity, action and gory violence ensues as they go about their special mission to destroy the main bad guy of the movie, while of course, stopping to rescue the two surviving members of the other team who kept the military so busy. Well I say two surviving members but, the first of the two post credits scenes does one of the few things I was expecting to happen much earlier on in the film so, yeah, stick around when the end credits start up people.

And, actually, there are a few bad guys in the film but when I say the main bad guy I actually mean the main bad starfish. Yeah, that’s right. Anybody remember the truly ridiculous giant starfish character Starro The Conqueror? Starro first appeared in comics (and on the cover) in the very first Justice League Of America story from an issue of The Brave And The Bold in 1960. And as silly as the thing looks.. well... he looks even sillier in the movie but James Gunn somehow manages to pull off his character really well and, grounded by some of the truly visceral violence (there’s way more spilled blood in this one than most modern horror movies... think of the fourth Rambo movie and that should give you some idea), the big pink starfish smashing buildings kaiju style (which is also used as an ‘in film’ dialogue reference) works really well and you do fear that this could be the end of humanity as we know it... if the squad doesn’t think of something.

The film is extraordinarily fast moving, even in it’s exposition scenes... hey, if you want someone to move that kind of dialogue along fast without it getting boring, what can I say? Peter Capaldi was an excellent choice after his experience playing in Doctor Who... and it’s a real visual, eye candy assault on the senses. Some of the scenes, such as Harley Quinn breaking out of a prison, are handled in a very surprising, expressive, totally comic book manner while still being absolute adrenalin rushes of cinematic action. The whole thing works really well and even the practice of using songs to illustrate certain scenes (okay, I’d prefer it was just score utilised but hey, you can’t have everything)  is not overly distracting and gives the film a certain lift in some sequences.

My one complaint... and it’s a really minor one which most people might not notice, is that a couple of long shots don’t match up to what is happening in the close ups. For example, Harley Quinn looking to the upper right of screen in one scene and then cutting to a long shot showing her looking down at a corpse. Or the scene where she is being tortured with electricity and in one shot her feet are clenching through the pain but, when you see this repeated for a long shot, she’s forgotten to clench her toes up. It’s all pretty small stuff though and it really doesn’t hurt the film, which is frankly one of the best movies of the year.

Although the film certainly is a sequel and certainly fits in with the overall arc of the current crop of DCU movies, The Suicide Squad can also be used as a jumping on point because it barely refers to the other properties and it certainly would work as a stand alone movie when required. Truly one of the best movies DC and Warner Brothers have put out and fans of big budget comic book movies should definitely give this one some time. I can’t wait for the Blu Ray myself.

Brightburn

Tyger Tyger

Brightburn
USA 2019 Directed by David Yarovesky
UK cinema release print (brutalised by collusion with the BBFC).

Brightburn is a movie produced by James Gunn, written by his brother and cousin - Brian and Mark Gunn - and directed somewhat brilliantly by David Yarovesky. The film takes place in the fictional town of Brightburn in Kansas and it’s clear that the location is this story’s Smallville. This is one of those 'superhero goes wrong' stories (like Chronicle, reviewed here) but it’s a concept which hasn’t been done too often on film... although, to be fair, it’s probably been done to death in various books and comics over the decades.

This one, in fact, is not afraid to wear it’s influences on its sleeve and there are many references in origin and similarity to the famous DC comic book character Superman. This is because the movie makers really don’t want you to forget this here... it’s what the film is really about. In fact, this is almost, in some ways and in all but copyright evading names, characters and situations only, a typical example of a DC Elseworlds comic book writ large on the big screen. To further extend that analogy, this time in a Marvel comics concept, it’s a What If...? story. Except the premise here, as you will no doubt know from the iconography of the crashed spaceship with it’s infant cargo landing in Kansas in the trailer, is... “What If Superman Had Crashed On Earth As An Infant But, Instead Of Choosing To Use His Alien Powers For Good, He Goes Psychotic At The Age Of Twelve And Uses Those Powers To Kill People In Fairly Unpleasant Ways”. Except, you know, Brightburn is a lot shorter title and really works a whole lot better, I suspect.

Now, this is very clichéd, to be sure. All the set ups within the plot such as the main antagonist’s personal Kryptonite (nicely saved to a point where it becomes tenuous as a weapon by the end of the movie) and the way the central antagonist, young Brandon Breyer (played with an impressively sinister demeanour by child actor Jackson A. Dunn), is shaped by negative experiences at school and also the influence of the remnants of his alien heritage reprogramming him... are easy to spot coming a mile off. Both Elizabeth Banks and David Denman as his parents, Tori and Kyle, are equally impressive as two individuals who want to do right by their son and fail to see him, at first, as the psychopathic alien monster he has become. Everything falls into place nicely but...

... but it is still very clichéd and there aren’t any real surprises. But here’s the thing with that... Brightburn is still a very interesting and completely entertaining film and, since it’s one of the first to really get to grips with this on the big screen (and especially within an almost strict Superman template)... it really does need to be clichéd and play to those expectations to keep the audience interested in the characters. To keep the audience in suspense. Which it does, in no uncertain terms.

One of the director’s ways of doing this was, it seemed to me, a little odd. In that, he takes an overtly voyeuristic stance. He’ll go from an establishing shot and either cut or move the camera to take you in further to pull you into a scene but... and here’s the thing... he does it a lot and, sometimes, even within a scene that already playing out. So he’ll cut away from the mother, say, to bring the camera back from another, distant vantage point... and then slowly pull you back to her again. Normally this might be a little distracting but the way he manages to pull it off here, without really popping the audience out of the action... indeed, using this technique to draw them in further... is very well executed and I’m wondering now if this particular way of shooting around a scene, which gives the camera a very distant, fly on the wall kind of voyeuristic atmosphere, is something this particular director does in every film he works on.

Also, there’s a lot of cross-cutting between two separate scenes in this, almost too much... and he uses this to accomplish two things. One is the obvious thing where he uses two adjacent sets of events to make a visual metaphor about some subtext of the film but, the other thing he does with this... and I guess it’s kind of a traditional thing to use this way of editing things together but it really works well here... is to build suspense when you don’t know just how close the lethal boy is to walking/flying into the other sequence and letting loose his child-like wrath.

Talking of which, when he does let loose said wrath, it gets pretty grim and disturbing. Now I knew before I went to see this that the film has been edited for violence in two places by the film company in collusion with the accursed BBFC in order to get it a lower, 15 rating. Normally I would just boycott the film accordingly but, like Aquaman before it, I was very interested in seeing this so, in those kinds of instances, my cinema trip basically becomes a window shopping trip. I know I’m not really watching the film but I can see roughly what it looks like so, when the US edition of the Blu Ray comes out, which will be an uncut version, I can just import it over and have that version instead (and probably before it even gets released in this country, I suspect). So yeah... definitely one of my ‘try first’ before buying the real deal trips and, in regards to this film, yeah I’ll definitely be grabbing a US edition of the film at some point.

Now I’ve got that out of the way.... even with those two cuts here, the film is still truly gory and violent. It’s not just the normal grimness you get when you see a young, sinister kid committing murders... these are elements of goriness which are especially graphic with human flesh and bone mangled into something it’s not supposed to be on characters who, more often than not, don’t die quickly. Now some of those set pieces you will see coming... every kid has wondered just what Superman could do with his heat vision if made angry... others you won’t, especially in terms of lingering on the violence and playing with it once the initial physical assault is committed. There’s a lot of bloody demise here so I’m truly interested in seeing what the BBFC suggested the company removed. Time and heinous US postal fees will tell soon enough, I guess.

So, yeah... really not much to say in criticism of Brightburn, to be honest. At least not in terms of negative criticism. The audience I saw it with were on the edge of their seat and I thought this was a perfectly good attempt at making a horror movie which is, in all the obvious ways, an anti-superhero movie. A super-villain movie, I guess... in a year where we’ve already had Glass (reviewed here) and with a Joker movie soon upon us. If you’ve seen the trailer for Brightburn and liked what you saw... well, this does exactly what it says on the tin but in a way which doesn’t run out of steam and is not overly long. An easy recommendation from me for fans of both horror and superhero movies. I’m hoping we’ll get some kind of well made sequel to this one at some point in the future. I can see how this could be expanded in a few directions.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2

The Groot, The Bad
And The Ugly

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2
USA 2017 Directed by James Gunn
UK cinema release print.

And so I come to one of the Marvel movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) that I’d been looking forward to the least... Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2. I’d been wary of this one because the first of the GOTG movies (reviewed by me here) was one which, although I found it mildly entertaining and, perhaps, gave it a better review than it deserved... I was mostly unimpressed by.

It’s been widely said already that this new volume in the series is either better than the first movie or at least as good as that one. I’d have to say that now I’ve seen this second outing, neither of these popular sentiments are something I would agree with. The second movie is at least consistent with the previous, though, in that it both fails and triumphs in the same areas as the first... for this viewer anyway.

Okay, the negative stuff. Action for the sake of action can be dull and mind numbing and this pretty much sums up a fair amount of my cinema experience with this one. Even though the movie was big and loud and dumb enough to be the kind of joyful Hollywood popcorn fodder I would hope for, this was a film in which I consistently found myself nodding off for a few seconds here and there, especially during the convoluted action sequences in the second half, which were edited in such a way that I couldn’t really work out what the heck was going on for a lot of the time anyway.

Perhaps one of the problems was that it felt like nothing was at stake. Even with a high stakes sacrifice towards the end of the movie (no, I’m not going to put any spoilers in here by elaborating on that statement), it felt kind of lifeless and ultimately like it was really not addling much to the current Marvel Cinematic Universe movies we’ve seen thus far. The director has gone on record saying that it’s a stand-alone piece and this does, at least on the surface, seem to be the case here. So you really don’t need to see this one to make sense of any of the MCU movies which are about to be unleashed on us... although there is at least one or two characters who would be unfamiliar or, in one instance, unexpected in their inclusion of future films if these characters are, as I suspect, making appearances in the forthcoming Avengers: Infinity War movie for 2018.

So yeah... for me this movie was noisy enough to keep me awake some of the time but, alas, dull and dreary enough for it not to succeed at that for any great length of time.

All that being said, there’s also some nice stuff happening in this movie too...

The regular Guardians cast... Chris Pratt as Starlord, Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Dave Bautista as Drax, Vin Diesel as Baby Groot, Bradley Cooper as Rocket Racoon, Michael Rooker as Yondu and Amy Pond herself, Karen Gillan, as Nebula... are all as solid as you would expect them to be and they are joined by such great actors as Pom Klementieff as Mantis and some old timer superstars such as Kurt Russel, Michelle Yeoh and Silvester Stallone. There’s some lovely stuff with a ‘younged up’ Kurt Russel set prior to the opening of the last movie which I can only assume is CGI and the character chemistry and development is, mostly, as good as it was on the first film... one of the strengths of the franchise, as far as I’m concerned. This meant, however, that as much as I enjoyed Bautista’s portrayal of Drax... he felt a little bit over-the -top and forced into his new role in some ways. Still pretty funny though, so there’s that.

And there were some great moments with characters from other bits of the Marvel Universe referred to or mostly unexplored getting a look in here. A character from the first movie which was a big surprise in the last one has another little moment here. There’s also a reference to a Christ-like Marvel figure who looks like he will at least appear in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Stan Lee continues his cameo against a creature (or creatures) who, similarly, also got his/their debut in the pages of Fantastic Four and this is all very nice. About that cameo... Stan has two sequences in this film and there are also, if you are interested, five post credits scenes in this one... which play out at regular intervals throughout the cast and crew shout outs. And absolutely none of them seem to have any relation to other movies upcoming in the MCU other than the creation of a certain person coming for Vol 3... who is mentioned by one name only. Also, about that Stan Lee cameo... it’s pretty cool because it references at least one other Stan Lee cameo and does so in a context where the seemingly random (as they were originally conceived) Stan Lee cameos can now be part of a single character cameoing at different points through Marvel history so... yeah, that was quite cool.

Ultimately though, as I said before, this wasn’t interesting enough of a movie to keep me from falling asleep for a few seconds at a time and it certainly, in my humble opinion, wasn’t as entertaining or as vastly ‘Universe trotting’ as the first installment. That being said, the audience I saw it with were certainly getting a kick out of it (kids dancing in the aisles to the end title sections) and if you were a big fan of the original movie then you are almost certainly going to love this one. Not a film I’d recommend to anyone else but, if you liked the original Guardians Of The Galaxy, then this is kind of a necessary watch, for you.

The Belko Experiment

War Gent Belko

The Belko Experiment
USA 2016 Directed by Greg McLean
UK cinema release print.

You know, I’ve probably had to overuse the expression “does what it says on the tin” rather a lot in my reviews over the last few months but, with regard to this film and the way it’s being marketed, it definitely is the “go to” phrase for this particular concoction. When I first saw the trailer for this a month or two ago, it looked like nothing less than a full on remake of the famous Japanese adaptation Battle Royale... with, perhaps, just a smidgeon of Cabin In The Woods thrown in for good measure. Battle Royale has the plot of one high school class taken away by the government every year for a live, televised event which see the kids fitted with exploding collars and then forced to kill each other within a specific time so the last person standing can be ‘the winner’. The Belko Experiment is exactly the same plot but, in this case, it’s adults who are working in an office building in Columbia who are part of the bloody carnage and the motivation, at least as it’s presented here, is slightly different in terms of why this ‘game’ is happening.

The film stars John Gallagher Jr. as main protagonist Mike Milch (who I recognised from 10 Cloverfield Lane, reviewed here). It's he who first realises that the trackers the company fits it’s employees with, inside their heads in case they are kidnapped, are actually tiny bombs planted in their skulls to detonate anyone who doesn’t play by the rules of the game. This is the equivalent of the exploding collars from Battle Royale and, of course, it’s used by the writer to establish the rules of the game in no uncertain terms pretty soon into the proceedings. Milch is joined by some pretty convincing actors and they all do their thing in the quite claustrophobic setting of the office building, which has been sealed up with metal to prevent anyone from escaping.

The film is not the kind of film I would associate with the writer, James Gunn, who directed the two Guardians Of The Galaxy movies... it’s a lot more sadistic and horror driven than that. It’s not an actual horror film but it is an intensely driven action thriller and the use of gory violence elevates the grimness of the scenario quite effectively at some points. It would be true to say that it’s not nearly as grotesquely bloody as many modern horror movies out there these days but, at the same time, it is quite edgy and certainly uses the visual syntax of horror to maintain a similar effect. The tension in the suspense scenes is quite high and the whole exercise has a certain amount of dread and, alas, a predictable inevitability about just where everything is going to be heading for the end of the movie.

About that ending... I’m not going to reveal anything here but I will say that I wasn’t expecting much in the way of actual hard answers as to the reason this carnage is going on. Sure, you do get some generic ones and there is, I suppose, a partial sense of closure at the end of the movie. That being said, the final shot of the film, which is a slow pull back looking at... something... very much sets this movie up to be only the first part in a franchise of Belko movies, to be sure. It’s in no way subtle and the very last line of the movie, spoken just before the credits roll, makes it very certain that if this film is successful then the studios will be able to start churning out the sequels.

That being said, despite its predictability, The Belko Experiment is a well made, somewhat entertaining (although also pretty mean spirited in its lack of morality and general unpleasantness) thriller which even has a nice line of musical jokes in the songs used in the soundtrack. The opening title song, for instance, kick starts the ‘fun’ with a series of foreign language covers which, if you know the English lyrics, provide a throwaway commentary on the action and intent of the film from the start. So that’s all good.

Wow... so this is one of my shortest reviews since my first year of writing them on this blog but I really don’t have much more to say about this movie, I’m afraid. If you are into the spectacle of violent cinema where people’s bodies are there to be penetrated by slow or fast moving objects as flesh is sliced and diced in ostentatious splashes of crimson, then The Belko Experiment is probably your kind of thing. If, however, you’re not into films where the characters are set up to be slaughtered in a mass celebration of violent bloodletting without, it has to be said, all that much criticism or judgement of such behaviour in the way in which the film is shot or in the issues it raises, then it’s probably something you should maybe approach with a little more caution. It’s not personally something I’d be that happy to watch again (unlike, for example, Battle Royale) but I do believe there’s a certain audience who will love this one and it's really not badly put together. Bon Appétit.

Guardians Of The Galaxy

Groot Point

Guardians Of The Galaxy
2014 USA
Directed by James Gunn
Cinema release print.

I was both pleasantly surprised and achingly disappointed by the release of the new Marvel Phase 2 movie Guardians Of The Galaxy. When the film was first announced as being another of the series in the linking Marvel story arc that kicked off with the first Iron Man film... I was a bit taken aback. The comic this is mostly based on is the 21st Century incarnation of the Guardians Of The Galaxy as opposed to the original 1969 team... and I have not read any of their original stories in any of the various team line-ups to be able to pass judgement on this film as an adaptation. I was, though, very worried about how Marvel would be able to pull off a movie with characters like Rocket Raccoon and Groot in it and still make it fit in with their other properties in such an intimate manner. The various trailers didn’t exactly endear me to the idea of going to see it either.

Sure, the groundwork had been done by Marvel in terms of sowing the seeds for a more intergalactic piece of their giant cinematic puzzle with the Thor films (which are reviewed by me here and here), which are set off-world, so to speak... and, of course, The Avengers movie (reviewed here), which shares a common villain with this one. The character of The Collector, for example, had already appeared in the second Thor movie and Thanos had already been revealed at the end of The Avengers (aka Marvel Avengers Assembled) as one of the major players in the conflict depicted in that movie. However, this didn’t change the fact that I was finding it mighty difficult that a film of this nature, which would probably end up as “just another space opera” (and kinda did, actually), would be able to slot in neatly with the other films in the series without looking incongruous. It’s a lot easier to get these kinds of mismatched crossovers to work in comic books than it is to do it in the movies, I’m sure.

That being said though... I was, as I said in my introduction, pleasantly surprised by the movie. For two reasons.

One is because... it’s not a terrible film. It’s not great but it is at least watchable and has some quite good moments which give it some entertainment value. The other reason is because, as it stands, I think this should just about slot into the current Marvel universe if the producers, writers and directors can do it very carefully and write to the various characters’ reactions and interactions with each other as they meet up in various films. I can imagine, for example, that a well written scene between Tony Stark and Rocket Raccoon would go down a treat.

This film opens very, very strongly with an opening, pre-credits sequence which is guaranteed to tear at the heartstrings and bring trickles of moisture from the audience’s eyes. We see the young Peter Quill, aka Star Lord, as he refuses to hold his mother’s hand and then she dies before he gets a chance to do that. He runs out of the hospital in his grief and is immediately kidnapped by aliens, one of the original members of the 1969 Guardians Of The Galaxy as it happens, although in this movie that character (played by Michael Rooker) is portrayed as a villain rather than a hero.

The cast is strong and the main players... Chris Pratt as Peter (Star Lord) Quill, Zoe Saldana as Gomora, Dave Bautista as Drax The Destroyer, Bradley Cooper as Rocket Racoon and Vin Diesel as Groot... are all really good in their roles... with special mention of Bautista who does a really good job at making me care about his character’s motivation. They all get some really nice dialogue in their scenes and it’s when they are interacting with each other in a way that doesn’t involve people punching, kicking, shooting or stabbing each other to death that their characters really get to shine through.

Similarly, there’s a good supporting cast of particularly reliable actors who are great in this including the always watchable John C. Reilly and the highly talented Karen Gillan, an actress I felt was somewhat wasted in this. She plays it very strong but the scripting seems to be working against her, I felt and the denouement of her character seemed to me, to be a triumph of the “quick technological special effects punchline” as opposed to anything which seemed earned by the main protagonists. It doesn’t help that a similar sequence is used right near the end of the movie either... people seem to be pulling out big guns and unloading them in the direction of the bad guys as a “quick fix” too often in this movie, I felt. It has to be said that Gillan’s portrayal of Nebula marked her out as the only villain in the movie that I felt even remotely intimidated by... so maybe casting her as a henchman... um... henchwoman, in a film which is already full of those kinds of characters, was a mis-step. She needed a bigger role to flesh out, I felt, and I hope the people in Hollywood are taking note of just how good she is at what she does. They need to play to her strengths more, I think.

However, for all of the good stuff... I had a very strong dose of negative vibes from the film also.

It’s a good film, no doubt about it. It’s entertaining when it needs to be and I felt like I could root for all the main protagonists in this one with no trouble. However, the plotting on this one seems a bit obvious and the film, filled with epic action and effects as it is, felt to me to be a bit like overkill when the story isn’t justifying it a whole lot. I would have preffered a much simpler film which doesn’t hurtle you from one scene to the next quite so blurringly. Also, I have to say, that apart from those often but brief bits of shiny dialogue, the whole thing felt kinda dull to me in places.

Of course, it didn’t help that I couldn’t follow the action on this one too easily, either. I’m sure the choreography of the various battles made a lot of sense on paper but, frankly, the way these scenes were edited together just kept losing me. I could maybe see a vague sense of the direction of the thing in the battle scenes but, honestly, I lost interest a little way into most of these scenes because they were either unremarkable, distractingly edited or seemed to be serving a storyline which seemed over simplistic for the “everything and the kitchen sink” attitude which seems to be prevalent for most of the film. About the best action sequence in this is when the five protagonists break out of prison but... that happens fairly early on in the movie and so, as far as action scenes go, you’ve already seen the best one before the film is even half the way through.

Again, I wasn’t feeling the music in this one either... which is strange since the inclusion of music in a diegetic role and as an important component of the Peter Quill character, means that music almost becomes a character in itself in this one. It was a main hook of the trailers too, as I recall, but... although I’m okay with pop music, it’s not really my main source of musical interest and I really didn’t like most of the songs featured in this movie. Tyler Bates score is appropriate and serves the film by giving it what it needs but, again, I didn’t notice anything really remarkable in this one... although that’s not always possible when it gets buried in the noisy mix of an action vehicle like it tends to here. I’ll probably get more of a feel for it if I ever get around to buying the score as a stand alone listen... but nothing in this movie screamed out at me, in terms of the music, which made me want to rush out and buy the score.

And that’s really all there is to it in my view. Guardians Of The Galaxy is not the disaster I was expecting it to be... but it wasn’t that great either. It’s an establishing movie, though, and it could well lead to better things for the on-screen Marvel Universe at a later date, I suspect. If you’re a fan of the Marvel movies in this cycle then you probably won’t want to miss it.. although I suspect it’s not as major a set up for the incidents in next year's The Avengers: Age Of Ultron as I’d initially suspected it to be. In terms of the overall arc I’ve a feeling that this one could probably be dropped out of the equation entirely and the next movie would still make 100% sense by the inclusion of key players from previous movies... so there’s that. Not a movie I will be rushing back to the cinema to see again anytime soon but I’ll probably take another look at it on DVD at some point next year because... I know my mother liked it. As usual with Marvel films now, there is both a mid-end credits scene and a post credits scene and, I have to say, I wouldn’t be surprised if neither of them are necessary for understanding the next movie in the cycle... but if you are so inclined, you should probably stay for the final drop. All in all though, I wouldn’t exactly say I got hooked on a feeling for this movie.

Super

Panel Vision

Super US 2010

Directed by James Gunn

G2 Pictures Region 2

Warning: There’s a couple of superpowered

spoilers in here somewhere.

Hmmmm... how to review a film like Super.

Not too sure about where to begin on this one because, although it’s riding the wave of “real vigilante super heroes” movies in the wake of more prominent movies like Kick Ass... it’s also very different in both its intent and its tone.

The movie is of interest because, although the main protagonist Frank D’Arbo, played by Rainn Wilson, decides to “shut up crime” and becomes The Crimson Bolt... he does so without any real knowledge of, or emotional investment in, the four colour heroes that might be expected to have inspired him in the first place. This dysfunctional character, though, has suffered from strange visions all his life and after he loses his wife to a drug dealer... his motivation is to get her back. This is filtered by an overtly and humorously extreme Christian superhero on television (played by Nathan Fillion, no less) whose messages of over zealous purity strike a chord with Frank and soon he is down to the local comic shop and seeking “superhero origin” advice and research material from the owner, Libby (played by Ellen Page).

Libby does her best to point him to the right back issues and he returns, after his first failure at fighting crime, to check out non-super powered heroes and the weapons they use (Batman etc). He becomes The Crimson Bolt and his new weapon is a wrench with which he bops people over the head, usually leaving them half crippled or unconscious and covered in blood...

And here’s the thing...

Although the movie is very much played for laughs, it’s certainly a very black strand of humour and it’s also shot through with the hard question of whether masked vigilantes should be allowed to exist and what the consequences of using violence as a weapon against crime are. And, like the best movies of this kind, it certainly doesn’t pull any super powered punches in this department.

Things start to escalate (or should that be descend) rather quickly when Libby figures out the true identity of The Crimson Bolt and begs Frank to be his sidekick. She eventually wears him down but it’s obvious she is sexually attracted to Frank (who has no interest in this and has a very violent body reaction when she, kind of, rapes him in a fit of lust) and also much more interest with the violent side of the costumed shenanigans as a revenge against the unjust as opposed to attempting to tackle the issue in a more level headed manner. In her first outing as The Crimson Bolt’s sidekick “Boltie”, for instance, she nearly kills someone because she suspects he’s the guy who keyed her friends car. We’re way out of sight of “the punishment fits the crime” here people!

And that’s kinda the point.

Frank is certainly no better. Seriously hospitalising a man and woman because they pushed into a cinema queue instead of going to the back and when “Boltie” saves his life by driving into a man and crushing his legs against a wall with her car (laughing in his face gleefully after the act), he immediately forgives her and they become a team once more.

The violence is harsh, as is Frank’s bad moral judgement when he and Boltie go on their final mission together and he allows her to go with him. It’s then that he learns the responsibility and consequences of taking a teenage girl into the heat of battle with him... and in a way that he finds emotionally devastating, even as he rescues his wife (Liv Tyler) from the clutches of the evil drug dealer (Kevin Bacon) and his friends.

By the end of the movie Frank is pretty much in the same boat he was somewhere soon after the start of the movie... except he now has a pet rabbit and a lot of “proud memory moments” as symbolised by the amount of sketches he’s covered his wall with. He goes unpunished by the law (and seems to have recovered from the amount of bullet hits he took during the course of his short-lived career as The Crimson Bolt) but at the same time you kinda feel that, while he’s probably not learnt much, he has at least rescued and liberated and truly saved the person he most loved in the world (although I don’t want to give away too much about how their relationship continues after that... please watch the movie) and there is a certain sense of redemption by the last few moments of the movie, even if that redemption cost more lives than it was possibly worth.

Super is a film which asks us to consider issues. The film poses these kinds of questions about “at what point the self proclaimed good guy fighting for justice becomes far worse than the criminals he is trying to punish”, without trying to force feed us answers or buy into a certain morality. It’s job is just to ask these things and leave you something to ponder once the movie is done... not ram solutions down our throats. As such, I found Super to be a quite refreshing antidote to many of the bona-fide superhero movies which have played on our screens over the last ten years or so and would definitely point this one out, for the same kinds of audience who are attracted to that kind of product, to add to their viewing list. This one’s definitely worth a look.