FOUR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

The best and maybe the only compliment I can pay to Fantastic Four, the third unsuccessful attempt at bringing the oldest of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's creations at Marvel Comics to the big screen, is that it's not obviously the worst of a sorry lot. Its big budget and generally solid (though not at all state-of-the-art) visual effects don't nearly compensate for the gung-ho charm of the unreleased 1994 film, famously made for $1 million to secure the production rights to the material, which improbably remains the best version of the story despite resembling a fan video made by some sugar-jacked kids in the basement. But its insipidities, and it is very insipid, aren't inherently worse than those of the ghastly 2005 big-budget version, just different. That film heralded the end of the "brightly colored larks that are wholly insubstantial but also not much fun" era of comic book movies; time alone will tell if its 2015 sibling will similarly ring down the curtains on the "ludicrously dark and serious-minded exercises in bitterness and misery" era, though I think we should be hopeful. Because Fantastic Four '15 is, if it is anything, alarmingly dark and serious-minded, to the point of parody.

How much of this is due to the awkwardly visible fencing match between director Josh Trank and the executives at 20th Century Fox is beyond our ability to say for certain. It does feel like a movie that wants to be anything than what it is: I am especially thinking of the rumors that Trank was hoping to make PG-13, summer-friendly body horror. There are vestigial traces of that conception: most notably, the giant rock-man Ben "The Thing" Grimm (Jamie Bell) darkly responding "I'm used to it" when asked if his body hurts. I guess it would have been better for the film to have gone all the way; at least then the incongruous bleakness of tone would have felt like it had some actual purpose. As it is, the movie doesn't have any clear intentions or personality, flattening everything into a single mood of aimless, sullen detachment, not caring about anything but just grinding through its leaden 100 minutes and getting it the hell over with. If it is possible for cinema to suffer from clinical depression, this is exactly what I'd expect it to look like.

The film laboriously reworks one of the most well-known origin stories in superhero comics, taking its cues from the Ultimate Marvel line rather than the more familiar story initially set out by Lee in 1961 (that is, the Fantastic Four are unlikable teenagers): in 2007, genius 5th grader Reed Richards (Owen Judge) set himself to the task of building a matter transporter, along the way picking up the support and friendship of classmate Ben Grimm (Evan Hannemann), a tough kid from a love-starved family, whose cruel older brother (Chet Hanks) would gleefully announce "it's clobberin' time!" before beating the 11-year-old into paste. Even if I had no goal but to write the bleakest possible grimdark parody of Silver Age comics, I don't think I could have come up with such a punishing origin for the Thing's corny-ass catchphrase. Anyway, Reed's early experiments are inconclusive, but by the time the two arrive in their senior year of college, with Reed now played by Miles Teller while Bell takes over Ben, he's almost got it down. And that brings him to the attention of Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), the director of the Baxter Institute, a research facility that has been working on very similar technology to open a portal to another dimension. Reed finds himself working alongside Franklin's son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) and adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara), as well as the former prodigy and current joyless slacker Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), and they succeed in cracking the technology necessary to travel to Planet Zero, a physical space made out of pure energy, or something like that.

Sadly, an unauthorised drunken trip to that dimension goes wildly wrong, leaving Victor stranded on Planet Zero and the other three boys warped by the transportation back, while Sue also gets fucked up even though she wasn't part of the trip for some reason. This leaves them with the usual suite of powers: Reed can extend his limbs far beyond their normal range, Sue can phase out of the visible spectrum and create force fields, Johnny can set his entire body on fire, and Ben is an invulnerable rock monster. They are immediately taken by the U.S. government in the form of Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson), who hopes to weaponise them; Reed escapes and tries to hunt for a cure while the other three sullenly learn to harness their new powers. A year later, the dimensional gate has been rebuilt, and a path re-opened to Planet Zero, which has now become Doom's hellish personal playground, from which he plans destroy all life on Earth.

Origin stories are all well and good, but this one is exceptionally methodical; it's not enough to show us how the Fantastic Four (not so named until the line immediately following the last line spoken in the film) came into being, we also need to understand in exact detail what their lives were like prior to the accident. That's literally all this film is, a distended first act that fleshes out backstory in three times the fulness it probably requires, minutely spelling out points that could be implied, and generally using expository dialogue on the principal that you can never be too specific and it's better to have characters say everything germane to the moment all at once than to make them sound like human beings. I do not think we should blame the writers - Trank, with Simon Kinberg & Jeremy Slater are credited - who were dealing with one of the most extensive reshoots of any major tentpole film in recent years, and could hardly be expected to make a shapely creation out of this gross hybrid.

Besides, there's probably something in this: a more psychologically-oriented, character-driven superhero movie is exactly what pop culture needs. It's a shame that Fantastic Four ends up with such compromised, indifferently-performed characters: to look at the highs and lows of their respective careers, one might not think that Teller, Jordan, Mara, and Bell would all end up underplaying their roles in more or less exactly the same way (for which we can almost certainly blame Trank), each of them walling themselves off from the other three and completely failing to make the connections that the "modern families can look weird but still be loving" conceit of the script absolutely demands: Mara and Jordan have a prickly dislike between them that's especially damaging given what a big deal the film makes about their polyglot family, while Teller responds to Mara with hostile chilliness in all the places that the script indicates that they should be flirting. And Bell (who is visibly far too old for the role) is completely checked-out, swallowed up by an American accent that sounds acutely painful.

Even setting aside its failure to execute the one thing that might have made it distinctive, Fantastic Four turns on itself the second that it puts its characters through their mutation. I can't recall if there's ever been a major big-budget superhero movie that breaks down so quickly and so completely as this one does after that "One Year Later" card. We know that whole sequences were ripped from the film, we know that much of it was re-conceived and re-shot, but it doesn't take following the gossip rags to sense that something went deeply wrong in putting the film together: Reed's escape ends up serving as nothing but a parenthetical, the return to Planet Zero is rushed and Doom's return and the battle to stop him abrupt and confusing, and the whole last 40 minutes generally ape the shape of a superhero movie without having any kind of meaningful content. It is as dysfunctional as anything in the genre has been since... I don't even know, Blade: Trinity? It's a damned ghastly wreck, anyway.

There is absolutely nothing in the aesthetics to prop this up: Matthew Jensen's cinematography uses the full palette of slate greys to be as unattractive as possible, and George L. Little's costume design fully commits to the trend of superhero garb looking functional in the bluntest way, all drab blacks and technologicalish lines. The score by Marco Beltrami and Philip Glass is a heartbreaking disappointment outside of its main collaborative motif, which mixes midcentury scientific optimism and contemporary soaring action music well, but otherwise sounds like a slightly less generic version of the banalities that show up in all the Marvel Studios films. The CGI is serviceable to very good, and is especially fin in the case of the Thing, captured in terrifically realistic shifts of rock against rock, aided by some great sound design. But the same veil of grimness that coats the rest of the visuals infringes on the CGI as well, and instead of being bowled over by how real and imaginative things are, it's easier to be depressed by how morbid Planet Zero looks, and how irritatingly off-putting they've made Doom's design.

It is, all told, a greatly joyless film, without any purpose to that joylessness; and it's dragged down further by its perfunctory, formless narrative. The homogeneity of recent superhero movies has very little to recommend it, but it means a certain level of basic competence: films this bad in that genre have been driven almost to the point of extinction. Hopefully, the failure of Fantastic Four on all fronts will be enough to finish the job.

3/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE FIRST FAMILY OF MARVEL

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: once again, it has proven impossible to make a remotely decent movie out of the seminal comic book Fantastic Four. Let us travel back in time to the movie that, against all odds, is still the best attempt that anybody has yet made.

This is a story wherein, if you're the sort who'd interested, you already know everything I'm about to say. But please bear with me anyway, because the backstory is the heart and soul of understanding how things could have ended the way they did. Once upon a time, the idea of making movies based on Marvel comic books was at best a pathetic joke, and because of this, German producer Bernd Eichinger was able to snag the rights to the oldest of all Marvel titles, Fantastic Four, for a mere pittance in 1986. This was after one studio, Universal, had already sat on the option long enough for it to run out, and Eichinger would do no such thing: he actively pursued big studios to partner with his Neue Constantin Film to make a Fantastic Four movie that all would be proud of, or at least profit from. But in those days, there had only ever been successful feature films made with Superman and Batman, and they were much too fussy and costly for anybody to roll the dice on such an uncertain project as a superhero movie.

As the deadline on Eichinger's option, 31 December, 1992, approached, he finally concluded that since no proper movie would be made, at least he could make an improper one, and thus retain his option for several more years. Wisely, he teamed up with Roger Corman, film history's greatest artist at stretching a budget to the breaking point and then beyond, to help produce his minimum opus, which went into production on 28 December. Their target was a release date in fall 1993, eventually bumped to January, 1994, but before that could happen, forward-thinking Marvel executive Avi Arad found out about the project, and rather than allow the release of such a tiny piece of shit dilute the brand name of one of his company's toniest titles, he bought out Eichinger and Corman, essentially paying them more than the production cost of their movie not to release it. The option remained, though, and some 22 years after all of this happened, any new Fantastic Four movie is still a co-production with Constantin Film.

And so that explains why the officially-unreleased The Fantastic Four, the story of a man who can turn into a fireball, a translucent woman, a man made out of a pile of rocks, and a man with long-stretching elastic limbs would have such an enormously insufficient budget as $1 million, and why it is now only possible to watch it in the form of bootlegs copied from a single full-frame VHS tape that leaked somehow. That does not explain why, for all of its flaws, those forced by its outrageous poverty and those which were simple the result of sloppy B-filmmaking, it's still the best Fantastic Four feature in existence. But it certainly is, and by my lights, it's no particularly close battle. It's insane to use the phrase "good faith" to describe any aspect of this particularly cynical production, but I truly do suppose that the filmmakers put in a good-faith effort to make the strongest and most respectful adaptation of the comic book that $1 million could buy in 1993. Whereas none of the big-budget films attempted since then have had much in the way of respect for the material, or even basic human decency.

The poor bastards tasked with turning this business proposition into a movie were writers Craig J. Nevius and Kevin Rock, and director Oley Sassone; between them, Sassone's work on the Don "The Dragon" Wilson picture Bloodfist III is the closest anybody comes to an earlier film credit that suggests that they even actually exist. What they turned out is about as thoroughly generic as an origin story gets; in college, Reed Richards (Alex Hyde-White) and Victor Von Doom (Joseph Culp) were best buddies, and they decided to perform an experiment tied to the closest approach of a comet-like energy object called Colossus, which goes badly awry, killing Victor. Or does it? Of course not, but Reed won't find that out for ten years. During that time, he and his other best buddy Ben Grimm (Michael Bailey Smith) work on perfecting that experiment so they can execute it again when Colossus returns, this time without killing anybody. This involves flying Reed's experimental spacecraft right up next to the object; for reasons that honestly seem to be solely sentimental, they're bringing with them the now-adult children of Reed's college landlady, siblings Sue (Rebecca Staab) and Johnny Storm (Jay Underwood), and for a totally unnecessary dose of creepiness, it's clear that A) Sue joins the mission because she's been harboring a desire to jump Reed's bones ever since she was a child and he was a college student, and B) he's happy to have her join because he's now harboring the same desire, though thankfully it seems unlikely that he's been doing so for the intervening decade.

Things go amiss, they all get blasted with cosmic radiation, and they crash back on Earth with a new array of superpowers: Reed can stretch, Johnny can flame, Sue can disappear, Ben is a big strong rock dude (and is now played by Carl Ciarfalio in a suit). This is iconic stuff, Comic Books 101, I don't need to belabor it. Bitter that his condition alone can't be turned on and off, Ben leaves, and encounters the weird subterranean Jeweler (Ian Trigger), who has stolen a large gemstone vital to harnessing the power of Colossus, as well as kidnapping Alicia Masters (Kat Green), a blind sculptor, to be his bride. And Victor, now styling himself Dr. Doom and wearing a metal face mask to hide his scars, has popped back up trying to build a weapon using Colossus, and the four heroes must learn to channel their abilities to stop both villains.

All of that is messier when you're actually watching it, with the subplot around the Jeweler in particular feeling like it could have benefited from another draft or two. And, frankly, it could have benefited even more from having a more clearly defined villain than this original creation (there's no readily apparent reason not to have used the Mole Man, the very first bad guy in the Fantastic Four comics, who would have required only a little tweaking to the script). But for the most part, this is boilerplate superhero origin story shenanigans, albeit from a time when there were just a few superhero origin stories that had been filmed. The details, though, are anything but boilerplate: the stupefyingly low budget and fast-paced production schedule gives The Fantastic Four a boldly amateur charm, like watching a middle school play with infinite ambition to go with its near-complete lack of resources. The one place, surprisingly, that the low-scale production doesn't betray itself is in the costume used to turn Ben Grimm into the Thing: it doesn't really resemble a man of rocks very much (he looks like a '70s linoleum pattern come to life), but the mechanics of the face are surprisingly functional in the mouth and eyebrows, and Ciarfalio's physical performance is the best in the movie, making the suit itself seem flexible and organic.

The rest of the effects are, unsurprisingly, quite dreadful, with the Human Torch realised primarily through judicious cutting and Mr. Fantastic's stretching arms a comically awful rubber prop (transforming Sue Storm into the Invisible Woman is pretty straightforward, using techniques pioneered in the 1900s, but it's also totally unimaginative). And the costumes, sets, and makeup (the garish white patches of hair designed to make Hyde-White look old are especially unpersuasive) are plainly not up to the demands of a broad-scale superhero movie, looking like a bunch of Midwestern ladies whipped them up over the weekend.

Where the cheapness shines, though, is in the unmodulated, one-take performances, ranging from the professor (George Gaynes) in the first scenes whose enunciation is delightfully stiff and formal (pronouncing "radioactive" as two discrete words is my favorite), to the '50s sitcom bigness of the doctor (Robert Beuth) who overreacts to the team's curious physical conditions, to the leads themselves. Hyde-White is generically unctuous, and Smith is actually good, insofar as the role gives him anything to be good with. But the other leads are all over the map, with Underwood screaming like a tweaked-out junkie and Culp hamming and camping it up like Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers films, only done deadly straight. The sheer ebullience of the performances is totally unacceptable, but so joyfully bad and low-rent that it gives the film a genuine personality as the kind of bad movie that everybody involved plunged right into rather than felt their way through cautiously. And that is the best kind of bad movie. It's hokey as all hell, the final act is made of pure idiocy (culminating with the Human Torch, in the form of ghastly CGI, outraces a laser beam) reliant on clichés every step of the way, and there's simply no way for the action to look like anything but people bumbling about in underlit sets, but through all of this, The Fantastic Four is surprisingly cheery and committed to the cheap world it barely builds. And this is better than can be said for any of the subsequent attempts at doing the same material on a halfway-decent scale.

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ANTS, THEN, WHEREVER YOU MAY BE

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

Ant-Man is maybe the most typical film yet made in the now 12-picture Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is up to the individual viewer to decide if that's a compliment or a vicious & lacerating criticism. But it's really hard to think of it as anything other than a factory-pressed rebuild of the same basic story beats, character arc, gags, and conflicts that have become locked-in through Marvel's seven-year multifranchise experiment.

The film's distinguishing elements are all at the margins: in the hands of director Peyton Reed (who is much more in Yes Man-style "mercenary hack" mode than Down with Love-style "crafty stylist" mode), this is the most generously comic of all Marvel films to date, with the zippiest, silliest performances; the stakes are refreshingly low, and there's no aerial battle with the fate of nations and worlds at stakes in the final act. The cinematography by Russell Carpenter - an Oscar winner for Titanic - is distinctly more interesting than anything in any Marvel movie so far, with something resembling a thought-out purpose for the muted lighting. In concert with the production design by Shepherd Frankel and Marcus Rowland, it strips back some of the polish and gleaming surfaces in the Marvel movies of yore, to make a film that feels like it takes place in an actual world.

Behind the uncharacteristically soft visuals, though, lies a perfectly ordinary story, originally by Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish, then revised and "Marvelified" by Adam McKay & the film's star Paul Rudd when Wright dropped out of directing in 2014. I should say, "perfectly ordinary at best", since whatever would have been true of Wright's version - and there's really nothing even vestigial in the script that tells me that this wouldn't have been his worst movie - it's unquestionably true that the corporate insistence on tying the movie in with the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe, the most persistently-rumored explanation for Wright's departure, has had specific negative effects across the board. The film opens with a gaudy, stultifying scene whose awe-inspiring CGI avatar of a youthful Michael Douglas is its sole justification for existing, while its pointless introduction of minor characters from the franchise's established back history, is conspicuously unnecessary in every way; later on, the most spurious and least-interesting action setpiece, by far, is the one that exists solely to introduce a pre-existing character into the goings on. The dozen or so lines of obviously inserted dialogue self-consciously referencing the other movies in the franchise all clang uncomfortably against the rest of the movie - there is a scene in which Douglas, otherwise a cheery, charismatic presence, downshifts so hard to talk about Robert Downey Jr's unseen Tony Stark that one half-wonders if Douglas was trying to get the line snipped from the final cut of the movie through turning in a totally unacceptable take.

The less corporate Ant-Man gets, the more enjoyable it is, though there are problems that go down to the bone: the Marvel problem with boring villains, for one thing, has only ever been worse in Thor: The Dark World, with slimy corporate boss Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) steadfastly refusing to be interesting for any other reason than his arrestingly shiny bald head. But at least the plot tries to have something animating it. Newly-released con Scott Lang (Rudd), desperate for any way to reconnect with his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson), over the objection of his ex-wife (Judy Greer, in a role marginally less thankless than her performance as the wallpaper in Jurassic World) and her boyfriend Paxton (Bobby Cannavale), almost turns back to crime. But he is saved by Dr. Hank Pym (Douglas), a disgraced genius ever since his refusal to weaponise his miraculous Pym Particles. These particles, in combination with a contained environment, allow him to change the size of any human being down to the size of, well, the title makes it pretty clear what size Scott ends up becoming for large portions of the movie. The mission: stop Cross from selling the rediscovered shrinking technology to God knows what kind of shady characters. The stakes: two different generations of shitty dads attempt to reconnect with their daughters. For Pym's resentful offspring Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly, making a generic "The Girl" role even shallower through her colorless performance) is his man on the inside, and she's disgusted by his literally patriarchal refusal to let her take on the Ant-Mantle, at least up until the sequel hook.

The littleness of Ant-Man is extraordinarily soothing after the increasing bloat and bombast of Marvel movies in the past few years: no more plot than breaking into a single facility, and the emotional hook of lousy parents wanting to redeem themselves but not knowing how is refreshingly intimate and humane. It's not always the case that the execution is up to the concept: Lilly is a tremendous detriment that the film has a hard time compensating for, and nothing that Rudd does can make the "criminal dad resents his burly rival for his child's affection" stock scenario feel minutely insightful, while Cannavale and Greer are just going through the motions.

But more of Ant-Man is likable than not, especially when it goes off the map completely to indulge most fully in comedy. The film's obvious secret weapon is Michael Peña, ostensibly just one of Scott's ex-con buddies and eventual helper, but beyond a shadow of a doubt the most captivating figure onscreen: what madness drove him to decide that the way to play the role was as a combination of a plucky reporter from a '30s screwball movie and the designated pothead from an '80s teen comedy is hard to imagine, but the results are truly impeccable. There's not a single line delivery that doesn't shock and delight me with its unexpected velocity; he's invaluable to selling the film's best conceit (which feels like Wright through and through, but it's been confirmed as a wholly new invention of Peyton Reed's tenure), in which he narrates nested flashbacks through a flurry of zoned out, slangy patter. I frankly don't want to ever watch another Marvel movie without Peña in it; his performance adds a lighting strike of weird, wonderful energy to Ant-Man and manages in the process to completely transform my expectations for what a superhero sidekick can be.

Even without Peña, there's enough bright comic momentum in the movie to make it fun to watch, when it's not going through the motions. The good news is, things never ends up in the latter rut long enough for it to detract from the film as a whole; the bad news is, there's enough of those longueurs that the whole movie, which is already overlong and far too slow to rev up, is rather sleepy and aimless, two unfortunate descriptors for a popcorn movie. Comic book pictures have been worse - comic book movies have already been worse in 2015, frankly - but they're not usually this indistinct.

6/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: TALKING ANIMALS AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the plot of Ted 2 touches on the sex life of a human woman and a talking animal brought to life with top-end effects. How nice it would have been if I couldn't come up with another such creation.

Howard the Duck isn't as bad as you've probably heard, but since you've probably heard that it's bad enough to melt the polar ice caps and give puppies cancer, that's not much of a defense. Still, let's run with it a little bit: as a story, it's neither more convoluted nor more contrived than any other '80s big budget creature feature and sci-fi romp (a bigger subgenre than I've just made it sound), and it has mostly the same strengths and limitations of any given superhero origin story in the three intervening decades. Jeffrey Jones dives right into a chewy, garish role, and makes a splendidly creepy voice as the family-friendly adventure bad guy. And I think that taps me out pretty much. There's nothing else good here; the best to cling to is that some of the elements are merely insipid and not actively rancid.

The film's origins stretch back to 1973, when Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik created a cynical, sarcastic three-foot tall anthropomorphic duck from another planet for Marvel Comics. Howard the Duck quickly found a spot in the Zeitgeist, ushered by Gerber into a potent force of comic book satire, running the character for U.S. President in 1976 among several less-showy examples of the character mocking society, pop culture, and the comics medium itself. He was as close to an underground comic book sensation as a character owned by one of the two big publishing concerns could get.

By the early 1980s, following Gerber's acrimonious split from Marvel over issues of creative control with the character, Howard wasn't quite the sensation he'd been in the previous decade. There was still enough there there for the character to attract the attention of the man who was, at that point, perhaps the most powerful individual in the American film industry: George Lucas, producer and overseer of the Star Wars trilogy, and the power behind Steven Spielberg's throne on the two Indiana Jones movies. In 1984, a year after Return of the Jedi, Lucas was in a position to do anything he could possibly have wanted, and what he wanted was... Well, the generous reading is that he just wanted a version of Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial to call his very own. I much prefer to believe that; it makes everything strictly a financial transaction. The alternative is to assume that Lucas was so infatuated with the Howard the Duck that he wanted to bring the creature to life, and so profoundly misunderstood the material that this ungainly display of ugly visual effects and nonsensical action sequences was in some way aligned with his actual vision. And that's just sad.

That being said, this is not a Lucas movie even in the sense that the Star Wars sequels that he didn't personally direct still count. Instead, it was a gift that the super-producer made to his longtime colleagues and friends, the married couple Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz. The thing to know about them is that they helped shape Lucas's 1973 breakthrough American Graffiti into a screenplay, and after its enormous success opened every imaginable door for him, he remembered them and what they did for him. As the intervening years made it clear that the Huyck/Katz magic was something nobody wanted much to do with, Lucas swept in and revived the couple's fading fortunes by offering them screenwriting duties on the heavily anticipated Indiana Jones and the Temple Doom; and once that was wrapped up, he blessed them with Howard the Duck, their seventh screenplay and Huyck's fourth movie as a director. It would turn out to be his last, as will happen when you direct a movie whose title quickly inserts itself into the cultural dialogue as a particularly mean-spirited synonym for "one of the highest profile bombs in the history of commercial cinema".

Huyck & Katz weren't the first filmmakers of limited talent to be given the reigns to a project because of their connection to a producer, and they weren't the last; but they might be the ones who got in over their heads the most. Howard the Duck was enormously expensive: some of the many 1986 releases that were made for less money include Top Gun, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Aliens. Something else those films all have in common: they were big hits. Not so for poor Howard, which made less than half of its production budget back at the domestic box office, and became so tainted by the reek of failure that it was feebly re-branded as Howard: A New Breed of Hero for the rest of the world's markets, where it still came nowhere near turning a profit.

It takes mere minutes for the sheer forcefulness of how repellent Huyck & Katz's script is going to be to make itself manifest: it opens on a tour of the apartment of one Howard T. Duck (voiced by Chip Zien and operated by several puppeteers and six different suit actors, though Ed Gale did it the most), a duck living in a city on Duckworld. It's like our world, only with ducks. And to demonstrate this, we see several duckified versions of our own world, like a poster for My Little Chickadee starring '30s duck superstars Mae Nest and W.C. Fowls. The apartment is also decorated with posters for Breeders of the Lost Stork and Splashdance, and at this point I was done with the movie. We still haven't seen the protagonist's face or heard a single word of dialogue, by the way. But "Splashdance" makes sense only vaguely in that ducks like water, and "Breeders" is just fucking nonsense. "Brooders" is at least bird-related. "Breeders" just means "the ducks like to have sex". Though that is a useful piece of foreshadowing for the remainder of Howard the Duck, which for a dippy talking animal movie with all the satire and nuance sanded off and replaced with shticky jokes for a family audience, is remarkably smutty. For example, the scene that immediately follows, where Howard is caught in a tractor beam of yet-unknown provenance and sucked through several apartments in his building. One of these apartments includes a lady duck taking a bath, and for reasons that I am anxious to learn nothing more about, the filmmakers wanted to make sure that she had preposterously detailed naked breasts, with pink nipples poking through her feathers.

On the backside of that tractor beam, Howard ends up in an alley in Cleveland, where he crosses paths with punk rocker Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson), who decides to help him figure out what the hell is going on. This first involves visiting a science lab janitor named Phil Blumburtt (Tim Robbins), who can do nothing at all but flail around crazily. Dejected, Howard fights his way into the Cleveland night, discovering that he can do nothing, and returning to Beverly, at which point they play-flirt and come about thiiiiis close to having sex, in a scene that should have been set on fire the moment it was written, and then set on fire twice when they actually went to all the work of filming it. Apparently, the mechanism to have the feathers on Howard's head stand up erect when he becomes aroused was the one of the most complicated effects involving any of the duck suits. This was a waste of Industrial Light & Magic manpower that borders on a moral crime.

Anyway, Beverly and Howard are interrupted by Phil, this time with a real scientist, Dr. Walter Jenning (Jones), who knows how Howard got to Earth, because it was his laser beam that brought him. Upon returning to his device, it malfunctions and warps another space being to our planet, this one a member of the Dark Overlords of the Universe, who inhabits Jenning's body and prepares to bring its allies here to eliminate humanity and take over. Naturally, only Howard, Beverly, and Phil are in a position to save the day.

That is a mercilessly stramlined version of the plot, which includes a lengthy side trip to Howard's job as a handyman at a sex club, and and even lengthier sequence at a diner that theoretically isn't more than a few minutes from Jenning's lab, but is also so far that it takes all night to drive back and requires commandeering an ultralight aircraft to fly back in time to save the day. Which is also a lengthy narrative digression that finds the movie stopping everything to lavish energy on a setpiece that is alarmingly flaccid and anti-exciting.

But while the script is a structural disaster and clunky at almost every line of dialogue, those are the least of the film's problems. The tonal mismatch present in the indecision between the blithe kiddie fantasy of most of the film and the unadulterated filthiness of a few key scenes is worse, exacerbated by Huyck's flat-footed direction. And it's not the only tonal imbalance in the film: Howard the Duck is, among its other sins, a comedy, and a particular wretched one with only one joke to speak of - he's like, a duck, but he acts like a person. Repeated ad nauseam, which only takes a few minutes. Certainly, the duck tits are about as nauseam as it gets. Mostly, the film tries to put over a playful, zany tone by getting really, really loud and broad, abetted by Zien's self-conscious delivery of almost everything he says in the arch tones of a sitcom catchphrase. The humans are much, much worse: Robbins's performance is a humiliating cartoon of '80s nerdiness, and Thompson plays a ditsy screwball character with such flighty detachment from anything going on in the plot or individual scenes that she appears to be the victim of some kind of terrible head injury. We know from the evidence of her nimble, insinuating comic performance in Back to the Future, just a year prior, that Thompson is not, in fact, the worst actor of the 1980s; but Howard the Duck certainly puts in a strong piece of evidence for the prosecution.

The film's worst element, though, is undoubtedly the title character. There might not have been anyone in the world who could do special effects better than ILM in the mid-'80s, and the Howard puppets are, if nothing else, miraculously well-engineered. There are God knows how many moving parts in the face, and the character is capable of incredibly subtle gradations of expression - we always know exactly what the duck has on his mind, and that's no small achievement. The thing is, though, there is no point at which Howard feels like anything else but a terrific piece of robotics. His textures and his foam rubber beak and the bland overlighting that cinematographer Richard H. Kline dumps on him make it clear, in virtually every shot, that Howard is a device: one that would bowl you over if you saw him at Disneyland, one that would catch your eye as a background character in Jedi; but crucially, critically, one that's vividly off-putting as a movie protagonist. There's no shortage of disastrous missteps in this movie, but what pushes it into the realms of the truly repellent is its amazingly unacceptable lead character, perhaps the only example on record of a live-action figure that falls into the Uncanny Valley.

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OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE

A review requested by Liz, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The body of work created by the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (credited equally as writers, directors, and producers, though it's generally understood that Powell was more the director, while Pressburger was more the writer and producer) is arguably the high water mark of all British cinema, and their 1943 collaboration The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is maybe the most essentially, urgently British of the 21 films they made together. It is probably the most epic and ambitious in scale and intention: it's a World War II propaganda film with a real message on its mind other than the usual "We can do it if we stick together!" cheerleading typical of its generic bedfellows, that bases its analysis of what the people of the British isles could and should do to stave off the Nazi threat in a long-form study of military history spanning nearly half of a century. It does this in the body of one immaculately conservative soldier named Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey, flawlessly playing a brash youth and a puffed-up old man so distinctly that it's almost difficult to believe that they were both a 37-year-old actor), inspired in his personality and appearance by Colonel Blimp, the star of a satirical comic strip by David Low, but infinitely more expansive in personality; and it does this in the form of what must absolutely be the most excitingly shot British production I can personally name up to that point in history, the moment that Powell's directorial style snapped into focus and provided a visual means of expression that's neither exactly Hollywood nor exactly European. It would not, for my taste, remain the best production released under the banner of the Archers (Powell & Pressburger's independent company, through which they'd make all of their films until 1957), with their post-war efforts A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes eclipsing it in stylistic and structural complexity, and overall excellence, respectively. But it's more radical than they are, inventing out of thin air what they (and the rest of the Archers' output) would thereupon refine and build from.

The movie begins and ends in 1942, where Wynne-Candy is an old and slightly ridiculous ex-Army figure, spending his retirement advising and training the Home Guard. He's introduced as the butt of something halfway between a prank and a political demonstration: the evening afternoon before a war game is meant to start at midnight, brash young lieutenant "Spud" Wilson (James McKechnie) breaks into the Turkish bath where Wynne-Candy and many other old Army outcasts spend their hours, capturing the old man and winning the war game before it begins. This triggers a spirited argument between the two warriors, Wilson insisting that old, traditional conservative men like Wynne-Candy aren't merely out of touch, but acutely dangerous in this new sort of warfare. Chastened and annoyed, the old man finds himself drifting into an extended flashback that rewinds to that same Turkish bath, 41 years prior, when he was just Lieutenant Clive Candy, on leave from the Second Boer War - the flawlessly-executed trick by which a youthful body double substitutes for Livesey in his old age makeup while the camera manages to get slightly too far ahead of the character is the first of many coups du cinéma in the film, seamlessly blurring past and present into one discontinuous chronology that doubles as the first leg in the filmmakers' argument about the way that the past informs the present.

The remainder of the film is largely concerned with three movements, one during the Boer War, one in the days immediately following the First World War, and one in the early years of the Second World War, bringing us finally back to the morning of the day on which we met Candy. In each of these segments, we also see Candy's developing relationship with Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), a German officer with whom Candy duels in 1901, while he's in Berlin on an unofficial mission to defuse an anti-British propaganda effort. And we see as well his encounters with three young women who all look exactly alike, for the good reason that they're all played by Deborah Kerr: Edith Hunter, an idealist who obviously loves Candy but ends up marrying Kretschmar-Schldorff; Barbara Wynne, a pragmatic nurse who marries Candy despite his being much older; and Angela "Johnny" Cannon, who serves as his sharp-tongued assistant and driver as he works with the Home Guard, and ends up helping to bridge the gulf between the honorably conservative Brit and the honorably conservative German while their countries prepare to go to war.

While each sequence is hung on a single driving narrative spine, the overall impression is of a movie that meanders its way through history over the course of two hours and 43 minutes (the film was cut twice before being restored to its full length in 1983; a more thorough clean-up job restoring the vivid colors was completed in 2011), and yet never feels like there's a single sagging moment or unnecessary layover. The script is thoughtful and decisive, crisply marking down character beats for the actors to later flesh in, and presenting symbolic conflicts which feel so personal in their execution that the degree to which this is all a metaphorical satire of British military etiquette hardly gets in the way of what a perfect study of individual lives it is as well. And I will give it this above even A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes and all the rest: it is very possible that this is the best-written of the Archers' film, structurally, psychologically, and thematically. As it cycles back into 1942 and presents its message that men of Candy's era, for all their dignity and experience and intelligence, aren't equipped to fight a war against the systemic evil represented by Nazi Germany, the film generates a fierce passion about its topic mixed with affection, deep and rich and abiding affection, for the characters it's consigning to history. For something with such a serious subject, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp moves forward with enormous generosity and a great deal of fresh, bubbly humor - indeed, it is as much a comedy as otherwise, growing gradually darker towards the end.

The beautiful writing goes hand in hand with exemplary filmmaking technique that draws it out and works it into the visual bones of the movie. It is supremely well made, and not always because it draws attention to itself: one of the most perfect sequences in the movie consists of a camera staring at Walbrook's face as he quietly delivers a deep, probing monologue, pushing into a close-up, and then backing away again. It's so simple as to be virtually anti-cinematic, but it's exactly what the movie needs, both for the integrity of the monologue, and the place it occupies near the very beginning of the 1939 sequence; it promises the seriousness and mournful intimacy that the rest of the film will largely concern itself with, in opposition to the more bright material of the first two-thirds.

Frequently, though, the style is so great precisely because it makes itself felt. There is the comic audacity of the first transition from the Boer War to the First World War, a montage of mounted animal heads representing Candy's somewhat bloodthirsty approach to leisure time until he can get back to business (ending with the nihilistic joke of a Germany army helmet with the descriptive plaque "Hun - Flanders, 1918"); there is the bleak poetry of the second transition from the First World War to the Second, with the Wynne-Candy family album skipping through blank page after blank page following the newspaper clipping of Barbara's death. And there is the richness and moral complexity of the individual images, shot in glowing Technicolor to accentuate the vibrancy of military uniforms and upper class splendor in sharp contrast to default setting of drab earth tones, suggesting throughout (but especially in the Boer War sequence) that the pageantry of the British military and the pride of men like Candy, however handsome and captivating, is also chintzy and surface-level, all glamor without soul. Or consider the way that Powell presents the duel that takes up a huge portion of the first act: the opening preparations are contained within a hollow wide shot of a gymnasium, like a dead cathedral of Continental honor; the actual duel starts during a high-angle crane shot that backs away as Allan Gray's jaunty score kicks in, suggesting a perverse ballet, all part of the theatricality of the lives it presents, before dissolving into a snowstorm.

The visuals are, throughout, sardonic and witty, detached with just enough ghostliness that they feel appropriately out of time and yet anchored by the superbly expressive faces of Livesey and Walbrook that the immediate feeling of the characters' lives is always front and center. The images are satiric while the script is utterly sincere, and the structure is moody and weary while the energy of each scene and each performance is fiery and urgent, communicating with an intensity that could only driven by enthusiastic and greatly concerned patriots in a time of war. Of course the film hasn't aged well: this is carbon-stamped to 1943 as firmly as a movie could possibly be. And yet its insights into how history moves and what role people occupy in it are utterly timeless. As a time capsule and as pure cinema, this is as as essential, enjoyable, and challenging as the movies can get.

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BACK WITH AVENGEANCE

During the press tour for Avengers: Age of Ultron - a press tour marked by an uncommon number of wrong turns by the participants - writer-director Joss Whedon admitted almost in so many words that making the film was exhausting and no fun and he wasn't happy with the final product. It helps to know that, but it's easy to guess something like that was the case: more than any other film yet made in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an eleven-film franchise marked above all by the commercial slickness and uniformity of its products, Age of Ultron feels helplessly obligatory and formulaic.

In the three years since The Avengers came out and made utterly silly amounts of money, the studio's "Phase 2" of movies have all tried to push into new territory, even if it's all within the limits of the most obviously corporatised filmmaking in contemporary Hollywood: Iron Man 3 dug down into character details and flashed some acerbic, Shane Black flair, and 2014's one-two punch of Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy saw the franchise at its most seriously consequential and then its most beguilingly sugary and breezy, ending in what could easily be defended as its two most self-contained, satisfying achievements since it kicked off. Even poor Thor: The Dark World tried to expand the scale and grandeur of the series' universe, no matter how badly it fumbled every aspect of carrying out that task. And here's Age of Ultron, and it is the most disappointing thing possible after that run of four movies: it's a straight-up retread, soullessly grinding its way through most of the exact same things that worked before in the hope that they'll work again, only all of the individual elements were more novel and more impressively achieved three years ago. There's too much of Whedon's personality bleeding through, in good ways and bad, to write it off as an impersonal non-effort, but damn, it does manage to feel perfunctory.

The film begins in medias res, which is probably the best thing it ever does; re-introducing the six-hero team of the Avengers by showing them as the exemplars of self-consciously iconic kinetic moviemaking. Honestly, get as far as the end of this sequence, and Age of Ultron seems to be setting itself up to be a much better work of popcorn cinema than the original - while the "Avengers diving across the screen in slow-motion" shot heavily pimped in the trailers isn't a patch on the "360° around the Avengers" shot heavily pimped in the trailers for the original, there's no other respect in which sequence isn't an improvement on all the action in The Avengers: the CG-aided long takes are wonderfully woven through the action and the location, the way that the characters' zingy quips punctuate the action feels perfectly like the way dialogue and violence interact in a comic book, and the characters are each showcased doing something specific and important. I had a better idea of why the archer Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) was even a member of the Avengers within Age of Ultron's first ten minutes than after the whole running time of the last movie.

It's not true that the film never matches this moment again, though this is absolutely the peak as far as action goes. The lack of context for what's going on - and we'll eventually receive an explanation, but not till after it's all over - means that the action really doesn't feel like anything but raw, untethered spectacle, making it hard to care beyond the momentary rush of adrenaline and the sheer pleasure of onscreen momentum. Which, to be sure, I don't regard as a problem. But motivating its action sequences never gets much easier for the film, no matter how much plot it packs them in, and there's nothing to follow that's as impressively mounted or stylistically ambitious (and we're not talking about off-the-charts ambition even in this case). The big sprawling climax, which enormously resembles the big sprawling climax of The Avengers with a paint job on the bad guys and different backgrounds, is clumsily paced and littered with moments for the action to stop to show us the heroes patiently saving civilians - a pointed riposte to the destruction-happy Man of Steel (or at least, the moralistic dialogue that happened around Man of Steel), but one that could be easily handled with about a quarter as many cutaways, which only really serve to inelegantly stomp the film's rhythm to the curb.

But let's back off from the climax. There's a lot of movie to get through before that point, some of it fun, much of it dismayingly samey and forced - Whedon's habitual quips have maybe never, in all of his writing, seem so joylessly fitted into a movie that doesn't quite know what to do with them, and delivered by actors who seem so annoyed at having to speak them (Renner is the only recurring cast member who could even arguably be accused of giving his best performance in his role in this particular entry). The best moments are the quietest, character-driven ones; the ones in which Natasha "Black Widow" Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce "Hulk" Banner (Mark Ruffalo) fence around their mutual attraction (though there's a tone-deaf scene where she discusses her biological past that's an especially weird choice coming from somebody as proud to declare himself a feminist as Whedon), or the film's obvious, maybe even objectively best scene, where the heroes get drunk in Tony "Iron Man" Stark's (Robert Downey, Jr.) high-tech superbuilding, goof around with casual camaraderie, get into the best dick-measuring contest in any recent movie, and make terrible decisions. These parts of the film are marvelous. The parts that aren't are the ones where the actual plot tries to do anything, with Stark making one of those terrible decisions, and creating an unbeatable sentient robot named Ultron (voiced and motion-performed by James Spader), who does what super-intelligent movie robots will do, and decide that to preserve peace and harmony, he must destroy all humans.

Everything to do with that whole deal is just a pointless retread of The Avengers, with Spader's sarcastic, self-aware performance making for a great character - it's the best performance in the film - and yet another in the long line of lousy Marvel movie villains whose plots are too convoluted and huge and generic to take seriously or remember clearly. The film doesn't manage to take advantage of the one strength afforded by the somewhat cumbersome "shared universe" conceit, and draw on our awareness of how the characters have changed and grown in their own movies - Stark, Romanoff, and Steve "Captain America" Rogers (Chris Evans) don't seem nearly as nuanced or complex as they did the last time we saw any of them, and they don't seem particularly interesting purely in reference to this film: Stark gets the first two-thirds of a really deep and dark character arc that the movie pointedly fails to follow through on. The film's new characters, twins Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) are inconsistent and plain, with motivations that vanish three-quarters of the way through the film, and comically awful Eastern European accents preventing either actor from doing much of interest with the roles. The film cares not a whit for psychology, even though it keeps pantomiming as though it does; it mostly wants to fit colorful personalities into situations and fights that have come to feel increasingly routine as we see the same basic plot beats from every other Marvel movie play out (I swear to God: I don't care how bland or ineffective it might be, I want just one of these movies to end with a final setpiece that doesn't take place in the sky).

I have to say one thing in the film's favor, though: it didn't really strike me as overstuffed - at least, it didn't feel like it had the wrong running time. Perhaps the wrong things were pulled out to carve it down, leaving such obviously dangling plot threads as basically everything surround Thor (Chris Hemsworth), easily the character left with the least to do in this film, as he busily disappears for what feels like a whole act to go set up his next film. Due in 2017, because try as one might, it's hard not to have the whole ungainly mess of upcoming Marvel releases lingering on one's brain. For example, the whole time I was watching Age of Ultron, I kept thinking about how much I wished it would just skip ahead to next summer's Captain America: Civil War already, which feels like its going to be consequential and character-driven in all the exact ways that Age of Ultron signally isn't. It's just one more damn world-ending plot foiled by characters doing exactly what we expect them to do in action sequences that are shot, edited, and scored like a whole bunch of other action sequences in the last few years, only with more of a palpable sense of exhaustion. It's a thoroughly competent movie, sure; but its competence is so routine and mechanical as to leave the thing overwhelmingly dull.

6/10

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TO CHAV AND CHAV NOT

There's a level on which Kingsman: The Secret Service is the movie director Matthew Vaughn has always been destined to make. In fact, that is perhaps true of all of its levels, both the good ones and the bad. On the good side of the ledger, Kingsman is one of the most smartly-crafted action films of recent years, even as it fully subscribes to the heightened aesthetic that has done so much to make action films of recent years noisy, visually incoherent messes. On the bad side, it has some grim, grim thoughts about human beings and society, and it doesn't even seem to be aware of them. And this is intensified by how consciously the film raises political and moral questions that it proceeds to explore with absolutely no depth whatsoever.

But we'll get back to all of that. Adapted by Vaughn and his longtime writing partner Jane Goldman from a 2012 comic miniseries written by Mark Millar (very loosely, I gather; but I do not make a habit of reading Millar's work), Kingsman is the story of a secret intelligence agency operating out of London but without the oversight of any world government, run by the best and brightest of White Male England's upper classes. When one of them dies while attempting to rescue a kidnapped climate scientist, the organisation starts a hunt for his replacement, and its most forward-thinking member, "Galahad", the code name for one Harry Hart (Colin Firth), looks outside of the usual suspects from Oxbridge to nominate a young tough kid, Gary "Eggsy" Unwin (Taron Egerton) from the grubbier places in the city. This is a bad habit of Harry's, we find; his last nominee when this happened 17 years ago was, in fact, Eggsy's dad, who died in the Middle East when Harry himself made a small but deadly blunder. Anyway, the quest to cull the nominees down to just one true Kingsman recruit is carried off with some intense urgency, for as this is all happening, American telecom genius Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) is executing an unclear but obviously devious plot to use free cellphone SIM cards against the entire population of the world.

There is a generous and an ungenerous way of looking at this. The generous one, the one that the film literally plops into the mouths of its characters, is that this is all a parody of the James Bond franchise, turning the posh world of British spies with tony accents and impressive educations upside down by throwing a class-shaped wrench into all of it, and holding up the sexism and violence porn of standard-issue spy cinema up for ridicule. In practice, I frankly don't think any of that works, in no small part because Matthew Vaughn doesn't have a good sense of humor. He's able to do jokes, sure: there is an almost non-stop litany of quips and snarky asides and absurdities scattered throughout Kingsman, and some of them are even funny. But it's not sustained enough for this count as parody, and it's damn sure not smart enough for it to count as satire. So really, it's just a particularly self-aware and sarcastic version of the exact thing it set out to comment upon.

Besides which, it's pretty clear that whatever surface-level interest the film has in exploring class (it has infinitely less interest in exploring race or gender, which is probably why the only two people of color in the film to open their mouths are also its villains), that interest doesn't ever last for more than a scene or two. Its central conceit is more based on letting poor urban thugs earn their way into the upper class than it is about providing any kind of dignity to those who aren't upper class, and its politics throughout are absolutely inconsistent, waddling around and cherry-picking what it wants from conservatism (Reagan's Star Wars program is approved of), libertarianism (the heroes are outside the government, the villains are part of it - including, for the briefest of cameos, President Barack Obama), labor (a joke about how awful Margaret Thatcher was), and a particularly unsavory form of American progressivism (the film kills off a bunch of civilians and expects us to laugh through it because they were "just" Westboro Church-style religious bigots). One might go so far as to say that, in fact, the film has no kind of coherent political outlook whatsoever, that its nods towards class-consciousness and the patriarchal mustiness of Bondian superspies are just a pose, and that it's really just a pretext for doing the actioney stuff Vaughn actually cares about. And I would say that one would be totally correct in saying that.

Considering how insistently and repetitively Kingsman articulates its themes, it doesn't actually have any: it's a big action spectacle that tries to pretend like it has any kind of depth at all without doing the things that would give it depth. But the spectacle! -oh the spectacle! I hate to admit it, because it's all so intellectually dishonest, but Kingsman has some unbelievably terrific action, and viewed strictly at a mechanical level, the film is just about flawless. It builds its scenes with clear, one-at-a-time purposes, introducing the characters and the world through punchy, humorous scenes that crank out exposition with just enough flair and wit that it's more entertaining than painful - and it is impossible to undervalue how much Firth is the keystone to all of this, with his effortless line deliveries and self-effacing sense of stuffy English propriety, and his impeccable impatience with everything. When the film eventually commits to making Egerton its solitary lead, as it clearly plans to do from very early on, it loses a great deal of personality and deftness of touch that keep it striding through even the most muddle-headed representational problems.

And having made that structurally wonderful screenplay, the film then lards it up with several absolutely perfect action scenes, that find Vaughn perfecting the style of action preferred by himself and Zack Snyder, as well as their copycats. It's manic, full of quick changes in the film speed, full of zooms and swooshes; and it is beautifully coherent. I am nearly tempted to call it the Rosetta Stone for an entire generation of action cinema: the chaotic, hyper editing that usually results in visual slurries where nothing can be followed suddenly works instead to accentuate the narrative clarity of the fights; the fetishisation of slow-motion, instead of pornishly drawing our attention to pain and blood, serves to punctuate and redirect the action choreography, and call our attention to the shifts in the rhythm of the fighting that drive that redirection. The film's best action setpiece is also its morally ugliest, which doesn't feel like a coincidence at all; it would, in fact, hardly be so ugly if the way it was shot wasn't so tremendously exciting and involving that it makes it impossible to care about all the bodies it's leaving in its wake. Far less problematic is the climax, where unambiguous bad guys are executed in a giddy, openly comic fashion, while the action cross-cuts across three totally different registers of tension (fight the computer, time a perfect shot, evade the armies with guns), serving each of them equally. It's cross-cutting that recalls the climax of Return of the Jedi, and I am not inclined to make that comparison idly.

So the question stands: does Kingsman's excellence as a work of craftsmanship outweigh its illiteracy and amorality as a drama of humans living in the world? Reader, I do not know the answer. I walked into it expecting to hate it, and I walked out having had a good time over a surprisingly fleet 129 minutes. That's enough to swing a positive recommendation, but I can't bring myself to be too enthusiastic about it.

6/10

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HARD KNOCK DEATH

In the United States of America, in the year 2014, when the country's race relations reached their lowest ebb in what feels like decades, there is a clear value to a film whose protagonist is an African-American child, and for which no attention is paid to that fact. No special pleading, no political messaging. Just a story whose unforced existence guilelessly posits that black kids matter, and can be the subject of any kind of story designed for any kind of audience. This is the good thing about the new remake of Annie. Virtually the only solitary thing that in any way justifies what is otherwise a soul-scarring exercise in the worst traits of 21st Century children's filmmaking. 32 years ago, John Huston made his all-time worst film with an ugly, ill-acted, racist, atonal adaptation of Charles Strause and Martin Charnin's 1977 Broadway musical, and in so doing set a bar low enough that it should have been the easiest thing in the wide world to jump over it. But this new film, written by Will Gluck (who also directs) and Aline Brosh McKenna, manages to dive under that mark without even breaking a sweat. And it is that Rob Marshall's 1999 telefilm remains the only remotely acceptable filmed version of the material, not a pleasant thing to concede for an inveterate old Marshall hater like myself.

Unlike the two earlier films, Annie '14 updates the setting from the Great Depression, and actually manages to do so without completely shitcanning the material in the process. It is not a flawless process: the film sees fit to showcase what it's doing by opening with a cheery redhead named Annie (Taylor Richardson) giving a fluffy little bit of pep to a classroom that jeers at her, upon which her classmate and our actual protagonist, Annie Bennett (Quvenzhané Wallis) lifts the room by encouraging the students to provide a rhythmic beat as she presents a grossly ahistorical summary of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This includes, as God is my witness, the notion that the Depression was an object lesson in how people could survive and make lots of money just as long as they were willing to work hard for it. The scene provides an elegant capsule version of everything we should expect for the rest of the film: the Broadway music has been largely supplanted by pop orchestrations, and this Annie absolutely loves the fuck out of the very rich, and has a pandering and broken idea of what grinding poverty looks like. Spoiler: it looks like an enormous multi-bedroom apartment located on the island of Manhattan.

Other than its intoxicated alignment with the 1%, the other major sour note the new Annie strikes comes in the form of its rampant, unapologetic cynicism. This is a nasty-minded movie about everything, including itself: in an effort to inoculate itself against criticisms that musicals are dopey, the film piles on what feel like dozens of jokes at the medium's expense (but is, in fact, I think only three). Meanwhile, it presents the hopelessly optimistic sprite of the title as a smirking, overly worldly foster kid who has far too cutting an awareness of political bullshit not to call it out when she sees it, and whose moments of gee-whiz innocence are far too few between, though Wallis excels at them. And everything around Annie herself is curdled and toxic, the ultimate expression of a world where everybody is plugged-in and hyper-aware and eager to prove it by being the most jaded person in the room. Centering itself around a businessman-turned-NYC-mayoral-candidate who first uses Annie as a PR prop - a development that even the designated decent human being on his campaign staff, Grace (Rose Byrne), signs up for without a second's hesistation - is hardly the stuff of ennobling the human spirit. There's a savviness that borders on cruelty threaded throughout the movie, and if bringing Annie into the 21st Century meant stranding her amidst so much internet-enabled irony (Twitter and Instagram culture are the focal points of the car chase climax in this telling), it had been better that she was left to her sugary innocence in the '30s.

So anyway, beyond that, it's just normal kids' movie wish-fulfillment boilerplate, though as I think of it, the strain of live-action kids' movie that this represents isn't so common anymore that "boilerplate" feels right. But anyway, Annie crosses paths with venal cell phone magnate Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx), a name that's at least no worse than Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks, his analogue from the original show and the vintage comic strip it was based upon. He and his even more venal campaign manager Guy (Bobby Cannavale) latch onto Annie like a pair of lampreys, spiriting her away from the most venal of all, opportunistic alcoholic foster mother Colleen Hannigan (Cameron Diaz), and in the process, finding that Stacks has a soul after all. As does Hannigan, in a new character redemption that the script does not the slightest damn thing to earn.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this, other than some offensively sloppy, mismatched editing, and Gluck's flaccid, detached directing, which leaves all the actors other than Wallis stranded. Diaz's hammy villain turn is enormous and unchecked enough to pick up a kind of dark energy of its own, but Foxx, Byrne, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (on-hand to play the wise smiling black man in a film whose two lead characters are already African-Americans, which is just weird), and especially Cannavale are pinned to the screen like dying moths. Bored dying moths, who transparently don't care about their line readings or motivations. The movie has major problems even when Annie is around, but it is a dessicated corpse whenever she's not, and that happens more in this retelling than in the original version.

All of which doesn't even mention the music, which is ordinarily a thing that we care about in musicals. Annie takes an already dubious score and strangles it to death by refocusing it from Broadway-style book numbers to ghastly overproduced pop song arrangements, with the lyrics changed wholesale (hope you're not a fan of "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here", because it is now unrecognisable), or simply tweaked enough to make them generic tunes that have only a thready connection to the narrative development (as happens to "It's the Hard-Knock Life", which now doesn't set the scene so much as it reminds the audience that Jay-Z - one of the movie's producers - did that thing that one time). But the words are nothing compared to the grating sonic assault that the soundtrack has been turned into, a whirlwind tour of everything that is worst in contemporary pop music, with the whole cast run through autotune so much that it's no longer possible to tell if they're human or not. Except for Foxx, permitted to croon all his songs using the silky smooth tones of an R&B singer, something would sound fine if it was even slightly appropriate for this material. Outside of the punchy surrealism of "Little Girls" (warbled badly by Diaz), the staging is uninspired and badly choreographed, with a persistent weird hang-up on having the young characters do a bunch of clapping and chest slapping. And while Wallis's cheery attitude is a lifesaving element in the middle of so much obnoxiousness, she's terrible at lip-syncing, sucking the last tiny molecule of pleasure out of the songs.

There are deeper depths to which children's cinema can sink - this blog has too recently hosted reviews of the later two parts of the Alvin and the Chipmunks trilogy for me to pretend that Annie is some kind of once-in-a-lifetime disaster. But oh God, its sucks. Take out Wallis, and it instantaneously becomes one of the most hateful, ill-made studio pictures of the year. With her and her upbeat presence, there's enough sociological force and enjoyable attitude to keep it from being a completely repugnant, useless experience - but only just.

2/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: PUNK ROCK GIRLS

“Scandinavian social realism” and “fluffy character-driven comedy” are what you might call non-overlapping magisterial. But that’s not the sort of thing to stop Lukas Moodysson, whose seventh feature We Are the Best! marries exactly those two genres and does it with surprising ease and charm. As one of European cinema’s foremost humanists, Moodysson has always been prone to treating his characters with particular generosity and forgiveness, and the jump from something like Together, and its deft lightness of touch, to a full-on comic exploration of human behavior at the edges, is not such a very long one, perhaps. At any rate, We Are the Best! works like gangbusters; it’s perhaps a little bit too similar to the writer-director’s big breakthrough, Show Me Love from 1998, to feel as fresh and insouciant as it wants to, and it has the inevitable roughness that comes when a movie builds itself completely around young actors, but it’s so likable in its storytelling and so earthbound in its observations about the travails of early adolescence that it could overcome much stiffer problems than it has facing it.

Set in the early 1980s, the film is about the dream of punk, then on its last legs as a meaningful cultural force. The heroes are a pair of tween girls, androgynous Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and mohawked, politically riled-up Klara (Mira Grosin), the latter of whom provides all the angry passion that drives the two friends to turn listening to music into an act of defiance against the system, the cultural rise of disco and new wave, and the old punks like Klara’s brother who gave up on punk when it started to fade out of fashion. On a whim, and to screw with some asshole teen boys playing clamorous rock in the local community center’s rehearsal space, the girls form a band to give vent to their disgust with the state of things. When it turns out that they can’t, between them, play a single note on any instrument, they finagle a talented religious schoolmate, Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) into serving as their lead guitarist and teaching them about music on the way.

That’s about it as far as heated drama goes. There is, eventually, some small conflict between the three when boys enter the picture and Bobo and Klara set their eyes on the same one, but this is all in the grand tradition of European art house drama. That means low stakes, limited plot, and a focus instead on watching people’s behavior in an unforced, naturalistic state. The success of We Are the Best! comes, then, from its terrific depiction of three contrasting (but not conflicting) personalities, and their outsider status: as young people trying to force adults to treat them with any kind of dignity, as young women in a cultural context that favors men, as political activists surrounded by comfortable conformity and apathy. It’s clear enough from the way Moodysson, adapting a comic book by his wife Coco Moodysson, treats them that he’s pro-punk, pro-political engagement, and pro-feminism, though We Are the Best! never remotely turns into a tract. In fact, one of the best successes of the film is that it looks on the girls and their enthusiastic naïveté from a clearly adult perspective. There is a point at which their passion shades into silliness, and the film knows it; while it admires the fervor of youthful ideology, it also recognises the limited scope of that ideology. The tone doesn’t eulogise punk rock, but merely acknowledge that its passing left a void in which those who had a driven certitude that society wasn’t working needed to find their own voice, since that voice wasn’t being provided by the culture at large.

Ultimately, it’s a film about children becoming young people and finding their identity, rather than about the particular meaning or merits of those identities, and it adopts a most forgiving and loving position to the mistakes and dead-ends that process can consist of. It’s a coming-of-age story that’s honest and moving without being nostalgic in even the smallest degree, an enormously difficult pitfall for the genre to avoid, though one that the roughness of the film’s realistic aesthetic and its caustic punk soundtrack help to keep at bay even if Moodysson’s writing wasn’t so clear-eyed.

An altogether delightful, intimate character study that’s consistently funny without being flippant or insincere (the tone is overwhelmingly “we can laugh at these kids now because we did the same goofy things once upon a time”), and limited only in smallish ways. The acting could be better, is part of it: some of that is inherent to the writing, since the most overwrought character, Klara, results in the most frequently mis-aimed performance. There’s a lot of grounding that needs to be done to keep her political rants sounding like passionate beliefs instead of just repeated gobbledygook, and Grosin has some problems making that happen consistently. And then on the flipside, we have Hedvig, the most quiet and reflective of the girls, the one who is most based in watching and thinking and responding, and LeMoyne’s performance is the best, or at least the most stable. To be fair, the acting is, across the board, very good more often than not. But when the young performers are missing the mark, it’s pretty distracting and debilitating.

The other problem, and oh, how “problem” is a leading word, is the style: in the middle of the 2010s, we’ve hit a point where the low-fi handheld docu-realist aesthetic of European stories about the life of people of limited economic means has entirely run out of anything new to do or say. The script, the tone, and the acting are the important things here, and they are all solid and doing what they must. But We Are the Best! simply isn’t very interesting or enlightening to look at, feeling like the camerawork and editing are on autopilot for most of the time, and serving only to give a good foundation for the script to do its job. There’s of course nothing wrong with any of that, but for all its real pleasures and its touching, accessible humanity, if anybody responded to the first five minutes of the film by sighing “not this again?”, I would have to reply that, yes, that’s pretty much exactly right. It’s a film for seeing familiar things being done well, not for being surprised or challenged.

8/10

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THIS FELLOW KEATON SEEMS TO BE THE WHOLE SHOW

It's worth admitting right in front that Birdman is nowhere near the best version of itself. Setting aside every other issue that someone could possibly have with it, it has been kneecapped by a story problem that would have been so easy to keep away from, and in fact the four screenwriters - Nicolás Giacobo, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, the last of whom also directs - pretty much had to go out of their way to specifically introduce that problem. Basically, Birdman is a stream-of-consciousness narrative, put over in the most vividly cinematic language that such a particularly literary genre could possibly hope for, and there are many, many moments in the film that are only sensible if we allow that they don't represent any kind of objective third-person reality, but only the bent perceptions of the protagonist's very fragile mind. The film banks a lot on this intense subjectivity. And then, for absolutely no practical reason other than to spell out some story development that might have been achieved a dozen other ways, there are at least four reasonably lengthy scenes that take place completely outside of the protagonist's vision or knowledge. They're not bad scenes; they're crisply-written, smartly-acted, and handsomely-lit. But they completely violate the aesthetic continuity of the film, and it is a film which privileges that continuity above all else.

And yet, despite that absolute, deadly flaw, Birdman - to just once give its messy, beautiful, strangely-punctuated title in full, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) - is one of the absolute keepers of 2014, for even if its execution ends up betraying its concept, that concept is so terrific that there could have been far more individual mistakes than there are, with the result still turning out to be one of the most audacious and satisfying experiences of the movie year. It's a simple little story: Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), is a faded movie star whose career hasn't recovered since his decision, 20 years ago, not to play the title character in Birdman 4, feeling that after three-successive go-rounds in the superhero's beak and wings, he was ready to move on to rich pastures. That has, after all this time, brought him to the world of Legitimate Theater, where so many former movie stars before him got to grab hold of a little bit of dignity near the end. He's the writer, director, and star of an adaptation of Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", produced by his friend and lawyer Jake (Zach Galifianakis), co-starring his girlfriend Laura (Andrea Riseborough), and taking as his assistant his fresh-from-rehab daughter Sam (Emma Stone). The situation is rife with cause for emotional trauma and self-doubt, and that's before an accident forces him to re-cast the other male role, three days before the premiere, with Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), genius stage actor, arrogant prick, and boyfriend of the other actress, Lesley (Naomi Watts), making her Broadway debut. The pressure of having a superstar performer stealing his oxygen and having to drive himself to the cusp of bankruptcy to get there forces Riggan beyond the breaking point, not that he needed to go very far. The very first image of the movie, and the very first line of dialogue, already do a fine job of dramatising Riggan's present inability to separate reality and fantasy.

So, for that matter, does the movie itself. A stream-of-consciousness narrative I called it, and that's just what it is, in the most appallingly exciting way. González Iñárritu, working with fellow Mexican expatriate and all-around cinematography superstar Emmanuel Lubezki, has fashioned Birdman to look like it takes place mostly in a single shot, seamlessly stitched together (one can notice the joins solely because of spurious camera movements that exist to hide them, not because there's ever a spot where the digital trickery is apparent; editors Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione, major names in their own right, have done some exquisite work that goes out of its way not to call attention to itself). Lubezki knowing a thing or two about shooting breathtakingly beautiful, wonderful long takes, it's not surprising that Birdman looks gorgeous and has camera movement that's so organic and three-dimensional that the film ends up being as much of a go-for-broke visual spectacle as anything with elaborate world-building CGI; it's great as well that the artifice of theater frees him up to play with sculpted and colored lighting in ways he hasn't done in years, without giving up the skills he's picked up in using only visible light sources. The result isn't his most groundbreaking work of cinematography, though in individual shots - a cherry red exit sign surrounded by blue, an elevated shot of Broadway at dusk - it ranks with his most purely beautiful.

But anyway, storytelling. Which, in Birdman's case, is indistinguishable from the goings-on of Riggan Thomson's frenzied mind, and that's where the single-take illusion works so well: for of course, the movie taking place over many days, it's not mimicking real time at all, the way long takes do. It is a strictly anti-realist gesture, in fact, suggesting the breakdown going on in the head of the panicky artist for whom there's never enough time, the aging man who has a terrified awareness of how quickly deadlines of every sort are blasting towards him. The visual structure of the film puts us squarely in Riggan's position, as time and space compress and blur together in patently impossible ways (the usual suspects have bitched a little about how the film misrepresents actual Manhattan geography, ignoring that it also inserts continuity errors into its own internally-established geography, and failing to wonder why that might be the case). It is, I honestly think, a way of exploring psychology through visuals that I have never seen done, not in this way; but I have not seen everything.

Anyway, it's all in service to a great, unflagging character study. It can be argued that we need no more movies about aging white guys and their privileged woes; but since we have Birdman anyway, it's great that it treats that subject (the perpetual core of Raymond Carver's writing, making the film's reliance on "What We Talk About..." doubly meaningful) so fucking well. Keaton's performance is absolutely dynamite, for one thing, the best of his career by far, even without so much as nodding in the direction of the meta-casting involved in showcasing him as a guy who hasn't done much of note since appearing in a major franchise at the dawn of the superhero movie epoch. There's unlovely misery and self-loathing plastered across every inch of his performance, in his expressions and his caustic line readings, and the way that he seems to age five years over the course of the movie. The whole cast is good (the men more than the women), but it's Keaton in the hot seat, Keaton who has to create a sufficiently believable well-into-midlife crisis for the rest of the film spinning around him to feel honest and meaningful.

Despite this heavy, pathetic center, the film is giddily watchable, a chain of firecrackers driven by González Iñárritu's surprising and heretofore entirely untapped facility with comedy, and Antonio Sánchez's irreplaceable drum score, adding a relentless tension that does almost as much to suggest the disorienting momentum of these days for Riggan as the sinewy cinematography does. It's a thriller, a sitcom, a merciless drama, and a highly expressionistic depiction of paranoia and panic that is, when it's working, one of the most jaw-dropping, exciting, totally effective films I've seen in ages. Now, again, there are parts where it's not merely failing to work, it's bragging about how much it's not working. But far more often than that, it's one fire: surprising even as it feels inevitable, heartbreaking and sympathetic even as it relishes in showing off its protagonist's most awful characteristics. It's not nearly perfect, but it's as essential as cinema gets.

9/10

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SIN YOU WENT AWAY

As far as nine-years-later sequels go, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For... well, actually it's pretty fucking awful, since the only other nine-years-later sequels I can think of right off star Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy instead of Mickey Rourke and Jessica Alba, and take as their explicit theme the evolution of culture and individual personality against the background of nostalgia. Whereas A Dame to Kill For is powerfully eager to act like not a minute has gone by since Sin City opened, exactly copying the original film's distinctive aesthetic and using extensive make-up to erase the passage of nearly a decade from every returning star's face.

What I started off to say is that, as far as nine-years-later sequels go, A Dame to Kill For could have been infinitely worse. Because, when all is said and done, exactly copying the original film's distinctive aesthetic - that is to say, the aesthetic the original film exactly copied from the Sin City comics of writer/artist Frank Miller, whose visual concepts were translated so precisely that director Robert Rodriguez extended him a directing credit, exactly the situation that attains in the sequel - isn't such a terrible thing as all that, when even after most of a decade, you can still count on one hand all the films that have recalled into Sin City's extremely unique style of harsh monochrome and all-CGI sets designed with the thinness of angry line drawings. And you can count on no hands the number of good films to have done so. Unhappily, A Dame to Kill For doesn't buck that trend; we'll get there in a moment. First I want to finish saying nice things about the way the movie looks, because it's just about the last nice thing I'll have to say. The one big change the new film makes is that, coming in 2014 instead of 2005, it gets to take advantage of 3-D: and for all that I'd have predicted that a 3-D rendering of such a vigorously 2-D art style would look be hideous on a pre-verbal level, actually, A Dame to Kill For turns that to its advantage, pitching itself somewhere between a shadowbox of paper cut-outs and an exploration of the possibilities of pure visual geometry, shapes and dots suddenly gaining some kind of unexpected texture from their planar relationships. It is surely the first and so-far only essential work of 3-D I've seen in 2014; or maybe it would be better to say that it's the only film for which it is distinctly better in three dimensions than in two. I mean, we're lifetimes away from Gravity here.

That nicety aside, the film is not very good, occasionally drifting into outright putrescence. And this was predictable as far back as 2006, when a Sin City sequel first started to form in Rodriguez's hopelessly optimistic eyes. Of the six books and one short story collection that make up the published entirety of Sin City, there's really only one great story and two pretty solid ones, by my reckoning, and the two best were already used in the first movie. Now, A Dame to Kill For is the other pretty solid one. So that's a leg up. And the filmmakers have the basic good sense to avoid the other full-length stories, Family Values (which is impenetrably awful) and Hell and Back (which is better on the merits, but only just, and it's dismally fucking long). Instead, the film rounds out its content with two new stories: "The Long Bad Night" (which, if I understand it correctly, is fleshed out from an unfinished story Miller has had around for a while), and "Nancy's Last Dance" (entirely new), and one of the better pre-existing short stories, "Just Another Saturday Night".

The last of these opens the movie as a prologue, and it's easily the peak of the film: a nice way to warm back up to the style, the moral corrosion, the dementedly hard-boiled dialogue, and the warped physicality of the characters in the form of Rourke's probably schizophrenic thug Marv. The other two are, I want to reiterate, new Frank Miller. "The Long Bad Night" much less so, but "Nancy's Last Dance" is a kind of no-holds-barred tour of all the incomprehensibly dark things that have happened inside Miller's head in the 21st Century, with its rageholic violence and disregard for any kind of logic or linearity (it is, I think, completely impossible to square with the existing Sin City chronology) and even the most modest coverlet ripped off of Miller's deeply unpleasant thoughts about women. Which seems even worse here since it seems evident from the focus on tragic stripper Nancy (Alba) and the voiceover she speaks - I believe, the first ever written for a Sin City woman - that this is trying to redress the baked-in sexism.

And A Dame to Kill For has the intense misfortune to end with "Nancy's Last Dance", which means that for the last 20-odd minutes of the 102-minute feature (more than 20 minutes shorter than Sin City), we are pummeled over and over with a nonsensical, needless story that can't put a single foot right (career-worst acting from Alba! Bruce Willis as a sad ghost!) and is almost too ugly for words, so whatever kindly feelings one can generate towards the film are bashed into pieces by the structure that insists on leaving us wanting so much less.

Not that kindly feelings are in strong supply. It's not a long movie, really, but the pacing is all whacked to hell, making it feel positively endless for stretches, and the insertion of "A Dame to Kill For" right in the middle of "The Long Bad Night" does neither any favors - particularly since "A Dame to Kill For" lacks the tendons connecting the two new stories, so instead of feeling like a collection of vignettes, like the first movie, A Dame to Kill For feels almost like one story that has a completely irreconcilable other story twisting around in its middle. "The Long Bad Night" is, itself, a pretty drowsy affair: Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a shockingly lucky gambler who picks up the sweet-natured bar waitress Marcie (Julia Garner) to watch him humiliate the most powerful man in the hopelessly corrupt Basin City - Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) - at poker. He has his own reasons, embarrassingly easy to predict, for wanting to needle Roark, and this perhaps overshadows his judgement about not fucking with psychopaths who have the police and the gangs at their disposal. Meanwhile, in "A Dame to Kill For", gloomy private eye Dwight (Josh Brolin) is approached by his former flame Ava (Eva Green) to help free him from her abusive husband (Marton Csokas) and his thuggish chauffeur Manute (Dennis Haysbert, replacing the late Michael Clarke Duncan, whom he resembles only in that he is an African-American man). But this is noir, and Ava is much too fatale a femme to possibly mean good news. Which Dwight knows and goes in after her anyway, because when somebody is played by Eva Green in full-on "I will play my flawless naked body like a Stradivarius" mode, it's easy to buy her as the kind of sexual enchantress that no male with even the ghost of heterosexuality inside of him could possibly resist. And there are, of course, only heterosexual males in Sin City. And pedophiles, but not in this movie.

The entirely subjective problem with this isn't that any of it is "bad" bad, but that virtually all of it is dull: as written, "A Dame to Kill For" is light-years better than the almost plotless "The Long Bad Night", but both coalesce into a sort of indistinguishable mushiness in Rodriguez and Miller's flabby directorial hands. The titular story is simply not paced well at all, lurching to life in fits and starts, but never maintaining itself - scenes drag on and dither and collapse.Worse yet, especially compared to the original movie, the acting is at an almost uniformly low ebb: Rourke is basically as good as he was last time, but with less interesting material to play, which is enough to make him the stand-out. Brolin and Gordon-Levitt give almost the exact same bad performance of a cold-blooded hard-ass, with Brolin courting goofy excess a bit more freely (especially in the final act of his sequence, when he really should have been replaced by the unavailable Clive Owen). Horrifyingly, even Green can't do all that much: she plays an almost mythically cruel woman well enough, I suppose, and it's easy to take for granted any performer who can be that at ease with her nude body and draw it up into her performance. But she already did both of these things earlier in 2014 in 300: Rise of an Empire, where she managed to, if certainly not "redeem" the character's grossly sexist clichés, at least play them up with a lifesaving amount of broad wit and tactically deployed campiness that recalls Vincent Price, if Vincent Price was an unbelievably hot woman prone to nude scenes. In that film, Green ripped herself out of the movie, off the screen, and into some totally other universe where she could just be jaw-droppingly magnetic. Here, she successfully embodies a straightforward, long-established stock character that, if she hadn't already existed on the page since 1993, could have easily been introduced in a pitch meeting as "we need to put an Eva Green type in this movie". Which is nowhere near as impressive, nor as film-rescuing.

Green's limitation is the film's as well: it's just not interesting in any way. It looks nice: shiny and stylised and glittering with its hard whites and jet blacks moving along the Z-axis. But it doesn't look any nicer than the 21-year-old comic book that it's re-staging, and sucking all of the life from in the process.

4/10

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