Tag: superhero

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Justice League

I’m a big believer in form following function. That’s why my review of the new Warner Bros/DC movie Justice League will reflect the form of the screenplay: a series of bullet points presented without any overall organizing principle.

Justice League Dark: (left to right) J.K. Simmons, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, Ben Affleck, and Ezra Miller

• Justice League is not a film. It’s a clip show. You know, like when a TV show has been on a long time and they want to save money late in season six by having all the characters snowed in together and swapping memories of that time in season two when they fought the bear? That’s what Justice League is like, except you’ve never seen the show before.

• At least our hypothetical sitcom on its last legs had an interesting villain. I’ll take the bear over Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds) any day. At least the bear has a discernible motivation. Steppenwolf is just a mashup of other crappy villains like Apocalypse from the last X-Men movie and that fire-demon thing (checks Wikipedia) Surtur from Thor: Ragnarok. Justice League even lifts the “empty horned helmet clattering to the ground anticlimactically” gag from Ragnarok.

• Oh yeah. SPOILER ALERT: Steppenwolf is defeated. The good guys win.

• Now I want to know what happened with the bear.

• Another SPOILER ALERT: Superman (Henry Cavill) comes back from the dead in a “we promise, one-time-only, super-special Kryptonian procedure that must involve all of the other Super Friends … I mean, members of the Justice League.” Even though we all know Supes is going to be fine, the resurrection sequence takes up a huge chunk of Justice League‘s running time that could otherwise be used for advancing the “plot.” It’s the most tedious part of a tedious movie.  

• Speaking of which, the scene where the Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) dig Superman’s body up from the Kansas graveyard where he’s buried as Clark Kent is probably the most entertaining moment of the film, just for the sheer perversity of it.

• The reason Justice League is better than Batman v. Superman is that there’s more Wonder Woman in it. Gal Gadot coasts on the excellent characterization she and Patty Jenkins created in Wonder Woman’s solo film. At one point, Batman (Ben Affleck) says she should be the leader. I’m totally down for that. But instead, they go for Zombie Superman.

• Henry Cavill is literally the worst person to ever play Superman. He’s not fit to hold George Reeves’ cape.

• Amy Adams is completely wasted as Lois Lane. I hope she got paid well.

• There are occasional flashes of life in swole Ben Affleck’s Batman. It made me feel kind of sorry for him. All those protein shakes for this?

• Of all of director Zack Snyder’s missteps, Aquaman (Jason Momoa) is the worst. He’s the exiled scion of Atlantis hiding in a human village in Norway, but he talks like a California surfer. What about that makes sense?

• Creeping Batman-ization Alert: Aquaman feels abandoned by his mother.

• Steppenwolf’s army of Parademons look like Arthur, the sidekick from the Tick, was assimilated by the Borg.

• The high-functioning sociopaths running the Hollywood studios are uniquely unsuited to making good superhero movies because they fundamentally cannot grasp what is appealing about a character motivated purely by altruism.

• When Aquaman asks Bruce Wayne what Batman’s superpower is, Batman replies “I’m rich.” Wrong answer. Batman should have said “I’m prepared.” Also acceptable: “I’m determined.”

• Since Roger Ebert is no longer around to point out these things, I feel it is my duty to note that at one point, Nazis emboldened by the death of Superman demonstrate their evil by turning over a fruit cart. Google it.

• In my notes, I referred to the McGuffins — glowing energy cubes that convey ultimate power to any creature that possess them — as “Infinity Stones.” In fact, those are the glowing energy cube McGuffins from the Marvel universe. These glowing energy cubes are variously called “the change engine” and “mother boxes” which must be combined to form “The Unity.” Everything in this film is a ripoff, and even the meaningless technobabble is bad.

• Jesse Eisenberg appears in the post credit scene as Lex Luthor, as if to say. “Who’s the lame villain now?”

• Aquaman’s trident has five points.

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Spider-Man: Homecoming

In the flurry of desperate corporate maneuvering in the wake of the 2014 North Korean cyber attack on Sony Pictures in retaliation for The Interview, the most significant move may be the return of the Spider-Man film franchise to Marvel control. Spider-Man is the crown jewel of the Marvel superhero stable, which is why the film rights were sold for big money back in 1985, way before the comic book company was mining its rich vein of intellectual property with Disney. Eventually, Sony ended up with the property, and, after the success of Brian Singer’s 2000 X-Men movie, the studio did three Spider-Man movies with director Sam Raimi starring Tobey Maguire as the webslinger. Raimi’s first two films are among the best blockbusters of the century, and, personally, I like the third one, even though that’s a minority opinion. Then the studio rebooted the franchise with The Amazing Spider-Man starring Andrew Garfield. While Garfield matured into a good actor, the two Spider-Man movies he starred in were clumsy and charmless.

Sony was reportedly planning on creating a Spider-Man series to compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but after Kim Jong Il’s minions splashed the confidential contents of their servers all over the web, they needed to raise money in a hurry and preemptively surrendered to the Marvel juggernaut. It turned out to be the best decision Sony has made in a long time.

Spider-Man defines the Marvel approach to superheroes. He’s not a superhuman paragon of virtue like Superman. He’s young, flawed, often scared, and while his heart is always in the right place, his judgment is not always the best. Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige cast Tom Holland as Peter Parker and fed him through the Marvel Cinematic Universe assembly line with relative newcomer Jon Watts at the helm. In a Hollywood that is exhibit A for bad decision-making processes, Marvel got everything right this time.

What’s most appealing about Holland’s Spider-Man is that we get to ride along while he discovers his powers. But this is not an origin story; we don’t have to see poor Uncle Ben die again. Tony Stark recruited Parker for Civil War, and created a high-tech Spidey suit, partially as payment and partially as initiation into the Avengers clan of super-beings. But Parker’s still in high school, so he’s just as invested in his Academic Decathalon team and the homecoming dance as he is in what he calls “my Tony Stark internship.” Spider-Man may be on the A-list in the real world, but in the Marvel universe, he’s C-list at best.

Michael Keaton as Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming

Wisely, the villain of Homecoming is also a C-lister trying to increase his Q rating. In a bit of genius casting that was, in retrospect, blindingly obvious, Michael Keaton, formerly known as Batman and Birdman, plays the villain Vulture. The character is a scrap metal dealer who used the broken bits of alien technology littered around New York after the Avengers saved the city from the Chitauri invasion to build himself a flying super suit. Keaton deftly straddles the line between the realistic and fantastic with a riveting performance. The confrontation between Keaton and Holland prior to the big finish is the best single scene in the entire Marvel movie canon. The world is not in peril in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and it’s all the better for it. Instead of a city-destroying battle between the forces of good and evil, it’s just novice hero vs. novice villain. The human-sized stakes make it more exciting, and it’s considerably easier to follow the action with fewer moving parts. You don’t come out of the film feeling like you’ve been beaten over the head for the last half hour.

Another vital element done right is the strong supporting cast. Marisa Tomei represents a radical new version of Aunt May, which totally works. Jacob Batalon is excellent as Parker’s best friend Ned, and Disney teen star Zendaya is sharp as smartass classmate Michelle. Comedian Hannibal Buress is pitch perfect as Parker and Ned’s distracted gym coach. Unsurprisingly, Homecoming only falls down when it’s trying to connect with the bigger Marvel universe. Robert Downey Jr. is his usual snarky self as Tony Stark, but an extended subplot with Iron Man director Jon Favreau playing Stark’s henchman Happy Hogan periodically grinds the momentum to a halt. But that’s not enough to derail Spider-Man: Homecoming’s fun.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

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Doctor Strange

I sometimes think it’s strange when people talk about a comic book character’s “true” identity. These characters were, and are, always changing to meet the commercial needs of the publishers. I mean, She-Hulk was briefly a member of the Fantastic Four! The only rules are a complete lack of rules.

Benedict Cumberbatch is Doctor Strange

And yet, there is something about the way Doctor Strange is drawn in the latest Marvel blockbuster that bugs me. I’m not a deep expert on comics. The number of comic book superheroes I have an emotional attachment to is not very large: Spider Man, Batman (90s animated series version), Rom The Spaceknight (that one’s never getting a $100 million movie), Dr. Manhattan, The Tick, and Doctor Strange.

Hiring Benedict Cumberbatch to play the Sorcerer Supreme was the perfect casting choice, which is keeping with the generally good decisions Marvel Studios has made under Producer Supreme Kevin Feige. And, as I’ll get to in a minute, Doctor Strange delivers big time on the visual front, and holds together reasonably well on the writing front. It’s the characterization that left me cold, which is surprising, because the promise of getting the characterization exactly right is what mustered the tiny bit of excitement I have left for Marvel-branded, extruded movie-type product.

After a perfunctory, McGuffin-establishing battle between reality bending mystics, we meet Dr. Stephen Strange, a brilliant neurosurgeon whose massive intellect is outstripped only by his outsized self-regard. And how do the trio of screenwriters and director Scott Derrickson choose to demonstrate his extraordinary brainpower? Turns out he’s a master of 70s pop music trivia. Sure, they reveal this character beat while Strange is in the midst of delicate brain surgery, but wouldn’t a complete mastery of classical music history be more consistent with the character than a fondness for Chuck Mangionie? From the first introduction, they have changed Doctor Strange into Buckaroo Banzai.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Buckaroo Banzai! Far from it. (Where’s my $100 million version of Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League, Hollywood?) But I can’t help but get the feeling that the real reason Doctor Strange listens to dad rock is because everybody loved Starlord’s mom’s mix tape in Guardians Of The Galaxy. Just as Batman and Superman are essentially the same character in Batman vs Superman, so too are members of Marvel’s much more varied hero stable morphing into marketing driven sameness.

Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One shows Stephen Strange what’s up.

But at least Cumberbatch looks the part, and, as appropriate for an origin story, he gains gravitas as the story proceeds. Strange injures his hands in a car accident (don’t text and drive your Lamborghini, people!), ending his neurosurgery career. Medicine fails, so he heads of to Nepal (don’t want to piss off the Chinese market by using the original Tibet) in search of a magical way to restore the full use of his hands. Once there he finds Kamar-Taj, a monastery full of sorcerers led by The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton, hitting her marks with crisp perfection), who teaches Strange the arts of conjuring and inter-dimensional travel. When the magic starts flying, Doctor Strange’s real strength is revealed. There are clear visual references, like the wall- and ceiling-walking martial arts moves taken from The Matrix and the recursive, bending cityscapes from Inception. But like an original beat built out of samples, the visual synthesis feels fresh, even while it pays tribute to artist Steve Ditko’s psychedelic 60s phantasmagoria.

Strange’s journey from adept to master is hastened by the attack of Kaecillius (Mads Mikkelsen), a rogue student of the Ancient One who wants to summon a god of the Dark Dimension to Earth, offering the planet in exchange for everlasting life. Pretty standard stuff for a superhero flick, really, but at least it’s a coherent vehicle to keep the eye-popping visuals flowing.

Doctor Strange is the best superhero movie of the year, but it doesn’t do much to change my hypothesis that we reached Peak Comics with The Avengers: Age Of Ultron. The film’s sturdy competence offers a sharp contrast with the flailing nonsense of the DC filmic universe, which says to me that Disney and Marvel are the only studio today that has an actual good creative process in place. But there’s a thin line between “process” and “formula”, and despite all of its visual bravado, Doctor Strange’s reality bends too strongly towards formula.

Doctor Strange

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Captain America: Civil War

Another May, another superhero movie. How far along are we on this wave of superhero movies? I date it from Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000, although you could argue that it goes back to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. The studios have refined the hit-making formula, crowding all other genres out of the blockbuster space. Only Star Wars brings in that kind of business, and, as great as The Force Awakens was, it clearly showed the marks of the Disney/Marvel method. As long as the returns remain good, the culture will be papered with comic book movies — and with Captain America: Civil War opening to $673 million on a $250 million budget, there’s no sign the returns are going to fall off any time soon.

Constraints breed creativity, and as formulaic as big-time superhero movies have become, Kevin Feige has a good process in place that both delivers the corporate goods and encourages filmmakers to do good work. Two of the Jon Favreau/Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man movies have been exceptional, but the real heart of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s overarching narrative is the Captain America franchise since Chris Evans was introduced as Steve Rogers in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. Directed with a classical flair by Joe Johnston, The First Avenger established Captain America as a link to the country’s most heroic period: fighting the Nazis to save freedom. Steve Rogers has become a stand-in for America’s best version of ourselves. Whether it’s a super weapon in the hands of the Red Skull in his first film or an unaccountable surveillance state in Winter Soldier, how he reacts to the problems thrown at him is in accordance with the best angels of our civic religion.

Much of the credit for the success of the Captain America movies must be laid at the feet of Evans, who plays Steve Rogers as empathetic and fundamentally decent but with a strong sense of melancholy befitting a man out of time. The series has also been bolstered by strong direction, first from Johnston and then from Joe and Anthony Russo, who plunged the stalwart super patriot into a world of spy vs. spy intrigue in The Winter Soldier. The best superhero stories come when the heroes are confronted with challenges they are not well-equipped to face and a villain with enough vision to turn the heroes’ strengths into weaknesses. Captain America, the super soldier created to fight the Nazis, the ultimate external threat, found new depth when he had to tease out friend from foe inside the government he has sacrificed everything to serve.

There are two sides to every story — Chris Evans (above) as Captain America; Robert Downey Jr. and Don Cheadle as Iron Man and War Machine.

The Russos are back at the helm for Civil War and have once again tried to tie into the zeitgeist of a divided America. 2016 gives us two blockbusters about superheroes fighting each other. The first was Zac Snyder’s dismal Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Civil War is much better in every respect, largely living up to Winter Soldier.

To defeat Superman, you must put Lois Lane in danger. He’s too powerful to beat on his own, so you have to trick him into making mistakes. Similarly, the way you defeat Captain America is to put Bucky Barns (Sebastian Stan), aka the Winter Soldier, in danger. Bucky is Steve Rogers’ only link to the life he left behind in the 1940s, and Rogers feels partially responsible for Bucky getting the Soviet super soldier treatment that transformed him into a brainwashed assassin. When Civil War opens, Bucky’s been lying low since his escape at the end of The Winter Soldier. Captain America and his revamped crew of Avengers — Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Vision (Paul Bettany), and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) — are engaged in their usual business of keeping the world safe by chasing the fabulously named superterrorist Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo). But, as usual when an “enhanced persons” donnybrook breaks out in an urban area, there are collateral casualties. In this case, a delegation of development workers from the reclusive African kingdom of Wakanda, the source of the world’s vibrainium, the material that Captain America’s shield is made from. The king of Wakanda, T’Chaka (John Kani) leads a movement to bring the Avengers under the formal control of the United Nations, and other countries, seeing the devastation wrought in the Avengers’ former battlegrounds, quickly come on board.

After Tony Stark is confronted by the mother of a young man killed during the final battle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, he decides to back the UN resolution, known as the Sokovia Accords after the city that Ultron levitated into oblivion. But Steve Rogers disagrees. The Avengers were created to keep the world safe from superpowered bad guys, and Rogers is absolutely sure that he is the only person qualified to determine when and how those threats can be identified and neutralized. He and Stark are already on the outs when a truck bomb blows up the United Nations meeting on the Accords, and his old friend Bucky is tagged as the guy to blame. Rogers is torn between loyalties to his friend, to his government, and his own moral sense, and his path splits the Avengers into factions: the Iron Man-led, pro-accord forces, which include Black Widow, Vision, War Machine (Don Cheadle), and T’Challa, (Chadwick Boseman), aka Black Panther, the son of the slain Wakandan monarch who has vowed to kill Bucky. Standing with Captain America are Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Scarlet Witch, Ant Man (Paul Rudd), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). To tip the odds in his favor, Stark tracks down Peter Parker (Tom Holland), who has only been Spider-Man for six months, and recruits him with an offer of a new spider suit.

The introduction of Spider-Man, the Marvel comic book empire’s greatest character creation, is just one demonstration of how superior the Marvel touch is to the DC regime. The Russos know we’ve seen Spider-Man’s origin story onscreen twice in this century, so when Stark asks Parker how he got his powers, he just mumbles “It’s complicated,” and leaves it at that. Holland’s version of Parker is closer to Toby Maguire’s goofy persona than the Andrew Garfield iteration, which is a big improvement.

Boseman’s Black Panther is a welcome addition to the MCU. He gives T’Challa a regal bearing that suggests he would fit in on Game of Thrones. The end of Civil War charts an interesting future for him, which we’ll get to see more of in his solo movie scheduled for 2018.

The centerpiece of Civil War is a great set piece inside the evacuated Leipzig airport where the two factions go at it for what feels like a good 15 minutes. Here the Russo’s major inspiration for the film comes into focus. The Empire Strikes Back brought moral complication into the Manichaean Star Wars universe, and Civil War attempts to do the same by making Rogers choose between competing goods at every turn. While defending Winter Soldier from Iron Man, Captain America says he’s doing it because Bucky is his friend. “I was your friend, too,” the wounded Stark says.

The shifting allegiances give the Russos a chance to bounce different pairs of characters off of each other, and it’s obvious this is where their interests really lie. Especially good together are Downey and Renner, who capture the raw anger of a longtime friendship betrayed.

Civil War is massively overstuffed with characters and fragmentary storylines intended to connect to the bigger universe but which bogs down the present story. Captain America: Civil War is a fun time at the movies, and among the best of its breed, but you can be excused if you feel superhero fatigue setting in.

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Trainwreck vs. Ant-Man

Last weekend’s box office race involved two seeming opposites: Marvel’s Ant-Man and Trainwreck, the collaboration between comedy titans Amy Schumer and Judd Apatow. But after a Sunday double feature of the two films, I was struck by their similarities and what they say about the current risk-averse environment in Hollywood.

Ant-Man stars Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, a former electrical engineer whom we first meet as he is being released from San Quentin, where he was doing time for a Robin-Hood robbery of his corrupt former employer. His wife Maggie (Judy Greer) has divorced him and is living with their daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) and her new boyfriend, Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). Scott tries to go straight, but after he’s fired from his job at Baskin-Robbins, in one of the more creative product placement sequences in recent memory, he takes his friend Luis (Michael Peña) up on his idea to break into a Victorian mansion and clean out a mysterious basement vault.

But, as the comic book fates would have it, the mansion is the home of one Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), an old-school superscientist who discovered a way to reduce the space between atoms and thus shrink himself down to the size of an insect. For years, he and his wife operated in secret as a superteam of Ant-Man and the Wasp. After a desperate mission for S.H.I.E.L.D. to stop World War III, she disappeared into subatomic space, and he took off his supersuit and vowed to keep the world-changing and potentially dangerous technology under wraps.

Under Pym’s tutelage, Scott sets out to stop the scientist’s former protegee Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from selling his own version of the shrinking technology to the evil forces of Hydra by stealing a high-tech Iron Man-type suit called the Yellowjacket.

Ant-Man is not as good as this year’s other Marvel offering, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, but it scores points for originality. Written by Attack the Block‘s Joe Cornish and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s Edgar Wright, who was originally slated to direct, the film tries — and mostly succeeds — to combine an Ocean‘s Eleven-style heist flick with a superhero story in the same tonal range as Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. It’s burdened with the traditional origin-story baggage, but the sequence where Scott discovers the powers of the Ant-Man supersuit by shrinking himself in the bathtub and fleeing running water, hostile insects, and a vacuum cleaner is another triumph for special effects wizards Industrial Light & Magic. Rudd, a veteran of many Apatow comedies, including Knocked Up, is exactly the right guy to sell the mix of comedy and superheroics, and some sparks fly with furtive love interest Evangeline Lilly as Pym’s double agent daughter Hope van Dyne. For the sections of its 117-minute running time when it’s focusing on its core plot, Ant-Man is a good time at the movies.

For Trainwreck, Amy Schumer’s vehicle for transforming basic cable stardom into a feature film career, she surrounded herself with some very heavy hitters. First and foremost is Apatow, the producer, director, and writer with his fingers in everything from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Girls. The pair execute Schumer’s first feature-length screenplay with verve. Schumer stars as Amy, a New York magazine journalist who is basically a fleshed-out version of her public persona. In a sharp inversion of the usual romantic comedy formula, she is a quick-witted, commitment-phobic hookup artist dating a hunky man-bimbo named Steven (John Cena), who just wants to get married, settle down, and raise a basketball team’s worth of sons in a house in the country. Soon after her chronic infidelity torpedoes her relationship, she is assigned to write about a prominent sports doctor named Aaron (Bill Hader), who counts LeBron James among his patients. The two hit it off, and she soon violates her “never sleep over” rule with him.

If this were a traditional Rom-Com, and Amy’s character were male and played by, say, Tim Meadows (who is one of the dozens of comedic talents who have cameos), I would be calling him a ladies man. Schumer is practically daring people to expose the double standard by calling her a slut. Her effortless performance proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that she has chops to carry a feature film. Apatow is savvy enough to give her a long leash, giving her scenes time to breathe, selecting some choice improvs, and letting barrages of comic exchanges live in two-shots. Hadler finds himself in the unfamiliar role of the straight man to Schumer’s cutup, but he acquits himself well in what is essentially the Meg Ryan role from When Harry Met Sally. Practically everyone in the film’s supporting hoard of comics and sports figures also gives a good turn. Tilda Swinton is stiletto sharp as Dianna, Amy’s conscience-free magazine editor boss. Dave Attell is consistently funny as a homeless man who acts as Amy’s Greek chorus. Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei slay as the leads in a black-and-white art film called The Dogwalker that the film’s characters keep trying to watch. Matthew Broderick, Marv Albert, and tennis superstar Chris Evert share a funny scene. But the biggest surprise is LeBron James, who shines with confidence and humor every time he’s on the screen. For the sections of its 124-minute running time that it focuses on Amy’s romantic foibles, Trainwreck is a good time at the movies.

But that’s the rub for both Ant-Man and Trainwreck. They both spend way too much time straying from what an M.B.A. would call their “core competencies.” In the case of Ant-Man, the distractions are twofold. First is the now-predictable, awkward shoehorning of scenes intended to connect the film to the larger cinematic universe. As his first test, Pym assigns Scott to steal a technological bauble from a S.H.I.E.L.D warehouse, prompting a superclash between Ant-Man and fellow Marvel C-lister Falcon (Anthony Mackie). The allegedly vital piece of equipment is never mentioned again.

Second is the turgid subplot involving Scott’s efforts to reconnect with his daughter Cassie, and her would-be stepfather Paxton’s attempts to put him back in jail. When Scott is having trouble using Pym’s ant-control technology, Hope tells him to concentrate on how much he wants to reunite with his daughter. The moment rings completely false in context: If you’re trying to talk to ants, shouldn’t you be concentrating on ants? The intention seems to be to make Scott a more sympathetic character, but Rudd’s quick-quipping charisma makes that unnecessary. Why spend the time on flimsy sentiment when we can be playing to Ant-Man’s strengths?

Similarly, Trainwreck gets bogged down in a superfluous subplot involving Amy’s sister Kim (Brie Larson) and their father Gordon (Colin Quinn). It starts promisingly enough in the very first scene of the movie when Gordon explains to young Kim and Amy why he and their mother are getting a divorce (“Do you love your doll? How would you like it if you could only play with that one doll for the rest of your life?”). But then, we flash forward to the present day, and Gordon has been admitted to an assisted living facility, which becomes a source of friction between the sisters. Quinn is woefully miscast as a disabled old man, especially when he’s sitting next to veteran actor and actual old man Norman Lloyd. The subplot is seemingly there only for cheap sentiment, and it drags on and on, adding an unacceptable amount of running time to what should be a fleetly paced comedy. As we left the theater, my wife overheard a woman asking her friend how the film was. “I like it okay,” she said. “I thought it was never going to end, though.”

When Ant-Man is kicking pint-sized ass and Amy Schumer is schticking it up, their respective movies crackle with life. Hollywood is filled with smart people, and I can’t believe that an editor didn’t point out that the films could be improved by excising their phony sentimental scenes. So why didn’t these films achieve greatness? I submit it is another symptom of the studio’s increasingly crippling risk aversion. All films must be all things to all audiences to hit the so-called “four quadrants” of old and young, male and female, so raunchy comedies get extraneous schmaltz and lightweight comic book movies get weighed down with irrelevant family drama. Both Ant-Man and Trainwreck end up like rock albums with lackluster songwriting filled with killer guitar solos. They’re entertaining enough but haunted by the greatness that could have been.

Ant-Man
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Trainwreck
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