Captain Marvel

Although it is a muddled and superficial film, Captain Marvel stars Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, the latter of which is among the most watchable movie stars working today. Their tandem charms and relative comfort working within the Marvel aesthetic make the experience almost tolerable.

Directed by indie journeymen Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Marvel’s latest chapter in its never-ending story is almost unwatchable in its first reel. The titular character has about three names, thus we can stick with “Captain.” We meet Captain on her home planet, where she’s haunted by memories she can’t quite snap into focus. It’s a warrior society, and in its first third the film borrows from everything from Green Lantern to Superman to The Matrix and grows more tedious with every purloined almost-idea.

There’s an early covert mission Captain goes on with her fellow alien freaks that’s a mess of too-dark cinematography and meandering, uninspired direction. The formal maneuver of representing Captain’s repressed/erased memories of a past life through extremely on-the-nose editing gets old instantaneously. It’s also annoying. There was an opportunity here to do something interesting with the are-we-our-memories philosophical underpinnings of the story, the feminist subject matter, and the 1990s setting. But these elements are never explored, just simply presented.

It would have been great, for example, to see the 90s setting used to some thematic effect rather than simply mined for its obnoxiously obvious playlist. A Marvel movie that actually mimicked a 90s movie aesthetic would have been… well, it would have been as good as any idea in Captain Marvel. The film’s one actually worthwhile major theme — that Captain Marvel had been fighting on the wrong side of a war because she didn’t know who she truly was (literally) — is rendered in such an incurious fashion that the notion is wasted.

Larson navigates the character’s intensity and, remarkably for an alien, penchant for wry comedy more or less skillfully. Of course, the problem with a hero who literally doesn’t know her true identity is that whatever personality traits she might exhibit seem random. Which they are. Oh, is she also a swordsman of sarcasm? Sure, why not?

Larson gets by on her instincts, never really seeming to know, well, who this character is. (Compare with Robert Downey Jr.’s handling of Tony Stark in the Iron Man films; this is less a testament to Downey’s talents than it is to the fact that Tony Stark has character traits that make him recognizable in a literal crowd of superheroes.) Predictably, her best scenes are ones that resemble her own indie background — e.g., sitting at a kitchen table and reminiscing with an old friend, or engaging is semi-barbed banter with Nick Fury (Jackson).

To the extent that Marvel films exist as long-form trailers for the next Marvel film, Captain Marvel is about as effective as it gets. It has the perfunctory boisterousness and pointless swagger that only the finest (worst) trailers can effect. Sitting in the theater, one realizes that the reason the fans come out is the post-credits sequences, in which it becomes clear that the main attraction is never the film you’re watching but the one you’re meant to watch next.

Captain Marvel — TWO STARS

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

Rated PG-13

Marvel Studios

Walt Disney Studios 

124 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.

Avengers: Infinity War

Are we supposed to feel badly for Thanos (Josh Brolin), the villain of the new Marvel assault on the senses Avengers: Infinity War? The intergalactic demigod certainly has enough screen time. Our usual heroes like Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), who at this point are fully developed characters, are encountered mostly in fleeting scenes of banter and wisecracks.

Infinity War is a movie about Thanos, not our Avengers. Previous films have established these characters to the point that, apparently, directors Joe and Anthony Russo see no need to even let the heroes speak much.

Thanos seeks the infinity stones, magical glowing rocks that fit into the infinity gauntlet, a magical glove that grants its wearer supreme power over the universe. Even having just one or two of the stones allows you to beat up the Hulk. Infinity War‘s irrelevant plot has to do with Thanos’ quest to take over the universe by acquiring the missing stones, which are scattered in goofy places — one is in Vision’s (Paul Bettany’s) head, another is around Benedict Cumberbatch’s neck, another is just being hoarded by some weirdo on a dank planet, etc.

Why does a being who already wields immense power want to go through all this trouble? If I’m understanding one of the exposition dumps correctly, Thanos is concerned about overpopulation. His home planet Titan got destroyed because of overpopulation, he reasons. So wiping out half of the conscious creatures in the universe is his plan. He needs all six stones to do this.

One would think that a better plan would be to simply use the stones to create new planets to which the population overflows can be relocated, but, hey, Thanos isn’t the kind of guy who takes constructive criticism well.

Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) collects a quick beatdown from Thanos in outer space and is mercifully zapped back down to Earth, landing, literally, in Doctor Strange’s (Cumberbatch’s) house. Bruce Banner becomes a kind of Paul Revere, reporting of the coming of the mighty Thanos. From there, it’s all hands on deck (except Ant-Man and Hawkeye, whose absence is explained away in a line of dialogue that exists solely to preempt nerds from complaining). In this cosmic game of keep away, every superhero on the Marvel team gets enlisted into keeping those stones away from Thanos. There are so many of them.

Infinity War is a tonal and structural catastrophe. There are a couple of dramatic beats that are genuinely stirring, such a Gamora (Zoe Saldana) attempting to kill Thanos, her father, failing, and breaking down into tears. But the bulk of the film’s two-and-a-half hour run time jumps with depraved abandon from location to location, where the rare dramatic moment that lands is summarily undercut by an ill-timed one-liner. But the comedy is funny. Actors like Chris Pratt and Downey can transform  cheesey one-liners into winners with sheer delivery.

Much has been made of Infinity War‘s bleak ending, which I found to be more obnoxious than daring. Really, it’s just plain silly. In the public screening I attended, people seemed to be moved by the killings that come late in the film.

Of course, there exists in the Avengers universe the infinity gauntlet, which gives one the ability to time travel, teleport, bend the space-time continuum, bring the dead back to life, and so on. Thus the world of the Marvel films is one in which everything done can be undone with a spell, a stone, or a sequel.

Avengers: Infinity War — TWO STARS

Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

Rated PG-13

Marvel Studios

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

149 min.

Black Panther

The era of the high-octane superhero movie has wrought a lot of artistically vacuous pomp and circumstance and a handful of worthwhile, clever films. Marvel’s Black Panther, which has been placed in the care of Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed), indeed marks something different from worthwhile and clever — it is asking socially relevant questions without preaching their answers. It’s also a high-budget, almost entirely black film about black people.

Coogler’s intricate script, co-written with Joe Robert Cole, begins in Oakland in 1992. Before the first scene, we’re thrust into a VFX-powered exposition dump that, unlike 2017’s Wonder Woman, is over fast. The basics: Wakanda is a central African nation that everyone thinks is tribal and third-world. In fact, their possession of a precious mineral called Vibranium has led to a hidden society more technologically advanced than any on Earth. Their king is known as the “Black Panther” and has superpowers. To preserve their way of life, the Wakandans have chosen to isolate themselves and not share their tech with the world. Again, we’re zipped through this exposition in about sixty seconds, a choice that felt rushed at first, but one wishes more superhero movies would respect our time in this way.

From there, Coogler and Cole present a delightfully convoluted (reminiscent of a Bond film in some respects) plot that sidesteps the usual high-spot nonsense that characterizes so many movies of this kind. There is not necessarily an action beat every ten minutes. And despite the voiceover exposition dump at the beginning, Coogler is skilled at delivering information visually in a manner rarely seen in Marvel films. (During a fast-paced heist scene, Coogler’s camera catches a glimpse of a villain, Michael B. Jordan, smooching one of his accomplices as they flee. The camera doesn’t linger on it or cut in for a close up to tell us our bad guy, Killmonger, is in love and has something to lose.) Although the pacing of Black Panther slows much too much at times, it is a comic book film that draws the viewer in precisely because it’s taking the time to do so. After the brief visit to 1992 Oakland, the significance of which comes into play later, we’re hunkered down with the Wakandans. How they live, how their tech works, how the king must accept challenges from other tribes — the film becomes maximalist as it celebrates its own details.

Chadwick Boseman plays the Black Panther. An actor of great poise, Boseman has the ability to shimmy between quiet dignity and a playful smile in a way that makes his performances seem singularly natural. (He has played Thurgood Marshall and James Brown in prior films.) But the villain is far more interesting than the king. Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger, we come to learn, has the kind of life story that superheroes would envy. A special ops soldier, and now an international criminal and spy of sorts, Killmonger has a legitimate claim to the Wakandan throne as well as a legit personal beef with King T’Challa (Boseman). There is a modesty to Jordan as a performer that is endlessly appealing. Even as a bad guy, Jordan seems to do very little, making every blink have a substantial effect. Jordan in this way can be contrasted with Andy Serkis, who plays an eccentric one-armed villain in cahoots with Killmonger and seems to be having an illegal amount of fun doing it.

The Panther must claim his rightful throne while fending off challengers and trying to locate the stolen Vibranium. But the film takes its conflict in a more ideological form. Killmonger, a Wakandan who has grown up in the U.S. and been radicalized by racial injustice, wishes to use Wakandan Vibranium to arm “oppressed peoples around the world” to rise up against their oppressors. The Wakandan society has always prided itself on its way of life, not meddling in the affairs of outsiders, and not welcoming outsiders into its midst. T’Challa’s dilemma is not whether or not to fight the bad guys — being a superhero film, that’s an easy one — rather, it’s one of allegiance. What responsibility to the diaspora do the Wakandans have?

This is a theme that goes beyond the usual “With great power comes great responsibility” issue of the average Marvel story. Here we have a villain who not only has a point but makes an argument too strong to ignore. Killmonger is a hero himself, in a sense. The final battle, which includes giant rhinos and Martin Freeman remotely flying a Wakandan fighter plane, is as much an intellectual debate as it is a physical smash-’em-up.

Black Panther — THREE STARS

Directed by Ryan Coogler

Rated PG-13

Marvel Studios

134 min.

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman, like its star, is at least comfortable in its own skin. The ease with which Gal Gadot twists and shouts through the typical paces of playing a superhero arrives like an opened window in a smoky room given the stuffed suits that constitute her Justice League teammates (Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill). Gadot has the poise and alpha-dog gaze of someone who has been a soldier, a model, and a movie star. (She has, in fact, been all of those things.) Director Patti Jenkins (Monster) photographs Gadot as a kind of eighth wonder of the world in herself, so talented and beautiful she seems from another realm. This is what they call “good casting.”

Indeed Gadot feels right for the role. The Israeli actor has all the confidence and self-possession of our finest movie stars but seemingly without the ego. There’s no winking at or cheating toward the camera, no stealing of scenes. Her accent is that airy, softer-on-the-consonants variety that seems simultaneously foreign and at home in an American blockbuster (see Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Christoph Waltz). Actors playing superheros superbly is so rare because the last thing that matters is the first thing people think about — looking good in the suit. In fact, it’s about having the fierceness and grace to make us think it’s possible this person can catch bullets in mid-air.

The movie itself is the familiar superhero origin story, but elegant enough in its exposition (which is copious) to feel fresher than it actually is. Recall that Wonder Woman is an Amazon warrior from the uncharted Isle of Themiscyra. Jenkins and screenwriter Allan Heinberg begin there. The women warriors seem to do nothing but full-contact battle training and speak in epic verse. The backdrops are almost too picturesque, like a souvenir mug your boss brought back from a holiday in Cyprus.

Connie Neilsen and Robin Wright play Diana’s mother and aunt respectively. One wishes to keep the daughter of Zeus — molded by the god himself from clay — from training as a warrior, and the other is in favor of it. (They’re a race of warriors. If one of them doesn’t train, what would she do? Bowling?) Jenkins borrows admiringly from Richard Donner’s original Superman. But Donner didn’t spend this much time on Krypton. The Amazons flip in the air, on and off of horses, kicking and punching and whirling through special effects shot after special effects shot. It’s kind of a lot of movie before we get to the movie.

Eventually, just as Diana faces a key dilemma, she witnesses a plane go down just off shore. Twenty to fifty effects shots later, she pulls Chris Pine out of the wreckage. Nice catch. Steve Trevor is a World War I pilot, and, he explains, the Krauts are on his tail. Diana doesn’t quite understand — which describes her character throughout most of the story. A battle ensues. The Amazons fight with Pine to put down the Germans (who don’t even know against whom they’re fighting), the first of many ultra-violent cartoon battles that manage to be both absolutely bloodless and shocking in their brutality. Diana has a heart and sees the good in mankind. Can someone who mouths the rhetoric of peace and love be this good at killing?

Pine and Gadot make quite the charming pair. Both get the joke about themselves as “sex symbol, sure, but maybe I’m doing a good job here, huh?” (Gadot asks a naked Pine whether he is a typical example of the male sex. Pine, with wry confidence, responds, “I’m, uh, above average.”) The movie’s finest moments are without any VFX, just Diana and Steve learning what the other considers “polite.” Both actors strike the impossible balance of being infuriatingly good-looking but not hate-able. When Diana hears of WWI, she presumes Ares, the god of war, is behind the bloodshed. She insists on going to the front with Trevor, an Allied spy coordinated with British intelligence, to defeat her nemesis and end war forever. She is told that once she leaves her island she can never return. Seems like a goofy rule to make for someone who is a god, but okay.

Wonder Woman, which is two hours and twenty-one minutes long, begins to find its narrative bearings at this point. Steve has to stop a German scientist and a general (the great Elena Anaya, given short shrift here, and Danny Huston) from developing a horrible gas (all we know about it is that it’s horrible). Diana wants to get to the front to fight Ares. Given this storyline, one would expect some fish-out-of-water gags to arise. Alas, the movie never stops with such gags. Diana is at once a god, the most powerful weapon of war imaginable, and constantly misunderstanding everything. I found it somewhat incongruous that Wonder Woman is presented here as a fierce feminist icon and as a big dope who can’t see how a revolving door works. (Of course, Clark Kent made the same mistake.)

Jenkins’s approach to the action is dynamic but at times ponderous. Large action set pieces give way to tender character moments, transitions that are sold on the performances more than the script. Again, Diana mouths the words of being a peace-loving hippie, but not a minute later she’s cutting down Germans with abandon, and a minute after that she’s sharing a laugh with Trevor’s compatriots. (Steve Trevor’s team of misfits are great but sidelined.) One moment she’s all compassion (“Awww a baby!”), the next she’s a walking id on steroids. Soon, a would-be better-than-average superhero film succumbs to the same old shortfalls: the weak third act, the underdeveloped villain of inchoate motivations, the painfully predictable plot beats. For me, most of what was exciting about Wonder Woman got buried under the rubble of its own contradictions.

Wonder Woman — TWO STARS

Directed by Patti Jenkins. Rated PG-13. Warner Bros. D.C. Films. 141 min.

Captain America: Civil War

The contemporary superhero movie runs on surprises that aren’t really surprises, more like plot and character elements that have been teased such that we know what’s coming. It’s the seeing it happen, the experiencing of the inevitable, that’s supposed to thrill us. To extend the familiar rollercoaster ride metaphor, we can plainly see the coaster’s twists and turns from the ground, but taking the ride still thrills. This is what Marvel Studios is banking on.

Whereas some some superhero films have drawn on genuinely interesting comic book plots (“Batman Begins,” “Watchmen”), “Civil War” wraps some thin comic plotting in deli paper to give us a to-go order of what the public wants: superheroes punching superheroes.

Continuing the recent trend of superheroes feeling crummy about all the destruction they’ve caused in the prior film, Captain America (Chris Evans) and the gang find themselves receiving public scrutiny. The Avengers, recall, are a ragtag group of superhumans who basically operate under their own authority and with the permission of their own good intentions. Cap, normally a smart fella, can’t seem to grasp why this might make folks uneasy.

But some members of the squad get it. Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) wants to sign a document that will put The Avengers under the control of the U.N. Cap says “The safest hands are still our own.” Thus two factions form. The film seems to exist in a universe where the United Nations functions as a kind of global government that speaks with one voice, immediately, and without bureaucracy.

Daniel Brühl plays the villain, Helmut Zemo, a Sokovian national who hates The Avengers because they decimated his nation. Brühl is excellent in a role that’s written to maximize his humanity (in a running motif he speaks solemnly to his wife and child on the phone). His grudge against The Avengers is understandable. The superhero crisis-of-conscience motif lends itself to a sympathetic villain who, in a sense, has a better argument than the hero.

Once sides are drawn, one realizes that it doesn’t matter who is on what side. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) sides with Iron Man, Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) with Cap. The other lesser superheroes get recruited onto their respective sides like a fourth-grade dodgeball game. Tony Stark makes a trip to Queens to recruit an underage Spider-Man (Tom Holland) under the pretense of awarding the young Peter Parker a grant. (Aunt May, played controversially by Marisa Tomei, has only a few lines, including the post-credits cookie, which reminds us that “Spider-Man will return.”) Why would the world’s foremost weapons innovator need the help of a reluctant superhero who has only been slinging webs for six months? Because everyone loves Spider-Man. Also early expositional dialogue lets us know that no one knows the whereabouts of Hulk and Thor.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo show tremendous sensitivity to character and the various personality conflicts among superheroes that makes these films funny (funnier in the hands of Joss Whedon, but the Russos prove good mimics of Whedon’s wit). The film is most like a film when it takes the time to revel in a moment of character-based humor or wit. When seated in a car, for example, the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) asks Falcon, whom he dislikes, if he could move his seat up. Falcon dryly says “Nnnope.” The brief gag underscores their distaste for one another while highlighting their established personalities. As with every such small detail, “Civil War” has the feel of a film that conducted a focus group inside the men’s room at Comic-Con.

There’s a magic ratio of fidelity to the comics against liberties taking that, when achieved, will be met with applause from comics fans. The Russos may have cracked that code better than any Marvel film to date. Which may be why “Civil War,” for all its humor and breakneck bombast, feels more pointless than its predecessors.

“Captain America: Civil War” — TWO STARS

Directed by Joe Russo and Anthony Russo. Rated PG-13. Marvel Studios. 147 min.