Creed II

Ryan Coogler’s Creed was a clever and ultimately satisfying resurrection of the Rocky franchise, one that updated the formula without monkeying with it very much at all. That easygoing reverence for the source material wasn’t precious and was all about moving forward with its new hero, Donnie, son of Rocky’s first foe and eventual friend, Apollo Creed (played with singular pizzazz by Carl Weathers).

Creed II, directed by Stephen Caple Jr. with a script co-written by Stallone himself, is, for my money, a better film, one that finds the series’ sea legs with Donnie as a protagonist. It also connects more firmly than its predecessor with the prevailing theme of Rocky films: fathers and sons.

One of the detriments of the first Creed film was the lack of a compelling opponent for Donnie (Michael B. Jordan). (Perhaps the plot of Creed II should have been the plot of Creed I?) This time they get it right. Somewhat ham-fisted dialogue lets us know that there’s been a six-fight time jump between films. This film begins with Donnie, with Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and Rocky (Stallone) at his side, now challenging for the heavyweight title (the champ is played by former light-heavyweight titlist Andre Ward).

Like Rocky before him, Donnie’s success in the ring is attended by ennui and familial strife. It’s revealed that the mighty Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), who was defeated by Rocky only after killing Apollo Creed in the ring, lives in Ukraine with his son, Viktor (Florian Munteanu). Viktor is a young, inexperienced fighter. But he has the benefit of his father’s training and resentments. It is revealed that after losing to Rocky, Ivan’s country turned its back on him, and his statuesque wife (Brigette Nielsen), Viktor’s mother, left them in shame.

Viktor also has the benefit of being big and scary looking, winning all of his handful of fights via devastating knockouts. In keeping with Rocky movie tradition, a slick promoter named Buddy Marcelle (Russell Hornsby, who is excellent with what little dialogue he’s given) sees an opportunity to make a superfight.

Can the newly crowned champion avenge his father’s death by defeating the son of his father’s killer? Pretty straightforward. Interestingly, Creed II swaps the cold war conflict of Rocky IV for what is essentially a familial dispute.

In the prior film, Coogler brought some degree of bravura camera moves to the Rocky franchise, which had until that point been conventionally shot. Caple at times mimics the style but without Coogler’s eye for shots. The fight sequences this time are less convincing, more choreographed seeming where Coogler used more wide shots that better resembled two fighters actually going at it.

Caple, though, is not without his tricks. The fight sequences are well timed and reliably surprising in how they play out. Once Donnie enters the ring with Drago, we really do feel the momentousness of it all.

Rocky’s reluctance to be in Donnie’s corner for a fight with Drago’s son is borne of the fact that Rocky failed to throw in the towel back in the day, which would have saved Apollo’s life. He doesn’t want history to repeat itself. Donnie feels this is simply his trainer and surrogate father having a lack of faith.

What Creed II cleverly achieves is that very dynamic — Rocky’s fear of repeating history, and his refusal to participate in the fight, actually repeats Mickey’s history with Rocky. Two consecutive movies have managed to literally recreate story aspects of the original films without it feeling stale or lazy.

Still, there is much to criticize in Creed II. Where Coogler’s film took its time in establishing its characters, this sequel leaves much under-developed. Drago & Son are actually fascinating, and the baggage they carry is somewhat more interesting than Donnie’s and Rocky’s. (If you play the movie from Viktor Drago’s point-of-view, it’s still a Rocky movie.) The dialogue is on-the-nose (as it was in the original films, admittedly), and the complications that arise in Donnie and Bianca’s efforts to build a family are of questionable wisdom.

Moreover, Rocky himself, and his strained relationship with his biological son, is dealt with in cursory fashion, making a key ending moment feel somewhat unearned. And yet —  Creed II impressed me. It is a beautiful exposition of the main themes of the franchise that, refreshingly, doesn’t worship the franchise.

Creed II — FOUR STARS

Directed by Stephen Caple Jr.

Rated PG-13

Warner Bros.

MGM

New Line Cinema

130 min.

Halloween (2018)

I appreciated the simplicity of David Gordon Green’s Halloween sequel, which uses a reboot title of plain old Halloween. Green is an above-average director, whose best work is found on the HBO television series East Bound and Down, and he’s not bad at striking an interesting tone, making so-so material watchable. (E.g., his film Joe starring Nicolas Cage.) With Halloween, Green brings back Jaime Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, now a paranoid prepper of a grandmother, and enlists none other than John Carpenter himself to reimagine the iconic theme music, which ends up being the film’s best attribute.

Strode, unsurprisingly, is traumatized by her experiences with the criminally insane serial killer Michael Myers, living as a J.D. Salinger-type hermit inside a fortress. Her daughter (Judy Greer) thinks Grandma Laurie is crazy and resents her PTSD-fueled emotional distance. Laurie’s granddaughter (Andi Matichak) longs for a closer relationship with Grandma while still resenting what seems to be an overabundance of caution. (Laurie lives alone, armed to the teeth.) Laurie’s paranoia has hardened her into what we take to be a not-so-great nanna.

Meanwhile Michael Myers, now as aged as Laurie, is locked up in the institution. Laurie’s relationships are frayed in ways that are established but not examined — would not Laurie’s family be more understanding, just a little? Having a serial killer stalk you is no joke. At one point Greer’s character insists that the world is a good place with good people in it. Usually characters that stupid die first.

It’s interesting how the culture of reboots and the nostalgia-drunk mentality that drives it has become as much of a commentary on itself as cash grab. Note how the movie begins on two obnoxiously bland characters who are summarily Janet Leigh-ed. They are documentarians who are “doing a podcast” about the Michael Myers killings of forty years ago. They visit Michael in the institution, shooting questions at him he doesn’t answer. They bribe their way into Laurie’s fortress to interview her. Laurie bursts their hipster bubble — there’s nothing to “understand” about Myers. Some people, as Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Loomis told us in 1978, are just bad. The brief interview scene is inert and pointless, with Curtis barely showing a pulse, but serves as a more or less well played commentary on the sort of movie the original Halloween was not. Evil killer, with a knife, loose in the neighborhood. That’s all there is to understand.

Even the competent Green, who co-wrote the screenplay with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, knows that whatever innovations he can muster must eventually give way to the  obligatory series of Of Courses. Of course Michael escapes. Of course this is what Laurie had been preparing for. Of course he kills some innocent people in gruesome ways. Of course he seems almost supernatural in his abilities. Of course Myers’ new rampage brings Laurie’s frayed family closer together. Of course this culminates in a final showdown. Of course this all happens on Halloween night.

The twists and surprises Green serves up have the effect of jump scares, just cheap little moves that ultimately don’t add anything to the central story. Curtis, whose engine has always run cool as an actor, makes Laurie seem more disinterested than traumatized. Green has attempted to make a classic slasher film that doubles as a meditation on trauma and family and catharsis. It does neither impressively. I’m all for using genre films for such explorations, but in this instance it feels more like finding a fly in your soup. Carpenter’s original was great because such things were deeply encoded in subtext, not stuff about which characters openly argued. Halloween (2018) tells more than it shows, and what it does show we’ve seen too many times before.

Halloween (2018) — TWO STARS

Directed by David Gordon Green

Rated R

Miramax

Blumhouse

Universal Pictures

105 min.

Deadpool 2

Deadpool 2, like its predecessor, is an exercise in contemporary superhero meta-awareness that ultimately is too similar to what it mocks to ever work. What works is the jokes, many of which are funny and move by at such a fast clip that the humor feels more like an action sequence.

Recall that Wade Wilson\Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) had mad scientists endow him with superhuman healing abilities. He can’t be killed, a burden that is better explored in this sequel. Since the first film, Wade has made a living being a contract killer who, we see in montage, travels the world clipping bad guys. His home life with his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) is still idyllic. In the tiresome shock-jock fashion that characterizes these films, she presents to Wade her intrauterine device as an anniversary gift. They want to have a baby.

When tragedy strikes, Wade is bent on revenge. That alone is enough for a good story. After all, director David Leitch, a former stunt double with a flair for vigorous action sequences, was part of the creative team responsible for John Wick. Of course, this is a Marvel product. Thus we’re bombarded with callbacks, loose ends being tied, cameos, and, in the case of Deadpool, an unending series of pop culture references hurled at the audience like impossible fastballs.

Even amid the laughs, it created a feeling of hopelessness in me. Does Deadpool 2 even need an audience to exist? It has the quality of a Rube-Goldberg machine designed for bringing about first-weekend box office returns.

In his quest for revenge, Wade again teams up with X-Men members Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Stefan Kapičić and Brianna Hildebrand), accompanying them on a mission to intervene in what is essentially a superhero version of a school shooting involving Firefist (Julian Dennison from The Hunt for the Wilderpeople). The kid is being hunted by Cable (Josh Brolin) a superhero soldier “from the future” in a John Conner/T-1000 situation. In between dick jokes, our heart strings are clawed at with shameless aggression.

Moreover, characters that are established as important, such as Juggernaut and someone named Black Tom Cassidy, seem to have melted in the background in the editing bay. A fantastic character named Domino, played by the equally fantastic Zazie Beetz, has an actually-quite-interesting superpower: she is lucky. But her role seems curtailed.

The constant meta-textual jokes and literal winking at the camera is more watchable that the goofy sentimentalism that the film, despite itself, seems to want us to take seriously. Wade must learn to get “his heart in the right place.” There are sentimentalist moments during which one is waiting for a joke to come, and it never does. The rest of the time, the adolescent joking never stops.

In fact, the comedy is what works best here. There is an excellent comedic scene in the middle of the film that uses all our major characters and, notably, relies more on staging and well-timed sight gags with reaction shots than on wisecracks and references to Say Anything.

The ending, with its insistence on fake-outs and false promises about the peril a superhero might actually face, brought to mind last month’s Infinity War. We’re involved in a story that moves inevitably toward a particular resolution, only to find that the either/or scenario of the central conflict cheats its way into a third option that preserves our team for the next film.

What’s disappointing about Deadpool 2 is that it didn’t need to be this way. It’s the one franchise under the Marvel umbrella that’s given itself a permission slip to be truly different, yet it resigns itself to the familiar.

Deadpool 2 — TWO STARS

Directed by David Leitch

Rated R

Marvel Studios

Twentieth Century Fox

119 min.