Review: X-Men: First Class

Clumsy, hollow prequel makes for summer’s first train wreck.

Neither a fresh reimagining of the stagnant X-Men film franchise or a back to basics return to what made Bryan Singer’s first two efforts in the series often (if never completely) enthralling, director Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class struggles to find its narrative footing and then collapses beneath a Frankenstein script and leaden, arrythmic pacing. Squandering an intriguing retro setting and a premise that ought to write itself on derivative and pained action sequences and mawkish dramatics, the film amounts to a long, tired rehash of a lot of hoary marketing gimmicks. And amid a widely divergent field of performances it includes an aggressively terrible performance by a veteran character actor who ought to know better.

The film starts with a scene lifted verbatim from Singer’s vastly superior X2, detailing Erik Lensherr’s - the boy who will grow up to become Magneto – struggles in a Polish concentration camp during World War II. This film continues his ordeal under scientist/cackling maniac Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), whose sadistic methods kickstart the young mutant’s abilities. Meanwhile in England, a young Charles Xavier befriends homeless, shape-shifting waif Raven, promising her a safe haven despite her otherwordly appearance.

Probably just a headache: McAvoy as Charles Xavier

Jump ahead to the early 1960s, when Shaw is under investigation by the CIA for interfering with U.S. military operations. Agent Moira McTaggert (Rose Byrne) infiltrates his casino/brothel and witnesses the mutant powers of several of his henchmen, but is dismissed by stodgy superiors who use her findings as evidence women shouldn’t be operatives. Instead, she contacts Oxford University grad Xavier for insight into mutations. Though the young geneticist’s earnest briefing is likewise met with skepticism, he and Raven are recruited by an agency scientist (Oliver Platt) to head up a division of mutant spies.

An aborted attempt to catch Shaw brings Xavier into contact with Lensherr, who’s spent his adult life stalking his former tormentor around the world in search of vengeance. Lensherr reluctantly joins the fledgling group, accompanying Xavier on a recruitment drive around the country. The script uses a familiar structure for this, one for which TV Tropes.org has a pretty ironic name, and it allows for a surprise cameo given extra spice by the precise use of an f-bomb.

The children of the atom model their fall catalogue.

The new recruits, who include a cab driver named Darwin (Edi Gathegi) who can adapt instantly for any situation and a stripper with dragonfly wings (Zoe Kravitz), continue their training until Shaw orders an attack on their compound. The resulting combat under Vaughn’s orchestration becomes both belabored and mean-spiririted, with repeated and derivative violence that fails to establish the bad guy’s menace so much as their one-dimensionality. One of Xavier’s team is murdered, and another defects, in efforts the script ostensibly intends to bring context to the Xavier-Magneto struggles of the later films. In fact it returns to that ambition time and again (at 132 minutes long, it’s got plenty of time) but seldom completely pulls it off.

Because Xavier, Lensherr, and Raven (played in adulthood by Jennifer Lawrence) are the only fully developed characters the script allows, the rest of the “first class” are practically cyphers, distinguishable solely by their powers or, more cynically, their boy band-esque personality types: the bad boy (Lucas Till), the sensitive one (Caleb Landry Jones) the geeky one (Nicholas Holt). Their training, free of the government’s meddling – us kids can do it for ourselves! – goes off with little impediment or setback, save the semi-humorous kind typical of such sequences. The evil mutants working for Shaw – teleporting Darth Maul knockoff Azazel (Jason Flemyng) and Euro-chic tornado thrower Riptide (Alex Gonzalez) – are similarly underdeveloped.

Shaw’s master plan sets the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Xavier, Lensherr and the gang scramble to stop. The ensuing set piece makes for the film’s best sequence, allowing all the mutants to finally let loose with their powers. Though too much of the sequence details the U.S. and soviet navies looking on in fear and hostility, until its conclusion the battle is well-orchestrated and even suspenseful, a welcome relief after the previous plodding 90 or so minutes. Having said that, plot holes and continuity errors trouble its narrative coherence all the while.

When the battle’s over and the character interaction resumes, the film again finds itself in trouble. The reasons for Xavier’s confinement to a wheelchair are revealed with the grace of a sledgehammer, and with a bathos that defies common sense. Lensherr’s character arc ultimately lands him on the side of the devils, as we knew it would, and in joining him Raven becomes the terrorist Mystique (Rebecca Romihn puts in a cameo as her grown up self, too.)  The film can’t resist indulging in multiple denouement, letting Xavier and Lensherr both come to their epiphanies about their identities.

Fassbender is compelling and charming as the haunted Lensherr, and Lawrence is affecting as the shape-changer with no sense of herself. The worst turn, ironically, belongs to the film’s most seasoned veteran. Bacon is hammy and nonchalant playing a villain who ought to be halfway between Dr. No and Dr. Mengele, and his nonchalance works against the film’s sum dramatic weight. In terms of performance his idea of evil apparently runs more to Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor than Heath Ledger’s Joker, in a way that sometimes patronizing; at other times the apathy seems to waft off him. Another weak turn comes from January Jones, playing Shaw’s operative/concubine Emma Frost. Perhaps because of the 60′s setting she recycles her Betty Draper iciness, but only to diminishing returns.

The film’s screenplay carries no less than six writing credits, including Singer and Vaughn both, and the confusion typical of too many cooks in the storytelling kitchen create persistent, debilitating troubles that the final film product never takes time to figure out. At the risk of second-guessing, it’s sometimes tempting to try to spot the segments that must have come from the aborted Magneto-only prequel rumored several years ago, and then to call out the parts that must have accumulated with successive treatments – the toyetic Azazel, the tween-friendly Xavier recruits, the cursory understanding of Cold War geopolitics. All in the name of money, of course, and served up with enough bombast that maybe you won’t notice. X-Men: First Class is a film that doesn’t expect very much from itself. It hopes you won’t either.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Thor

Kicking off the summer movie season with a thrilling, uncomplicated adventure.

Thor may finally settle a debate about Marvel Studios, one that’s brewed for years now: whether the company can build a successful film out of its lesser known characters, following earlier thuds such as Elektra and Ghost Rider. Hardly a household name and not even one of Marvel’s most popular characters among its devoted fanbase, mainstream audiences may approach this film with even heavier doses of skepticism than those earlier misfires. The almost simplistic story of an upstart Norse godling roaming the Earth in combat with his evil half-brother Loki can seem simplistic at best and, honestly, a tad goofy at worst.

Nevertheless, director Kenneth Branagh and his production team  must have taken those pitfalls as a challenge. Despite a hefty run-time that sometimes feels a bit belabored and a romantic subplot that often threatens to become superfluous, the film is a perfect opening volley for a summer movie season swamped by superheroes. Here’s hoping that they’re all as enjoyable as this fast-paced, smartly dumb adventure.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth), his parents Odin and Frigga (Anthony Hopkins and Rene Russo) and half-brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) rule the other-dimensional megalopolis of Asgard, the highest of the universe’s Nine Realms. In centuries past they had defended Midgard (their name for Earth) from an invading army of frost giants, until Odin pushed the monsters back to their own realm of Jotunheim. In the present day the Asgardians and giants maintain an uneasy peace guaranteed by Odin’s supervision of an artifact (more or less a giant battery) containing the bulk of the giants’ power.

Branagh keeps the back story moving fluidly and quickly, zooming past derivations from The Lord of the Rings series (which are unmistakable, even if possibly coming from the same source) and getting the story into the present day. When a frost giant raid on the Asgardians’ armory spoils the celebration announcing Thor as Odin’s designated successor, the young prince determines to lead a counterattack into Jotunheim despite his father’s explicit orders. Joined by his friends Sif (Jaimie Alexander), Volstagg (Ray Stevenson), Hogun (Tadanobu Asano), and Fandral (Josh Dallas), Thor crosses the rainbow bridge leading out of the Asgardians’ fortifications and into Jotunheim, assisted by the city’s stoic gatekeeper Heimdall (Idris Elba).

The point of the mission, at least for the script, is to establish Thor’s fighting credentials. The film is shrewd in understanding that, as a character, Thor lacks the cultural universality of Spider-Man and Superman or the simplicity of the Iron Man concept (Watch Green Lantern hit the same speed bump next month.) The early battle scenes, full of flying bodies and sharp weapons, demonstrate the young goldling’s skill before establishing his character dept in the second act. The action scenes are thrilling, though predictable, as is Thor’s banishment to Earth for his impudence.

He crash-lands in New Mexico, where he’s found by astrophysicist Jane Foster (Nathalie Portman) and her mentor (Stellan Skarsgard) and intern (Kat Dennings.) Foster monitors the atmospheric disturbances over the desert, looking for evidence of wormholes in time and space. Meanwhile residents of the local town stumble upon the crash site of Thor’s war hammer, sent after him by Odin and cursed to resist any attempts at lifting except by those worthy to wield its power. The impact crater quickly gets locked down by SHIELD, the same spy agency so prevalent in the Iron Man films and led here by those movies’ Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg).

Hemsworth remains convincing in taking the upstart god from brash and entitled to self-sacrificing and mature. His chemistry with Portman helps, as does the easy friendship he shares with his Asgardian compatriots; Hiddleston is equally effective as the silver-tongued trickster God, though the script takes his characterization a step further in providing a more classical motivation for his treachery. Odin’s family is conflicted and at odds against itself in the film, making for meaty intrigue that plays directly to Branagh’s Shakespearean strengths. But ultimately it’s Hemsworth’s show, he and Hiddleston’s, and the two make solid counterpoints to one another.

Loki eventually gains the upper hand, supplanting Odin on the throne and sending a towering metal giant named The Destroyer to kill Thor and his friends, leading to the film’s climactic battle.  The fight between the lumbering destroyer and the determined thunder god comes closer to the Tony Stark-Obadiah Stane duel of the first Iron Man than the comparative anti-climaxes found in Iron Man 2 and The Incredible Hulk.

Just don’t expect closure. Thor the movie, resting as it does on the franchise trajectory leading to next summer’s The Avengers, has to keep its ending open not only for its own sequels but for that coming film crossover. (The much-reported appearance here of longtime comics Avenger mainstay Hawkeye doesn’t satisfy, exactly, but doesn’t disappoint, either.) The film drags on a bit too long near the end as it winds down all its moving parts, and a final scene between Odin and his two sons drags for feeling perfunctory. Hiddleston does what he can, however, making Loki pitiable in defeat, however temporary.

CGI-rendered exotic worlds are a commonplace in current cinema, but the production design and sets displayed here are staggering, particularly the Asgard and its many hallowed, echoing chambers. By contrast, the New Mexico desert community is simple and Modernist in a backlot kind of realism, a town seemingly full of chrome diners and Atomic Age facades, dotted with references to the characters’ histories.  

The after-credits preview, incidentally, establishes what’s likely the MacGuffin of the Avengers movie while validating a theory many filmgoers will likely concoct about Dr. Foster’s mentor Dr. Selvig. As a teaser goes, if you’re familiar with the object displayed it’s a great story twist. Those not familiar with the item in question will be less amused.

- Michael Kabel

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Updated: Seven Lesser Known Comic Book Adaptations

Not every comic-to-screen leap was a blockbuster success.

The comic book movie gold rush is in full swing. This summer no less than four of the studios’ tentpole releases draw inspiration from comics, and speculation and surveillance of upcoming projects including Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film and Joss Whedon’s The Avengers routinely fuel top-of-the update online news. Meanwhile Nolan and Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot, The Man of Steel, continues to announce unexpected and enviable casting decisions.

This image has nothing to do with the article. Its just too strange not to share.

Hollywood has gone to the comics well time and time again since the genre first gained notoriety in the early 1940s, most often for low- or mid-budget fare aimed at children and teens. And for every attempt that hit its box office or audience reception target, there are probably three adaptations that tanked, fell victim to restrictive budgets, or just couldn’t garner enough public interest to build a devoted cult fan base.

We’re sure a few of the following are sentimental favorites to forgiving fans of their respective inspirations. (We like The Flash TV series.) Some aren’t bad, considering their limited resources, and some had unrealized potential. And one or two are terrible. But they’re all from comic books, for better or worse.

Sable (TV series) Premiered November 1987; lasted seven episodes. Based on the First Comics series by longtime Green Arrow writer-artist Mike Grell, Sable followed the exploits of freelance mercenary Jon Sable (Lewis Van Bergen) who worked days as an author of children’s books. Rene Russo, very early in her career, played his girlfriend Eden Kendall.

The clip below shows its noirish promise, even if the show’s “alpha dog adventurer helps client of the week” conceit seems kinda passe now.

Steel (Movie) Released August 15, 1997; total U.S. box office: $1.7 million. In his own DC Comics series and in the Justice League comics and cartoon, Steel is a brilliant engineer and inventor who dedicates himself to defending good after Superman saves his life. So what better “actor” to convey such intellectual and moral strength than human marketing platform Shaquille O’Neal? Judd Nelson played the bad guy, while Richard Roundtree (Shaft) appeared as Uncle Joe.

Though admittedly the film carried a modest $16 million budget, “Shaq Steel” still looks as if he swallowed an electromagnet and walked through a junkyard:

Dr. Strange (TV movie) Premiered September 6, 1978. Clad in a snaredrum-tight Disco perm and piles of gold jewelry, New York psychiatrist Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten) trains to be Earth’s new “Sorcerer Supreme” and rescue a young woman from the evil sorceress Morgan LeFay (Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter).

Intended as the pilot to a television series that never happened, the telefilm featured Marvel Comics’ honcho Stan Lee as a consultant.

Supergirl (Movie) Released November 21, 1984; total U.S. Box Office: $15 million. For years the poster child for misbegotten comic adaptations, Supergirl was rushed into production after the success of the first two Superman films but struggled for distribution after Superman III flopped. Nevertheless, expanded versions released on DVD have clarified its choppily-edited story and somewhat repaired its reputation.

Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, and Faye Dunaway make the supporting cast pretty top-heavy, while underused 80s actress Helen Slater (Ruthless People) makes her debut as super-cousin Kara Zor-El.

Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV Movie) Premiered May 26, 1998. A decade before Samuel L. Jackson’s turns in Iron Man and Iron Man 2, David Haselhoff starred in this low-budget TV movie about Marvel Comics’ Man from U.N.C.L.E. riff Nick Fury. The superspy and his former love Valentine Fontaine (Lisa Rinna) take on rival organization HYDRA for possession of a deadly virus. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight scribe David Goyer wrote the script.

The Hoff plays the hyper-macho Fury as… The Hoff with an eyepatch. Watch how S.H.I.E.L.D.’s flying headquarters looks like a basement steam room somewhere. (actual video begins about 23 seconds into clip.)

The Flash (TV Series) Premiered September 20, 1990; lasted 21 episodes. CBS brought the Scarlet Speedster to the small screen apparently motivated by the runaway success of Batman the year before. A TV movie pilot got the family friendly series off and running, but constant schedule shifts and pre-emptions for Gulf War news coverage kept it from building an audience.

Still, The Flash’s (John Wesley Shipp) costume has aged well, as have the special effects. The script quality suffered as the season wore on, however, though fan favorite guests stars like Mark Hamill, Tim Thomerson and Jeffrey Combs frequently livened things up. The series is even collected in a no-frills DVD package.

Captain America (TV movie) Premiered January 19, 1979. An attempt to update the character for the Evil Kenievel/motorcycle years of the 70s, this adaptation featured the original Captain America’s son trying to stop terrorists from detonating a hydrogen bomb on Phoenix, Arizona.

There’s almost nothing about the clip below that doesn’t feel dated, especially the ersatz Cap’s costume and the long, loving takes of motorcycle stunts. A sequel TV movie, released just eleven months later, offered a comparatively more comics-accurate uniform and included Christopher Lee as its villain.

Marvel Studios’ Thor opens nationwide this Friday.

- Michael Kabel

Our Traditional Turkey Dish

Celebrating once again the cinema of Turkey, the land that copyright infringement laws forgot.

Spend the holiday with friends.

Do you have big plans for the holiday tomorrow? Ours involve a lot of not blogging. We’re going to not blog as hard as we can. But, since traffic here on SBR has grown so much lately we want to once again re-present our traditional thanksgiving salute to Turkey – the country – thereby killing two birds (maybe even turkeys) with one stone.

Turkey, if you don’t already know (and why wouldn’t you) sometimes… ahem, pays homage to Western comic and sci-fi franchises by imitating them on the cheap. As a bizarre example, check out how the  Turkish entertainment industry rips off Batman and Robin:

You can’t really call them “caped crusaders” because they don’t have capes. (For that matter, historically speaking the term “crusader” may not have the same noble connotation in Asia Minor.) Whatever, the clip is typical of Turkey’s devil-may-care attitude about copyright. YouTube is chock-full of Turkish riffs on most Western geek culture mainstays, riffs that almost always employ (in a clumsier manner than their American cousins) dizzying amounts of violence, sex, and overwrought soundtracks. Did we mention they’re also really cheap-looking? It bears reiteration. Check out the Turkish Star Trek:

As the clip shows, the Turkish Captain Kirk is much better at walking than most American actors. Still, the language barrier makes impossible any stab at understanding why a peasant hangs out on the bridge and pesters the legitimate crew members. The bridge set also seems to be in some kind of basement garage, if those metal support posts are any indication.

Still, where there’s Star Trek there has to be its dumber, more exciting cousin Star Wars, right? 1982′s Dunyayi Kurturan Adam (“The Man Who Saves The World”) used bootlegged footage from Star Wars Episode IV as well as stock footage of American and Soviet test rocket flights to tell its weird, garbled saga about… stuff in space? The musical score to this clip’s interminable opening credits sounds like public access talk show music from the 1970s, and it only gets worse from there.

Not content to hit George Lucas up once, Dunyayi Kurturan Adam also pilfers the themes to Raiders of the Lost Ark as well as Battlestar Galactica. Eventually achieving cult status by sheer power of its awfulness, the film spawned a 2006 sequel. In a case of bad art imitating more bad art,some fans of the original complained the follow-up was kind of a letdown – just like Lucas’ recent efforts.

Finally, given Marvel Comics’ love for merchandising we’re not entirely sure this next clip is even a bootleg. 3 Dev Adam (“Three Mighty Men”) was a startlingly low-budget, brazenly lurid 1973 abomination depicting an ersatz Captain America’s struggle to stop an evil, pudgy Spider-Man knockoff from running amok through Istanbul. Cap was joined in his efforts, for some reason, by a copy of the legendary Mexican luchadore El Santo. Meanwhile “Spiderman” and his two girlfriends idly torture and kill people in depraved ways or have sex in front of puppets.

Probably the single most trivial thing you will learn this week: 3 Dev Adam featured Turkish star Aytekin Akkaya, who also appeared in Dunyayi Kurturan Adam.

We’ll be back next week with plenty of fresh content, including our latest edition of the always-popular Miscellaneous Debris. Have a happy, safe holiday weekend.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Iron Man 2

Overstuffed, top-heavy sequel arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray September 28.

If sequels to successful films rarely live up to their fan bases’ expectations, then sequels to films that surprised audiences have twice as much work cut out for them. The surprise of discovery and the thrill of infatuation clear away, and the hard work of earning an audience’s respect – while justifying their initial enthusiasm – settles over the sequel like a heavy cloth from which the story has to emerge.

The first Iron Man surprised almost everyone a couple of years ago by presenting better entertainment than even fans of the Marvel Comics superhero likely anticipated. Its sequel, arriving barely two years later into theatres but atop a crest of eager audience expectation, feels rushed and over-reaching for much of its wall-to-wall, action-packed proceedings. Luckily an enviable ensemble of actors, including most especially Robert Downey, Jr., work to keep the whole project from dissolving into noise and chaos. But it takes their combined efforts, and they succeed just barely.

Following Tony Stark’s (Downey, Jr.) revelation to the world that he is in fact the armored hero, his use of the suit has rankled his competitors and lawmakers alike, especially his bumbling rival Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and a pompous senator (Garry Shandling) who would like the armor’s secrets for, respectively, themselves and for the government. But the maverick Stark ain’t having it, insisting he has “successfully privatized world peace” and that he serves the people at his own pleasure. “You can always count on me to pleasure myself,” he quips.

But pride goeth before a fall, and when Russian physicist Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) attacks Stark during the Monaco Grand Prix, it sets off a domino chain of events that crash Stark’s world down around him. “All I have to do is sit here and watch,” Vankdo taunts from a jail cell, “as the world will consume you.” Hammer later recruits him to perfect his own flawed armor technology, while the U.S. military exerts increasing pressure through Stark’s buddy Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard) to cooperate with their own agendas. Making matters worse, the palladium that powers the reactor in Stark’s chest is slowly poisoning his blood, provoking increasingly erratic and self-indulgent behavior that alienates him from Rhodes as well as secretary/love interest Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Relief and assistance come from directions both expected but welcome and unexpected and disappointing. The spies of SHIELD, led by the eyepatch-wearing Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) have the means to treat the blood poisoning but want Stark’s cooperation in their own efforts; to that end, they’ve had a sexy agent (Scarlett Johansson) posing as a legal assistant within his company for weeks. Stark also learns his father Howard (John Slattery) was a founding member of the organization, and that an old filmstrip contains the aloof elder Stark’s vision for his son’s greatness and salvation. At this point the film comes closest to coming completely off the rails: to see the individualist Stark reduced to daddy issues, and to have a solution handed to him, is probably the film’s greatest and cheapest fault.

All of this and more is compressed into a two-hour runtime, with the result that the script often bulges at its seams. The first hour is a flurry of exposition and explanation that sometimes loses its coherence, and for audiences not already well-steeped in the comic mythology the confusion is likely to be compounded. The translation from comic book to screen is almost never without a few bumps, but here a persistent sense of something going unsaid, something taken for granted, permeates the characters’ dialogue and interaction. Little is done with the new characters to establish their connections to one another, save for some brief explanation by way of tossed-off speech. Typically, that speech is Stark making a wise crack about them.

The hurried sense of chaos unfortunately takes its toll on the performers. Rourke’s casting was heavily publicized, but his role remains opaque and largely devoid of nuance. He’s a bad guy, evil and driven by revenge, with little else complicating him. For as entertaining as Cheadle and Johansson are in their parts, there’s no compelling reason for their participation except that their characters are mainstays of the source comic; in a telling sign, none of the new characters are ever called by their comic code names: Stark dubs Cheadle “War Machine” out of context, Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff is never referred to as “The Black Widow,” Vanko is never called “Whiplash.” To be fair, Johansson’s fight sequences have an exciting fluidity in contrast to the high-tech armor everywhere else while Cheadle, the consummate actor’s actor, manages to seem completely at home in what’s essentially a fighter jet worn as a suit.

Rockwell does his best with an underwritten part, but Hammer is too self-sabotaguing to ever seem a credible threat to Stark’s genius; if ever a villain performance actually needed more mustache twirling, this may be the case. John Slattery plays Howard Stark as an unmistakable riff on Walt Disney in the 1960′s, when the animator had turned his energies towards a utopian futurism that likely seemed naive even then. (It’s a weird counterpoint to his normal role as the cynical Roger Sterling of Mad Men.) Of the returning characters, Downey Jr. is excellent yet again, building on Stark’s less endearing qualities while undercutting them with vulnerabilities and needs he has no idea how to express. Paltrow is exactly the same as she was last time, no more and no less; Jackson is fine but looks somewhat less than convincing marching around in a leather trench coat and riding boots in broad daylight.

The Marvel Universe is nothing if not interconnected, and all the superfluous characters and story threads piled over one another are all leading to 2012′s The Avengers. Like last time, fans will want to stick around after the credits for a brief scene that teases the ongoing build-up to that film. In the meantime, this flm feels too rushed, too ambitious, and preoccupied to match the giddy revelation of its predecessor. But it’s still entertaining thanks primarily to what was right with the first film, even while introducing some new elements that stand on their own. It’s an above average sequel to a superior action film, not great but pretty good, moving the ongoing story forward while only sacrificing some momentum.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Iron Man 2

Robert Downey, Jr. and an ace supporting cast hustle to keep an overloaded script aloft. 

If sequels to successful films rarely live up to their fan bases’ expectations, then sequels to films that surprised audiences have twice as much work cut out for them. The surprise of discovery and the thrill of infatuation clear away, and the hard work of earning an audience’s respect – while justifying their initial enthusiasm – settles over the sequel like a heavy cloth from which the story has to emerge.

The first Iron Man surprised almost everyone a couple of years ago by presenting better entertainment than even fans of the Marvel Comics superhero likely anticipated. Its sequel, arriving barely two years later, feels rushed and over-reaching for much of its wall-to-wall, action-packed proceedings. Luckily an enviable ensemble of actors, including most especially Robert Downey, Jr., work to keep the whole project from dissolving into noise and chaos. But it takes their combined efforts, and they succeed just barely.

Following Tony Stark’s (Downey, Jr.) revelation to the world that he is in fact the armored hero, his use of the suit has rankled his competitors and lawmakers alike, especially his bumbling rival Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and a pompous senator (Garry Shandling) who would like the armor’s secrets for, respectively, themselves and for the government. But the maverick Stark ain’t having it, insisting he has “successfully privatized world peace” and that he serves the people at his own pleasure. “You can always count on me to pleasure myself,” he quips.

But pride goeth before a fall, and when Russian physicist Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) attacks Stark during the Monaco Grand Prix, it sets off a domino chain of events that crash Stark’s world down around him. “All I have to do is sit here and watch,” Vankdo taunts from a jail cell, “as the world will consume you.” Hammer later recruits him to perfect his own flawed armor technology, while the U.S. military exerts increasing pressure through Stark’s buddy Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard) to cooperate with their own agendas. Making matters worse, the palladium that powers the reactor in Stark’s chest is slowly poisoning his blood, provoking increasingly erratic and self-indulgent behavior that alienates him from Rhodes as well as secretary/love interest Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Relief and assistance come from directions both expected but welcome and unexpected and disappointing. The spies of SHIELD, led by the eyepatch-wearing Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) have the means to treat the blood poisoning but want Stark’s cooperation in their own efforts; to that end, they’ve had a sexy agent (Scarlett Johansson) posing as a legal assistant within his company for weeks. Stark also learns his father Howard (John Slattery) was a founding member of the organization, and that an old filmstrip contains the aloof elder Stark’s vision for his son’s greatness and salvation. At this point the film comes closest to coming completely off the rails: to see the individualist Stark reduced to daddy issues, and to have a solution handed to him, is probably the film’s greatest and cheapest fault.

All of this and more is compressed into a two-hour runtime, with the result that the script often bulges at its seams.  The first hour is a flurry of exposition and explanation that sometimes loses its coherence, and for audiences no already well-steeped in the comic mythology the confusion is likely to be moreso. The translation from comic book to screen is almost never without a few bumps, but here a persistent sense of something going unsaid, something taken for granted, permeates the characters’ dialogue and interaction. Little is done with the new characters to establish their connections to one another, save for some brief explanation by way of tossed-off speech. Typically, that speech is Stark making a wise crack about them.

The hurried sense of chaos unfortunately takes its toll on the performers. Rourke’s casting was heavily publicized, but his role remains opaque and largely devoid of nuance. He’s a bad guy, evil and driven by revenge, with little else complicating him. For as entertaining as Cheadle and Johansson are in their parts, there’s no compelling reason for their participation except that their characters are mainstays of the source comic; in a telling sign, none of the new characters are ever called by their comic code names: Stark dubs Cheadle “War Machine” out of context, Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff is never referred to as “The Black Widow,” Vanko is never called “Whiplash.” To be fair, Johansson’s fight sequences have an exciting fluidity in contrast to the high-tech armor everywhere else while Cheadle, the consummate actor’s actor, manages to seem completely at home in what’s essentially a fighter jet worn as a suit.

Rockwell does his best with an underwritten part, but Hammer is too self-sabotaguing to ever seem a credible threat to Stark’s genius; if ever a villain performance actually needed more mustache twirling, this may be the case. John Slattery plays Howard Stark as an unmistakable riff on Walt Disney in the 1960′s, when the animator had turned his energies towards a utopian futurism that likely seemed naive even then. It’s a weird counterpoint to his normal role as the cynical Roger Sterling of Mad Men. Of the returning characters, Downey Jr. is excellent yet again, building on Stark’s less endearing qualities while undercutting them with vulnerabilities and needs he has no idea how to express. Paltrow is exactly the same as she was last time, no more and no less; Jackson is fine but looks somewhat less than convincing marching around in a leather trenchcoat and riding boots in broad daylight.

But the Marvel Universe is nothing if not interconnected, and all the superfluous characters and story threads piled over one another are all leading to 2012′s The Avengers. Like last time, fans will want to stick around after the credits for a brief scene that teases the ongoing build-up to that film. In the meantime, this flm feels too rushed, too ambitious, and preoccupied to match the giddy revelation of its predecessor. But it’s still entertaining thanks primarily to what was right with the first film, even while introducing some new elements that stand on their own. It’s an above average sequel to a superior action film, not great but pretty good, moving the ongoing story forward while only sacrificing some momentum.

- Michael Kabel

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Summer Vacation and Our Recent Best

Enjoy our best features as we enjoy our vacation.

Vacation time again.

It’s July. The sun is shining and the weather’s nice. Screaming Blue Reviews is suspending publication this week to get out and enjoy some time off but also to get caught up on our movie watching. We’ve got a full DVR and several new indies to check out, so our work is cut out already.

While we’re having fun, we suggest you check out some of these other reviews and features we’ve published over the last few months. We hope you like them. Join us when we return Monday, July 20 with our review of this summer’s brainy science fiction spectacle Moon. 

1. We love gangster movies for a lot of reasons, not least of which is their amazing resonance with the times surrounding them. Our Road To Gangsterland feature looks back at eight decades of gangster films, including video clips from some of the best of each era. And for what it’s worth, each film discussed is better than Public Enemies, this summer’s 800lb monster of disappointment.

2. Film Noir is both the gangster movie’s successor and perennial accomplice. Summer, with its steamy heat and oppressive atmospheres, is the perfect climate to take a walk down the genre’s long and seductive side streets. Last summer we talked about five movies to make a good film noir festival, films that merit a place in any film collector’s library but provide an excellent treat for fans of the genre’s bleak worldview and sumptuous textures. There’s a video clip of the notorious scene from Kiss of Death, too, which must be viewed to be believed.

3. If crime and criminals aren’t your thing, consider the careers of seven leading men and seven leading women we think are due for major comebacks. They’re talented performers who’ve made some pretty amazing films, and to a person their presences are missed. Happy to say, but at least two of the actors – a man and a woman – mentioned on the lists have independent films circulating this summer. We hope that’s the start of a trend.

4. With so many comic book movies in the pipeline right now and so much casting news and rumors making Internet headlines, check out this list of seven lesser known comics-to-film adaptations. Some had potential, some never had a chance, some were just… weird. Marvel Comics’ stalwart Captain America has had so many big- and small-screen misfires that he rated a film retrospective all his own.

5. Reading books makes us feel smart, but we’d rather be watching movies – it takes less time and there’s usually some kind of candy. Still, we recently made a list of five books with the potential to become great movies, including ideal casts and directors to do the novels profiled justice. There’s been a surprising amount of feedback on this piece – a surprisingly low amount. Does no one else armchair produce their favorite books into blockbuster films?

6. We also enjoy crap, with our without ironic detachment. Last Thanksgiving we ran a fun piece – we can’t quite call it an expose – on all the cheap knockoffs of American film franchises to come from the nation of Turkey. Some of the video clips will very probably blow y0ur mind. Also, we grew up in the 1990s (the golden age of ironic detachment), and our piece about eight of the worst films from the decade’s first half brought back a lot of memories we were content to leave dormant. We’re also embarrassed by how many we actually saw in the theatre. Be advised each of the cinematic train wrecks profiled comes accompanied with a video clip as proof of its dubious quality.

7. Finally, every now and then we talk about a film we want to encourage people to see, either because it’s under-appreciated or has gotten somewhat obscured by the passage of time. A few are box office turkeys we think got a bad deal from their marketing or public reception. These films include the 1973 realist drama Save The Tiger with Jack Lemmon, 2006′s David Fincher-directed Zodiac, and several more we present together . We’ve also got a list of films that deserve a DVD release but haven’t gotten one yet. Life is too short to watch bad movies, and we sometimes suspect that good movies are made every day. The hard part is finding them to watch.

See you next week.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

The fan-favorite mutant superhero’s beginnings get a sluggish and unconvincing film treatment.

Since his introduction as an adversary for the Incredible Hulk thirty-five years ago, the Marvel Comics character Wolverine has come to symbolize not just that comics company but a particular type of comics storytelling. Far from the gifted aliens, self-improving millionaires or brilliant scientists who make up the bulk of comics’ protagonists, the mutant known simply as “Logan” had powers thrust upon him, not once but twice: he was born a mutant and later subjected to military experiments that enhanced his abilities even further. His adventures are violent, uncomplicated, and thick on the spy/military tropes found in drugstore paperbacks and B-movie combat actioners.

Wolverine as a superhero is not a genius, not a strategist and not even much of a thinker, really. He’s a brute force of nature and a scrapper with no end of machismo. So if X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not an especially well-thought movie, if it places its expensive emphasis on action over clarity of plot and characterization, in a mean sense it’s true to its subject. Does that make it a good movie? No, though its vast array of flaws and mistakes make it a bad one.

Jackman, Shreiber compare mutton chops

Directed by Gavin Hood (Rendition), the film opens with a visually and narratively murky prologue that shows Logan (Hugh Jackman) as a young boy escaping the murder of a man who may be his father. He’s abetted by his playmate Victor (Lieve Shreiber), who may or may not be his brother. Possessed of special healing powers that make them more or less immortal, the two go on to serve in every major conflict of the next 130 years, depicted in the film as a thrilling opening credits sequence. In time they’re recruited into a special military unit composed of mutant soldiers and led by a Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston) who encourages their bloodlust. Logan quits the group when their – and Victor’s especially – savagery pushes him to his ethical threshold.

Hello! Collins as Silverfox

In time Logan finds serenity working in Canada’s logging industry while romancing a local school teacher (Lynn Collins). Her apparent murder at Victor’s hands drives Logan back into Stryker’s influence, where he volunteers for a special experiment to coat his bones with a special alien metal called “adamantium,” making him all but indestructible. The rest of the film is Logan seeking revenge against his Victor as well as Stryker, and liberating Stryker’s gulag of mutant prisoners on Three Mile Island.

As their most popular character, Marvel has revised and re-imagined their hero’s origin story multiple times over the years, the better with which to entice audiences with “now it can be told…” comics events. As a result, the script by David Benioff (Troy) and Skip Woods (Swordfish) has a lot of complicated and tangled ground to explain and cover. But like the recent Watchmen, their screenplay puts action above narrative, so that fight scenes (or, more frequently, Victor’s cruel execution of his targets) are constant and prolonged. That’s true to the genre: the basics of the superhero story has always boiled down to “come for the action, stay for the pathos.” Comic books are by design a visual medium, and character depth is actually a fairly recent development in their history.

Still, for an action movie the special effects should be better – really, they have to be for the film to be worth the audience’s time and money. And for a film both prefacing and expanding on the already profitable X-Men movie franchise (composed so far of two good movies by Bryan Singer and one terrible one by Brett Ratner), they should be better still. Instead the fight sequences – and there are many - are redundant and blurred, with CGI that’s convincing only about half the time. It’s hard not to think that with such an expansive cast, many of whom also have super powers, the money was spread too thin. A scene in which Logan toys with his new metal claws while at a bathroom counter is especially unconvincing. Likewise many of Shreiber’s leaps and twists as the feral Victor and Will.i.Am’s blinking teleporting  as soldier John Wraith. Most unconvincing, given the carnage, is the lack of blood onscreen, obviously removed for the sake of that crucial PG-13 rating.

Jackman, making his fourth screen appearance as the hirsute and claw-brandishing mutant hero, is serviceable as always, but he’s seldom given anything to do except respond to events surrounding him. For an action hero he’s curiously passive until circumstances demand his attention. He’s also never entirely sympathetic as a character, as there’s no explanation for why he fought in so many wars or why he feels repulsed by his “brother’s” violence in the first place. After 150 or years together, you’d think he’d know his constant companion better. Jackman is also given to striking outlandish poses before running at his enemies, throwing his arms and legs into weird Tai Chi-like contortions that sometimes look mannered.

Bonjour! Kitsch as Gambit

Shreiber, playing the borderline feral Victor as a method exercise in animal snarl and pent-up menace, nevertheless shows again why he’s possibly the most underrated American actor working right now. Ryan Reynold’s (Definitely, Maybe) charm is underused as the wisecracking ninja Wade, while the normally wooden Kevin Durand (3:10 To Yuma) is effective buried beneath layers of fat suit padding as the Blob. Collins (True Blood) as Logan’s doomed love Kayla Silverfox does the best she can with a stock role that begs for further development. Despite an intermittent gumbo drawl, Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) overachieves as the fan favorite mutant Gambit, a character whose appearance in a Bourbon Street nightclub is one of the film’s few truly suspenseful moments.

On the other hand, David Fincher and Brad Pitt can take comfort that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button no longer represents the most superficial treatment of New Orleans in recent cinema history. The French Quarter club and alleyway look fake and modeled, provoking a realization (for me, anyway) of how many of the other sets and set pieces also looked inauthentic. It’s hard to set wirework indoors, but sets don’t have to look like sets, and they shouldn’t look fake.

The film debuted at the top of the box office with a strong $87 million U.S. haul, and anyway it’s the kind of release that on many levels is only a preview of the expanded director’s cut version that’s inevitably released on DVD and Blu-Ray. But word of mouth is everything with comic book films, and if fans don’t warm to the liberties taken with the larger X-Men mythology they’ll likey stay away. Wolverine is not a good film, but perhaps more importantly it is not even a good film for the kind of movie it is. Logan may not be a genius, but his long-awaited solo feature shouldn’t be so dumb.

-Michael Kabel
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Captain America Film Retrospective

Celebrating (?) the announcement of a director for the upcoming Marvel Comics film.

The news this week that veteran director Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park 3, Hidalgo) has signed to helm Marvel Film’s upcoming The First Avenger: Captain America didn’t exactly make us explode with enthusiasm. We like Cap, have since we were kids, and we’ve got the longbox full of back issues to prove it. Coming on the news that Kenneth Brannagh would direct Thor, the man behind Jumanji taking on the Avengers’ leader was bittersweet news at best. UPDATE: the ad that aired during the Super Bowl didn’t look too shabby, even if it’s editing makes the term “teaser” seem a bit too generous.

Nevertheless the bar for this latest version is set really, really low by previous attempts to translate the Star Spangled Avenger from comics to cinema and television. Whether from their low budgets or low ambitions, or both, the hero known to fans simply as “Cap” has had an especially pungent run of bad luck. Moreso, for sure, than even Spider-Man and the Hulk, who’ve also got plenty of bad adaptations lurking in their respective histories.

What is it about Cap that makes the transition so hard? Is it the deceptively simple concept of a patriot trying to embody his country’s ideals? Does such undiluted optimism about America not figure into the modern cultural zeitgeist? Like Superman, Captain America is an idea meant to be writ larger than life, a central figure on an almost mythic stage. Maybe it’s that huge presence that makes flawed adaptations seem so much worse: the Hulk only looks silly in an unconvincing special effects sequence. A guy wrapped in a flag just looks sad, as some of these adaptations plainly illustrate.

Captain America (1944): Boasting the odd distinction of being the most expensive Republic movie serial ever made, this 1944 Saturday-matinee series recast the captain as District Attorney Grant Gardner (Dick Purcell), who used a gun instead of Cap’s trademark shield. The super-soldier serum that gave him his powers is not used, and the villain is a saboteur called The Scarab. The series actually met with a warm response from some critics, who praised its elaborate stuntwork.

Captain America Animated Series (1966): Marvel’s top-tier characters all got their own quickie cartoons in the mid-60s, only a handful of years into the company’s reformation. The rushed and bargain basement production shows in every turgid frame of the clip below, much of which looks lifted directly from the actual comics’ art. Actually, the finished product is typical of  the cartoons Marvel was putting out at the time. For the truly curious, or for those just wishing to punish their eyes, many of them (including episodes  starring Iron Man and The Hulk) are availabe in their grueling entirety on YouTube.

Captain America and Captain America II: Death Too soon (1979) These two made-for-TV films, released within a year of one another, recast their hero as the son of the original and a surfer dude on a custom street bike. The first telefilm depicted the new Cap (Reb Brown) battling a group of terrorists trying to blow up Phoenix (Phoenix?) with a hydrogen bomb. Death Too Soon, markedly the better of the two films, included Christopher Lee as a touring company Dracula and Connie Sellecca as Cap’s love interest.

Captain America (1990): Another low-budge effort from a period in Marvel-inspired cinema that also included a Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four film that was never even released, this 1990 attempt starred Matt Salinger (Revenge of the Nerds) as the captain and Scott Paulin as his archnemesis The Red Skull. Veteran character actors Ned Beatty and Darren McGavin wander into frame on their way to the pay window. 

Captain America: The First Avenger opens nationwide July 22, 2011.

- Michael Kabel

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Moving day today

We’re moving our palatial offices today, so there’s no update. Well, partly that and we’re still trying to figure out how Wanted made fifty one million dollars in a benevolent universe. Seriously, fifty one million dollars for a Matrix derivative based on a second-tier Marvel comic? Chalk it up to America never growing tired of watching Angelina Jolie slink and smirk, we suppose. Oh, and weeks of relentless marketing to a demographic killing time between The Incredible Hulk and The Dark Knight.

In the meantime, we’d like to recommend you check out one of the other blogs we’ve become aquainted with over the past few months:

The Fail Blog: The chronicle of human failure, misery, and misadventure.

The Long Take: Our friend Anil Usumezbas’ intelligent, considered approach to film.

Noir of the Week: An atmospheric yet self-explanatory blog that’s been around for a while. Editor Steve-O is a standup guy.

We’ll be back Wednesday, we promise, just as soon as we unpack all these DVD’s and other less important stuff.

- Michael Kabel