SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (2019) in SPOILERVISION

Most of the way, Jon Watts' sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming feels like an appropriately comic epilogue to the last two Avengers movies. It feels true to the spirit of Marvel Comics to treat with levity what so shortly before had seemed the ultimate disaster or tragedy. So here we get a lot of riffs on the the comical complications of the event now known as "the blip," the five-year absence of half the people of Earth, followed by their very abrupt return. It seems like almost everyone in Peter Parker's science school suffered this fate, so all the characters we met in the last film look no more than two years older now. Far From Home leans even more toward teen comedy than Homecoming did, using a class trip to Europe as its framework like a special episode of an old sitcom. Writers spend so much time developing the teen plot -- in short, Peter (Tom Holland) wants to declare his love for MJ (Zendaya) but best bud Ned (Jacob Batalon) wants them to be bachelor buddies in Europe until he almost accidentally falls for Betty Brant (Angourie Rice), while suddenly-grown Brad (Remy Hill) has his own eyes set on MJ and Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori) remains a conceited jerk. On top of that you have two comical chaperones, and on the side there's a budding romance between longtime Stark henchman Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) and Peter's frisky Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) There's so much of this early on, once we get past a prologue establishing the film's superhero credentials, that the standard supervillain plot feels secondary for quite a while. It doesn't help the supervillain plot that comics book already know what to expect from the beginning. The film, however, introduces Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal), who acquires the nickname "Mysterio" from European TV, as a hero from an alternate universe who stands as Earth's only hope, in the apparently extended absence of most of the Avengers, against a quartet of rampaging elemental creatures appearing in different parts of the world. The only familiar hero Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) can lay hands on is Spidey, who finds this new crisis an unwelcome complication of his European plans but feels obliged to carry on Tony Stark's legacy. The comic book fans know Mysterio is a villain and are bound to grow impatient for the other shoe to drop as Beck befriends Peter and becomes a kind of new mentor for the young hero. The teen stuff is actually better written and definitely funnier, even if it makes Far From Home feel more like an Archie movie than a Marvel one.

The shoe finally drops once Peter is convinced that Beck is a worthier successor to Stark than he could be. He gives Beck the precious, all-powerful EDITH glasses bequeathed him by Stark, which is what Mysterio was after all along. Comics fans know the character as an illusionist and will have expected the elemental monsters to be fake. They are, in fact, a collective project, as Quentin Beck is but the leader of a clique of disgruntled former Stark Industries employees who have combined their talents to create illusions with teeth, holograms with drone air support adding up to genuine destructive power. The idea seems to be to make Mysterio Earth's greatest hero in a way that will allow all the clique to reap benefits in some corrupt way. To succeed, they need to kill the ever-suspicious Fury, but Beck is willing to let Peter live his life until Peter (and MJ) discover the truth about the elemental attacks. Now both of them, and Ned and Betty, are in mortal peril as well. While the idea of a gang of working stiffs, albeit in a higher pay grade, echoes the Vulture's gang in Homecoming, Far From Home raises the stakes from the previous film's admirably modest level as Mysterio orchestrates a mass-destruction attack on London, hoping to reinforce his heroic reputation by thwarting it after killing off anyone who may know too much. This adds up to an overlong, arguably incoherent climactic battle that has Spidey fighting drones, illusions and finally Beck himself while Happy Hogan and the primary school kids fight off drones in the Tower of London.

Gyllenhaal simply lacks the combo of charisma and gravitas Michael Keaton gave the vulture, and while the climactic fight is much busier than the climax of Homecoming it's not really an improvement. That Mysterio proves to be a one-and-done villain may also prove that neither the writers nor the actor were never very invested in the character, though he does get in a parting shot that will have ramifications for any further sequel. The weak villain condemns Far From Home to be an inferior film to Homecoming, unless you judge superhero films exclusively by the scale of action, but the ensemble of young actors remain likable enough to make their probable return still a welcome one. Holland is still a fine, easily-flustered Spidey and the other kids complement him well. Jackson is a more irascible Fury than we've seen in a while --  there's an explanation for this in the post-credits scene -- while Favreau, who goes back to the beginning of the MCU, makes a more plausible quasi-father figure for Peter. Overall, Far From Home isn't great, but thanks to most of the cast, it's hard to really dislike it.

DARK PHOENIX (2019) in SPOILERVISION

One problem with the modern superhero film cycle is that most superhero comics stories are deemed too small for the big screen. Only existential crises, ideally for both our heroes and the world, are thought to justify movies' big budgets. Films like Spider-Man: Homecoming, in which the hero thwarts a gang of thieves, are the exception. More typical was Zack Snyder's decision to get on with "The Death of Superman" in only his second film using the venerable character. So it is with the slightly less venerable Jean Grey, a charter member of the Uncanny X-Men dating back to 1963. To judge from the movies, the only reason to put the erstwhile Marvel Girl on film is to retell Chris Claremont's long story arc in which Jean survives a space disaster and becomes a being of godlike power. You wouldn't know from the movies, however, that Claremont took more than thirty issues of the X-Men comic to get Jean to the point where, having undergone mental and emotional manipulation while increasingly craving to manifest her power, she becomes Dark Phoenix and threatens the entire civilized universe. Filmmakers -- or to be specific, writer Simon Kinberg -- prefer to cut to the chase and get Jean from Phoenix to Dark Phoenix as soon as possible. Interestingly, though, Kinberg, making his second try with the material and now directing as well, tries to steer clear of the familiar "power corrupts" trope that has made the Dark Phoenix Saga a template for so many more comics over the last forty years. That's not to say that he steers clear of cliche entirely, however.

To review, we're in the new reality created by Days of Future Past, the second film with the current core cast of James McAvoy (as Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender (as Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (as Raven aka Mystique) and Nicholas Hoult (as Hank "Beast" McCoy). The new continuity has reached the year 1992, eight years prior to the events and release date of the original X-Men movie, but the four principal actors appear to have aged little over the decades. In the early scenes we get the best illustration yet of how reality has altered in mutants' favor. In a world where there are, to our knowledge, no non-mutant heroes (depending on how you classify Deadpool), the X-Men are the only game in town when a U.S. space shuttle gets in trouble in orbit. The President of the United States can call for help on the X-Phone, and Charles Xavier will answer. And when the X-Men return, their mission accomplished, they're acclaimed as world heroes. Xavier in particular is lionized and decorated by the government, and yet somehow the universe itself recognizes that there's something wrong with this picture. When Jean (Sophie Turner), almost sacrificing her life to save the shuttle crew, becomes possessed by primal cosmic energies she can hardly control, it's as if the cosmos has risen in rebellion against the historic anomaly and to punish Charles for some fundamental hubris.

The nature of Xavier's hubris will be familiar to any regular viewer of superhero TV shows. I really should have known what was coming when the film opened with a flashback to Jean as a little girl arguing with her parents over the car radio and unconsciously manifesting telekinesis moments before a fatal wreck. We cut to Charles taking Jean in at his mansion, but the rest of the film will fill in crucial gaps. In the present, Jean will discover that her father survived the accident. From him, she'll learn that Dad basically gave her up to Charles Xavier, wanting nothing more to do with her after his wife's death. The film seems unclear on which is the worse sin: the father's abandonment of his daughter or the surrogate father's lie. The fatal combination of the two puts poor Jean into a lethal rage that at long last liberates Jennifer Lawrence from a series that long ago had stopped offering her anything but money.

What would you do if you suddenly had immense but uncontrollable power and you killed somebody? Of course, you'd go look up Magneto, since it was long ago decided that you can't have an X-Men film without their on-again, off-again nemesis. Good ol' Eric has gathered a bunch of mutants in some shantytown, where he warily welcomes the wandering, bloodstained Jean. The girl won't answer when asked whose blood that is, but Magneto will find out soon enough. Both he and Hank McCoy had old, strong feelings for Raven, so when Beast spills the beans, after Jean has skedaddled, they decide to take revenge, while the rest of the X-Men resolve to stop them.

So far so meh, but at least it's easily better than the previous mutant movie, X-Men Apocalypse. Unfortunately, the new film promptly repeats the old film's fatal mistake by introducing an utterly boring big bad. To be accurate, this character first appears earlier in the picture, but it's not until she encounters an increasingly frightened and angry Jean that we realize how bad she's going to be. If you think Jennifer Lawrence had been phoning in her mutant performances recently, wait until you see how Jessica Chastain does it. She sends hers by snail-mail. Long story short, she's an evil alien who leads an expeditionary force of superpowered refugees from a world previously destroyed by the entity that now possesses Jean Grey. These aliens hope to harness the "Phoenix" power to build a new world -- ideally, as it develops, on the corpse of our world. If they can get the disgruntled Grey to help out, fine. If not, they have ways of taking her power for themselves. In a way, I suppose, Chastain aims for actorly authenticity. Tasked with playing an emotionless alien, she pretty much nails it. The problem is, you start to believe that the actress herself is an emotionless alien, and the suspicion is no tribute to her work. She and her apparently infinite supply of soldiers have no interesting characteristics whatsoever. Worse, her character botches the master plan by lapsing into blatant villain dialogue in Charles Xavier's hearing at the moment when she's convinced Jean to surrender her power. Feeling the need to tell Charles that she's going to kill all humans, so there, pretty much seals the aliens' fate, though we still have to sit through an initially exciting but ultimately interminable-seeming fight aboard a speeding train before the final scene between Jean and the alien queen....

Probably only long-form television could do justice to Claremont's original stories, though there, too, creative license would be inevitable. Jean Grey's power-drunkenness is a slow burn that only accelerates late in the game when she falls under the influence of the Hellfire Club -- who aren't available for the Dark Phoenix movie because they'd been used back in the Sixties-set X-Men: First Class. By no means do I argue that the Hellfire Club is essential to telling the story effectively, but a telling truer to the spirit of the original would allow time for storylines like theirs to play out. You really need the X-Men to be more regular presences in your entertainment life, instead of showing up every three years or so, for Jean's story to have anything like the impact the comics did. Doing the whole arc in two hours is hopeless, and the emotions and motivations Kinberg substitutes for the originals don't help matters. A collective failure of acting helps even less. Nobody here does their best work for the franchise with the arguable exception of Tye Sheridan's Cyclops, whose best moment is an unexpected but appreciated f-bomb threat to Magneto, proof of feelings for Jean that in comics had nearly forty years of publication time to develop by the time of the Dark Phoenix saga. As Jean, Sophie Turner seems more assured than in Apocalypse, but there's only so much she can do with the script's high-school psychoanalysis of her character, and there's nothing she can do with the void that Chastain becomes. In the film's favor, most of the characters are at least likable -- and I'll at least acknowledge that they want Magneto to be likable this time. While the main action scene goes on far too long, and the climactic confrontation includes way to many swirly lights, at times Kinberg and editor Lee Smith give the fight scenes a good punchy quality when speed is of the essence. Hans Zimmer's music is okay, I guess. That may not sound like much, but it's still better than Apocalypse, though early box-office reports indicate that that film turned people off a franchise that most now realize is moribund. Inevitably the X-Men will fall under the control of Marvel Studios following Disney's takeover of Twentieth Century-Fox. That probably means that somewhere down the line there will be more and better mutant films -- as long as Marvel can resist the very temptation their comics line planted in people's minds long ago.

AVENGERS: ENDGAME (2019) in SPOILERVISION

I laughed when the title of the sequel to Avengers: Infinity War was announced last year. "Endgame" is one of those cliche titles you see everywhere. Nearly every genre show has an "Endgame" episode. It seemed almost hilariously unimaginative of Marvel Studios to use it now. But while that made me laugh months ago, the surprising thing about the actual film is how consistently funny it is. I really shouldn't have been surprised, since humor has been crucial to the more-than-decade-long success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There seemed to be no room for comedy after the previous film, which saw half the life of the universe, if not 50% of all Marvel superheroes, snuffed out with a snap of Thanos' fingers. Yet there is such a thing as gallows humor, and there's always a new normal with room for jokes. That's how some people (or whatever Rocket is) cope with situations, after all. The really surprising thing about this is that the comedy star of the picture turns out to be Mark Ruffalo as The Incredible Hulk. In what may be his last turn in the role, Ruffalo gets to perform the popular variation of the character in which Ol' Greenskin has Bruce Banner's brain. It's alarming how at ease Ruffalo makes the mighty monster, compared to the pouty, childish Hulk of Thor: Ragnaraok and the default rage mode. This Hulk always has time to pose for selfies with fans -- for there are still fans in this traumatized world -- and, compared to normal, seems almost imperturbable, even when dealing with theoretical science over even Banner's head. There's a wonderful scene in which this new Hulk time-travels to 2012 New York during the climactic battle of the original Avengers film. In order to be inconspicuous on his mission (see below), he's advised to behave in his old self's smashing manner. The well-meaning yet hopelessly halfhearted way in which he goes about lazily growling and lackadaisically wrecking a car is, as of now, my favorite scene in the picture.

The Russo brothers and their writing partners, Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus, take an actually daring approach to the story, getting a much-anticipated catharsis out of the way about 30 minutes into the film when Thor (I shouldn't have to identify the actors by now) decapitates Thanos on the latter's retirement planet. The problem is, killing Thanos doesn't solve anything, since he'd already destroyed his Infinity Stones, making a reversal of his infamous snap impossible. From this empty bit of avenging, the film jumps forward five years to a world -- not to mention a universe, as new arrival Captain Marvel reminds us -- barely hanging on. Some of our heroes aren't even doing that. Thor has lapsed into drunken slackerdom, hanging out at New Asgard with some of his Ragnarok buddies while Valkyrie does most of the real work without anyone asking where she was when Thanos attacked the refugee ship in the last picture. Hawkeye, having lost his entire family, goes full vigilante on a global killing tour, less convinced than ever of some people's right to live. Only Tony Stark (along with the Hulk) seems better off, having given up and settled down to have a kid with Pepper Potts. Yet when Ant-Man gets randomly released from his post-credits predicament from last year, he intuits a solution from the fact that only a few hours passed by for him in the Quantum Realm while years went by outside. It takes a while to convince Stark, who worries that changing the recent past might wipe out his daughter, but once he's on board the film becomes Avengers: Timeheist -- an excuse for a valedictory tour of past MCU moments in search of Infinity Stones to preempt Thanos' seizure of them. While probably no one really wanted to revisit Thor: The Dark World, that mission gives Rene Russo an opportunity to make one of this film's many, many encore appearances by its supporting players. This middle act is more caper film than action picture, but comes to a dark climax as one team of heroes arrives at that planet where the Red Skull curates the Soul Gem, which as ever requires a love sacrifice. This results in a surprise exit from the franchise, but the sacrifice may be for naught. Thanks to a big gimme -- the idea that past evil Nebula can tap into the memories of her good future self, Thanos circa 2014 is tipped off to his future and endeavors to change some details. Thwarted then, he takes the battle to the present, only to be faced with an almost entirely replenished superhero army, plus the game-changing power of Captain Marvel. Ultimately, though, the only way to keep the Infinity Gauntlet away from Thanos is to use it against him, and as Hulk experienced using it to reverse the Snap, it would very likely prove fatal for a human to wield it.

Endgame is a fine film but lacks the relentless tension of Infinity War and barely makes it past the three-hour mark with more endings than The Return of the King, but its indulgent length feels earned. The battles aren't as ambitious or dramatic as in the previous picture, though yet again we have a strangely sexist moment when all the female heroes converge on one location for no special reason apart perhaps for the convenience of GIF makers. I suspect, however, that many people will like it more than its predecessor simply for the feels, both happy and sad. For the most part, the sequel exemplifies Marvel Studios' commitment to quality control in pursuit of a consistent defining tone. It quite self-consciously marks the end of an era, as half the original Avengers are exiting the franchise, but also takes time to point toward new directions: Thor teaming with the Guardians of the Galaxy, Sam Wilson as Captain America, etc. It is not the end some fatigued critics may have hoped for, but it does at least feel like the end of a chapter. The one-two punch of Infinity War and Endgame puts an exclamation point on what so far has been (with a handful of exceptions) an uncannily consistent run of epic entertainment.

Pre-Code Parade: HOT PEPPER (1933)

Marine Corps Captain Jim Flagg (aka "the Admiral" or "His Flagship") and Sergeant Harry Quirt were created by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings for the 1924 play What Price Glory? The 1926 film version, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Victor McLaglen as Flagg and Edmund Lowe as Quirt, was a blockbuster hit, in part because of the implicit invitation to lip-read dialogue far more risque than you could read on the intertitles. By the time Walsh made a sequel, The Cock-Eyed World, in 1929, talkies had arrived and there was no more silent subtext; you had to take the characters at face value. This, too, was a hit, and Walsh, McLaglen and Lowe carried on with 1931's Women of All Nations, which saw the boys fightin' round the world. Fox Film went to the well one more time, without Walsh, in 1933, finally rising to the challenge of what to do with Flagg and Quirt as civilians. John G. Blystone directed, and not badly, while a team including Dudley Nichols came up with the obvious solution to the big question. Flagg and Quirt would become gangsters.

There's an oddity in the billing, with female lead Lupe Velez, playing the title character, wedged in between top billed Lowe and third billed McLaglen -- though as you'll see in our movie ad, in some places Velez was the main attraction. Of course, women always did get between Quirt and Flagg but the hierarchy seems odd since Victor McLaglen is sort of remembered today while Edmund Lowe almost certainly isn't. Anyway, the boys are finally going to try their luck in civilian life. Quirt gets a head start by cheating Flagg out of a bankroll with loaded dice, but to be fair Flagg forced the dice on him, thinking that simpleton Olsen (the ever-enigmatic El Brendel) would carry fair dice but not knowing that Quirt had gifted Olsen the loaded pair. Three years later, despite this setback, Flagg has become a successful, limo-riding bootlegger with a chain of speakeasies and floozies on each arm, while Quirt is a shabby schmoe who nearly gets run-over by his old buddy's Olsen-driven vehicle. It develops, however, that Quirt is a master shakedown artist, taking advantage of the gullibility of gangland by flashing novelty-store badges, first at Quirt and then at crooked card player Trigger (Boothe Howard), in anticipation of big bribes.

Flagg soon has a bigger problem than Quirt. A stowaway on one of his rum-running ships can get him in trouble with the immigration authorities, who seem more threatening at least in this gangster's mind than all the enforcers of Prohibition. The stowaway is Pepper (Velez) in full spitfire mode, which is pretty much what you need to deal with such master mashers as Flagg and Quirt. Once Quirt gets wind of this situation it's just one more thing he has on Flagg, but he's willing to take a chance on Pepper in more ways than one. Stealing her away from Flagg, and tricking his erstwhile buddy into a short stay in jail, Quirt gets into the niteclub business with Pepper as his star attraction, even though the place has a French theme. Pepper puts on quite a show, pretty much giving Quirt a lap dance right in front of an irate Flagg, who's returned expected elite treatment but is getting set up for another rip-off. Alas, Quirt can't flaunt his triumph for long; he's tipped off by a war-buddy turned cop that there's going to be a clean sweep of all the speakeasies the next day, but before he can think of selling out he has to deal once and for all with both Flagg and Trigger, who still wants the ten grand Quirt took from him earlier in the picture. At first Flagg is willing to let Trigger give Quirt the works, but some Marine instinct kicks in and he can't allow his comrade in arms to be treated that way. This sets up a climactic brawl in which Flagg, Quirt, Pepper and Olsen lay waste to a small army of gangsters with more chair shots than an ECW wrestling show.That leaves only the matter of who gets Pepper, but when the boys decide to settle it peacefully with a coin flip, Pepper decides she doesn't want either of them. "You can't have this head or this tail," she says of herself before storming off. With Repeal imminent, as the film accurately prophecies, there's nothing left for Flagg and Quirt but to revert to warrior ways. They hire out to the Chinese army, ending the film on a slightly embarrassing note with the burlesque assertion that "Ah, Nuts" and "Ah, Phooey" are legitimate drill commands in Chinese.

In its amoral exuberance Hot Pepper is a textbook pre-Code picture, with Velez putting it over the top not only with her lap dance but also with an earlier scene where she seduces Flagg with a protracted striptease on a long, winding staircase, stepping out of frame to let the next bit of scanties come sliding down the bannister. As Flagg and Quirt McLaglen and Lowe are pretty much the definitive ball-busting frenemies, as purely comic a team as the Marx Bros. or Wheeler and Woolsey yet clearly capable of murdering all the competition in that category with their bare hands. You rarely ever see movie clowns so convincingly thuggish apart maybe from the Fast and Furious films. With those two and Velez dominating the action El Brendel is kept to an endurable minimum and the film is more enjoyable as a result. Strange, then, that while McLaglen and Lowe teamed up for several more films this marked the end of Flagg and Quirt (on screen at least; the actors recreated the characters on radio) until they were rebooted by John Ford in 1952. Maybe, as the end of Hot Pepper suggests, there was nothing more to be done with the characters but throw them back into the military milieu; and maybe Fox lost the rights to the characters. Whatever the studio execs were thinking, it probably was for the best because with Hot Pepper as a representative vehicle it's hard to imagine what would have become of Flagg and Quirt in the era of Code Enforcement, except to guess that it would not have been good.

ANT-MAN AND THE WASP (2018) in SPOILERVISION

Director Peyton Reed, star and co-writer Paul Rudd and the supporting cast for 2015's Ant-Man return for the inevitable sequel, and if you've seen the first one, you've pretty much seen this one. Last seen on the losing side of Captain America: Civil War, Scott Lang (Rudd) was sentenced to house arrest and is days away from completing his sentence when a strange vision brings him back into contact with his estranged mentor, Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and Pym's daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), still fugitives held responsible for Lang's use of Pym's shrinking-growing suit during the 2016 conflict. Coincident with the Pyms' attempt to contact the quantum realm, where Janet Van Dyne was lost thirty years earlier, Lang has a vision suggesting that during his short time in the quantum realm he had somehow made contact with the original Wasp (Michelle Pfeiffer, returning to superhero cinema after more than a quarter-century). Much as they resent Lang for forcing them into a fugitive life, the Pyms realize that he's essential to their plan to rescue Janet through all manner of quantum-this, quantum-that technology. Not only must Lang risk a longer sentence for breaking house arrest, and not only must the Pyms perform delicate science on the run, but all three have to deal with people muscling in on their work. A gangster (Walton Goggins) who'd provided the Pyms with crucial components for their projects now wants commercial control over their work, while a super-powered interloper who comes to be called Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) wants access to the quantum realm to cure her chronic intangibility, the by-product of an accident that killed her father, a former Pym colleague. Meanwhile, the audience expects the Infinity War to break out at any moment, and when it does in mid-credits, the consequences are dire.

That necessary business aside, has any film ever been more about fathers and daughters than this one? Not only do we continue the daughter-surpassing-the-father storyline of the first film, as Hope gets a shrinking costume of her own, and not only are we reminded of Scott's bond with his young daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson), but even Ghost has a father figure in yet another of Pym's old partners, rival scientist and long-ago "Black Goliath" Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne). Resentment of Pym conflicts with humanitarian instincts as Foster initially strives to help Ghost but ultimately recoils from the selfish ruthlessness of the former SHIELD assassin, who has a mad notion of leeching quantum energy from Janet Van Dyne, should the good guys reach her, in order to save herself. I'm not sure what the point of this triplication is, unless the point is that these storylines are increasingly common as we insist on female empowerment in genre cinema. Whatever the point, Ghost is an entertaining enough villain but suffers from having to share the screen with Goggins and his gangsters, while everyone suffers from the involvement of a bunch of FBI idiots and especially from the return of Scott Lang's ex-con buddies (Michael Pena, Tip Harris and David Dastmalchian), who are now his partners in a budding security business. Those three were just about insufferable in the first film, and there's no question of their insufferability in the sequel. The film, really a Marvel B-movie, is bloated by comedy relief, including a reprise of the storytelling gimmick from the first film in which Pena's character recaps previous events, putting his words in the other actors' mouths. It was interesting the first time, but never since. At least Pena has some natural likability and his character has something of a personality. Dastmalchian's personality boils down to superstition, and Harris doesn't even have that. Nor is Rudd himself particularly hilarious in his comic showcases; Scott Lang often seems more like a shtick than a character, and it's hard to know what more can be done with him, even as we're promised that he'll return in another sequel if not sooner.

For all that the comedy was tiresome, the action kept me interested. While the fight choreography itself is nothing special, the idea of people who can shrink and grow (though the Wasp never becomes giant like Lang can) fighting someone who can turn insubstantial gives an inventive quality to the battles between Ghost and the title characters. I was also amused by the chase scenes with shrunken cars racing through San Francisco, which seem partly an homage to the toy-car chase scene in the SF-set The Dead Pool. These bits are good enough for me to spare Ant-Man and the Wasp a thumbs-down, though the stale comedy parts make it slightly worse than the original film. Both are definitely lower-tier Marvel films, but that seems to be understood by all going in. It also seemed to be understood that something light and possibly funny was needed after the sturm und drang of Infinity War and before the heavy lifting of its sequel next year. That the Ant-Man films are mere programmers by Marvel standards shouldn't be held against them, but I think we have a right to expect a third film to escape the rut the filmmakers seem determined to drive the series into. More of the same next time will be more difficult to forgive.

DEADPOOL 2 (2018) in SPOILERVISION

Tim Miller's Deadpool was one of the surprise hits of 2016 and the first proof that an R-rated brand-name superhero movie could succeed at the box office. Miller is gone but the star and writers remain; in fact, Ryan Reynolds, who plays Deadpool, has joined the writing team for the sequel, and the greater creative control granted him reportedly helped drive Miller from the franchise. So what's different? In some respects Deadpool 2 is a more conventional superhero movie thematically, despite the continued in-joking and fourth wall-breaking Reynolds indulges in, extending here to assassinating himself a couple of times to prevent bad career decisions. Even in the relatively irreverent first film, you get a standard origin story and you're meant to sympathize with Wade Wilson through his formative ordeals even as you laugh at his ultraviolence and raunchy jokes. In the sequel, you're not only expected to empathize with Deadpool even more, but you're supposed to follow him through a storyline sometimes more typical of a CW show. Recovering with the X-Men as a trainee after the death of his beloved (Morena Baccarin) makes him ineffectively suicidal -- he can't even blow himself to pieces as long as someone picks them up -- he gradually befriends a troubled young mutant (Julian Dennison) who literally burns for vengeance against his tormentors at a private school dedicated to suppressing mutant abilities. Naturally, a man comes from the future to kill the kid, for should history run its course the kid will graduate from revenge to gratuitous mass murder. Deadpool is determined to keep Cable (Josh "Thanos" Brolin) from killing the kid, but eventually realizes that the real solution is to keep the kid from taking his revenge. Let that sink in: Deadpool is going to tell someone not to kill someone. I understand that Reynolds et al are self-conscious and somewhat tounge-in-cheek about taking up this trope, but it still bogs the film down a bit. Why does it need to be conscientious about anything, after all?

The answer is probably that no matter how wacky or trangressive the films are meant to be, their success is still presumed to depend on the hero being likable in a very conventional way. It makes Deadpool 2 a somewhat"X-hausting" picture not unlike some classic comedies in which the story is something you must endure between the more inspired bits of grand guignol comedy or meta joking. It leaves Josh Brolin in the flesh an inferior antagonist to the CGI-enhanced Brolin of Avengers: Infinity War, but that was probably inevitable once it became clear, as it was all along to comics fans, that Cable isn't really a villain. No one really rises to the level of "big bad," despite the appearance of the Juggernaut (voiced and mo-capped by "himself," i.e. Reynolds), a major X-Men villain who provides the returning, long-suffering Colossus someone to have a CGI fight with. To be fair, a largely comic film like this might not need an epic villain, but the lack of one adds to the impression that Deadpool 2 is often simply spinning its wheels. It doesn't help that new director David Leitch (fresh from Atomic Blonde) doesn't do much to make the action fresh, though individual fight gags are often quite entertaining in the expected outrageous way. And make no mistake: the funniest parts of this film are wildly hilarious, and there are plenty of funny moments. There are easily enough to recommend the sequel to fans of the original, but don't fall for the hype that says the second film surpasses the first. If anything, Deadpool 2 proves that there's a plateau for this sort of film, and this franchise already got there. It's still hanging around there and may do so for some time and some films yet, but I don't think it's ever going to get much better than the first time.

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017) in SPOILERVISION

It's not that bad as a whole, but to be honest, the first half-hour of Zack Snyder's new film, with credited co-writing and uncredited reshoots by Joss Whedon, is awful: a jumble of scenes attempting to establish an important trait of parademons (the bug-winged creatures Batman [Ben Affleck] saw in his Dawn of Justice nightmare); remind us urgently that Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) exists; and remind us more clumsily that the world is worse for the death of Superman (Henry Cavill) in the aforementioned Snyder production. Nothing really flows together and you might believe that several films, not just the Snyder and Whedon footage, had been awkwardly spliced into something crudely approximating a feature film. Nor are things helped much by the introduction of the film's villain. Steppenwolf, here embarking on his second stab at world conquest after millennia of dormancy, is a relatively minor character in Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" mythos, which few at DC Comics have really known what to do with since the King laid down his pencil. His presence here looks like a hedging of bets, as if Snyder, co-writer Chris Terrio and DC producer Geoff Johns didn't want to waste Kirby's actual big bad, the oft-misused Darkseid, on this particular movie and chose Steppenwolf as his proxy. No effort was made to give this substitute villain any personality beyond his generic lust for conquest, but I suppose you could argue that the villain of this piece was never meant to be anything more than a Macguffin, since the real story of Justice League is the formation of DC's in-print precursor and cinematic answer to Marvel's Avengers. Picking up the hints dropped like anchors in the last film, Batman and Wonder Woman set out to recruit the three supposed superbeings discovered by Lex Luthor's researchers: Arthur "The Aquaman" Curry (Jason Momoa), the bastard child of Atlantean royalty and quite the strongman on land; Barry "Flash" Allen (Ezra Miller), the young Central City speedster; and Victor "Cyborg" Stone (Ray Fisher), a man now more than half machine desperately trying to keep up with his evolving alien technology. The real purpose of this movie is to get you interested enough in these three to seek out their solo films as they appear, beginning with next year's Aquaman.

The results are mixed. All three actors succeeded in making their characters interesting, and they establish decent chemistry with each other and the established heroes. But I still question whether any of them can carry a feature film by today's standard of what such films should be. The future of the DC movie franchise now rests on the shoulders of Jason Momoa, and I'm glad to report that, liberated from his grim typecasting, the actor gives easily the best performance I've ever seen from him. But I still doubt whether whatever good will he's earned will make people interested in exploring DC's Atlantis, all too little of which was shown here apart from introducing Aquaman's eventual love interest Mera (Amber Heard). As Cyborg, Ray Fisher does probably as good as anyone could do with Marv Wolfman's character, making him sardonically bitter rather than self-pitying and adding a certain coldness that inclines the character to agree with Batman much of the time. But Cyborg has always been a hard sell as the black face of the DC Comics universe since Geoff Johns gave him that role by putting the character in his "New 52" era Justice League. Popular though he may be as one of Wolfman and George Perez's Teen Titans, Cyborg never seems to have clicked as a solo character despite Johns and other writers' stubborn efforts, and he has so little personal mythos that I find myself wondering what on earth a Cyborg movie would be about. Meanwhile, the development of a Flash movie is an ongoing nightmare for Warner Bros. Laboring in the shadow of the popular CW TV series, which automatically begs that question of what a feature film can do differently other than spend more money, the project can't hold on to a director as everyone struggles to fine-tune the property. The one thing different about Miller's Flash so far is his relative youth and his jittery Spider-Manic personality that makes him Justice League's comedy relief character. I thought Miller was likable enough to get away with it here, but I don't know if he can carry his own movie doing the same stuff. I'd be happy to see all of these guys again in another Justice League film, but despite this film's post-credit scene there are no immediate plans for another that I know of, and the drubbing the film is getting from Snyderphobic reviewers is unlikely to speed the day of their return.

I probably should talk about the story some more. The plot is right out of a serial: an artifact hunt. If Steppenwolf gets all the artifacts he can activate "the Unity," which won't be a good thing for anybody. Despite their being salted away on Atlantis, Themyscira and ... somewhere Cyborg knows about, he gets them. Fortunately, the good guys had just used that last one to resurrect their old pal Superman who, acting true to comic-book form, starts fighting them until Lois Lane (Amy Adams) shows up and tells him that the sun's getting real low, or something along those lines. Honestly, though, even in comics if Superman is messed up and not behaving right, mind-controlled, amnesiac or whatever, Lois is your best antidote. There was this one comic where to snap Superman out of Poison Ivy's mind-control, Batman has Catwoman throw Lois off a building, or at least that's how I remember it. But I digress. Anyway, Supes still needs some work in the shop so Lois takes him back for (ahem) debriefing in Smallville while the rest of the gang goes to some Sokovia-like place where Steppenwolf, his Unity and his army of parademons make life miserable for one humble family -- to, you know, make the situation more real for us, I guess. Determined that this shall not stand, the as-yet-unnamed Justice League -- I think the only person who actually describes them as a "league" is Lex Luthor (our old friend Jesse Eisenberg) in a post-credits secene -- go about delaying the bad guy until Superman is cleared for action, after which point there's really no contest.

Sounds stupid, right? Well, it kind of is, but while this is regrettably one of those films where the whole is less than the sum of its parts, a lot of those parts are quite entertaining. While Fisher, Miller and Momoa held up their end of the deal, Affleck, Cavill and Gadot were once more their reliable selves, though our Batman is much more mild-mannered than in his last appearance, to a degree that's left some again questioning his commitment to the franchise. I actually liked the change of pace and the way some things (like Bruce Wayne's whiskey-swilling) remained the same. So the acting was fine, apart from the helpless Ciaran Hinds, tasked with voicing Steppenwolf. As one might expect from Zack Snyder, some of the action is spectacular. The highlights include an extended battle on Themyscira as the Amazons run a desperate relay race to keep their artifact from Steppenwolf; a flashback establishing Steppenwolf's backstory featuring a super-epic battle pitting Amazons, Atlanteans, Olympian gods, Green Lanterns, etc. against old-timey parademons; and the guilty pleasure of the JL's brawl with the reawakened Superman, who seems capable of matching the Flash's speed (Miller sells this wonderfully) and trading head-butts with Wonder Woman all day. For all its many flaws, the film ultimately entertains. I'd reverse the conventional reviewer consensus and contend that Justice League is marginally worse than Dawn of Justice, and almost the weakest of this year's good crop of superhero movies -- after a second viewing of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, I'm inclined to leave that at the bottom. Snyder and Whedon have done Warner Bros. no great favors as far as Friday morning reviewers are concerned, but I close with the observation that at my half-full multiplex screening the audience applauded the film.

THOR: RAGNAROK in SPOILERVISION

Taika Waititi is a cinematic miracle worker. His What We Do in the Shadows is not only the funniest vampire comedy ever made, which isn't much of an achievement in itself, but one of the funniest movies I've seen recently. His portrayal of vampires as almost childishly narcissistic apparently persuaded Kevin Feige and the folks at Marvel Studios that Waititi could be entrusted with the next chapter of their absurd Asgardian soap opera after the disaster of Thor: The Dark World. That Waititi could work wonders on a limited budget didn't hurt either, though now, by comparison, he would have money thrown at him. Working from a screenplay by three other people, he's made the most imaginative and funniest Marvel movie since Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) while demonstrating an aptitude for epic action on a colossal scale -- though as always with Marvel movies, one must wonder exactly how much of the set-piece action was planned out and rendered on computers before Waititi first called "Action!"

For all the spectacle, Ragnarok is character-centered, reiterating more strongly the premise implicit since the beginning that Thor (Chris Helmsworth) and his half-brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) are a couple of spoiled brats of frighteningly immense power. This is re-established early as Thor, after thwarting the demon Surtur's scheme to initiate Ragnarok, the foredoomed fall of Asgard, quickly clears up the one dangling plot thread from Dark World, exposing Loki's impersonation of All-father Odin (Anthony Hopkins finally has some fun imitating Hiddleston) and overthrowing the self-indulgent trickster, who had placed the old man in a since-demolished retirement facility in New York City. Their arrival in Manhattan to claim Odin sets up the encounter with Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) previewed in the epilogue to Strange's own origin film. The Strange scene shows Waititi's hand most plainly in the disorienting way the Master of the Mystic Arts teleports Thor all over his sanctum in a succession of jump cuts. The good doctor sends them off to some cliff where Odin has been waiting, before dying, to tell his boys that their elder sister Hela, goddess of death (Cate Blanchett), will be released from her prison upon his imminent demise. In other words, the grown-ups are taking over, as Hela, who grows an antler-like crest in combat mode, breaks Thor's favorite toy, his Uru hammer, and boots both him and Loki off Bifrost bridge en route to Asgard, where she promptly slaughters the Warriors Three (Tadanobu Asano, Ray Stevenson and the other guy) on her way to the throne, while the boys tumble to parts unknown. I'm sure this perfunctory dispatching of three favorite supporting characters from the comics will annoy some people, but it really was a waste of time having Asano and Stevenson keep showing up for how little the films have used them. As for the other supporting players, Sif is AWOL (the actress has a regular gig elsewhere) while Heimdall (Idris Elba) conveniently went underground when "Odin" started acting weird, forcing the king to appoint the mediocrity Skurge (Karl Urban) as guardian of Bifrost. Skurge survives Hela's initial onslaught to give the villainess someone to whom she can tell the secret history of Asgard and offer the job she held under her father as Executioner of the ruler's will and enemies.

A film within the film now begins as Thor crash-lands on Sakaar, better known to comics fans as "Planet Hulk" but ruled here by the self-styled Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) on bread-and-circus principles, with emphasis on circus. Big G relies on slave hunters like Scrapper 142 (Tessa Thompson) to recruit talent for his gladiatorial games. He agrees with her assessment that Thor, rendered tractable by a classic sci-fi pain device, will make a good contender for his "incredible champion," whose identity was revealed in trailers long ago. Loki has ended up here as well, but is content to make money betting on Thor to lose. For his part, Thor has recognized Scrapper 142 as a Valkyrie -- for all intents and purposes, the Valkyrie or just plain "Valkyrie" -- one of a long-gone cohort of Asgardian women warriors, and apparently the sole survivor of an attack by Hela during her uprising against Odin. There's no hope of Thor pulling rank, however, since Scrapper/Valkyrie has grown cynical and alcoholic in her attempt to forget the loss of many close comrades-in-arms. But the situation isn't as hopeless as it looks, since Thor's powers over thunder and lightning prove innate rather than hammer-based, though it takes the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) nearly beating him to death to realize his potential. Ol' Greenskin has been on Sakaar since we last saw him in Avengers: Age of Ultron and has come both to like it here and to express his liking. Waititi and the writers give us a classically stupid Hulk (he had one of his increasingly common intelligent periods in the original Planet Hulk comics) with an almost-Trumpian insistence on taunting and "winning" regardless of appearances. Fans of the character will regret the wasting of one of Hulk's best-regarded storylines as a subplot to a Thor movie, but as Ruffalo himself has conceded that we'll probably never see another Hulk solo movie this is probably as good as it'll get for Marvel's Hulkamaniacs.

Thor's challenge now is to rally his three most likely collaborators into teaming with him on a breakout and reconquest of Asgard. Valkyrie would rather drink and forget, Loki is still out for himself and Hulk actually likes it on a planet where he's beloved by fight fans and hasn't had to turn back to Bruce Banner for ages. Those of you who found the buildup of a Hulk-Black Widow ship in Age of Ultron icky will be annoyed to learn that that's still a thing and key to Banner finally reappearing after Thor's own efforts to use Natasha's calming spiel fail miserably. The other pieces soon fall into place and we're finally on our way to a spectacular showdown in Asgard, assisted by Heimdall and, eventually, Skurge, whose machine-gun fetish allows him to recreate the comics character's classic last stand in Walt Simonson's 1980s comics, which are acknowledged in the end credits and regarded by fans as the best Thor stories since Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's time. A lot of undead minions are wasted, Hulk fights a big dog, and Thor hits Hela with "the biggest bolt of lightning in the history of lightning," but the film still hasn't hit 11 yet....

While most of Ragnarok is generic Marvel spectacle on paper, on screen it benefits from Waititi putting a fresh set of eyes on it. As the Doctor Strange sequence shows, the style he developed collaborating on What We Do in the Shadows was not entirely homogenized into the Marvel machine, and that helps make the new Thor feel fresher than, say, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Both films may share a retro sensibility in their soundtracks -- as do most recent Marvel movies, it seems -- but Ragnarok creatively enhances that retro feel with original music with hints of video-game soundtracks from Mark Mothersbaugh and a pictorial sensibility, assisted by cinematographer Javie Aguirresarobe, reminiscent of vintage van murals or Heavy Metal magazine covers come to life. The acting is a mixed bag, and a lot of it may disappoint people who expect something more like, as Tony Stark would say, Shakespeare in the Park from a Thor movie. Helmsworth and Hiddleston are fine, but as Hela Cate Blanchett arguably doesn't chew the scenery enough, or as much as one might expect from a barnstormer like her. You might have expected Galadriel with the Ring on, but she sometimes sinks to the overall glib level of the dialogue, referring to Odin as "Daddy," for instance. By now, of course, we should be reconciled to not getting authentic Stan Lee-style rodomontade from Marvel movie villains, but if you were going to get away with it in any Marvel movie, this was probably it. These are action movies anyway, and Hela's actions (both Blanchett's and uber-stuntwoman Zoe Bell's) speak louder than her words. As for the other villain, Jeff Goldblum gives, to no legitimate surprise, a Jeff Goldblum performance as the Grandmaster that makes that Elder of the Universe more capricious than truly threatening, but his participation in the interlude doesn't require him to be truly evil or scary. For all Waititi's efforts to maximize the comedy in the story, Ragnarok was only ever going to be an action spectacle, and the fact that he succeeds on that level gives us more cause to look forward to whatever he does next, for Marvel or on his own.

BLADE RUNNER 2049 (2017) in SPOILERVISION

Once the mystery plot of Denis Villeneuve's film began moving, I had a bad feeling about where it would end up. But when it didn't end up there, I still felt disappointed, since it was now clear that the writers, including a contributor to the 1982 Blade Runner film, were just playing with the audience -- or else they realized sometime during the production that the most cliched of plot twists probably would have sullied a revered brand name. Whatever they thought, they had Villeneuve, who after last year's Arrival was poised to become dean of sci-fi filmmakers if 2049 hit big, plod ponderously toward a revelation anticipated even by the protagonist, only to leave audiences possibly wondering why, after all, we were supposed to be interested in a protagonist who turns out to be just another replicant. Of course, all replicants are supposed to be more human than human, and when given a chance Ryan Gosling, playing the replicant blade runner with the Kafkaesque nickname "K," did all right portraying the yearning introspection of a genuine artificial intelligence. The problem with 2049 is that while there arguably was a viable film idea in returning to the world Ridley Scott had extrapolated from Philip K. Dick's very different dystopian vision and following a new character, there was no point commercially to making a new Blade Runner film without catching up with fugitive recluse Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) thirty years of so after his romantic, violent heyday. Whatever the writers wanted to do with K, it had to connect at some point with the Deckard saga. As noted already, the film threatened to link them in the most hackneyed, tiresome way, but perhaps I should elaborate a bit.

So K. is a replicant blade runner, not really respected by his human police colleagues but also condemned as a traitor by his victims, such as Sapper Morton (for more on Dave Bautista's character, see one of the short subjects released online to promote the feature). Off duty, he leads a seemingly sad life, his only companionship coming from his personal Joi (Ana de Armas), who is basically Alexa with a holographic body. In the brief early scenes of his domestic life I thought the new film actually came slightly closer to the actual existence of the protagonist of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But before 2049 becomes an enhanced version of Her K has to follow up on a grisly discovery on Sapper's property. The now-retired replicant at some point buried a skeleton under a tree. The skeleton belonged to a woman who had been pregnant and may have died during childbirth, but closer examination reveals a serial number identifying the corpse as a replicant -- a replicant, that is, that indisputably gave birth, according to the forensic evidence. If the child of this dead replicant (you can guess who it was) is alive, that could revolutionize the expanding extra-global economy. The idea of reproducing replicants appeals greatly to Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), the tycoon who acquired the bankrupt Tyrell Corporation some years ago, because organic reproduction would be less expensive than mechanical production, while making available the large innately unfree workforce Wallace believes essential to humanity's further expansion across space. K's police boss (Robin Wright) sees replicant reproduction as a threat to human supremacy and sanctions K to find the child and retire it. The problem with this, from K's vantage, is that he has cause to suspect strongly that he is the child.

K. lies to the police, claiming to have found and killed the child. He's lucky he wasn't asked to produce a body, but the Wallace Corporation, spearheaded by replicant enforcer Luv (Syliva Hoeks) isn't fooled. They feel certain that K. continuing on his quest, will lead them to the child. Almost as good, he leads them to the long-missing Deckard, who's been hanging out in a recently irradiated Las Vegas with a whisky-swilling dog. Knowing of Deckard's relationship with Rachel the replicant (Sean Young appears in clips and apparently did some mo-cap and/or voice work for a 2049 vintage Rachel doppelganger), the Wallace crew thinks Deckard can point them to the child, so they overpower K, snatch Decker, and inexplicably leave K laying rather than retiring him or bringing him along -- didn't they suspect that he might be the mystery kid? This miscue proves costly, for Luv if not for Wallace himself, as K is retrieved by a replicant underground that tells him the presumably straight story of Rachel's pregnancy. This reduces K, even as he races to Deckard's rescue, to a facilitator of the actual father-child reunion while he, having little left to live for, has little time to live....

Blade Runner 2049 is too long and slow to work as the sort of sci-fi thriller the original film was. In choosing Villeneuve to direct, the producers, including Ridley Scott in an "executive" capacity, opted for mood over momentum, but for all his proven virtues the director isn't really the man for the sort of popcorn film 2049 has to be. It's stylish as hell, thanks largely to cinematography by Roger Deakins, and I appreciate they way the production design doubled down on the original film's vision of a corporate future in spite of the so-called "Blade Runner curse" that befell many of the companies advertising in the old film's cityscapes. There's not much new to those cityscapes, however, while the most striking scenes are set in the quasi-pornographic ruins of Vegas, which apparently has worse in store for it than last weekend's massacre. While the new film can recreate the original's architectural effects, the abandonment, for the most part, of the older film's neon-noir atmosphere somewhat undermines the effort to identify sequel with precursor. As for the actors, Gosling tried hard but is undercut as soon as Ford puts in his belated appearance. The older actor's performance is pretty much an ego trip, as the elderly Deckard is shown still to be a two-fisted he-man capable of beating up the presumably human goons Wallace has conveniently sent along with Luv to collect him. As the corporate baddie Jared Leto orates like a comic-book villain, apparently making up for the speeches he didn't get to make in Suicide Squad. As the top cop, Robin Wright may have finalized her new typecasting, following Wonder Woman, as a mature female authority figure. In sum, 2049 is far from terrible -- using a relevant benchmark, it's better than The Force Awakens --  but the fact that it's merely underwhelming is more disappointing, in a way, than if it had laughably bad.

On the Big Screen: WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2017)

Matt Reeves' Planet of the Apes trilogy has gradually moved away from the concept's dystopian foundation, as established by original novelist Pierre Boulle and original screenwriter Rod Serling, making the saga of Caesar the chimp revolutionary a crowd-pleasing fantasy series. His movies remain superficially dystopian, portraying the further decline of the human race, but by now they don't feel dystopian in any meaningful way because no one's rooting for the humans. From the beginning, the Apes myth has been the sort of dystopia in which the victims had it coming; Charlton Heston's final rant in the 1968 movie sets the tone. Keep at it and the victims are bound to lose viewers' sympathy, especially when the filmmakers don't treat them as victims, but villains. The best proof of Reeves' success is that people don't ask themselves whether, as human beings, they should be happy with the results of his films. A lot of people will credit this to Andy Serkis's by-now overrated (But still good! Don't kill me!) motion-capture performances as Caesar and the sympathy he earns for the apes, but it really comes down to the writing -- and maybe also to a more misanthropic spirit in our time. You might expect a divided audience, some identifying more strongly with the apes while identifying the humans with certain more obnoxious or oppressive members of the species, while some still regard even the purely fictional prospect of human extinction with horror. But I doubt whether anyone watching War is not on Caesar's side, no matter what that means for those who aren't.

We open with the war promised at the end of the last picture underway. Diminished as they are by the simian flu, humans in northern California still outnumber and outgun Caesar's band of artificially-evolved apes, but still can't overcome the ape defenses in the dense forest. Nevertheless, each skirmish brings unacceptable losses, and Caesar hopes to break out of the forest and head south, where there are, presumably, fewer humans. Col. McCullough (Woody Harrelson), the leader of the local army, isn't going to let the apes go so easily. Doubly resentful now that he's discovered that simian flu is a gift that keeps on giving, McCullough (referred to by everyone else as simply "The Colonel") intends to exterminate the apes through slave labor. He's put captive apes to work building a wall -- don't freak out, anybody; the screenplay was written before anyone took Trump seriously, and in any event the wall is meant to keep out fellow humans, fellow soldiers even. A main force further north hasn't taken well with the Colonel's method of controlling the spread of secondary simian flu, which is to shoot anyone who contracts it, including his own son. Despite his extinction agenda, McCullough has simian collaborators: followers of the late Koba (Toby Kebbell takes a few encores to haunt Caesar's dreams) who paradoxically make common cause with humans out of fear and resentment of Caesar. In his greatest blunder as a leader, Caesar sends the majority of the apes south while he seeks personal revenge for casualties inflicted in one of the Colonel's raids on the forest. He's accompanied by his stalwarts: Luca the gorilla (Michael Adamthwaite), Maurice the orangutan (Karin Konoval) and Rocket the chimp (Terry Notary) -- and by a little human girl (Amiah Miller) that Caesar's crew inadvertently orphaned, and for whom the kindly Maurice in particular feels responsible. We learn eventually that her muteness is a result of the secondary virus, but more on that later. While this motley band, joined eventually by the first evolved ape they've ever seen who isn't part of their original group, heads toward a border station where they expect to find the Colonel, that clever man swept down upon the refugee apes with such swiftness and efficiency that they all arrive there and are put to work before Caesar reaches the place.

I prefer to keep spoilers at a minimum for non-superhero movies so I won't say much about the rest of the film, except to describe it as a cross between Apocalypse Now and The Ten Commandments, the latter proving the dominant strain even though Reeves openly invites comparison with the former with a bald, crazy colonel and some "Apepocalypse Now" graffiti. There's clever symbolic labeling throughout the film; the Colonel's soldiers call the apes "Kongs" but dub their gorilla collaborators "Donkeys"; one soldier's battle slogan, written on his helmet, is "Bedtime for Bonzo." There's more overt humor here than in the previous films, perhaps because Reeves recognizes by now how popular these films are. We even get a comedy-relief ape in the aforementioned but just-now identified "Bad Ape" (Steve Zahn), whose nebulous origin story opens the door to further exploration or the increasingly apish planet. He got smart like his fellow zoo apes but he honestly isn't very bright. His main trait is old-school comic cowardice of the sort that gets set aside when your buddies apply enough pressure. The little girl, who is given the easter-egg name "Nova" after one of Bad Ape's car-ornament trinkets, often proves more useful than this simian who never learned sign-language and thus can't communicate understand the other apes when Caesar's not around to translate. About the girl and her sickness: anyone who knows the history of Planet of the Apes can see that her plight evokes the mute humans Charlton Heston encounters. But what has happened to her exactly? For Col. McCullough the secondary flu is a fate worse than death because it robs people of speech. He also claims that victims are reduced to a "primitive" state, but we have only his hysterical word for that, compared to the evidence of Nova, who picks up the apes' sign language readily enough and displays numerous positive character traits that belie the Colonel's pejorative sense of "primitive." One could almost believe that the secondary flu has purified the girl, whose future is one of the more tantalizing threads that could be picked up in a post-Reeves sequel. For now, at least, it looks like Reeves and co-writer Mark Bombeck may have meant to make a point about our identification of sentience with speech or our reluctance to ascribe sentience to those without speech, but if so they fudge it a little by having Caesar talk more often than he probably needs to or should in story terms, for the obvious reason of reinforcing audience identification with the hero chimp.

As I said, the Ten Commandments gene ultimately overwhelms the film, inflicting a gratuitous disaster climax on top of the genuine climax of Caesar's escape from the Colonel's base in the middle of an air attack by the enemy army. It keeps up after that extra-climax with a sadly flat denouement at the edge of the promised land, with Maurice as Caesar's Aaron and Rocket as his Joshua, while Reeves can think of nothing better for Nova and Bad Ape to do than romp around in circles in something like a parody of play. But I won't hold the end of the picture against its actual story or Reeves' overall direction. War relies on emotional intensity rather than frantic action, often lingering on the wondrously expressive faces of Caeasr -- surely you can't credit Serkis alone for all of this -- and the other lead apes, and emphasizing Harrelson's profoundly menacing presence as the Colonel without requiring him to emote villainously. Reeves is at his best simply framing Harrelson watching the imprisoned Caesar from his balcony, or receiving the adulation of his troops while preoccupied with shaving his head. Harrelson does a tremendous job under Reeves' direction to compete with the lead apes, who probably are the best CGI creations on film to date, not counting Pixar movies. Reeves can shoot close-ups of their faces with Leonean intensity with full justification; you really do feel like you can see the inner workings of Caesar, Maurice or Rocket's mind when they're not talking or signing. War may not really stick the landing, but it should still go down as one of the best third films in a series. While there can and perhaps should be more films in this Apes series, Reeves' trilogy should stand for some time as one of the most impressive achievements in modern genre film.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 (2017) in SPOILERVISION

How can the Guardians of the Galaxy claim to be friends, one skeptic scoffs in James Gunn's sequel to his 2014 sleeper hit, when all they do is argue and yell at one another? The answer, as one might guess without seeing this film but having seen many another popular film of our time, is that the four interstellar misfits, plus the offspring of their late cohort, are not friends but "family." Gunn doubles down here on this more dubious aspect of the previous film, but people today apparently dig this idea. The interesting thing is that Guardians Vol. 2 harps on this theme while simultaneously highlighting a sororial blood feud and an act of celestial parricide. In the main event, Peter "Star Lord" Quill (Chris Pratt), the human being of the team, finally meets his father, the unselfconsciously named Ego (Kurt Russell), who gives the galaxy's biggest fan of 70s pop the great news that he has the genealogy of a god. Biological didn't bother until now because his momentarily conscience-stricken agent, the ravager Yondu (Michael Rooker), kept little Pete to train as an artful dodger. Now that Quill has proven himself a space hero -- the Guardians now hire out as a cosmic security detail, defending an obnoxious planet's power batteries against a random monster during the opening credits -- Ego wants to test whether he, of all his many, many offspring, has the divine spark. It turns out that he does, and that makes it possible for Ego, whose consciousness is one with the planet he lives on, to implement his long-cherished plan to exterminate all other life in the universe. Star Lord will come to realize almost too late, just as Gunn beats the point into our heads, that Yondo is more his true father than this literal rockhead. Meanwhile, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and her cyborg sister Nebula (Karen Gillan) carry on their lifelong battle, which climaxes this time with a space-opera homage to North By Northwest on the surface of the redundantly-named "Ego's Planet," yet appears to end on a tentative note of reconciliation. And wouldn't you know? Daddy's to blame. Family seems easier without one of those around.

The novelty of the first Guardians picture is irrecoverable, and the sort of shtick we often get in its place here is a poor replacement. There are times when you may imagine yourself reading the script and seeing "[Insert joke here]" with numbing regularity. Not even Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) is as funny as he was before, though it's not the actor's fault that his best moments were used in the trailers. His imperturbable, sometimes arrogant imbecility, combined with lapses into childlike enthusiasm, still make Bautista the best thing about these films. He gets a new foil, and the film gets a much-needed breath of fresh air, in the form of the empath Mantis (Pom Klementieff), a reluctant protege of Ego's. She's based on one of Marvel Comics' most obnoxious characters of the 1970s -- which is saying a lot -- but writer/director and actress redeem her by emphasizing her naive insecurity and a plausibly alien nature compared to the Guardians, who all, regardless of species, seem all too human most of the time. There are many more weird new characters, including some sure to appear in the next Guardians film, if not sooner, among them a group of badass elders some may recognize as the original comic-book Guardians of the Galaxy, but the gold-skinned Sovereigns (ruled by Elizabeth Debicki), for whom war is a bloodless (for them) video game, don't make much of an impression despite their importance to some plot threads now and in the future. On every level Vol. 2 is less inspired than the first film, but despite its faults the sequel manages to get audiences emotionally invested in the heroes' climactic perils, and it retains the original's surprising sense of wonder amid all the hard-boiled antics. From the more attractive landscapes of Ego-land to the outer-space fireworks display during one character's viking funeral, Gunn's determination to hit us with moments of pure or at least aspiring beauty is one aspect of the Guardians series that continues to surprise.

X-MEN: APOCALYPSE (2016) in SPOILERVISION

"The third one is always the worst," a young mutant says of trilogies as she leaves a 1983 screening of Return of the Jedi, and the audience watching X-Men: Apocalypse laughs knowingly. It's a blatant dig at Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand, the third film in the series and the one most hated by comic book fans. It's also Bryan Singer's way of leading with his chin, since Apocalypse itself is the third film of a "prequel" series of X-Men films, all set before Singer's original 2000 production, starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult as mutants whose common attribute is a very slow aging process over 21 years of story time. Fortunately for Singer, the first film of this current series, Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class, was bad enough that Singer could not curse himself. Instead of making the worst film of this particular trilogy, Singer has only made one of the most boring superhero movies to date. There's nothing really inept or incompetent about Apocalypse, but there's also nothing inspired or imaginative in it. Between the repetition of tired tropes from the two previous films and the reintroduction of characters already established in the original trilogy, the new film has nothing to say and, worse still, nothing to show.

It's named after its villain, apparently a major figure in the comic-book canon, but can't help making "Apocalypse" -- I don't think anyone actually calls him that name in the movie -- almost an afterthought in its preoccupation with continuing storylines and subplots from previous installments. The big problem with En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac), an ancient Egyptian god-man and supposedly history's first mutant, who somehow was overthrown by his subjects, only to return to malevolent life in 1983, is that he lacks the core of authentic grievance that drives both good and evil mutants in the X-Men films. If he rose to his exalted position from the bottom, or was ever downtrodden, we don't learn it here. Instead he combines a megalomaniacal sense of entitlement with a pseudo-Nietzschean philosophy favoring rule by the strong that makes the relatively egalitarian 20th century offensive to him. The obvious solution is to destroy civilization through a Man of Steel style catacalysm -- yet so uncompelling is the spectacle that no one to my knowledge calls this destruction porn -- and build his own pharaonic utopia in its place. But first he must recruit four attendants, since that's how he rolls. At this point Singer grabs the first four balls from the hopper and appoints Angel, here a demoralized pit fighter, having lost to a novice Nightcrawler thanks to outside interefernce; Psylocke, a sort of gangsta mutant with a magic energy sword and a blue Elektra costume; Storm, seen in something close to her origin story as a Cairo street thief; and the increasingly insufferable Magneto, whom En Sabah fortunately finds in a grumpy mood, given that a Polish policeman has just killed his wife and daughter with a bow and one arrow. This shows that En is no judge of character, for Erik Lensherr is as changeable as the wind. Over three films the X-Men's archnemesis has become intolerably wishy-washy. God help us if he ever finds out that the speedy new kid at Charles Xavier's school is his own bastard. He may never find out, however, since the boy shares his dad's indecisiveness,having initially decided to confront him only to chicken out toward the end. But I, like the film, digress. The villain's "four horsemen" are an utterly random assemblage whose flimsy motivation left me caring little about whether they'd snap out of it. As it turns out, seeing his old frenemy Mystique in mortal peril snaps Magneto out of his funk in a way her own earnest speeches -- she tries the technique Xavier used on her at the climax of the previous picture --could not, and the sight also flips Storm to the good side, since she, like many young mutants, idolizes Mystique for her role in the 1973 events recounted in Days of Future Past. There's a sketch of a subplot scrawled across the picture about Mystique's reluctance to accept the mantle and responsibility of a hero, but you might not notice it given how, for perhaps the first time in her mighty career, Jennifer Lawrence totally phones in a performance. But you might not notice that given how everyone in the film really does the same thing, even Oscar Isaac in what should be the flamboyant villain role.

Part of the problem is that threatening the world has lost its novelty in films (and TV shows) like these, but a bigger part is Singer's inability, especially shocking after the coup of Days of Future Past, to sustain any dramatic momentum for his story. Several times over the film stops dead for contrived set pieces, from a reprise of the last film's speedster-moves-so-fast-to-pop-standard-that-everyone-stands-frozen showcase to Hugh Jackman's obligatory pop-up amoklauf in the middle of a secret army base. Worst of all, when Xavier finally sics Jean Grey on En and she basically wipes the floor with him Phoenix style, you're left asking why he didn't have her take action much earlier, before cities were wrecked and thousands of people killed. I suppose it wouldn't be much of an action film had he done that, but the action itself is a mixed bag, and during the climax Singer has an annoying habit of cutting from real fighting to Mystique trying to lecture a pouty Magneto through a swirling cloud of iron filings. When it was over, I had the queasy suspicion that Singer had a lot of things he wanted to do in another mutant movie, but no real story that could hold them all together. En Sabah Nur is only a pretext for a movie and never really a character in it, and the movie as a whole (I almost typed "hole") has a hard time justifying its existence. It's too bad, really, since the last two mutant films, Days of Future Past and The Wolverine, are arguably the best of the entire cycle. Perhaps the studio should have quit while it was ahead, but that wasn't going to happen. Instead, we have an X-Men film with a lack of ambition that's all too obvious in this year of Dawn of Justice and Civil War, and a post-credits scene assures us -- or should I say warns us -- that Fox isn't done yet. But since I wouldn't have expected a film as good as Days of Future Past after First Class, I'll close by saying "better luck next time."

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015)

George Lucas's mistake was to think of Star Wars as a fictional universe to be shaped by his imagination. At least that was his first mistake -- the second being that his imagination wasn't so hot after a while. But the big mistake was not to realize that Star Wars essentially is a very specific type of story. Certain things have to happen in this story, and certain things have to be in it. At the turn of the century Lucas made three films that failed, among other ways, to meet these criteria. It was time for someone to step up and say they knew Star Wars better than George Lucas. To judge by the box office and a critical consensus best described as a sigh of relief, J. J. Abrams proved that he knew Star Wars better than George Lucas by remaking Star Wars. It wouldn't do, of course, literally to remake Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), but the idea clearly was to do an archetypal remake, to tell essentially the same story while continuing the original story. An unintended consequence of this strategy is a strange sense of demoralization, of the impossibility of progress, hangs over the film, despite it being not at all implausible that partisans of the Galactic Empire would not all lay down their arms upon the deaths of Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader, however much such an outcome was implied at the end of Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983), especially in its later, enhanced edition. So if I understand the opening crawl correctly, this rump Empire, ruled by an entity called the First Order, itself led by some nebulous Oz-like power named Snoke, occupies a significant part of the former Empire, while the restored Republic occupies the rest and wages a cold war against the First Order masterminded by Leia Organa, who supports and/or provokes insurgencies on occupied worlds under the rubric of the Resistance. In answer, and in the classic action of the insane, the First Order builds a death star, bigger and more destructive than ever yet with the same fundamental vulnerabilities required by the Star Wars archetype. Meanwhile, on some outlier planet, the Force stirs in a resourceful ragamuffin who winds up with custody of a cute droid with important strategic information. And there's Han Solo!

The one relatively original idea in The Force Awakens is to have one of the heroes be a deserting Stormtrooper, a young man whose conditioning fails him when he's ordered to take part in a massacre. On some level, however, Finn (John Boyega) defaults to a Han Solo archetype -- while the actual Han (Harrison Ford) limps into the Ben Kenobi role -- according to which selfish motives evolve into selfless heroism. None of the major characters in Episode VII is a perfect match for someone in Episode IV; Rey the resourceful ragamuffin (Daisy Ridley) is sort of Luke and Leia rolled into one, while the cheerful X-wing pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) is a similar blend by virtue of his original ownership of the cute droid and his high-spirited heroism. Black clad Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is obviously our Darth Vader -- it's his right by blood -- but he looks more like a Slytherin dropout when he takes his mask off and his overhanging family drama leeches any badassery from him. For all that Abrams and Disney have declared themselves unbound by all the once-canonical novels published since 1983, the key idea that Ren is actually Han and Leia's son turned to the Dark Side had already been done in the books. It turns out not to be a good idea on film, for nothing could take the life out of the beloved Han Solo before he was actually killed than to force him into a "fathers and sons" storyline, and to treat his final confrontation with his delinquent brat as a moment of operatic grandeur undermined by cliched earnestness. Han's exit is a mercy killing, since Ford is unconvincing as a septuagenarian swashbuckler, however necessary his mostly irreverent presence was to make this new film recognizably "Star Wars" to all the people who cried for a Han-type character through all the Prequel Trilogy the way small children cry for Mickey Mouse during the second hour of Fantasia. That demand for programmed irreverence has always been a drag on fantastic ambition, a warning to creators not to take anything more seriously than the casual viewer is willing to. Here, somehow, by bringing Han back only to burden him with child issues and then kill him, Abrams manages to have his cake, spill it on the floor and face-plant into it. Still, the film's treatment of Han and Ford is as reverential as intended compared to its pathetic display of Carrie Fisher as General Organa. I don't know whether Abrams gave her nothing cool to do as, say, a fighting general, because he couldn't imagine it or because Fisher is heartbreakingly incapable of doing anything. You'd hardly believe, if you didn't know, that she's considerably younger than Ford from her presence -- it can hardly be called a performance -- in this picture. Neither her face nor her voice appear capable of expression at this point in her life, though I try to tell myself that she might have given more had Abrams given her more to do. Seeing this Leia is more tragic than seeing Han die. The real surprise, for anyone who'd seen him play the Trickster in episodes of The Flash, is that Mark Hamill, conveniently bearded, is the least decrepit looking of the original trio. Objectively, by appearing in only one scene he does the least to poison our imaginations.

While it's depressing to see the old stars displayed this way, the overall effect of The Force Awakens is like a random Star Wars role playing game brought to life, with roughly sketched player-characters getting to meet some famous NPCs in settings new yet familiar, Tattooine-ish or cantina-esque. For all that, it's not an overtly bad film; it lacks the ambition to be bad in the ways the prequel films often were bad. The craftsmanship is unimpeachable, apart from the acting, but there's only so much you can do with a paint-by-number set. The new main characters might have been more interesting if they (not counting Finn) weren't so tied, explicitly or implicitly, to the old characters. While the prequel films are largely failures, you can appreciate what Lucas was trying to do, and actually did, which was to expand his universe by exploring its past. We're supposed to be moving forward now, but Force Awakens doesn't feel like its expanding the universe in any way. Since the prequels showed us the slow rise of the Empire, having the First Order and Snoke and Ben Solo's corruption thrown at us each as a fait accompli seems wrong, and the incestuousness of the story in the way it has everything circle back to Han, Leia and Luke feels like a universe closing in on itself and locking into unalterable archetypes. A lot happens in this film, and some of it is quite impressive visually, but I don't know if "awakens" really describes any of it.

THE RAID 2: BERANDAL (2014)

The greatest superhero in movies today is Rama, the martial-arts policeman played by Iko Uwais in the Raid movies directed by Gareth Evans. His fight scenes, which Uwais choreographs along with co-star Yayan Ruhian, have the sort of relentless action comic book fans have always wanted in Batman movies but haven't yet seen. Rama doesn't have any more super powers than Batman does, but Evans, Uwais and Ruhian give their hero as much ferocity, resilience and stamina -- creative editing helps, too -- as American crimefighters have in comic books, but not on film. The Raid movies -- a third is most likely in the works -- are comic book movies, regardless of their gritty urban trappings. They take place in an Indonesia -- as I wrote about the original film, this may reflect reality in the country -- where guns are apparently reserved for the criminal elite, and the foot soldiers must rely on their feet, or their hands, or blades, or whatever's at hand. Raid 2 is even more a comic book movie than its predecessor because it has more blatantly gimmicky fighters. At one point Rama has to fight a brother-sister assassination team. The sister fights Oldboy-style, with hammers, smashing with the heads, slashing with the claws. Just for the hell of it, she's a deaf-mute. Her brother has a baseball fetish, fighting at close quarters with an aluminum bat or making deadly missiles out of batted balls.

We know they'll be formidable adversaries because we've seen them cut swaths through hosts of gunless bodyguards in pursuit of their gangster quarry. In fact, they give Rama trouble for a few minutes, but they only set the stage for our hero's mano-a-mano showdown with a nameless assassin who had taken him down with abrupt ease earlier in the picture. For action filmmakers Evans and his colleagues are great at dramatic pacing, since this one-on-one fight is the true highlight of a picture that has already given us several epic-scale mass melees, including a riot in a muddy prison yard that must have been an ultimate challenge to fight choreographers. Uwais and Cecep Arif Rahman are not dwarfed by the earlier spectacle; their fight is intimately epic in a Homeric way. Rama's victory may be inevitable, but Uwais earns it while allowing Rahman to shine; the bad guy gives as good as he gets down to the final seconds of the battle. The plot of the story remains to be resolved, but this fight can't help make the denouement look anticlimactic.

There's no raid in Raid 2. Instead Evans has opened his narrative up to encompass the archetypes of global crime cinema. Born out of ideas he had before making The Raid, Berandal quickly dispatches the surviving supporting cast from the first film and gives Rama a new mission. To root out corrupt cops in Jakarta, our hero must get himself sent to prison -- by beating up a politician's son -- to befriend Uco (Arifin Putra), the son of the local crimelord. In deep cover for two years, Rama becomes Uco's protector and is rewarded with a place in the organization of Uco's father, Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo). He sees Uco grow impatient with his position as his dad's "bill collector" and with dad's apparent kowtowing to Japanese gangsters. As Rama watches, waiting for evidence identifying cops on the take, Uco provokes a gang war and puts himself on a parricidal path. Arifin Putra's performance as Uco holds the film together, making it something more than a highlight reel of fight scenes. There's something almost poignant about Uco's frustration, his bitter recognition of the contempt with which even bar girls regard him, and his need to prove himself to his father that can only be fulfilled by killing him.

Neither Putra nor Evans entirely holds the film together. At almost 2.5 hours, Raid 2 is about a half-hour too long. To be more precise, it's too long by the time it takes to introduce a character played by Yayan Ruhian (giving him two roles in as many pictures) and eliminate him. Ruhian's storyline comes across as a gratuitous addition designed only to give him some screen time. Apart from that indulgence, the pace of the action doesn't flag and the main story is compelling enough to keep us interested between the fight scenes. Berandal carries some of the artistic risks of the quest for novelty -- the sibling killers may seem silly to some observers --  but the rewards justify those risks and compensate for any awkward moments. Aided by Uwais and Ruhian, over the course of three films (I haven't seen the earlier Merantau) Gareth Evans has become just about the best action movie director on Earth.