This was a pretty good summer for movies. The superhero offerings all failed to live up to their hype to some regard or other, but that was offset by a trio of capers (to use the term loosely) and the unbelievably good Mad Max Fury Road. Plus, this summer had Pixar unarguably jumping back on top of the animated pile. Aside from Fantastic 4, even the disappointing movies were enjoyable. Really, while I only really loved the top few, this is probably the most I’ve enjoyed a crop of summer movies from top to bottom in a long time.

9: Fantastic Four – Miserable. Simply miserable. There really isn’t anything good to say about it. *1/2

8: Jurassic World – Dumb, but really quite enjoyable. It is half monument to the original and over the top escalation. Either way, I like it quite a bit ***1/2

7: Avengers: Age of Ultron – This was maybe the biggest disappointment of the summer, if only because expectations were unreasonably high for it coming it. Not bad, but it is feeling the emptiness that first managed to avoid. ***1/2

6: Ant-Man – Another example of Marvel executing their formula. This is good popcorn entertainment, but there is nothing new here. I enjoyed it slightly more than Marvel’s other offering. ***1/2

5: Furious 7 – This one goes above the Marvel offerings just because it had more that I hadn’t seen before. Mostly because it was too dumb to put in a movie, but Furious 7 managed to entertain with the audacity of its stupidity. ***1/2

4: The Man from UNCLE – Light and breezy and perfectly fun. It really elevated my opinions of Cavill and Hammer. ****

3: Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation – Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg are an entertaining pair. As long as they can keep the same essential cast together, with Cruise as an American Bond and Pegg as his more hands on Q, I’ll keep going to see them. ****

2: Inside Out – I am a big fan of even Pixar’s recent output. Monsters University and Brave were excellent. Inside Out, though, blows them away. It is excellent, a top 5 Pixar film. *****

1: Mad Max Fury Road – Not just the best movie of the summer, but maybe the best movie I’ve seen since I started reviewing movies on this blog. It is amazing. It may be the best movie I’ve ever seen in a theater. *****

So that was what I saw this summer, but what about the rest of the year? There are still a ton of interesting movies coming out in the latter part of the year. The fall and winter has a good mix of would be blockbusters and award bait. So what caught my eye while flipping through IMDB’s coming soon list?

Victor Frankenstein – A take on Frankenstein with McAvoy and Radcliffe. I like those actors and this story, this looks like it might be good.

The Jungle Book – Another well-known story with an interesting cast. Favreau has done good work with the Iron Man movies, but Cowboys & Aliens was drek. Still, this could be good.

Crimson Peak – I hate horror movies, but I love Guillermo del Toro, so I am torn on this movie. I really want to go see it, but I’m not sure I’ll have the stomach to sit through it.

Bridge of Spies – This is on here just because it is Spielberg. His best work may be behind him, but I’ve still enjoyed most of his recent efforts.

Jem and the Holograms – The trailer looked like they sapped everything interesting out of this in the process of making it. If some of the craziness of the 80’s cartoon makes it through it should be interesting.

Spectre – I may be a critic of Craig’s Bond movies (they’re good, not great) but still I will be going to see this. Hopefully it is at least as good as Skyfall, which was easily the best of Craig’s movies.

The Peanuts Movie – Peanuts is great. I hope this is as well. I don’t have much else to add.

The Martian – The trailer looked good, I still have a little irrational faith in Ridley Scott and I like Matt Damon. So I’ll likely be seeing this.

The Good Dinosaur – Another Pixar joint, another trip to the cinema for me. That’s all there is to it.

In the Heart of the Sea – Another good (at least occasionally) director, good cast and interesting story. I’m not certain, but I’ll like be there for this as well.

Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens – The big daddy of second half of the year movies. I thought I was over my Star Wars love, but I am getting caught in the growing hype for this. It looks and sounds really good. I can’t wait.

Sisters – Tina Fey can do no wrong by me. 30 Rock was great, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is great, Mean Girls was great. As long as she, and Amy Poehler, are involved I am interested. I realize they didn’t write this, but still, I’m in.

The Hateful 8 – Quentin Tarantino. Of course I want to see it. It might be hard to work it in around Star Wars, though.

Of course, it is unlikely in the extreme that I end up seeing all of these movies this fall, but they are the ones that look interesting. Are there any I’ve missed? If so tell me what else I should keep my eye on.

 

Coming off of the highly enjoyable Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, any sort of spy movie was going to be hard pressed to leave a favorable impression.  The Man from UNCLE, fortunately, was up to the task.  Like Mission Impossible, UNCLE is based on an old TV show.  Instead of modernizing it, something that would have been hard to do with a concept set so completely in the Cold War as The Man from UNCLE, the movie is set in the time that the show aired.  The result is a stylish, brisk caper that keeps the audience smiling the whole way through.

Guy Ritchie is a director that in past films was loath to let viewers forget his presence.  His finest films, crime movies Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, used a lot of quick dialogue and fast cuts to set an unmistakable visual style that Ritchie has retained in his later films.  What felt fresh and enjoyable in Snatch, though, felt a little tired in Sherlock Holmes.  His movies remained enjoyable, Swept Away aside, but they didn’t match those first two classics.  The Man from UNCLE has Ritchie at his most anonymous.  His style is still there, but it is not as omnipresent.  It is allowed to drift into the background, with split cuts and fast cuts saved mostly for action scenes. The movie feels not quite so completely his, but the slightly lighter touch makes the touches work all the better.

The Man from UNCLE stars Henry Cavill as Napoleon Solo, a suave American thief turned spy. He charms his way through the movie affecting to be above it all.  Across from him is Armie Hammer as Illya Kuryakin, his taciturn Russian counterpart.  Facing an unthinkable threat, surviving Nazis getting their hands on the capacity to make nuclear bombs, the Soviets and Americans team the two up to stop them.  They are joined by the daughter of a kidnapped scientist Gabrielle Teller, whose uncle is one of the Nazis.  The three of them go to Italy to get to the bottom of things.

While Illya is clearly the more accomplished fighter, his short fuse occasionally endangers the mission.  Solo is unflappable, no matter how flippant his manner seems.  The two of them play off of each other wonderfully.  With Vikander’s character added to the mix things just sizzle.  The opening scene, where Solo extricates Gabby from Soviet controlled East Berlin under the nose of Kuryakin, is just about perfect. It maintains that unmatchable level of energy all the way through the two spies’ simultaneous infiltration of a hidden base, the highlight of the movie. Cavill, who was allowed to show very little personality in Man of Steel, is a delight in this and Hammer makes a great gruff counter point to his smooth charm. The rest of the cast is good as well, especially Vikander and Elizabeth Debicki, who plays one of the villains. The plot twists around, but it never feels cheap or convoluted.

The one flaw is the ending. The action builds and builds, but instead of a bang to cap it all off, it instead just sort of fizzles out. Our heroes feel just a little too good at their jobs and while the world is technically at stake the ending doesn’t really sell that notion. It is a bewildering note for an otherwise excellent film and since it comes so close to the end the movie has no opportunity to recover.

The Man from UNCLE also does that incredibly annoying thing where it sets the whole movie as something of a prequel to the concept. The spy organization UNCLE isn’t mentioned until the closing seconds. While it doesn’t actually hold back the concept, it does make the whole thing feel like set up. It is too bad that the box office results aren’t encouraging, if there is any justice this movie will see a sequel that continues right where this one leaves off. Still, the slightly deflating ending doesn’t change how good the rest of the movie is. I don’t know that I liked it quite as much as Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, but it is still loads of fun.

****

The new Fantastic 4 reboot is embarrassed by its own existence. It is not embarrassing; the first half is a pretty solid set up for a second half that face plants as hard as any movie I remember. Still, this isn’t a Ninja Turtles or Transformers level train wreck. The biggest problem with Fantastic 4 is that is seems to be mortified anytime the makers remembered it was based on a comic book. It is an adaptation of that Fantastic 4 that shows nothing but contempt for the concept of the Fantastic 4. So it tries to morph it into something else and it just doesn’t work.

The movie starts off fine. There is nothing particularly groundbreaking, but it works introducing Reed and Ben. Ben’s set up does have the first of many cringe inducing call backs to comics. The Thing’s famous catchphrase “It’s clobbering time,” can’t just be something goofy the rock man says before he punches somebody, it has to be gritted up. Now is what his older brother would say before he beat him up. It takes something fun and familiar and makes it bleak and sad. That is what this movie excels at. Eventually Reed’s genius is noticed and he goes to school/work at the Baxter building, working on interdimensional travel with a handful of other geniuses. One is the anti-social Victor von Doom, an anti-government computer guy and Sue Storm, who is amazing with pattern recognition. Though they work together, they rarely actually work together. There are a few fleeting scenes that show them interacting, but mostly they are together but isolated. They are soon joined by Sue’s bother Johnny, who is an engineer. When they finally crack interdimensional travel, Reed calls up Ben and they go through to the other dimension.

This is when the movie, which until this point had been fine, if dull, goes completely off the rails. This is when the superpowers are acquired. It started with the feeling of a horror movie; that it was about science that is going to go horribly wrong. It is a bad choice for the Fantastic 4, which is much more about adventure and exploration, but removed from the context of the team it is a good premise for a movie. After they come back, the movie has no idea how to deal with them. The first infuriating change is that Sue doesn’t go with them. For some reason, she is excluded in favor of including Doom. That is something even the previous movies go right. The team has to go through the traumatic events together; there is no reason to leave Sue behind. While the viewer doesn’t get to see it other than on a monitor that someone else is watching, they force the Thing to be a government killer while they train Sue and Johnny to do the same. Reed, meanwhile, managed to escape. His friends, that he barely knows other than Ben, think he’s abandoned them. After he is retrieved, they get to work recreating the teleporter. Then Dr. Doom arrives and the final battle happens.

It rushes through all of the interesting stuff, instead focusing on character building that is never exploited. They supposedly form a team at the end, but they have barely interacted before that. Much of is either based on the kind of terrible Ultimate Fantastic Four or created from whole cloth. Anytime the movie must reference the Fantastic Four that formed the backbone of the Marvel Universe, it does so with such an air of mortification that you can almost feel everyone making it cringe. Victor is called Dr. Doom only ironically, codenames are referenced fleetingly and jokingly and Johnny almost grumbles his one time saying “Flame on.” This movie seems scared that the viewers might crack a smile or enjoy the subject matter. It makes the somber Man of Steel feel almost jubilant. It is kind of crazy. This is how superhero movies were before Spider-Man just gleefully went with the comic feeling and even it couched some it in realism. X-Men tried to avoid a lot of its superhero trappings. I had thought we’d grown out of that, for better or worse. Marvel’s movies generally celebrate their comic roots, even if they do so with an ironic wink that they aren’t taking it that seriously. Even the more recent X-Men movies seemed to embrace the comics. This one rejects that connection completely. It sucks all the joy out of the concept and tries to sell as seriousness and it just doesn’t work. For all they were goofy and sloppy, at least the previous two Fantastic Four movies has their heart in the right place. This one is wrongheaded at every turn.

**

I was not big fan of Mission Impossible before the fourth movie, Ghost Protocol, came out. The TV series is a couple of decades older than I am and the first movie, while enjoyable, didn’t really make me eager to follow up and I skipped the next two movies entirely. When Ghost Protocol was coming out, I was drawn not by Mission Impossible or Tom Cruise, but by Brad Bird and Simon Pegg. (I would have been all over the third movie had it come out just a year or two later than it did) I loved it; it was a delightfully kinetic action movie, with everything I could want from a fun spy movie. Fond memories of that, plus a rediscovery of how enjoyable Tom Cruise generally is, had me excited for the fifth film. Rogue Nation is another stellar outing for the series.

Not much has changed from the previous outing. Again Cruise’s Ethan Hunt must team up with his crew and get to the bottom of an evil organization that it out to destroy the free world. Again, they lose the support of the IMF, their spy agency. It is a good formula that has not come close to wearing out its welcome yet. This one plays a little more with the idea of divided loyalties. In Ghost Protocol, the good guys were the good guys and the bad guys the bad guys. In Rogue Nation, some loyalties are unclear and remain so for the bulk of the film. It makes some of the spy and counterspy stuff very tense.

The team of Hunt and Benji (Pegg) is delightful. I believe there is no one you could pair with Simon Pegg and not get an enjoyable performance. Hunt’s force of nature daring and energy blend perfectly with Benji’s enthusiasm and well-meaning bumbling. Cruise remains the star, but Pegg never feels superfluous. When Benji uses their friendship to force his way into the mission it doesn’t feel forced, these two actually interact like friends. The other teammates don’t get quite as much to do, though it is good to see Ving Rhames’ Luthor back, they are there. The fly in the ointment, so to speak, is Ilsa Faust, a British agent that is undercover with the villainous Syndicate. Or maybe she has defected to the Syndicate. Much of Rogue Nation’s tension lies in determining exactly who she is working for. The true villain, Solomon Lane, wheezes his way around as some kind of omnipotent super spy, being all the less interesting for his supposed but rarely demonstrated skills. He spends much of the movie two steps ahead of everyone else and it ends up feeling more cheap that anything else when he constantly snatches victory away from the heroes.

Rogue Nation is more interested in fun and its plot than in having any sort of theme, which is why it constantly backs away when it wanders into territory that might prompt some thought. Lane is a spy like Hunt, but he was pushed too far and started to question if the people he was spying for were any better than the people he was spying on. While there is plenty of room to find some points of agreement, especially once the rest of the mystery is unveiled, Hunt never does consider it. He never questions the rightness of his cause. Maybe he shouldn’t, but the question was raised and he simply ignored it.

Any flaws I find with this movie seem like nitpick in the face of how entertaining it is. No, the capers are not quite as intricate as those in the previous movie. Yes, the villain feels like a real missed opportunity, especially when it would have been easy to make him just evil James Bond. But the action is impeccable and it is complex without being convoluted. Mission Impossible Rogue Nation is a delight.

****

Ant-Man is the perfect antidote to Avengers Age of Ultron. The first Avengers toed right up to the line where candy becomes a stomachache; its sequel blasted past that line into overwhelming nausea. It was still enjoyable, but it felt bloated, like it was bursting at the seams. Ant-Man is the opposite of that. It has a few moments where it forces its connections to the greater Marvel cinematic universe, but otherwise it is a peppy, light superhero movie.

After the gargantuan success of Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man became the movie that would end Marvel’s domination of movie theaters. It certainly had the making of a failure, a movie about a mostly unknown superhero that had lost its director midway through production. Disaster would not have been especially surprising. What we got instead is a small superhero film that makes in character for what it lacks in spectacle. I can’t help but be wistful about the true Edgar Wright version that never was; Wright has produced a handful of the best movies to come out in the last decade and losing him as the director was absolutely a blow to the film. However, the end result is still largely satisfying. It isn’t the best from Marvel, but I wouldn’t put it at the bottom either.

Instead of trying to untangle the Gordian Knot that is Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, this movie wisely decided to sideline him into a mentor role and focus instead on Scott Lang, he successor. The biggest problem with Pym would have been that his one memorable story is also the one that kind of makes him irredeemable (mostly because no matter how many times he is redeemed, comic writers keep coming up with was to undo or redo that redemption). Scott’s story, that he is a former criminal trying to go straight for the sake of his daughter, is much easier to handle. It also allows the film to set up as a sort of superhero heist movie.

For the bulk of its runtime Ant-Man deftly weaves Marvel history around the pair of Ant-Men that are its primary characters. It doesn’t stray too far from the usual Marvel origin formula, but does add a few interesting touches, namely those heist bits. The stakes are low for a superhero movie. Yes, if the Pym’s formula gets out it could be disastrous for the world, but it is mostly about Hank trying to reclaim his legacy while Scott finds redemption for his criminal past. There is plenty of humor, some hit perfectly, other jokes are a little to broad, but it comes together as a delightful, and oddly personal, superhero romp.

It is easy to see that the script went through a late in the game rewrite. Some great symmetry, which judging by his previous movies I am certain Wright would have managed brilliantly, is left sort of soggy. Both Hank and Scott are men with daughters. This obvious point of comparison is used a bit, but it is largely left unexplored. More time is spent with the comic relief of Scott’s heist team. There is a completely out of place, but not necessarily unenjoyable, diversion with Falcon from Captain America. It is one of Ant-Man’s only overt connections to the current status quo of Marvel’s movies, but it is even more distracting than similar scenes in Iron Man 2 that killed the middle portion of that movie. And Hank’s daughter Hope feels like another wasted opportunity for Marvel to actually have a superheroine in a movie.

Ant-Man’s greatest strength is that it doesn’t try to be more that it is. It stays small in contrast to Avengers Age of Utlron’s unwieldy bigness and works for it. Its greatest weakness is that it feels like it could have been more without sacrificing anything. Despite the inherent likeability of Paul Rudd, Ant-Man doesn’t quite nail either the humor or the heart. Both are near misses. It is a movie that does everything just about right and brings nothing new to the table. It is enjoyable, but forgettable.

***1/2