Three Films Make A Post: Human traffickers beware.

A Working Man (2025): Unlike quite a few other friends of Stathamsploitation, I already hated David Ayer’s last cooperation with the guy, The Beekeeper. Little did I know that their next cooperation would be this thing. With writing credits for Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Dixon (the former trying to jump on the MAGA train to make up for his ever decreasing talent, the latter once a writer whose right-wing bullshit accepted a certain degree of real-world complexity, but certainly isn’t that anymore) and consequently this contains more QAnon/MAGA dog whistles than whatever they call it when they cart Trump out to spew hateful nonsense.

It’s also a surprisingly bad action movie, full of fights without any physical impact, indifferent action direction and a lack of energy that makes it painfully dull. Even Statham deserves better.

Ash (2025): Flying Lotus has certainly seen Event Horizon, played the Dead Space games and is into a bit of gore from time to time. There’s not a single original idea in the whole of the film, and it could certainly have used another editing go by somebody who isn’t tripping all of the time, but in its undemanding low budget SF horror way, this is pretty good fun. If nothing else, this has a sense of aesthetics it is all too willing to show off.

Captain America: Brave New World (2025): I am by far not as angry at this stage of Marvel Studios’ output as a lot of other people appear to be, so I actually went into the fourth Captain America movie with hopes on being entertained by a perhaps mildly politicized superhero tale.

Which I actually was for two thirds of the film’s running time, until it broke down into two separate climaxes that really would have needed to be turned into one for the film to work and a series of four(?) epilogues that also could have been fruitfully turned into one by – gasp – having more than two characters at a time interact with each other. But hey, at least it’s the film where Captain America punches an orange president.

Three Films Make A Post: The tide is turning.

Aquaman – Lost Kingdom (2023): Even though I’m not writing about the current crop of superhero movies all that often, I haven’t jumped on the superhero hate train, and “superhero fatigue” just fatigues me.

However, most everything bad you’ve read about this second Aquaman movie is unfortunately true. For much of its running time, this doesn’t feel like a proper, finished movie from a big studio at all, but the rough cut of something that doesn’t appear to even have had a finished script, with characters just dropping in and out of the plot for no good reason, no dramatic arc, and an absolute inability to sell the film’s tonal shifts; actually, I don’t even see attempts at selling them, for James Wan has apparently not just decided to direct this as if it were a TV movie, but given up on doing his job completely.

Making matters worse are special effects that often appear to simply not be finished, with many a scene that takes place in what looks like raw sets you’d find in 80’s Doctor Who serial instead of intricate greenscreen work. It’s just a complete train wreck of a movie, and not even an entertaining one.

The Marvels (2023): Also much maligned is this second Captain Marvel movie directed by Nia DaCosta. Here, I really can’t see the problems I’m supposed to notice. Sure, the film can get silly as all get-out, but most of the time, its jokes are actually funny and imaginative, and the script has no trouble shifting from this to the more serious stuff.

Unlike certain parts of the internet, I also enjoy watching a superhero movie carried by a trio of women where the male characters simply aren’t terribly important without the film making much of a thing of it one way or the other (call it the Claremont approach). But then, I am a simple man.

Detective vs Sleuths aka 神探大戰 (2022): If you’re like me, you’re missing classic Hong Kong cinema rather badly. As this extremely energetic mix of action movie and twisty thriller suggests, classic Hong Kong filmmakers do so as well, so long time Johnnie To cohort Wai Ka Fai’s film isn’t just a big damn action movie that follows many of the rules of modern blockbuster cinema to perfection and with considerable verve, but that also contains more winks and nods towards the tradition of post-80s Hong Kong cinema than you can shake a stick at, some of them very subtle, others very obvious indeed. Lau Ching-Wan playing another Mad Detective really is only the beginning there, and before the film is through, we’ll even have gone through a moment of baby juggling.

That all of this works as an absurd but absolutely riveting action film of the highest order instead of sinking into some kind of retro mire is a particularly wonderful achievement.

In short: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

These turtles, be they heroes or ninjas, popping up in comics or animation form, have never been much of a part of my pop cultural universe, but I’d have to be pretty dead inside not to love this piece of absolutely brilliant animation by Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears.

It counteracts the often too great slickness of your typical US digital animation by using glitches, smudges, and influences of the parts of visual arts that aren’t slick, but never as a pose like those movies that add artificial burn marks tend to do. Instead, the added grubbiness and grit is part of the aesthetics as well as of the thematic mission of a film that’s telling us that old, true story of the deep worth of the weird, the freakish, and the slightly off in the proper way, by being all that itself. It’s also disarmingly charming, fast, fun, clever and energetic in a way only a very stubborn kind of anarchist would not call anarchic.

Really, the only element of the film I had some trouble with its need to make its moral (shudder) as explicit as possible during its final act, because if there’s one strain running through the most conservative and the most progressive US art meant for children and their families, it’s the assumption of such braindead stupidity, you apparently have to tell them badly what you’ve just shown them much more convincingly. Of course, the rest of the film is so riveting, fun and outright charming, featuring some of the best uses of classic hip hop and even ESG you’ll encounter anywhere, and so convincingly positive – not naïve -  in its outlook, I’ll accept the fall into needless obviousness as its cost of doing business (and of getting Jackie Chan to voice act Splinter?).

Blue Beetle (2023)

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) has just returned from college to his very quirky, his oh so very very quirky, family in DC’s version of Florida. A college degree means very little apart from student loan when you’re from a brown and poor family – however quirky it may be – so Jaime has a life of crappy servitude to look forward to, like many of us. A series of accidents leads him on the path to Destiny, though, and he’s soon starting in on the superhero business when an ancient alien symbiote chooses him as its new host, turning him into what we’ll just call the Blue Beetle. He certainly has better symbiote luck as his colleagues over at Marvel.

Evil rich white villain Vicoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) wants control over the symbiote to build an army of OMACs – stupidly without the mohawks so important to that role - so Jaime and his oh so very quirky family have a bit of an uphill battle in front of them. On the plus side, Jaime also gets his mandatory love interest in form of Victoria’s niece Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), who, not being white and young and hot, gets a rich but not evil exception.

Angel Manuel Soto’s Blue Beetle is a sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating and generally pretty likeable attempt at a superhero movie, never to be followed up by DC of course. I really do appreciate that it tries to add a bit of talk about class to its typically US-centric thinking about race, and how much it lacks mean-spiritedness even when talking about the groups it is okay to be rather essentialist about when one is in the trenches of the US culture wars. Of course, part of its use of class fantasizes about some inherent goodness and solidarity of the poor amongst one another, which is about as kitschy and untruthful a portrayal of the actual experience of being poor as possible. Fun fact: a lot of poor people suck as much as most rich people, they just don’t have the power to express that as destructively.

On the other hand, I’m now complaining that a superhero movie’s politics are lacking in subtlety; newsflash for me: superheroes aren’t subtle, aren’t meant to be subtle, and should be praised for actually putting some effort into politics beyond mere representation, so Blue Beetle certainly deserves that.

Rather more easy for me to appreciate about the film is its total aesthetic focus on garish neon colours, where nothing isn’t made better by glowing. There’s a verve and energy to the visual style that certainly helps provide the action set pieces with a very individual look and some personality.

Part of that personality is somewhat goofy, but then, one of the script’s main problems is that it wants to be funny more often than it actually is, a problem that isn’t helped by a tendency to repeat jokes in slightly revised form sometimes three scenes after another.

Timing is a bit of a problem for the film in general: some dialogue lines seem curiously misplaced, coming a scene or thirty seconds too early or too late for full effect. There’s a sloppiness here that surprises on this budget level. If this sloppiness is caused by the script or by the film’s editing is anyone’s guess. It’s a bit of a shame, too, for despite my gripes, there’s quite bit of fun to be had with Blue Beetle. If it were a bit tighter, it would probably even be a whole lot of that.

Three Films Make A Post: It's never too late to start.

Living (2022): There’s so much that could have gone wrong with shifting Oliver Hermanus’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to 1950s London, but the resulting movie carves out its own, individual identity instead of being the original movie, but worse and set in the West. Kazuo Ishiguro’s script for the tale of a man confronted with the diagnosis of his looming death and what this does to him is delicate, intelligent and easily portrays the difficult bits of the human heart, so that a story that in the wrong hands could be just a piece of kitsch becomes deeply felt, thought and moving. Hermanus directs with quiet intelligence, a presence that’s never showy, and the ability to support his actors.

The cast, led by a typically wonderful Bill Nighy doesn’t exactly need the support, great as the ensemble does, but the film isn’t exactly getting worse by them and their director being on the same page.

Sri Asih (2022): Only the second film of the Indonesian Bumilangit Cinematic (superhero) Universe, and we’re already getting not only a female led (Pevita Pearce as the titular heroine) entry, but one directed by a woman – Upi Avianto – to boot. For my tastes, this is a better paced movie than Gundala is, a little slicker in presentation and choreography, and a lot of fun like this sort of big budget superhero thing is supposed to be, particularly – as with its predecessor - in the way it allows itself to be local as well as universal.

Hergé: In the Shadow of Tintin aka Hergé à l’ombre de Tintin (2016): Apparently, there are different cuts of Hugues Nancy’s documentary about the great pioneer of the Bande dessinée, Hergé. I have only been able to see the shorter, fifty-two minute cut. I suspect most of my problems with the film would be resolved by the thirty minutes longer version, for this version’s main problem seems to be its neck-breaking pace, racing through its subject’s life and work with so little breathing room, it can only touch on anything – his unpleasant early politics, the war years, his emotional struggle with being the Tintin drawing machine, the development of his style and so on – without ever finding the time to actually say anything deep about it, despite featuring an impressive number of experts as well as rare and valuable archive material from Hergé’s estate.

I’m not quite so sure the film’s tendency to hyperbole – there’s a lot of talk about “genius”, whatever that means, little talk about any comics work influencing Hergé and things like that – is going to be better in the longer version, but it running around like the White Rabbit really is its main problem in the short cut.

In short: Gundala (2019)

An orphan learns that he has divinely inspired superpowers. Combined with the martial arts skills taught him by an older orphan during his worst times, this makes him prime superhero material. Eventually, reluctantly, the grown-up version of our orphan turns into the masked hero Gundala (Abimana Aryasata) to fight off a demonically (well, the Indonesian equivalent of demons, really) inspired rich man (Bront Palarae) with a very complicated mad rich villain plan, and his small army of orphan assassins. There’s also a subplot about ancient evil that only makes partial sense to the uninitiated like me, but is most probably in here to prepare the future of this superhero universe, as is the short appearance of Sri Asih (Pevita Pearce), who has her own prequel film following this.

Directed by the great Joko Anwar, this is the first entry into a proposed big Indonesian comic book based superhero universe, the Bumilangit Cinematic Universe. Because very little of this stuff has made it into languages I can understand, I really can’t say how this connects/compares to the comics. I always find it fascinating how standard super hero tropes are treated through a slightly different cultural lens (see also the riches of Filipino superhero movies of decades past, or Japanese tokusatsu cinema), and it certainly makes a very nice change from the Marvel and DC styles, even if you don’t understand every cultural nuance. And you’ll hardly get this movie’s class war aspect from Hollywood.

Of course, there’s so much here that’s universal to the subgenre – heroes being heroic and all - the film is still easily understood and related to even for an audience outside of Indonesia.

Anwar is of course a fine director, and I appreciate the film’s complicated sort of leftist touches, but I do think Gundala does spend a little too much time on our hero’s horrible misadventures as an orphan. Some of it has a pay-off later on, but I do prefer my origin stories generally a bit shorter unless the length is absolutely necessary. The pace is in general a bit more leisurely than it needs to be.

That our main villain’s plan only makes very little logical sense is no problem whatsoever in the context of this kind of project, of course, and Anwar (who also scripted with Harya Suraminata) uses the dubious logic to set up some fine and fun set pieces for Gundala to fight his way through. The fight and action choreography is generally fine, not quite as inspired as in some modern Indonesian action movies, but individual enough to be fun and have heft when the plot actually needs it.

Which certainly makes for a promising start for this particular universe.

Three Films Make A Post: In a city forever in darkness an ancient horror awakens.

Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham (2023): For large parts of its running time, this adaptation of the Mike Mignola, Richard Pace and Troy Nixey Elseworlds mini-series as directed by Christopher Berkeley and Sam Liu sticks rather closely to the original. In its first acts, its mostly makes some not terribly creatively handled gestures towards inclusivity it would have been weird not to include in 2023, and allows Oliver Queen a bit more heroism than the original had. For the finale, though, the script by Jase Ricci makes increasingly strange choices that muddle what was a pretty straightforward plot and climax in ways that seem weird, and pointless. I’d understand – if not like – changes to make things slicker or more contemporary, but farting around with a solid structure to replace them with a rickety construct of rotten wood makes little sense to me.

Otherwise, Doom certainly is one of the better DC animated features; it even shows some moments of visual creativity instead of the more factory like approach DC’S animation arm seems to prefer these days.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre (2023): Whereas this misbegotten attempt at some sort of comedic Mission Impossible thing by Guy Ritchie is at times astonishingly bad: jokes never hit – and are generally underwritten - action set pieces are bland and lifeless, scenes that shouldn’t be in the film at all go on forever. Even at his worst – and I’d say that’s at least half of his output – Ritchie usually knows how to pace quick, usually at least semi-witty dialogue and seems to be a director who appreciates the qualities of a good cast, but you won’t even find any of that here. This is just a lifeless, glossy yet cheap-looking waste of a great cast.

Acidman (2022): For my taste, Alex Lehmann’s film never quite rises to the set-up of “woman’s (Dianna Agron) attempts to reconnect with her long-time estranged father (Thomas Haden Church) and fix her own hang-ups in the process is repeatedly interrupted by his obsession with UFOs and his Alzheimer’s”. The film’s neither sad nor weird enough to really pull the set-up off quite as effectively as one would wish it to, and much of it turns out to be a pretty middle of the road “woman meets dad” indie that doesn’t seem to dare to become as strange or emotional as it could and should. It’s a nice enough movie, mind you – it only wastes its potential to be more than that.

Three Films Make A Post: I stopped caring a long time ago

Samaritan (2022): If ever you wanted to see a cross between Over the Top and The Dark Knight Rises, director Julius Avery, writer Bragi F. Schut and an expressionless rock formation named Sylvester Stallone have made the movie for you. Apart from badly ripping off the least regarded Nolan Batman movie, this is a film whose makers ignore the last three decades of superhero movies, instead preferring the eldritch horror of using a child as their viewpoint character, and the bad child acting that belongs to this sort of thing.

There’s a big reveal you’ll see coming ten minutes in but that still takes more than an hour to happen, and whose early use would have made the film and its characters a million times more interesting, action sequences that can’t see the difference between low-powered and badly structured, and a lead actor who either can’t act anymore or simply doesn’t on general principle. That the dialogue is dreadful and the plot harbours neither surprises nor interesting ideas and can’t even hit generic plot beats well should come as no surprise in this context.

Nope (2022): The new movie by Jordan Peele, on the other hand, fails on a much higher level. But then, even in this, his by far worst film, you can’t help but see that he’s still an excellent director. Just one who lets himself down as a writer this time around, creating a film that bloats a ninety minute plot up to more than two hours. I’m all for slow horror and spending lots of time to get to know characters as well as to build up dread, but in this case, the characters and their relations are simply not interesting or complicated enough to reward the time spent with them, and the monster that’s the film’s major threat is not the kind of thing for which “dread” is the appropriate feeling. Worse, the film’s attempt at a commentary on people’s drive to win cheap entertainment fame has little that intrinsically or metaphorically connects it with the horror movie parts of the affair, which makes the film not just feel sluggish, but also somewhat disconnected.

Requiem for a Village (1975): Most films about traditional country ways getting swallowed by the New and the city do tend to have a certain reactionary undertone in which the old is somehow always better than the new. David Gladwell’s documentary about the memories of an old country man coming to life on a graveyard is not such a film. There’s a deep longing for disappearing ways of living running through the film, yet it is also painfully honest about the harshness and cruelty of country life and country people, often seeming to suggest that only the good bits of the Old are swallowed by the New, while the violence, the rape and the cruelty just continue on in other clothing.

Morbius (2022)

Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), biochemist with black metal musician hair, has been suffering from some rare and terrible, and supposedly lethal blood disease since birth. Obviously, he’s using his research for attempts to cure himself and other sufferers from that disease like his old friend “Milo” (Matt Smith). He seems to be on the right track, too, for he does indeed manage to use bat science stuff to cure himself from the symptoms of his disease. Alas, he also turns himself into a (living) vampire with a bad disposition as well as an insatiable blood lust. Michael, being a decent guy at his core, is very much unhappy with turning into a super-powered killer. Milo, on the other hand, is a-okay with being evil.

Given that the last superhero movie I watched that was supposedly not good at all turned out to be the rather great Eternals, I was actually somewhat optimistic going into Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius. Alas, this has all the problems Sony’s other Spiderverse movies made without the help of Marvel Studios have, and them some.

Problem number one is the script. It is credited to Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, both of whom were also responsible for Dracula Untold, Gods of Egypt and the “story” for that terrible Power Rangers movie, and so stay true to form. Even though I’m not as obsessed with “correct” plot structure as contemporary mainstream Hollywood scriptwriters usually are, I can’t help but think that writing a film whose middle act takes up ninety percent of its running time is ill-advised. Particularly when said middle act is full of scenes that have no business being in the movie at all – at least the version that somebody laughingly pretended to be the finished one to be inflicted on an audience – and do nothing, mean nothing, and are a slog to even get through. Characterisation generally makes little sense, pacing is non-existent, and there’s not a single scene to suggest anybody involved in the filmmaking had any concept of what its core ideas – yes, superhero blockbusters need those too – are supposed to be.

This godawful mess isn’t at all improved by messy, often genuinely bad, effects that have no business being in a movie in a budget bracket where competent craftsmanship should really be the absolute minimum to make the way to the screen. The action is generally murky, goes on too long, and is edited with random insertions of freeze frames and slow motion that are probably meant to be cool but show no sense for the proper pacing and choreography of action. In other words, Espinosa has learned nothing whatsoever since the execrable Life.

Our director also isn’t good at night time scenes at all, leaving things, dark, murky, yet also completely without a sense of atmosphere or place. Which turns out to be a bit of a problem in a movie that mostly takes place by night (even though it doesn’t actually need too, for Morbius has no trouble with daylight).

I could go on longer about the film’s problems, the distracted way it shuffles its female lead (Adria Arjona) on and off stage because it can’t come up with anything for her to do, or how Leto’s performance is very, very intense but also completely wrong for the film he is in, how lazy and phoned in every single aspect of Morbius is, but honestly, that would mean putting a lot more effort into the film than the actual filmmakers and the billion dollar company they are working for did.

Three Films Make A Post: And you thought that other HOUSE was bad

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021): I already wasn’t terribly happy with the first Venom movie, what with its combo of a crap script and uninventive action, but compared to this second attempt at a movie, that thing was a masterpiece. Instead of even a bad script, this is based on what really just a series of badly connected memes that’ll probably go well on Instagram but certainly do not a movie make, terrible acting by a bunch of people who can do so much better, some of the worst effects you will see in this budget bracket, and direction by Andy Serkis that suggests he’s not even acquainted with the concept of tone, much less able to provide this nonsensical mess with one.

Perhaps the writer of the next Venom movie might take a look at some of the better comics runs of the characters and just crib from there?

The Hypnosis aka 최면 (2021): In comparison, this deeply mediocre horror movie by Choi Jae-hoon with its much too obvious twists, its indifferent character writing and its never more than okay staging at least feels like it is at trying for coherence in tone, style and narrative. Sure, it mostly only manages to land there in the blandest manner imaginable, and ends up being the kind of film you’ll watch and forget in a manner of minutes, but at least it isn’t going out of its way to become a bad time.

The House on Straw Hill aka Trauma aka Exposé (1976): By all rights, this pretty sleazy British thriller with Linda Hayden and Udo Kier (and barely anyone else) as directed and written by James Kenelm Clarke should be a much better time, if in a pretty unpleasant way. There are certainly all the elements here that make comparable exploitation movies (mostly from Italy) a good bad time, but things never come together as they should: the sleazy bits feel more awkward than anything else, the thriller narrative is much too predictable (not helped by a narrative style that shows always too much or too little), and the film’s attempts at being artsy (always useful for exploitation, obviously) manage to at the same time weaken the sleaze and feel like a put-on.

In short: Justice Society: World War II (2021)

The Barry Allen Flash (Matt Bomer) is vibrating too hard (or something) while trying to catch a kryptonite bullet meant for Superman and finds himself sucked into what he first assumes to be the past, World War II. There, he teams up with a JSA version led by an - apparently Eastern European going by her accent - Wonder Woman (Stana Katic).

Theoretically to kick Nazi butt, but the weird, episodic plotting of this animated movie eventually provides other butts to kick.

The whole thing, as directed by Jeff Wamester, is a rather middling affair, animated with a kind of cell-shade look that never quite commits and ends up looking weirdly generic for the approach, decently – but not better – voiced, and which suffers from a pretty weak script by Jeremy Adams and Meghan Fitzmartin. There are several problems here: first, there’s the whole Future (actually SPOILER) Flash angle that adds exactly nothing to the World War II business, has no pay-off except one of those interminable valuable lessons to be learned (that is to say, an anti-payoff). Hell, Barry doesn’t even have anything of import to do in the grand finale at all, and is probably only in the movie because someone higher up in the development ladder became afraid the audience might be confused by a film headlined by Wonder Woman (I am being sarcastic here). The Barry business takes up quite a bit of valuable space, too, so there’s not enough left for the short hand characterisation of most of the rest of the cast beyond Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor, so that their supposed character arcs all seem to have a beginning and an end but no middle whatsoever, destroying the impact of something like a less heroic becoming the Superman, and killing most of the emotional beats in the climax stone cold dead.

There’s little dramatic flow to the narrative in general, and the second half of the film seems to belong to rather a different movie than the first one altogether. At least it’s one with more interesting set pieces.

Three Films Make A Post: The hunter becomes the hunted.

Enhanced (2019): By now, quite a few low budget filmmakers have realized that they may not be able to keep up on the spectacle of contemporary superhero cinema, but they sure as hell can use superhero tropes when focussing on comparatively low power sets and street level plots. Like at least half of these films, James Mark’s Canadian example of the type Enhanced is clearly taking its cues from the X-Men, with (mostly) innocent superpowered beings hunted by the government.

The resulting movie is a lot of fun for my tastes. It makes good use of the fantastical elements it can afford, presents some choice comic book science, and comes up with a handful of very nice, small-scale action scenes with more than decent choreography and direction. Leads Alanna Bale and George Tchortov comport themselves well in and outside of the action, too, so there’s a fun time to be had here.

Deep Cover (1992): Bill Duke’s (who is probably much better known for his character actor work than directing despite his copious direction credits on TV and in the movies) movie about a black cop played by Laurence Fishburne when we still called him Larry going undercover as a drug dealer (and partnering with Jeff Goldblum) packs a lot of style (one can certainly be sure that Duke watched Miami Vice and learned all the right lessons from the show), quite a bit of creative wildness, comments about being a black man in the 90s and a generally acerbic attitude towards 90s drug capitalism as well as the war on drugs into all the best-loved tropes you expect from a film in this genre.

With the help of Fishburne, Goldblum and a generally wonderful cast, Duke makes a film that manages to be genuinely intelligent under the cheap thrills, delivers these thrills in the best possible way, and really convinces anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that he should have been one of the great crime movie directors after this, instead of the travelling craftsman he became. (No shame in being one of those, naturally).

In the Cut (2003): Also pretty fantastic is this hazy and moody erotic psychological thriller by the great Jane Campion, who never let her feminism stop her to get deep into the less easily stomached and judged areas of sexuality, desire and lust, and indeed found much useful for feminism to explore there. This is very much a film of a hazy yet tactile mood, interested in all kinds of liminal spaces – between characters, between feelings, between glances, between waking and sleep, between lust and caution, and of course (this being Campion) between touches. The film is pretty giallo-esque in its eroticism, as well as in the deep implausibility of its thriller plot; just as it is with most other great giallos, that implausibility really isn’t the point, though.

Of course, this being a Campion movie, we also get to watch some great performances, not just by Meg Ryan going brilliantly against her America’s Sweetheart thing with ease but also by house favourites Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nick Damici (of all people to encounter in a Campion movie).

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

For the sequel to a commercially (and even critically) successful superhero blockbuster, this is one strange movie. I, at least, would not have expected the film to not just take place in 1984 but actually emulate some of the tone and structure of late 70’s/early 80’s superhero films  (the few there were at the time).

It’s not exactly a tone I’m particularly fond of, and at first the film does feel somewhat awkward - also thanks to the seeming repetition of the only larger flaw of the first film, taking ages to actually get going (later more on that) – but Jenkins is actually going somewhere with the film’s somewhat peculiar tone between faux-naïf and fairy-tale (which does feel a lot like reading “golden age” comics, minus the bloodthirst of those venerable books of often dubious quality) on a thematic level. It is indeed difficult to imagine a big mainstream film renouncing this bluntly and heavily the values (ha!) of the 80s in the West that eventually brought us neoliberalism and a world of other hurt and doing it in any different tone. Pretending to be harmless and a bit goofy is still a useful disguise for a bit of subversion, apparently, even if one is about as subtle about it as a sledgehammer.

Once the film has hit its stride, and a viewer has adapted to the tone (if one doesn’t, one won’t have any joy with this one, I suspect) it actually becomes quite a lot of fun, with action scenes that share the rest of the film’s complete disinterest in pretending to be naturalistic and instead increasingly live in a space of their own imagination. There’s a cheesy and deeply romantic sense of wonder on display in some of the slower moments in between the blockbuster business, Jenkins milking the tone she has decided upon to wonderful effect, turning what to some critics seems to read as “overindulgent” or just plain silly cliché into pure charm driven by the kind of intelligence that doesn’t need to show off in my eyes.

The performances are broad and big in a manner perfectly appropriate to the surroundings, with Gadot still being pretty much a case of perfect casting, Chris Pine giving the impression of genuinely enjoying playing the second fiddle most other films would have their female leads be, and Pedro Pascal repeatedly hitting just the right spot where caricature and real person meet. The only of the main players I wasn’t particularly fond of was Kristen Wiig, but I suspect her ever mumbling, curiously apathetic acting style is simply so little to my taste, I couldn’t say if the performance is any good on a more objective level or not.

On the surface, the film’s plotting can feel rather messy – particularly in a film world where the scripting ideal seems to be of film as a relentless clockwork automaton – but that’s less an actual weakness (alright, the film really could have lost the prologue on Themyscira) than a sign of a film that’s really trying to do justice to quite a few ideas and needs to take some time to do so. And make no mistake, while the presentation here is often charmingly goofy, the script by Jenkins, Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham is neither goofy nor stupid – it’s just not afraid to express its bigger ideas through cheesy dialogue and broad tropes, losing the sort of over-earnest man-face that pushed something like The Joker (aka “ranting arsehole in front of bad versions of all of the director’s favourite Scorsese scenes”) into being a critical darling but winning my heart in the process. Also having a fucking heart itself, which is of course isn’t allowed in proper art.

WW84 is really quite the movie, certainly not an attempt to make the first movie again, but bigger, but the product of filmmakers genuinely exploring the space the superhero genre affords them. That this sort of thing does exist can only be good for what looks to still be the dominant genre of huge Hollywood movies for at least the next half decade to come.

Dark Angel: The Ascent (1994)

Veronica (Angela Featherstone), a young demon, is more than just somewhat unhappy with her life in hell. Hell, it turns out, is pretty boring for a young woman not satisfied with her place in the underworld. Her father Hellikin (Nicholas Worth) is sweaty and abusive, treating here dream visions of ascending to the overworld with his fists and a lot of shouting.

Eventually, Veronica, accompanied by her “beast” (or as we call them around here, German Shepard Dog) Hellraiser (Heros), flees to the overworld. Once there she falls in with and for a young physician (Daniel Markel), and spends her nights smiting evil-doers, for in this interpretation of demons and hell, Veronica’s kind is definitely doing the dirty work for heaven. She will need some time – and some heavenly “encouragement” – to learn about concepts like punishments being meant to be appropriate to the heaviness of the crime. Before that, she’s all about ripping muggers’ and would be rapists’ spines out and feeding their flesh to her dog as well as to her unwitting new boyfriend. Veronica’s not only going after the small fry, though. Having early on identified the city’s right-wing mayor as “evil incarnate”, she is planning to do something about him.

I have no idea where Linda Hassani’s (whose magnum opus this is) Dark Angel: The Ascent has hidden from me all of my life, but I’m certainly very happy that we have finally found each other. This was made in the early Romanian phase of Charles Band’s Full Moon, at a point in time when the budgets were still workable, and Band and company still seem to have been interested in making proper low budget movies instead of mostly focussing on very slow moving in-jokes about puppets and dolls.

Hassani makes a lot out of what Band gives her, turning the Romanian sets as lively as possible through the powers of inventive lighting and genuinely great camerawork by veteran Romanian DP Vivi Dragan Vasile. The film starts with a really cleverly realized low budget hell, containing the proper titbits of the more violent versions of Christianity and quite a few good jokes and continues in that mode when Veronica arrives in New York, Hassani selling fake America with the best of them.

Tonally, the film is a curious mixture of actually pretty coherent (if not exactly real-world canonical) theology, straight-faced jokes, some well done violence, quite the dollop of goofiness, and just as much seriousness. The script by Matthew Bright (who wrote quite a bit of interesting stuff like this and Freeway) clearly has a lot of fun with the sillier elements of the plot, but the filmmakers do present jokes and silliness with as straight a face as possible, as do the actors, who avoid all winking into the camera even in moments when most anyone would have been tempted to do some of it. Of course, the film’s jokes are all the funnier because they are presented with that straight a face and never get in the way of the film’s serious side of right wing bashing, light feminism, romance and fun violence. There’s a lot of actual intelligence in the writing and the staging of the film, Hassani and Bright clearly understanding that having fun and being silly does not mean you can’t also take your film seriously at the same time.

In its own wonderfully eccentric way, Dark Angel does fit snugly in between other 90s (mostly low budget) attempts at making dark superhero/urban vigilante movies, mostly getting around the problem a lot of these films had with understanding the differences between the superhero and urban vigilante genres thanks to its violent religious angle. Grimdark superheroes and visitors from hell do ponder comparable moral conundrums, it turns out, just in rather a different language. The film’s really interesting when it comes to its portrayal of Veronica’s little bits of slaughter, too, or rather, it repeatedly portrays the people she rescues as being genuinely afraid of her and disturbed by her methods, going very much against the grain of typical vigilante movies who’d never dare suggest a victim of a crime might react with anything else but a high five to being rescued in the most violent way possible. It’s interesting, and really important to the very specific kind of redemption tale the film is telling.

But before I leave anyone with the impression that this is a totally serious movie for totally serious people, let me quote my favourite scene to you. Veronica has just disrupted two police officers beating up a gentleman for the crime of walking through the streets at night while being black (and yes, the lack of improvement between then and now in this regard is pretty damn depressing). Non-plussed by a slight young woman with very big feet (that’s a plot point) talking grim-faced biblical vengeance at them (Featherstone’s pretty great at that particular note in most of her scenes), one of the cops says “How would you like to spend the night in jail – on a prostitution charge?”. To which our heroine replies “How would you like to die in a state of mortal sin?” before dispatching the cops rather easily. Which may very well be the best line a movie vigilante has ever said to someone.

The hopeful viewer can also look forward to a first date at a porn cinema (Taxi Driver was certainly not lost on the filmmakers), a floating angel lady right out of a Christian kitsch postcard, and various comments on the mores of Hell and Earth.

I honestly have no idea what more anyone could ask of any movie.

The New Mutants (2020)

After a catastrophic event which apparently destroyed her whole township with her family within it, Dani Moonstar (Blue Hunt) finds herself in the clinic of one Dr Reyes (Alice Braga). It’s a bit of a strange place, with Reyes alone taking care of only a handful of patients. Apart from Dani, there are Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams), Ilyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton), and Roberto da Costa (Henry Zaga). All of them are mutants whose lack of control over their powers has cost loved ones (or in Ilyana’s and Rahne’s case, not so loved ones) their lives.

As Reyes tells it, she is supposed to help the kids achieve control over their powers so they can take the next step her mysterious superiors have chosen for them. Not surprisingly given this language, the place is also a cage, surrounded by an indestructible force field, and Reyes changes tack between helpful counsellor and prison warden with disturbing ease.

Ever since Dani has arrived, the clinic seems to have become haunted, too, and the young mutants will have to confront their greatest fears, learn to work together, and uncover the true goals of Reyes. Well, a bit of smooching is also involved, because that’s what future X-Men are supposed to do in their downtime, just ask Chris Claremont.

After it has been shuffled through release dates for years for no fault of its own, Josh Boone’s The New Mutants has turned into the last of the Fox style X-Men movies, a state of affairs that has not helped the reception of the film much, I believe. Then there are also the expectations of the first adaptation of a particularly beloved comic to cope with. These expectations, a film can only survive if it is an absolute masterpiece, which the film at hand isn’t. So it’s no surprise that New Mutants hasn’t been a smashing success even with the nerd press or those parts of the mainstream who don’t automatically rant nonsense about the end of cinema through superhero movies.

However, while not a masterpiece, Boone’s film isn’t a bad one at all. At the very least, even if one is unkind towards it, the it is made pretty interesting by the decision to replace some standard superhero movie tropes with (light) horror touches (and a lot of nods towards the third Nightmare on Elm Street). After all, the backgrounds of troubled teenagers in the real world are only one step away from being a horror movie anyway, mutant powers only sharpening the metaphor, as is right and proper for the franchise as well as the specific comics this adapts. The realization of the horror sequences shows rather clearly why the film is only a good movie instead of a great one in my book, though. They are just not that creepy, Boone never quite finding a visual language that makes the weight of horror the protagonists feel towards them completely believable. In part, that’s really a problem of visual choices by the director, in part it’s the film’s very middling effects as well as the less than creative design work done to bring elements of the comics on screen. It’s not Shazam level terrible, but it does weaken the film’s emotional heft considerably.

On the other hand, the film’s narrative (script by Boone and Knate Lee) does have a pleasantly clear idea of what it wants to be about and the ways it believes teenagers can overcome heavy emotional loads (and horror movie scares) through the power of diverse families of choice. There’s an obvious reason why the kids are repeatedly shown watching Whedon’s “Buffy”, and while this sort of thing is obviously a simplification of how we get through life, it does speak to some things I at least believe to be true and important, while treating its characters and their concerns with respect and love.

There is little in the film that doesn’t directly speak to its thematic concerns, leading to a very focused and low key movie that only fulfils the expectations on the amount of action and loudness a modern superhero movie has to show as much as it needs to if it actually wants to get a budget. Though the climactic action scene really not being that great a catharsis it should narratively and thematically be seems to have a lot to do with that budget not being high enough.

Yet still, The New Mutants is a very interesting, and often also a very entertaining, film, ending the Fox X-Men movies on an unexpected yet fitting note.

In short: Armstrong (2017)

Her first night as an EMT does turn out even more difficult than Lauren (Vicky Jeudy) expected. Not only does she have to battle through her troubles as a recovering addict in a stressful situation and has been given the bitter, unsympathetic Eddie (Jason Antoon) as her partner, there are rather less normal troubles ahead of her, too.

On their way to an explosion, Lauren and Eddie nearly run over a man we will soon enough learn to be called Armstrong (Shawn Parsons). Armstrong’s wounded, drifting in and out of consciousness and outfitted with a huge, awkward looking bionic arm. As a matter of fact, Armstrong’s fighting an underground war against a well-organized death cult (with its own paramilitary organization, even!) out to cause the end of the world via earthquakes. Just detonate some nukes over the appropriate fault lines in Los Angeles, and the world is apparently going to end. Armstrong’s gotta know, for he was once one of them.

With the alternative being murdered by said death cult, the EMTs – well, mostly Lauren – find themselves joining in Armstrong’s fight.

Kerry Carlock’s and Nicholas Lund-Ulrich’s Armstrong is a surprisingly decent attempt at making a low budget superhero movie, using no pre-existing comics characters but telling a perfectly fitting low scale but not low rent superhero tale. Despite being a low budget film, this was made by people with copious experience in other roles in film production, so there’s always at least a high degree of professionalism on display. Particularly Lund-Ulrich’s experience with effects work is visible on screen whenever we actually get to see some of the action, and makes things pleasantly convincing (even though Armstrong’s strong arm – groan – looks like plastic).

More often than not, the film stays with the EMTs when Armstrong goes out doing his action hero thing, the filmmakers clearly preferring to have a handful of effects scenes that are great to look at to a dozen unconvincing ones.

Plus, while these characters aren’t exactly new to a genre movie audience as types, spending time with Lauren and Eddie isn’t a bad thing, the script (by the directors and Nick Rufca) grounding their characters in mostly believable problems, capably assisted by actors – particularly Jeudy - willing to put an effort in even when in a small-scale genre film like this.

Seen as a whole, Armstrong is a film obviously made by people clearly very conscious of what they can do on their budget and what not, shifting the narrative perspective in the affordable direction while still hitting the most important street level superhero beats effectively. The ending’s terribly cheesy, of course, but it also does the film’s main character (who isn’t its titular character) justice in a way appropriate to the film’s genre.

Three Films Make A Post: The old flesh is dead, long live the new!

Darklands (1996): What starts out as if it could become a considerably interesting piece of post-industrial folk horror (the sub-sub genre still waiting on its day) becomes less and less so the longer it goes on, the film wasting some promising ideas on occult conspiracy by the numbers plotting. On paper highly interesting elements like the connection between a “back to our Celtic roots” right-wing politician and a revived druid cult are wasted on barely competent suspense scenes; the filmmakers clearly didn’t do any research on actual pagan practices and most certainly couldn’t come up with anything exciting on their own. The conspiracy plot only manages to remind one of films who are much better at this sort of thing. There’s really little there apart from the initial promise, this being the first Welsh horror movie or not.

Project Power (2020): On one hand, I really think superhero cinema could use more of Henry Joost’s and Ariel Schulman’s focus on POC characters, and featuring among others a plot line that’s explicitly about empowering a young, poor, black teenager is a fine thing to have in this sort of thing. But the film’s not terribly good at integrating these aspirations into its more typical superpowered business, the action movie parts never feeling actually informed by the rest of the film. It doesn’t help that the film is one of those films that believe replacing superhero tropes with action movie tropes somehow makes its view of the world more realistic, when in fact, it’s just blowing up its body count.

Generally, the film has a bit of a meandering quality, its plot lines taking too long to come together (and I would argue that excising Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character completely would have cost the film nothing but an actor working below his abilities), and the big dramatic beats never quite having the heft the film seems to think they do.

Visually, the Netflix production is a bit of a middling affair where ugly colour schemes meet competent but often slightly bland action.

Ava (2020): Also perfectly watchable but not exactly great (or even good) is Tate Taylor’s tale of a killer for a weird organization with the least believable procedure finding herself in the crosshairs of her own people while also trying to solve some family business I could care less about. The cast – with Jessica Chastain, John Malkovich, Geena Davis, Common and Colin Farrell among others – is great, but the script loves to go through the most generic plot beats available at any given time, leaving these poor people to pretend the way that organization does business (from its boss doing business at his home next to his playing children to the bizarre assassination plans) makes any kind of sense even for an action movie or allude to not terribly interesting backstories.


All of this would be perfectly forgivable if the action were actually impressive, or the family drama all that riveting, but the former is competent (with action-inexperienced Chastain sometimes struggling to go into the action heroine poses) at best, the latter simply not very interesting.

In short: Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

Following as it does that pretty dire Suicide Squad movie, I didn’t exactly go into Cathy Yan’s Harley Quinn solo movie disguised as a Birds of Prey outing with high expectations. Particularly when you add various comics nerd problems I have with the movie conceptually: that the Birds of Prey without Batgirl/Oracle never feel like the Birds of Prey to me; that Harley Quinn has become to DC what Wolverine was for Marvel in the late 90s and early 00s – so omni-present, it becomes rather difficult to care about her; that the film uses characters so far from any of their comic incarnations, I’m not sure why it does use the names from the comics at all (see Cassandra Cain).

However, as a wise writer once wrote: talk about what’s actually there, not your expectations, and approaching Harley Quinn this way, I found myself really rather enjoying the whole affair. For one, unlike the David Ayer Suicide Squad film this is closest to, Cathy Yan and writer Christina Hodson actually know the tone they are going for and are sticking with it, yet still find time to just go off into the direction of some goofy, fun, or interesting idea if they come upon it. Most of the jokes are even funny, and the film is stuffed full of hilariously little details it presents for its audience to get or not get without having to tell us every damn second that we are indeed supposed to laugh now.

For my taste, this one’s much better at the humorous ultra-violence than the much praised Deadpool (which I still loathe with surprising intensity); but then, this is more playful than cynical a film in character, even if some guy gets fed to a hyena, so I’m bound to enjoy it more. It’s also surprisingly good at the small-scale/street level superhero violence, taking quite a few choreography tricks from classic martial arts cinema, which is never not a good thing.


And best of all: EXXXtreme Joker is not actually in the movie in person but only as a symbol of really shitty men for the heroine to mentally break free from, while ranting asshole Joker never existed in this world.

Three Films Make A Post: Some directors live for their work. He kills for it.

Return to Cabin by the Lake (2001): Because apparently nobody in the early 00’s could get enough of Judd Nelson mugging idiotically through a nonsense plot that tries to excuse its stupidity by calling itself a comedy, the world suffered this sequel to Po-Chih Leong’s TV movie Cabin by the Lake. The film’s still plotted for an audience of fools, the jokes are the sort of smug “ain’t Hollywood horrible” jokes that must have had a beard in the 1930s already, and Nelson’s performance as serial killer/screenwriter/director is so broad, no bridge could cross it. Though you gotta give some respect to screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick when an early, completely insufferable, victim of Nelson’s Stanley goes by his own name; I accept the apology.

The Droving (2020): This piece of British indie folk horror about a soldier/torturer (Daniel Oldroyd) searching for the killer of his sister (Amy Tyger) as directed by George Popov is fortunately not trying to be funny. It’s a bit of a frustrating film, though, the sort of affair that’s clearly made with talent and love but doesn’t come together quite well enough. The film certainly has an eye for moody (and pretty) landscape shots very useful for folk horror, and its script has a clear idea of the intersection between its folkloric idea and the inner life of its main character. The acting’s good too.

The problem is the pacing: scenes, as is so often the case in indie productions, tend to go on longer than they should be – sometimes clearly aiming for suspense but not quite being able to sustain it long enough, other times going slightly overboard with an attempt to deepen the character and his flashback relation to his sister. Of course, these are the kinds of flaws that come from a willingness to take risks and show the right kind of ambition, so it’s difficult to be too unhappy with the film.

She Never Died (2019): Speaking of indie movies with ambition, Audrey Cummings’s peculiar mix of grungy proto-superhero elements and horror, with a smidgen of 80s buddy comedy certainly is that, also. Canadian and city-based, this also shows an understanding of creating mood via landscape, or rather cityscape. Otherwise, there’s little connecting it with any of the other films in this post. It’s one of those films that have a peculiar and personal vibe, as if you were watching someone’s very individual favourite bits of different genres put together to form one movie. As is typical for this sort of affair, this isn’t always as effective as it could be on a dramatic level, but still features nice effects, fun performances by lead Olunike Adeliyi as our superpowered cannibal heroine with a secret and various Canadian character actors like Peter MacNeill and Noah Denby, and a visible love for the city as the true place to set one’s grubby vigilantism in.


The only truly off-putting element here is the sudden excursion into the biblical in the final ten minutes or so, promising a sequel I suspect will never come instead of finishing the film properly.

Three Films Make A Post: Think fast. Drive faster.

The Man Who Saw Too Much aka El hombre que vio demasiado (2016): I find Trisha Ziff’s documentary about Mexican tabloid photographer turned elderly art scene darling Enrique Metinides, and the relationship of Mexican mainstream culture to violence, utterly fascinating. Particularly, I love the film’s willingness to leave questions open, to accept that there are no absolute keys to understanding a person and what drives them; instead of providing solutions, it introduces us to the man and his work from all sides, leaving interpretations open and diverse, suggesting a man who might be a kind of folk hero, simply a commercial artist, a parasite on other people’s suffering, or a man who has seen way too much.

The only element of the film that rubs me the wrong way are the interview snippets of people from the US art scene, who provide little insight in many words, blithely ignoring the actual suffering in Metinides photos, replacing it with their half-baked ideas about suffering.

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003): This one’s the final entry into the actual Timm/Dini/Reaves universe of Batman: The Animated Series but without Timm or Dini and little of the spark of what made B:TAS so great. The animation, while technically probably better than in the post B:TAS films that came before, is curiously lifeless, the design feeling as if the animators were going through the motions of reproducing a style without thinking too hard about what it’s there for. Reaves’s script is flabby and unconvincing, full of jokes that fall flat, and aiming for the detective side of Batman without constructing a decent mystery for him to solve.

There’s a sad lack of personality to the whole affair, so once again something great ends on something of a whimper instead of a bang. But then, the animated Batman has never quite left B:TAS behind even after this part of his world was officially closed.

Overdrive (2017): This mainly French production directed by Antonio Negret quite desperately wants to be a (The) Fast & (The) Furious film from the second half of that franchise’s run. Alas, it can’t actually afford the kind of effects and stunt work it would need for this, and nobody involved seems to have much of a clue about how to go about staging the kind of action the production can actually afford. But, hey, Scott Eastwood and his perfectly horrible screen presence was in the budget, as well as poor Ana de Armas.


The script is dire, too, as if it were written by people who mistakenly believe that making formulaic movies is easy; that’s only the bad formulaic movies nobody wants to see.