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

Jurassic World is a hard movie to get a handle on, especially for a summer blockbuster. At times it seems really smart, a completely worthy successor to the original Jurassic Park. At others it seems like the worst of braindead schlock. It fully acknowledges the crassness and intellectual barrenness of just constantly trying to be “bigger” and “more,” while simultaneously trying to be “bigger” and “more” than its predecessor. At other times it is reverently echoing not only Jurassic Park, but a plethora of Spielberg movies. It flits from joyous wonder to complete cynicism. It doesn’t have Furious 7’s complete disregard for reality, nor Fury Road’s perfectly coiled narrative, but somewhere in this messy movie is a solid heart.

Jurassic World starts with a theme park on the island that is not only operating, but very successful. After the disaster of Jurassic Park, Hammond wouldn’t let the idea of the park die and sold it to a businessman who could get it up and running. In the present of the movie, it has been running long enough that people are starting to get tired of merely seeing dinosaurs, so scientists at Ingen have cooked up something special, a hybrid dinosaur called Indominus Rex. Surprising no one, the new attraction breaks free and wreaks havoc on the island. It chases around a pair of kids, Gray and Zach, sent to spend some time with their Park Director Aunt Claire. She is too busy running the park, leaving them with her assistant to get the expertise of Owen, who is doing a field study with velociraptors. When the new attraction breaks loose, the whole park is put in danger.

This movie doesn’t stray too far from the original Jurassic Park. Literally, as it takes place on the same island and occasionally in the exact same buildings. There is a dinosaur theme park and the dinosaurs get loose, havoc is wreaked. There are other Spielberg movies referenced as well. There is a short chase scene right out of Indiana Jones and the great white shark fed to an aquatic dinosaur as an attraction can’t help but be reminiscent of Jaws.

It is the mix of crass pandering and thoughtful update that makes Jurassic World hard to parse. It is well executed in most aspects, but it is built on an irreparably flawed foundation. It can’t shake the fact that it is exactly the thing it is criticizing. It manages to work on Chris Pratt’s considerable charisma and the actual likeability of the two kids running around. Vincent D’Onofrio does what he can with a terrible and unnecessary villain. Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire hovers on some line between awesome character and sexist stereotype. She is undeniably competent and under control, but the film also seems to castigate her for working while her while her nephews are around. She wears heels, which are actually appropriate footwear for her job, for quite a bit longer than is in anyway sensible and for long after she had been advised to remove them. Her character is much like the movie itself, largely admirably but stuck with some hard to excuse warts.

***1/2

The accepted, though not correct, narrative is that after a nearly unprecedented run of success, Pixar has been flailing a bit with their films lately. I don’t agree with that at all, their previous two films have not been as well received but we just as good as the first ten or so. The one black mark on their resume is Cars 2. The difference now is that Pixar actually has competition putting out good animated films. The Disney ship has been righted over the last few years and Dreamworks has put out a couple of good movies. No matter what you think of Brave or Monsters University, with Inside Out, Pixar is unquestionably on top of its game.

Inside Out is about a young girl, Riley, and the emotions that control her brain. That is the big hook of this movie; it is about a handful of entities representing the different emotions that control this girl and everyone else. Joy takes the lead, making it her, and her companion’s, mission to keep Riley happy. When her family moves from Minnesota to California, her emotions have trouble dealing with it. Joy and Sadness end up removed from the control center. It is really a quite brilliant premise, both amusing and affecting. I don’t know that the metaphor of these emotions quite hold up through all the little details, but it is packed with enough energy that it really doesn’t matter. Inside Out pulls out a very effective twist. It starts as Joy’s quest to get back and make Riley happy again, but it really becomes her journey to realize that Sadness is just as important as Joy to a person’s emotional health.

Like all the best Pixar films, it toes the line between being a children’s movie and a mature film. Because Inside Out is packed with mature themes, in the sense of being actually mature, not in the sense of having nudity and cusses. The human characters don’t do a lot; they are merely learning a new place, but still the end up feeling very human. There is no big action or humor plot, just a girl having a tough time adjusting to a cross country move. That being said, it perfectly nails a truthfully all ages approach to humor. Inside Out evokes many emotions, but it is one of Pixar’s funniest films. Looney Tunes sight gags and clever word play are the order of the day, especially with the emotions left in the control center. Disgust is constantly disaffected by everything, Fear has a terrified manic energy and Anger is a delightful hothead. Possibly the best gag in the movie is the brief look it gives into the emotions of Riley’s mother and father. It isn’t a particularly inspired bit of comedy, but it is undeniably funny.

The true emotional content comes from the adventures of Joy and Sadness, who must trek back from Long Term Memory before Riley’s life goes completely off the rails. The meet up with Riley’s somewhat shady former imaginary friend and try to board the train of thought. There are plenty of amusing bits, but it is here that the various emotional lessons are learned.

Inside Out is terrific. It might not be quite as good as the absolute best of Pixar’s catalogue. I wouldn’t put it above Wall-E, Up or The Incredibles. But it is right there in that next echelon of truly excellent movies. This is one of the best animated movies to come out in the last five years.

*****

The largest part of my movie viewing this month was watching through the Star Wars movies with my little brother. I also caught some classics on TCM, really good stuff. I did see a couple of movies in theaters, one I liked more the more I thought about it and one that did not hold up so well to any sort of reflection. Those being Mad Max and Avengers Age of Ultron respectively.

Movies

Star Wars – Still great after all these years. *****

The Empire Strikes Back – Better than the first. The love story might be between Leia and Han, but the most compelling interactions are between Han and C-3P0 *****

Return of the Jedi – The space battle at the end is still the best committed to film, though some other parts sag a little. *****

The Phantom Menace – It really feels like the rough draft of something that could have been good. I had forgotten just how insufferable Jar Jar was. **

Attack of the Clones – Good Lord, there is little to recommend here. *1/2

Revenge of the Sith – This fails mostly because of how unbelievable Anakin’s turn is. It is just so ridiculous. **

Sunset Boulevard – Amazing movie. I do think its reputation is aided by Hollywood’s love of movies about Hollywood, though. *****

North By Northwest – Holy crap this is great. *****

Mad Max Fury Road – See here. Also, I saw it in theaters 3 times. I wish I had gone one more time. *****

Avengers: Age of Ultron – See here. ****

Lawless – Tom Hardy mumbles his way through this Prohibition Era crime movie. There is nothing all that great here, but it is a solid effort. ***1/3

Twins – They could have done more with the premise of DeVito and Schwarzenegger being twin brothers, but instead it gets caught up in some plot about stolen technology. Still, there are just enough laughs to not be a complete waste of time. ***

The Princess Bride – Still among my favorite movies. I love everything about it, from Andre the Giant to the swordfights to Peter Falk. *****

This is Spinal Tap – There is never a bad time to watch this. *****

The Interview – This is really only notable for the controversy about its release. I think the movie theaters, and Sony, were cowardly to not release it in theaters. Still, there nothing here worth getting excited or upset about. **1/2

Space Jam – I remember this being better in a cheesy, ridiculous sort of way. It isn’t. The premise is great, the execution is completely flat. *1/2

30 for 30: Once Brothers – A touching documentary about basketball players ripped apart by the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. ****

TV

Magnum PI Season 4 – I love how much this show loves mystery writers. They are constantly being brought up as part of the plot. Also, it is just a great show.

Poirot Series 3 – This series has as much affection for mystery writers as Magnum. These are all well made, but not particularly exciting.

Hitler and the Nazis – A documentary about the rise and fall of Hitler and the Nazi’s. There is something horrifically fascinating about this hateful regime and how people let it happen. This was a pretty good look at it, though its length does not let it be that detailed.

Ken Burns Prohibition – A look at America’s failed attempt to make liquor illegal, that recounts all of the reasons and ways that it went awry. A really interesting look at a really interesting time.

Filmmakers attempting to return to the series’ that made them famous don’t tend to work out well. George Lucas made something of a dog’s breakfast with the Star Wars prequels and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus tried to excise its Alien connections until the movie didn’t make sense. I assumed that would be the case with George Miller’s return to Mad Max. Mad Max Fury Road made those concerns seem foolish. Fury Road feels like Miller was storing up energy for decades and it all explodes into one powerful, muscular movie. Mad Max Fury Road shows up every action movie of the last decade, making them look tame and heartless. It manages to tell a more coherent story than nearly any other blockbuster with something like one tenth of the dialogue. It is never pandering or wasteful, just pure essential action. It is an exhilarating rush unlike anything in years.

Tom Hardy stars as Max, a former cop turned loner in a post-apocalyptic world that is haunted by visions of his dead family. He is captured by a group of Immortan Joe’s War Boys and becomes their prisoner and “blood bag.” When Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) frees Tom’s breeder wives and heads for “The Green Place” the War Boys, with Max in tow, tear off after her, igniting the chase that takes up the rest of the film.

For the simplicity of its plot, Fury Road tells a fairly complex tale. There are probably fewer lines in this whole move than are spoken by just Iron Man in Avengers: Age of Ultron, but you learn more about the characters here despite how little they say. In something of a shocker for a modern action movie, the characters actually have arcs. Nux, a War Boy that ends up enmeshed with Max and Furiosa, starts out as a full-fledged believer in Immortan Joe’s homecooked religion. He wants nothing more than to die in service to the Warlord, so he can live again in Valhalla, shiny and chrome. He is crushed when he fails in front of his hero, then crushed even more as he comes to realize that maybe Immortan is not as all powerful as he claims. By the end of the movie, he has freed himself from Immortan Joe’s self-serving thumb. The wives also have arcs to go through, at first overwhelmed by the world outside of the Citadel where they had been held, but each of the five moves on in their own way, all of them becoming more self-reliant. Max goes through quite the change as well, starting the movie as all but feral and by the end coming to once again see some hope in the idea of human society. The only one of the main characters that doesn’t change over the course of the movie is Furiosa. Theron’s character is completely unforgettable, but her change has happened before the movie starts. Once she takes the wives from the Citadel she is set on her path. Still, she is the character that the viewer latches onto.

The biggest drawn is the action and Fury Road absolutely delivers. Nearly the entire movie is the chase, and its three big action sequences are exquisite. There is little weightless CGI, the movie is largely done with practical effects. It makes everything feel all the more real, since much of it is. Nothing is pointless or extraneous. It plays out like a delicate ballet of destruction, both exhilarating and by the end a little exhausting. The characters on screen are tired from their ordeal and the viewer feels that as well, the action is so visceral one can’t help but get swept up.

I have praised action movies before, but Mad Max Fury Road makes me realize how empty most of the genre has been for years. The joyous absurdity of Furious 7 feels pales to Fury Road, and it makes Avengers Age of Ultron look sick. There is no scene in either of those that touches any of the action sequences in Fury Road. They might be fun, enjoyable movies, but Mad Max Fury Road is on another plane of existence entirely.

*****

The most anticipated movie of the year, Avengers: Age of Ultron hit theaters last weekend. Its success is to be expected, the Marvel movie juggernaut just keeps steaming on ahead, even in movies that don’t bring near the star power that Avengers does. The second movie continues the standard that the first one set, though it doesn’t do so without some problems. Age of Ultron, for better or worse, is solidly dependent on the existence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with all of its call backs and cameos and set up for upcoming movies. Avengers: Age of Ultron does its best to be bigger and more than its predecessor, a futile task when that movie was already the biggest and the most.

Age of Ultron is positively stuffed. It runs two and half hours and rarely stops to let viewers catch their breath. The first movie was already so jammed full that most of the characters didn’t get anything even resembling an arc. This one adds more. Supporting characters from all the Marvel films make appearances, some little more than cameo’s but enough to keep them in mind. It is the worst a Marvel movie has felt like a commercial for others from the studio since Iron Man 2’s heavy handed set up for the Avengers. For the main cast, on top of the returning six heroes, this movie adds three more. And instead of Loki and an army of faceless monsters, this movie is decked out with more villains. That fact that it comes together into anything resembling a coherent story is remarkable.

Despite rushing through all of its story beats, the plot of Age of Ultron does remain coherent. It doesn’t need the team building from the first one, which lets them give most members of the team their own story to work through. The first movie felt rather like Iron Man and the Avengers; it was Starks story and the others were mostly there to help out. Stark again takes the lead, understandably. With the exception of Captain America, the others actually have some personal problems this time. Not all of them work, the romance between Black Widow and the Hulk kind of comes out of nowhere and her likening herself to a monster because she is sterile is an odd story beat, but they are mostly solid. Banner has trouble believing he can harness the Hulk for a good cause and Hawkeye has family concerns. None of them are much, but it is enough to make them feel like more than just action figures this time, though it also contributes to that over stuffed feeling that the movie has.I am sounding harder than I really feel about this movie. It is too much at times, but it is still a fun, well-made film. Whedon does his usual thing, with quippy dialogue and dynamic fight scenes.

Ultron is the signature Avengers villain, and he feels like a big enough threat to keep the whole team busy. Spader chews into his lines with his usual gusto, and it works a lot better than one would think for a killer robot. Whedon even nearly makes Vision an interesting character, a feat I thought to be impossible. That is a big part of what hold this movie back. The three Avengers it adds the team are some of the least interesting on the roster. Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver and Vision are C-list Avengers, the guys that fill up the team in the comics because Thor or Captain America aren’t available due to goings on in their own titles. I love seeing more obscure characters brought to live in movies, but here there are already more than enough characters and Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are hampered by being cut off from their origin. An origin (their father is Magneto) that could have played into how the movie dealt with children, like Tony’s “child” Ultron or his shared child Vision or Banner and Widow’s inability to have children. But that was not to be.

In many ways, all the ways that seemed to matter, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a triumph. It is perfectly light and fun; a cotton candy movie. Like cotton candy, it is delicious, but has no substance. There are nods to it having some deeper themes, like the nature of parenthood and legacy, but they are lost in the deluge of action scenes and new characters. That the action scenes are as well realized as they are keeps it from being the disappointment. Sometimes you want some cotton candy.

***1/2