Action

dir: Patrick Hughes

2014

Old old old, I’m feeling old today. I’m feeling so old that I think I’ll just talk about how old I feel and how old everyone around me looks instead of doing anything else that’s interesting or anything really worth reading. Did I mention that I’m old?

The first Expendables was a tribute to itself, in that Sylvester Stallone and a bunch of other has-beens from the 1980s thought they’d remind the world that they were still around, and they could still star in movies where they look like they’re total badasses. Let’s pretend for a moment that it wasn’t then and isn’t now special effects and stunt people stand-ins. No, these guys, because they looked like badasses, must have been badasses, surely?

‘We’re not past it!’ they’d bellow like nervous cattle, loudly through the screen at us while joking about being past it. Everyone else would tell them they’re ‘past it’, especially the villains, they themselves would mock each other about being ‘past it’, but they’d still win in the end. So, thus, the Expendables were anything but expendable.

dir: Bryan Singer

2014

Time travel is tricky. I guess it comes down to what your intentions are. I'm not talking about the intentions, good in nature, that the road to hell is paved with. I mean the story-telling purpose, or the creative purpose, or the "let's-make-shitloads-of-money" impulse.

After watching Days of Future Past, it occurs to me that the purpose of this movie, and the desire it represents to change the past in order to alter the present (or future), is really about one thing: Bryan Singer's desire to rewrite history so that X-Men III: The Last Stand never happened.

For some people, including me, it's a perplexing but still appreciable impulse. That third X-Men film, not directed by Singer, was pretty shithouse. It wasn't shithouse because Bryan Singer didn't direct it. It was shithouse because Brett Rattner, who's a barely mediocre director, directed it. Even though it was, as I said, pretty shithouse, it's perversely the most successful of all the X-Men related flicks. So it would seem strange that the studio would give the keys to the franchise to Singer again in order to undo what they themselves allowed to happen in the past.

Let's talk about that for a moment: every time another superhero flick comes out it's an opportunity to express how utterly sick of superhero flicks "we" all are. But we keep watching them, I keep watching them, so why would the gods/clods of the movie studios stop?

dir: Alan Taylor

Yeah, you think you’re Thor: I can hardly walk, because I just watched The Dark World.

And here I thought it would be a screening of childhood favourite The Dark Crystal. Thor fights a giant Crystal and loses!

No I didn’t, I’m being a jerk. My beloved partner and I went to the flicks to celebrate the anniversary of the day of her birth. What better way to celebrate such a golden day than let her watch many scenes of Australia’s Own Chris Hemsworth showing off that incredibly chiselled physique? Those granite abs, that geography of musculature and those planes and angles of flesh she’s hopefully not going to be able to touch in real life with anything other than her eyeballs?

It was a golden day for all concerned. Maybe not Hemsworth, since he was probably busy all day long oiling up those quivering muscles, but I’m sure he’s doing all right.

This is his flick, yeah? The next instalment out of the Marvel Machine that is no longer content with just taking the hardly-earned money out of teenage losers’ pockets and middle-aged shut-ins’ bank accounts with comics has Thor! taking centre stage again after that grand occasion of The Avengers getting together last year.

dir: Jeff Wadlow

I know, I know, whenever you hear “It’s better than the first one!” regarding a sequel to an ordinary movie, the immediate response is "well, that's not saying much."

In some ways, though, ways that probably don't matter that much, Kick-Ass 2 is probably a better, or at least less repugnant movie that the first one, though not from want of trying.

The Kick-Ass stories falls into a sub-genre of hero flicks which are about regular people with no discernable skills or abilities wanting to be crimefighters. Also, of regular scumbags who want to be supervillains despite having nothing that makes them particularly super or villainous.

Kick-Ass himself is defined by a look, being a green-and-yellow wetsuit, the wielding of two batons, and no actual abilities. But he has the desire, the will to do good for the city, and he has inspired others to do the same.

And we're meant to applaud them for it. "‎Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing", is a line from someone more profoundly famous that myself, insofar as John Stuart Mills said it and not Edmund Burke, who everyone always attributes the "all it requires for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing" line, despite it not being true. I am and never will be more famous than either philosopher, but look at it this way, right now, at this very point in time, you're reading my writing instead of theirs, and that is a small victory indeed.

Different people interpret the call to public service differently. Some serve their community by working for charities, in health, as educators, or as cops, or firies, saving people and burning kittens from trees. Others put themselves forward as lawyers, either defending the innocent/guilty or prosecuting the innocent/guilty, either way keeping the scum in and out of jail respectively.

And some people just want to beat up other people. It helps if they're baddies, but they don't have to be, I guess. You just want to make a difference, is all.

Kick-Ass, or Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) as his father would know him, is pretty much just a regular "kid", who I guess is still in high school, since he goes to one. He still gets to see Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz), who he met in the first film, and she endeavours to train him up to better fight crime in the city, since she's the only person in the enterprise with skills, abilities and equipment with which to fight crime, or kill a whole bunch of people, whichever comes first.

There is a tension, not between them, but between themselves and the various promises they've made to various people, living or dead. Hit Girl wants to be killing scumbags and drug dealers and other scum, like her daddy Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) trained her, but she's made a promise to her guardian (Morris Chestnut, what a pointless role) that she will lay down her arms and become a regular girl.