Guardians of the Galaxy - 2014

"Guardians of the Galaxy" - 2014
Dir. by James Gunn - 2 hrs. 1 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

By now, I have a good expectation for what I want to get out of a "Marvel Movie."  I mean, after three Iron Mans, two Captain Americas and two Thors, and the best of the lot, "The Avengers," there's a certain approach, charm, and skill that are an expected part of the package.  Thankfully, the first movie since the first "Iron Man" that doesn't have any real continuity propping it up completely fulfills that promise.  "Guardians of the Galaxy" is a little funnier, a little weirder than the "Avengers" line of films, but still has the familiar banter set against people in very tight outfits punching the crap out of everything in sight.

Peter Quill, you may know him by his other name, Star Lord (Chris Pratt), is abducted from Earth as a child, and has grown into something of an a-hole (the film's words, to be clear).  He's like a younger Han Solo, looting everything he can get his hands on (including, and especially women).  One of his jobs involves retrieving an orb from a desolate, formerly populated planet, but it turns out that he's not the only person interested in it, nor the only person on the planet.  A lot people are very focused on this orb, which eventually lands Star Lord, a pair of bounty hunters in the form of a very unpleasant intelligent raccoon named Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and a giant tree person named Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), and a cosmic deity's adopted daughter, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in the slammer together.  With Drax's (Dave Bautista) help, they all break out of this space prison, with the goal of selling the orb, getting rich, and heading their different ways.  Which is, of course, exactly how things play out.

On one hand, I kind of envy people who are introduced to material like this for the first time, and through film.  Being a long-time comics reader, a talking raccoon bounty-hunter and his tree-based Chewbacca is the sort of thing that you just take for granted in comics.  That's not to say that it doesn't come across as weird when you're reading it, but it's there in ink just like everything else, and you accept that things like this are part of the deal.  But if you don't have that background, a film like "Guardians of the Galaxy" might come off like a surrealist action film, where insanity is the rule, and nothing makes any sense.  It would be awesome to see "Guardians" under those circumstances.  But I knew about Rocket and Groot way before the film, so I wasn't really struck by the weirdness of them.  They're just characters, albeit ones you might not run across in real life.  One of the achievements of "Guardians" is that both characters (well, all of the Guardians, really) are well-rounded enough that you can just take them as characters, and not have their very existence be a hit-or-miss joke.

Visually, there's plenty to feast on.  The cosmic backgrounds that are a part of the Thor films are everywhere here (and so much fun to look at).  There are tie-fighter...  I mean spaceship shoot-outs, there's hand-to-hand combat, there's chases, there's escapes...  I know that I keep making "Star Wars" references here, but "Guardians" really feels like a film made in the Cantina, in a world made up solely of Cantinas.  Only instead of the Cantina band, we've got Star Lord's mix tape of '70s and '80s soft-rock hits.  Normally, I'd instinctively hate anything that borrows so heavily from "Star Wars," but it works here.  "Guardians" is tight, action-filled, clever, and layered with great dialogue (there are at least a couple of instances of people misunderstanding Star Lord's colloquialisms, to great effect).  It's also been cast extremely well; Pratt is a great lead character, because he's able to be crude and awful at times, but with a lack of malice that suits the movie well.  Dave Bautista (WWE's Batista) does a great job playing a straight man, and also seems comfortable spending an entire film with no shirt on.  Rocket and Groot are fun together, and are integrated into the live-action material seamlessly.

In a broader sense, the one thing that I hate about the Marvel movies is that they've applied the "Fantastic Four" bickering-family dynamic to every team, and every interaction, and yet we still don't have a good FF movie, and even if they completely nail it next time around, the dynamic will seem old, or at least familiar.  Each of the teams (at least in the comics world) have their own personality, but the Guardians interact in pretty much the same way that the Avengers do.  And both teams act the way that the Fantastic Four do/did originally.  That's perhaps my only complaint about "Guardians," that there's a plug-and-play element to the interaction between the characters, even if the details do keep the characters distinct.  Also, in "Guardians'" favor, Gamora used the phrase "pelvic sorcery," which goes a long way with me.

I think there's almost no way anyone's going to be disappointed with "Guardians of the Galaxy."  If you've been on the "Avengers" ride since "Iron Man," no problem.  If this is the first "Marvel Movie" you've seen, probably even better!  "Guardians" is a fun ride, tonally consistent with the films that have preceded it, and has a lot of familiar faces in it.  I was happy to see the bit on the credits that said the Guardians would return.  I'm not sure what that means - another film, or being incorporated into an Avengers sequel - and I'm not going to research to figure it out.  I'll be happy to see them show up again in whatever form.  Any complaints that I have with "Guardians" is pretty much down to having seen enough movies in this series to start seeing duplication in structure and approach, and that I was never a fan of the comics, but I still enjoyed the film, and I'm pretty sure everyone else will, too.  It's a crowd-pleaser, not a challenging art film, and it delivers completely on that front.

3.5 / 5 - Theatre (3D)

Star Trek Into Darkness - 2013

"Star Trek Into Darkness" - 2013
Dir. by JJ Abrams - 2 hrs. 12 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

By Sunday afternoon standards (which is when I saw this), "Star Trek Into Darkness" is perfect entertainment.  I grew up on weekday afternoon repeats of the original TV series, and then weekend episodes of "Star Trek: the Next Generation," and the newest movie fits right into that sort of slot.  It's funny, the characters play well off of each other, and the visuals are pretty stunning.  But if I'm being 100% honest about things, I'm not exactly sure how the content of this movie justifies it being a film that took four years to deliver to theatres, rather than the end-piece of a season of a kick-ass TV series.

ST2 opens up with Kirk (Chris Pine) and Bones (Karl Urban) having stolen a sacred scroll on an alien planet, luring the aliens away from their village that will be destroyed by an impending volcano explosion, which will basically exterminate that particular species of life.  Kirk, Bones, and Spock (Zachary Quinto) sort of succeed at this task, but not seamlessly, and it didn't really fall under their orders anyways, which leads to some demotions from Starfleet.  Meanwhile, another Starfleet officer, John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), organizes what you'd have to call a terrorist attack against Starfleet headquarters itself, which leaves him on the run, many dead, and the Enterprise on his trail to a very dangerous locale.

One of the things that ST2 does really well is the brief, sharp exchanges between characters.  There aren't really soliloquies here, so much as commas punctuating the action sequences.  Kirk is a man of action, and although he's not an unthinking character, that's about all the self-examination you can realistically expect from him.  And since he's in charge, the other characters largely follow suit, albeit in ways that work with their own personalities.  There are also a number of stunning visuals, the best of which is probably in the opening scene, which has a planet with a red and white forest.  It's hard to explain how exotic it looks, but one of the film posters uses a picture from that scene:

Beyond that, there's plenty of space porn: nebulas, moonscapes, alien planets, ruins, enormous space stations.  And in at least a couple of scenes, director JJ Abrams really gets across a solid sense of the scale of these ships, something that's easily lost in space scenes with no normal points of reference.  In terms of the story, I felt like it worked (although one of the third act twists was so apparent from a very early point that there appeared to be a giant shoe hovering over the screen for the duration of the run-time, waiting patiently to drop).  Long-time Trekkies won't be entirely surprised by some of the things that happen, but I didn't find it to be a detriment to my enjoyment of the film.

But to get back to my early point, I'm just not sure that what was here was worth a trip to the theatre and waiting four years for a second installment.  That's not to say that I didn't enjoy ST2 quite a bit, and it's also not to say that you wouldn't, either.  I liked this one a lot better than the first one.  I will grant that some of the scenes of calamity aren't anything that you couldn't accomplish on a tight schedule, and that this movie had a couple of fairly intense moments.  But I'd argue that it wasn't any better than ST:TNG's Borg storyline, merely a bit prettier.  Part of the burden of doing franchise movies is that you have to realize that the characters' histories are loping behind you, and having watched years of Star Trek TV series, I feel like that's a more ideal environment for stories involving these characters.  You can't do big, action-filled stuff every week (and that's not really what the shows were all about), but more than half of the appeal of the earlier TV series is that you can see characters you like engaged in everything from drudgery to excitement.

I'd love to see these characters bored out of their minds and getting on each other's nerves (space is big and empty, it can't possibly be all explosions), but as long as there's one movie every so often, that'll never happen.  There's an obligation to deliver something specific if you're going to build up a story as an event, lest you derail the franchise and kill off any future sequels.  That totally didn't happen here: "Star Trek Into Darkness" is a lot of fun, and it's good popcorn entertainment.  But I was a little bummed out that there's not going to be another, tonally different story with these same characters next week.

3 / 5 - Theatre

The Losers - 2010

"The Losers" - 2010
Dir. by Sylvain White - 1 hr. 37 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

While I might have questions about why "The Losers" exists in the first place (of all the comic books that DC Comics has created, why make a movie based on this one?), the finished product stands on it's own.  And what is "The Losers?"  A reasonably decent almost low-budget action movie that doesn't seek to re-invent the wheel, but instead tries to pull off standard material with a bit of extra flair and style.

Based on the comic book by Andy Diggle and Jock, the losers in question are a military unit who are under the direction of the C.I.A.  They're lead by Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and include Roque (Idris Elba), driver Pooch (Columbus Short), sniper Cougar (Oscar Jaenada), and Johnny Blaze...  I mean Captain America...  I mean communications expert Jensen (Chris Evans).  One of their missions goes awry, stranding them in Bolivia, cut off from government support.  A woman, Aisha (Zoe Saldana), stalks Clay until offering a way out of their predicament: get back to the U.S. and gain revenge on the man who double-crossed them, Max (Jason Patric).

I don't think that "paint-by-numbers" is the proper way to explain this movie, but a lot of the story is standard-issue.  If you've got a group of quirky soldiers (an easy way to tell them apart) united in a common cause, you know that the villain is going to probably be engaging in some highly profitable, highly duplicitous behavior, and that things are going to blow up.  And, also, that the good guys are probably going to have to face impossible odds, because an easy win is unsatisfying (especially if you're paying to see this story in a theatre).  Also, that the one woman in the story is going to get bedded, with the only real question being how much skin you're going to see ("The Losers" is rated PG-13, so probably not quite as much as you'd like).  These are the foundations that this genre of film is based upon, so unless the film-makers go the script-flipping route, that's what you're going to get.

So then, if a genre exercise hits all the necessary standard plot points, the film will rise or fall based on how these plot points are executed and by the performances of the cast.  Points awarded to the director, Sylvain White, who recognized the quality of the source material, and cribbed from it whenever possible.  There are shots taken directly from the comic books, not to mention incorporating series artist Jock's work into the actual movie.  I'm generally of two minds about this sort of thing - it usually doesn't do a film any favors to continually remind people of the source material, but I felt it was incorporated well here, and added to the general style of the direction.  As far as the crew, the Losers themselves generally did a good job.  I wanted to see them succeed, which is a victory.  Zoe Saldana was good, as well, but being pretty much the only woman in the whole film sets the bar for good acting at a different level than if the cast had been a little more balanced.  However, I didn't care for Jason Patric's Max at all (and not in the way you're not supposed to like a villain, in the way that I think it was generally ineffective), and I think that character not being what it needed to be really hampered the film.  I'm not sure whether to pin that on the script or the actor, but even though the film kept telling me that he was impossible to get hands upon, I never felt that was true.  And if you can't sell the main baddie as a real threat, a lot of the drama of the story falls limp.

So what's left here is a decent film that I enjoyed more than I figured I would have, but it's not essential viewing.  It's a reasonably good film adaptation of a pretty good comic book; it's not like the Fantastic Four films, in that it's not really a blown opportunity at adapting excellent source material, and it's not like "Jonah Hex," in that it's not a complete disaster in every conceivable way.  There's a ceiling for how good a film like "The Losers" can be (barring a genius take on the source material), and it got really close to that ceiling.  If you catch this on TV, you'll probably get through it without much trouble, and probably enjoy a couple of scenes more than you figured you might, but unless you're a huge fan of any of the actors or the comic books, there's no real reason to go out of your way to track this film down.

2.5 / 5 - TV