Ant-Man

"My days of breaking into places and stealing shit are over! What do you need me to do?"

While it may be ridiculous to dwell on what might have been when it comes to fairly judging a movie, it's pretty damn hard to not wish that Edgar Wright had been allowed to direct Ant-Man.  As it stands, it doesn't really feel like a Wright film, aside from moments here and there.  What Ant-Man amounts to is mostly fun, but also generic, superhero action movie. You've got the unlikely hero, the sassy romantic interest, and the over-the-top villain.  It's probably the lightest in tone of all the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, though it's hardly the funniest.  Fans of the series should feel right at home with the material, which includes lots of fun surprise cameos from other characters in the universe.

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has just been released from prison and is attempting to make an honest living working at a Baskin Robbins (WOW, I REALLY WANT BASKIN ROBBINS NOW, WHAT ARE THE ODDS?!).  He isn't allowed to see his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) due to his inability to pay for child support, so he decides to pull a robbery with his buddy Luis (Michael Pena) on an old, rich man (and former S.H.E.I.L.D. agent) named Hank Pym (Michael Douglas).  However, instead of finding money inside Pym's huge safe, Lang finds what he assumes to be a motorcycle outfit and takes it.   Accidentally, he discovers that what he's actually stolen is a high-tech shrinking suit, giving its wearer the power to shrink down to the size of an insect while gaining super-strength.  After Lang tries to return the suit, Pym reveals his heroic past as Ant-Man and ropes Lang into becoming his protege.  They set out to steal the shrinking technology from a crazed CEO named Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) who plans on selling his own suit, the Yellow Jacket, to the government as a weapon of war.  Pym's daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly), works at the company and gives Land and Pym the inside information they need to pull off the heist, while simultaneously training Lang in how to use the Ant-Man suit.  I smell a forced romance.

It's a neat (and sort of silly) concept that could easily have been a disaster if it had taken itself too seriously. Thankfully, the tone is light and fun, the stakes are appropriately small-scale, and the pacing is quick.  That works in the film's favor, because after the relatively strong set-up, the plot is paper-thin.  We get training montages, spectacularly-realized scenes of Ant-Man shrinking, growing, kicking ass, and delivering a few self-referential jokes (though thankfully, the two lines from the trailer concerning the name "Ant-Man" are missing from the film entirely).  There's a bit of drama thrown in concerning Pym's wife that gives he and his daughter some development, but it's all cut together so quickly that it feels like an afterthought.  Had that element been pushed to the forefront (strengthening the father/daughter relationship themes already established by Lang and his daughter), there might have been something really memorable here.  And Ant-Man is a movie that desperately needs something memorable.

The cast is mostly great; Paul Rudd has great comedic timing, as does Michael Pena.  Michael Douglass gives it his all as Pym, and adds a little soul to his character.  It actually really made me want to see a movie about his expoits as the original Ant-Man, which was undoubtedly the point.  While Evangeline Lilly is likable as Pym's daughter, she wasn't given enough to do, and her one dramatic scene is ruined by hyper-active editing and over scoring.  The one weak link is Corey Stoll, who plays his uninteresting, generic-as-hell villain with confusing motivations terribly.  It just seems like there are a lot of strange acting and writing choices all directed at the Darren Cross character, resulting in one of the worst Marvel villains this franchise has seen yet.  I just don't believe him as someone who could own a business and keep it running; he's too unstable. As for his Yellow Jacket suit?  That was kind of bad ass.

While I'll always stick to my guns when it comes to using piratical effects, there are some really jaw-dropping moments that come from the shrinking scenes, especially in IMAX 3D (yes, even the 3D part).  When Ant-Man shrinks down the first time, it would have been nice to linger on the moment and take in the spectacle.  Unfortunately, the action is pretty chaotic and quick for the most part, though the dreaded shaky-cam is thankfully not an issue.  My favorite action scene is at the climax, where there are some brilliant visual gags that include a giant ant and Thomas the Tank Engine.  The score by Christophe Beck is a fun, Mission:Impossible-style bit of orchestration, but it follows in the grand tradition of Marvel movie scores being very bland and generic.  Gone are the days of superhero themes being an essential part of the characters; just play the same four notes over and over again and we'll call it a day.  Danny Elfman and John Williams, your skills are much needed here.

  

Ant-Man is a goofy movie its core, but it does try to infuse its characters with depth, personality, and some pain.  It falls a bit flat, but Rudd, Douglass and  carry the film successfully with their performances and some of the visuals are really impressive.  The plot is something like the "Iron Man Light" without the threatening villains, and we can't forget that this could have been something special had the original director been in place.  In any case, I'm looking forward to seeing plenty of the insect-sized superhero in what I'm sure will be many, many more MCU movies, hopefully with more to work with.

6/10

On the Death of James Horner

James Horner, 1953-2015

I'm honestly a little disgusted with myself.  I learned this morning that one of my favorite composers of all time, James Horner, died in a plane crash.  What's worse is that he died over two months ago and I had absolutely no idea.  In a time where film scores tend to be generic and unmemorable Hans Zimmer knockoffs, James Horner will be sorely missed.  Even if he did tend to recycle his own work, he packed so much heart into his music and added incredible spectacle to movies that wouldn't be the same without him.  As a '90s kid, I grew up with so many movies he had a personal hand in, including An American Tail, The Land Before Time, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Hocus Pocus, The Pagemaster, Casper, and Jumanji.  Not impressed?  He's scored James Cameron movies like Aliens, Titanic, and Avatar; Ron Howard films like Cocoon, A Beautiful Mind, and Apollo 13; other classics like Braveheart, Field of Dreams, and two Star Trek movies.  He's been nominated for an Academy Award ten times, and won two Oscars for Titanic (best original score and song).

So you might say I'm pretty devastated by the news.  At only age 61, it wasn't Mr. Horner's time and he will be sorely missed.   Whether his music was charming, epic, sentimental, or exciting, it always added something special to the movie.  You've done a great service to the industry and have given me untold amounts of happy childhood memories.  Thank you for your contribution; your films will last a thousand lifetimes, and your heart will most certainly go on.

Fantastic Four (2015) SPOILERS

"Look at me. I'm not your friend. You turned me into something else."

If the new Fantastic Four movie has anything going for it, it's that it doesn't share much of anything with its 2005 counterpart, despite both films being an origin story for characters with the same powers.  While the former version is colorful, silly, and lacks a compelling story, the 2015 film is dark, gritty, and lacks a compelling story.  On second thought, maybe the two do have something in common. Trailers for the film didn't impress me, but I'll tell you what did: the 8% score the movie received on Rotten Tomatoes.  Ouch. That's not a bad reception, that's a gaping black hole of suck.  With all the talent in front of and behind the camera, how could it turn out to be such a disaster? I had to see it for myself.

Truth be told, I was really wondering where all the damn hate was about for the most of the first act. Teenaged genius Reed Richards (Miles Teller) has been working on a matter transporter, essentially a teleporter, ever since he was in fifth grade.  His best friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) has always played Igor to Reed's Dr. Frankenstein, helping him out with his experiments in all likelihood to get away from his trashy family.  After Reed's invention is disqualified at a high school science fair, Professor Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) offers him a scholarship to the Baxter Foundation for a chance to work with a team of scientists who are on the verge of traveling to another dimension.  The machine he's been working on all this time has actually been tapping into a place the scientists dub Planet Zero, and with Reed's help, they are able to complete a successful test.  Aiding in the project are Storm's children Sue (Kate Mara) and Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) as well as the potentially dangerous Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), all geniuses in their own right.  But when they attempt to travel to Planet Zero themselves (just to claim a little glory for the experience), things go horribly wrong.  Like horribly wrong.

Aside from a strange feeling of coldness and some major plot contrivances, the first act of Fantastic Four is actually pretty good.  I'm a fan of Josh Trank's breakout hit Chronicle, and I saw many of the same qualities that made that film work fully intact.  The acting is natural and generally very good (allowing me to disregard the fact that all of the actors are a bit too old for the parts they're playing), and a few interesting themes were established (childhood friends growing apart, rebelling against a parent's wishes, dysfuntional families, lust for fame, etc.) And what a shame too, because as soon as the group heads to Planet Zero and gets their powers, everything goes to absolute shit.

The film cuts to on year later with a title card, and it's precisely then that the movie implodes on itself. The entirety of the story's meat, which is how they learn to control their powers, is 100% missing.  That's the core of the story, the reason you tell the origin in the first place.  Why oh why is that crucial part of the story missing?  Can you imagine if during the first Spider-man movie, after Peter Parker is bitten by the mutant spider it cut to one year later and he was already Spider-man?  That's what this is like... no Uncle Ben dies, no love story, character development, absolutely nothing.  Everything after the opening dips in quality tenfold; the acting is for shit, the dialogue is for shit, the story is for shit, and not a single one of the themes established gets any kind of resolution.  Nothing works about it in the slightest except for the visual effects, which are decent at best.  Apparently Trank was not involved in extensive reshoots and editing which changed the entire second half of the film, and it shows. Badly.

Even if the second half of the movie hadn't been such a trainwreck, there's something about the bleakness of the whole affair that is a bit off-putting, not unlike Man of Steel.  The colors in the trailers were rich and warm, which might have been pleasant to watch as opposed to the dull greys and blues the movie wallows in.  It works for the Dark Knight trilogy because Christopher Nolan is a fantastic director that tone simply fits Batman.  There's nothing memorable about the score by Marco Beltrami and Phillip Glass, which doesn't even attempt to give the Fantastic Four a memorable theme or generate excitement in the slightest.  I would say that there's no shakey-cam during the action scenes, but truth be told, there really are hardly any action scenes to speak of.  This is pretty much the anti-Age of Ultron.

I may not be a fan of the comics, nor was I a huge fan of the past film attempts, but the Fantastic Four is just too iconic and important to the world of superheroes to be treated like this.  In 1961, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Marvel's first team of superheroes and broke new ground in the comic book medium for how realistically the characters were developed.  Where is any of that here?  Where are the character dynamics, the plot developments, the general reactions to these crazy scenarios?  We never even hear any of the characters being called their comic book names throughout the film, aside from jokes here and there.  And I didn't even get into the villain, Doom, who is positively awful on all fronts. The cast here is uniformly excellent at first, and the friendship between Reed and Ben had a lot of charm before all potential was flushed down the toilet.  What a waste.

2/10