Tag: Chris Evans

Captain America: Civil War

Captain America and Iron Man engage in an epic battle of titans in Marvel’s latest.

Civil_War_Final_PosterMarvel’s head-honchos must’ve spent years dreaming up this moment. It’s the moment when Captain America, Iron Man and 10 other superheroes all dash at one another in anticipation of an epic death match. This battle is why we’ve sat through these movies since 2008, and it’s everything fans could’ve asked for.

And whether you’re a fan or not, that may be enough. This particular scene, what is really a sizable chunk of “Captain America: Civil War,” stands out because it’s all these heroes at their best and having a blast. Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man is clambering through Iron Man’s circuitry, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is web-slinging and talking wise as Chris Evans’s Captain America manages to drop a building on him, and Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther is sleek, acrobatic and menacing. They’re not trying to kill each other, but are really just having fun.

“I don’t know how many fights you’ve been in, but there usually isn’t this much talking,” Falcon says to Spidey, who really does breathe a lot of life into this film. Except that’s not entirely true. For a long time now, Marvel has been making sensational action sequences that look and feel exactly like this one: rapid fire action editing that resembles comic book panels rather than cinema, carefully allotted portions of screen time for every hero involved, and a bunch of quippy Whedonisms tossed in between the mayhem.

So if this fight really is the best thing Marvel has ever made, is that really saying much?

To be fair, the Captain America movies are arguably a step up from its Iron Man or Thor counterparts. I’d rather watch Cap and Black Widow engage in some Jason Bourne style hand-to-hand combat than watch Tony Stark shoot lasers at swarms of CGI robots.

But regardless of who the participants are, every Marvel movie ever made feels exactly the same. Each one has been polished and tailored to fit a brand image, and they’ve been rubbed clean of their style, emotion and ambition. Anthony and Joe Russo may be listed as directors here, but these movies don’t have directors, just brand managers. It’s meant movies that are perfectly competent, enjoyable and disposable: almost never bad, but almost certainly never great.

In “Civil War,” when Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) bungles a mission in Lagos that leaves 12 civilians killed, the Avengers are brought before an oversight committee to be kept in check by the United Nations. Iron Man and Black Widow both agree to sign the sanctions, but Captain America believes they would be surrendering their right to choose.

Not unlike the recent “Batman v. Superman,” it makes boardroom discussions, MSNBC talking heads and debates about morality the stuff of blockbusters. Say what you will about that film, but Zack Snyder is a filmmaker with a voice and a style behind the camera. He invoked Greek mythology and Christ parables in order to argue his ideas, and he made Bruce Wayne far more of a tortured soul than the narcissist Tony Stark ever could be.

“Civil War” is entirely paint by numbers with simplistic, reductive writing. Is this movie really about anything other than vengeance? It bungles its libertarian political overtones by trying to straddle the line and appeal to a mass audience, and it proves yet again that Marvel has very little clue what to do with its villains. “Batman v. Superman” didn’t have a sense of humor, but so what if “Civil War” does?

When has this franchise ever made you feel anything beyond a giggle? Marvel has never been one to make you afraid, sad or joyful, to pay homage to a genre, or even to truly care for the fate of these characters. It’s for the same reason that Marvel movies only look like other Marvel movies. By making them all uniformly bland with glimmers of excitement and pathos, they can tease you for the next one.

Where can the franchise go after a dozen superheroes have all fought in an epic battle? If all we keep getting is more of the same, does it really matter?

3 stars

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Marvel’s latest blockbuster is a mess too beholden to plot threads of the MCU, and James Spader’s great Ultron can’t save it.

AvengersPosterMarvel has been branding their Cinematic Universe in such a way that each subsequent film teases the next, and all seem to be building to something. “Avengers: Age of Ultron” should be that moment, but it doesn’t feel like the culmination of all that’s come before. Worse, it doesn’t even feel like an “Avengers” movie.

With 2011’s “The Avengers”, director Joss Whedon did successfully juggle the many characters who showed up in Marvel’s “Phase One”, and he seemed to wink at the camera while doing so, allowing these big personalities to clash and poke fun in a way that returned the color, fun and originality to what had become an increasingly dense, plot driven series.

“Age of Ultron” doesn’t allow its characters to grapple with a major story as a team. It’s a super mess full of forced backstories and plot threads to past and future movies. Black Widow and Bruce Banner are given an unlikely and unexpected tortured romance while trying to battle their demons. Iron Man hints at fracturing from the team as he will in “Captain America: Civil War”, but feels half-baked and underdeveloped here. Thor disappears from the team to fulfill a nonsensical side plot in a Nordic cave. Hawkeye suddenly has family melodrama on a reclusive farm that slows the film to a halt. And new additions are given neither the screen time nor the emotional heft to truly make an impact.

If Marvel isn’t building to this and still hasn’t arrived at their best, what are we waiting for?

In the film’s opening shot, Whedon weaves through the forest of a fictional Russian-esque country as the Avengers stage an attack on a compound. It’s an unbroken take (achieved through digital trickery) that unnaturally circles the area in an effort to showcase each hero one by one as they deal with some baddies, all before catching them all lunging forward at once in a poster-ready screen grab. It’s emblematic of how “Age of Ultron” both looks and feels, in which Whedon is really just showing off. Some of these elaborate, but not stylish shots only remind how much is going on.

Like the camera, the plot also fails to stay fixated in one place. Upon reaching the compound, they retrieve Loki’s scepter. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) plan to research it in an attempt to create a brilliant form of artificial intelligence that can provide peace on Earth somehow. They inadvertently succeed but manage to create Ultron (voiced by James Spader), a highly intelligent program that in no time flat deduces that the only way to achieve peace is to eliminate The Avengers and evolve mankind through extinction.

Ultron brings to the film possibly Marvel’s first actual theme and message, and he proves to be arguably the best super villain Marvel has dreamed up. He repeatedly sings “I’ve Got No Strings” from “Pinocchio” to show he’s not one of Iron Man’s puppets, and his principled ideas about the evolution of intelligent life resound with the weight of countless sci-fi films before it. “Age of Ultron’s” ideas about AI and the folly of man may not be profound, but delivered with Spader’s quick, dry, ironic tone, it’s convincing.

But as for making a convincing narrative and objective for Ultron, Whedon is far less successful. As a villain, Ultron is convenient. He exists in the Internet! He’s unstoppable, and always one step ahead. So when his plan is revealed to make a tangible version of himself, it seems like a step in the wrong evolutionary direction. But even that plan fizzles out to make way for yet another new character, and the resulting final battle is The Avengers taking on thousands of disposable metal baddies. The action sequences feel like a rehash of not just the chaotic spectacle at the end of “The Avengers”, but of “Iron Man 3” for how many Stark-powered enemies they’re forced to bring down.

Whedon has more luck with a battle between Iron Man and a hypnotized Hulk in a crowded city. It isolates the action on two figures and smashes things up real good. Yet it too blends in with the chaos at the Russian compound, then in the African warehouse, then in the Russian city. Marvel seems unable to stage a compelling set piece that doesn’t involve a million moving parts in a busy area.

These scenes are so unmemorable because they lack suspense. They’re hugely bloodless and without any of the dark edges of Christopher Nolan’s or Zack Snyder’s superhero attempts. Marvel also doesn’t see the need to make us care for these characters again, as they’ve already done so in previous films. But it’s easy to forget what makes Tony Stark heroic and likeable in the first place, not least of which because he’s been separated from the brilliant, charming chemistry he has with Pepper Potts (the movie makes a quick, cheap concession to explain why Gwyneth Paltrow and Natalie Portman are missing).

When the action does settle down, Whedon brings his trademark smarm to the party, particularly in a scene where all the Avengers try to lift Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) hammer and find themselves unworthy. These characters have shades and nuance, but under Whedon’s dialogue they all seem like the same cocky adventurers with a quick act of wordplay here and a too-clever high-brow pop culture reference the next.

But Whedon has interesting things to work with, and you wish Marvel would withhold flashbacks of Black Widow’s (Scarlett Johansson) assassin up-bringing for her own movie and condense the two hour, 20 minute run time of this one. Johansson is arguably the standout of this franchise, and her interactions with Ruffalo are the closest Marvel has gotten to making Hulk’s werewolf curse understandable and believable.

“Age of Ultron” isn’t a movie though; it’s seven movies, and none of them stick. Marvel has to quit making teases for their next Big Thing and make that movie today.

2 ½ stars

Snowpiercer

Joon-ho Bong’s “Snowpiercer” is a challenging, polarizing and disturbing action sci-fi with big real world parables

To paraphrase Jon Stewart, the end of humanity won’t come because of an asteroid or the apocalypse but because of the moment when a brilliant scientist declares, “It works!”

In the dystopian, sci-fi action movie “Snowpiercer,” humanity has agreed to release an experimental gas into the air to scale back the effects of global warming. The process works too well, and the world is plunged into an ice age unfit for life on Earth. 17 years later, the only remaining humans on Earth live on a perpetually moving train, one that circles the Earth each year.

Given these conditions, how quickly would you imagine humanity would slip back to its basest nature? How soon would the world start devouring itself? When would martial law be declared? When would society deteriorate?

“Snowpiercer” is a bleak, violent and surreal look at the broad, caricature of the human condition. Director Joon-ho Bong’s film makes a bold and blunt allegory about the way the world works, and amid the beautifully photographed action sequences and garish, even humorous depictions of the human class system, he finds little worth liking. Continue reading “Snowpiercer”

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is the most bullet-ridden superhero movie ever made, and it has a strange assortment of politics embedded within.

Captain America is a hero of morals and integrity. He represents the American ideal not because of his politics but because of his values. And yet his presence in comics dating back to World War II has always had to contend with the American political sphere. What would be the implications if the values of America’s greatest hero no longer matched America’s behavior?

Marvel took an ambitious step by removing Captain America from his ’40s origin story and dropping him into the modern day. “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is a film in which Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) must now grapple with thorny, ripped from the headlines debates surrounding America’s defense spending, use of military drones and their technological dominion over our privacy.

It’s the first time a Marvel film has presented grave, real-world stakes. In one way, the modern setting makes “The Winter Soldier” feel hardly like a superhero movie at all, closer to a conspiracy thriller complete with modern weaponry and combat. But in another way, Directors Anthony and Joe Russo’s placement of the film well within the Marvel template and “Cinematic Universe” make the presentation of “The Winter Soldier’s” vague political ideas that much queasier.

Continue reading “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”

The Avengers

“This intergalactic energy cube ain’t big enough for the six of us,” “The Avengers” says with a forceful tone as it struggles to conceal a smile.

Joss Whedon’s superhero movie equivalent to The Travelling Wilburys fully knows how impossible it is to squeeze all of these massive folklore figures into one film. So when the whole serious side starts to cave and just gets silly, Whedon is there with a zinger to run with the moment.

“The Avengers” is a fun and smart movie in doses, one that surprises and dazzles when it isn’t talking your head off. Continue reading “The Avengers”

Captain America: The First Avenger

“Captain America: The First Avenger” is campy fun with some neat ’40s nostalgia but gets bogged down by service to the franchise.

Don’t be mislead that “Captain America: The First Avenger” is a period piece war movie. It’s got a sepia tone and World War II era costumes, but the film is done up with as much CGI flair as any other superhero blockbuster. That said, this campy, Americana kicker that’s more sci-fi than old Hollywood is still a good time at the movies.

It goes to show that even if your character is just as goofy as a Norse God and if your film has nearly as many blatant product placement moments for yet another franchise a year in the future, a movie can still have quality if it feels like more than an advertisement.

Let’s leave all the Avengers mumbo jumbo aside. The real movie starts not with a crashed and frozen spaceship in modern day but with the vicious Nazi Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) stealing an ancient artifact that will do more for the war than the Ark of the Covenant did. Mutated with powers that make him believe he’s above God, he wants to separate from the Fuehrer and take over the world himself. The only person to stop him is a scrawny kid from Brooklyn, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). No enlisting center will accept him given his size and medical problems, but he’s granted a special opportunity by a German scientist, Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci). Erskine will transform Steve into a hulking super soldier with the hope that he’ll maintain a good and strong heart. And thus Captain America is born. Continue reading “Captain America: The First Avenger”