Action

dirs: Anthony and Joe Russo

Finally. A decent action movie based on a comic book. Wonders will never cease.

Sorry. Forgot to use the sarcasm html tags around the intro. Yes, we’re all sick of superhero movies. We still look forward to the entertaining ones, the ones that will make it easier to grit our teeth through the shittier ones.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is not completely terrible. It’s definitely better than that last Thor flick, and it’s probably better than the first Captain America flick. It works as an action flick, and it works, for Marvel’s purposes, as an extension of their franchise, pushing the overall story in some kind of direction, which is good.

It’s also the only one of this recent crop of the Marvel renaissance that has anything to say about the actual contemporary world we live in, with its all pervasive surveillance and drone/targeted killings and such. Okay, so it doesn’t say anything useful about these issues, like the fact that you can’t send a text or have a conversation on the phone without Google, various governments and Obama knowing about it, and what should be done about it, but at least it reminds us of stuff we are perfectly well aware of.

dir: James Mangold

2013

Yes, yes, another superhero flick. Your eyes just glazed over thinking about it the way mine did as I was typing it.

The Wolverine, at least, is a more modestly ambitious superhero flick than the four thousand or so we've watched in the last year. In fact, you could argue it’s not even a superhero flick, in that it’s just about a guy with weird hair and the magical ability to heal instantly who kills a bunch of Japanese people. So it's an action flick, more than anything, with nary a mention of the X-Men or most of anything that happened in all of the other films, with the pointed exception being the fate of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) at the end of X-Men 3.

Now, when ranking X-Men flicks, it would seem to make sense to order them from best to worst, but, to my mind, worst to least mediocre is probably a better methodology. The cumbersomely-named X-Men Origins: Wolverine might seem to be the worst, but I have a special hatred for that third turd of a flick, being The Last Stand, which was anything but the last stand, since the tedium rolls on and on.

Let's just agree that both movies are pretty terrible in special, unique ways, and leave it at that. Fortunately, nothing about Origins plays a role here, and I'm assuming in the timeframe this plays out some years after Last Stand.

As the film begins, we're watching curious footage of two bombers approaching a seaside town. Some Japanese guard at a POW prison camp circa 1940s starts going berserk, screaming presumably "The Americans are coming, the Americans are Coming! Quick, abuse the prisoners some more and then quickly commit suicide!" My Japanese is a bit rusty, so I might be slightly inaccurate on that score. Most of the guards are running around like Japanese chickens with their heads artfully decapitated with the precise deadly beauty of a katana. One guard is still trying to kill POWs, as if there's any percentage or value in doing so. One of them, though, seems to value human life a little more than his brethren, as he tries to help the prisoners escape before the bombs drop.

dir: Zack Snyder

2013

Zack Snyder was given an incredible reward when they chose to make him the director of a Superman film. This is very strange, to me, a very strange turn of events.

Snyder’s last film was called Sucker Punch. What was Sucker Punch , I hear you ask, since you blocked it out of your memory or didn’t see it and it doesn’t seem like a real film that was released in this, the apparently real world?

Sucker Punch was an incredibly bad movie, a movie so bad it assaulted the very nature of the word ‘movie’. 'Movie' almost became a derogatory word for a degenerate and pointless form of entertainment previously adored by the masses and now shunned for the horrid waste of time and money that it became post-Sucker Punch for all eternity.

The actual shitty movie itself seemed like it was the fevered dream of an idiot on acid and meth simultaneously, furiously and pointlessly masturbating as he watched a whole bunch of fetish material (Aerosmith’s Janie’s Got a Gun film clip, nubile females in Japanese schoolgirl uniforms fighting Nazi robots and samurais and dragons and lobotomies), who then somehow translated this dirty weekend of cable watching and jerking off of his into a movie, an actual movie, that people paid for and such. Not just to make, but to watch!

And like an idiot, I was one of those people!

Such a film, such a crime shouldn’t have been rewarded, with the executives at Warner Brothers saying “well, sure, Sucker Punch was an abomination, and not only should you not be allowed to make films again, but you should be blinded and put in public stocks so that children can throw rocks at you for ever more, but instead we’re going to give you $200 millions dollars and the rights to make the new Superman film. Boys will be boys.”

What a world. It’s as if after the Nuremburg Trials, they’d said to people like Hitler's close friend and the Third Reich's architect Albert Speer, “Now, we know you guys did some pretty awful stuff, and your names will live in infamy for centuries to come, but there's a really exciting opportunity for a new Opera House in Sydney, and, aw shucks, we'd be real honoured if you could get back to work just for us, okay?"

Too far, I know, but if you think invoking Godwin's Law this early into a review is tasteless and trivialising of the Holocaust, clearly you have no fucking idea how terrible Sucker Punch is.

Never again. Anyway, wow, that's a long preamble, even for me. So, I go into a flick like this predisposed towards hating it, knowing that there is a hack at the helm, so it would have to do a lot to win me over.

It didn't win me over entirely, because it's still Zack fucking Snyder at the helm, but I really wanted this to be a good Superman film, and I mostly got what I needed from it. Mostly.

dir: Shane Black

Third-parters are almost never good. They never work out well, whether in comparison to the first two instalments, or compared to any other decent films in general. Aliens III? Matrix: Revolutions? Superman III? Can you think of a third parter at least as good as what came before it? The only one I can think of is Return of the King, which many callous people think of as being The Kiwi Flick with Three Hours of Endings. But I don't, since if one happy ending is a good thing, then lots of happy endings has got to be even more super amazing.

You could argue that the difference is when the third part of a film trilogy is an organic part of the story, rather than a second sequel, whose purpose is just to capitalise on diminishing returns. Where Dark Knight Rises fits into this I couldn't tell you. Where some would argue 'necessity', others would argue 'doesn't say anything it hasn't already said twice before'. So whether it's Shrek the Third or Jaws III or Robocop III, or Spider-Man III, we're generally programmed to expect much more of 'more of the same' -ness to predominate, as well as a certain tiredness to the premise and mistakes particular to thirds that just have to be made.