Recent movies

I had a couple of emails asking “hey, when are you going to do another movie review roundup?” I’m pleased people actually read those posts, so let’s take a look at some of the movies I watched so far this summer/late spring.

ANT MAN & THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA

I’d say this was the weakest of the three ANT MAN movies.

Lately, Disney/Marvel gives the impression of an empire that is in rapid decline, or perhaps a bus with the wheels falling off. There are any number of theories – the Disney corporation’s massive debt load, the time bomb of the Hulu/Comcast deal, backlash over the company’s embrace of certain political positions, the company losing its creativity and running out of IP it can cannabalize, Bob Chapek’s mismanagement, Bob Iger’s mismanagement, the US culture war making it impossible to appeal to a fractured mass audience, all the popular Marvel characters dying off and retiring, Disney’s near-infallible gift for alienating its top talent, Disney+ cannibalizing most theatre sales, Disney+ losing a 1.5 billion dollars, superhero genre fatigue, or overworked VFX artists getting fed up. Maybe it’s a combination of all of those things, or perhaps none of them.

Anyway, all that is an aside. I think QUANTUMANIA has two problems.

First, the previous two ANT MAN movies worked because they were generally humorous heist movies. The villains were fairly comedic – the corrupt CEO in the first one, the corrupt weapons broker in the second, and the honest but awkwardly earnest FBI agent in the second. QUANTUMANIA has Kang as the villain, and he’s super-serious and brooding, making him a bad fit for an ANT MAN movie. Given the actor’s recent troubles, Marvel probably regrets choosing Kang as the next Big Bad of their movies to replace Thanos.

Second, there was just way too much CGI. When the Ant Man family gets zapped to the Quantum Realm, everything becomes CGI. You could tell the poor actors were trying really, really hard to emote on a green screen sound stage. Peter Jackson’s THE HOBBIT trilogy fell into the same trap. THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy holds up so well because so much of it was done with practical effects. The same cannot be said for THE HOBBIT or QUANTUMANIA.

One minor point was that Ant Man’s daughter Cassie started out as a very annoying character. That’s just what we need – another teenaged daughter of a rich man come to tell us how to live from a position of smug self-righteousness! She does get better in the second half of the movie, though.

Overall grade: C-, maybe D+

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES

I had doubts about this, but it was really good.

The biggest mistake that a Dungeons & Dragons movie could make was taking itself too seriously, since Dungeons & Dragons, if you think about it, is kind of ridiculous. But HONOR AMONG THIEVES hits the right balance of tongue-in-cheek humor without losing a sense of internal logic. The characters often act exactly the way you would expect a Dungeons & Dragons party to act, including hilariously bad decisions at times.

The plot is disgraced bard Edgin, aided by his best friend, the barbarian Holga, wants to reconnect with his estranged daughter, who has been in the care of a former thieving colleague named Forge. However, it turns out Forge has been lying to Edgin’s daughter about her father for years, and he has the backing of some seriously dark wizards.

Adventure & hilarity both ensue. (Some of the amusement comes from the fact that the chief villain thinks she’s in a serious grimdark fantasy movie, but she’s actually in a comedic Dungeons & Dragons adventure.)

There was some CG, but it was used quite a bit better than in QUANTUMANIA. Like, it made better use of the CGI. The characters would be riding through a landscape and they would have a fantasy city in the background, that kind of thing.

I heard some people argue that the movie didn’t do quite as well at the box office as anticipated because of all the many ways Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast alienated their core audience via sketchy behavior. I don’t doubt the part about sketchy behavior, but I think the real problem was that while Dungeons & Dragons is now more mainstream than it’s ever been, it’s still not mainstream enough to support a big budget movie.

All that aside, it was an excellent movie and I enjoyed it. Hopefully it gets sequels with the same team, but that seems unlikely.

Overall grade: A

MASTER & COMMANDER

This was pretty great. It’s based off the Aubrey-Maturin historical novels by Patrick O’Brian, set during the Napoleonic war. Aubrey is the captain of the HMS Surprise, while Dr. Maturin is the ship’s surgeon and Aubrey’s confidant. The HMS Surprise is sent to defeat a French privateer ship called the Acheron, but the Acheron’s captain outwits Aubrey and escapes. Aubrey sets the Surprise after the Acheron, to the growing worry of Maturin and the other senior officers, who fear that it is becoming an obsession.

The movie manages to capture the grim reality of life aboard a 19th-century British warship (amputations, bad food, 14 year old boys serving as officers, etc) without wallowing in grimdark the way modern historical fiction often does. It builds to a slow burn when Aubrey at last has a chance to attempt to outwit the Acheron’s captain.

Honestly, the pacing reminded me a bit of an 80s movie – slow build, and more leisurely character scenes than a lot of modern cinema, but no shortage of action for all that. Definitely recommended.

Overall grade: A

FAST X

The FAST & THE FURIOUS movies are what you get if the screenwriters take logic out back behind the barn and shoot it. I mean this in a complimentary way. In the first movie, Dominic Toretto and his team were basically stealing DVD players in East LA. Twenty years and ten movies later, they’re flying cars in space, battling international terrorists, and Dom has apparently acquired the superpower of suspending the laws of physics whenever he drives a car.

In other words, glorious, over-the-top spectacle. You don’t come to a FAST movie to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. No, you come to watch our plucky group of ethnically diverse bantering heroes drive cars real fast and flip off the laws of physics while battling megalomaniac villains.

In this installment, the son of the evil drug lord from back in FAST 5 (the best of the movies, in my opinion) returns and swears revenge on Dom and his family. Jason Momoa ably plays Dante as an affably deranged psychopath (though when he gets really ticked off, the games stop and the charming mask drops). Sadly, FAST X ended on a cliffhanger, so hopefully the sequel will get made.

Overall grade: B

JOHN WICK CHAPTER 4

First things first – the JOHN WICK movies are ridiculously violent. Olive Stone recently made a minor bit of news when he complained about the unrealistic violence in the JOHN WICK movies. Which is the point, since JOHN WICK is about the fantasy of violence the way Hallmark movies are about the fantasy of true love. The reality of violence is quite a bit different than the fantasy, though thankfully the reality of true love is quite a bit different than the reality of violence.

Anyway, enough philosophical rambling. If you don’t like movie violence, then the JOHN WICK movies are not your cup of tea.

The JOHN WICK movies have achieved something near-impossible – they achieved the same high level of quality and tone across all four movies. The series has two great strengths – the elaborate fight scenes, and the intricate worldbuilding of the underworld. In Real Life, criminals tend to do what they want until they screw up and get arrested, or get killed by their rivals. In JOHN WICK, the criminal underworld is governed by elaborate and byzantine rules, with brutal punishments for any infractions.

JOHN WICK 4 gives the story of Mr. Wick a satisfying ending, with the door open a crack if Keanu Reeves decides he wants to do more of them. In this final installment, Wick has a chance to finally get out from under the thumb of the High Table, the sinister council that rules over the underworld. But to do it, he’ll have to face his old friends.

As an aside, every country John Wick visits must experience a drastic reduction in crime – every underworld goon and assassin comes after Mr. Wick, and then he kills them all. Like, personally! After John Wick visits a country, it must be impossible to hire an assassin there, because John Wick killed them all on his way through.

Overall grade: A+

ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

Absolute masterpiece. It maximizes what a superhero movie, an animated movie, and a multiverse story can do. (And I generally don’t even like multiverse stories.)

I have to admit when I saw the first movie, INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE, back during COVID (it turned up on Netflix) I wasn’t enthused. An animated movie about a multiverse? No thanks. But I watched it and it was really good, so I made the effort to see the sequel in the actual theatre.

The animation is not only gorgeous, it pushes the limits of what animation can actually do in terms of the storytelling.

I suppose it is amusing that of the four movies about multiverses that I actually liked, three of them were Spider-Man (Spider-Men? Spider-People?) movies.

It is very regrettable that the working conditions for the animators were apparently awful, but (as we mentioned with QUANTUMANIA) that may be a problem across the film industry as a whole. Which, to be fair, generally has a lot of problems and doesn’t seem like a great place to work in general.

Overall grade: A+

-JM