Deader, Pooler

Year: 2018

Director: David Leitch

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Hollywood is really hoping the world's refractory period for superhero movies is a short one, because Deadpool 2 arrives just three weeks after the massive, universe-shattering blockbuster Avengers: Infinity War, which came just two months after the box office juggernaut Black Panther. But even the shadow of Avengers can't quite obscure Deadpool 2, which is the followup to a film that was a massive hit exactly because it was a nasty-minded R-rated comedy sandwiched into the superheroic genre elements that have become so pervasive in movie theaters over the past decade.

Unfortunately, that means that Deadpool 2 isn't a superhero sequel but a comedy sequel, and those are quite a bit harder to pull off. All of Marvel's sequels have done better than their previous entries, because sequels don't have to worry about setting up their characters and conflicts, and just get to relax into a new adventure. Comedy sequels have to appease the audience by repeating their favorite jokes, only without the necessary element of surprise. Let's see how that went, shall we?

So far so consistent.

Warning: this plot synopsis and subsequent review contain SPOILERS for the first act of Deadpool 2; one major plot point that I couldn't care less about, and one minor reveal that I found way more interesting. But this really isn't a movie where the plot matters one whit, so I'm not bothered about it.

Deadpool 2 sees the return of its indestructible red-clad merc Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) just as his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) gets blown away by gangsters after a hit gone wrong. His mourning process (they were going to have a family, which is not a terrible idea for these people apparently) involves him couch-surfing at Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters as a trainee member of the X-Men alongside returning D-list members Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), who now has a girlfriend (Shioli Kutsuna) in one of those Hollywood stabs at LGBT diversity where gay people don't kiss or touch or talk, but just kind of stand next to each other.

His first mission involves defusing a situation involving a young mutant with anger issues and the ability to shoot flames out of his hand, the self-proclaimed Firefist (Julian Dennison of the terrific Hunt for the Wilderpeople). Deadpool's irreverent humor drives the kid away, just in time for the time-traveling terminator Cable (Josh Brolin) to arrive from the future with an eye on destroying the kid to prevent crimes he commits as an adult. Does Deadpool learn to overcome his grief and become the father he was always meant to be? Well, you'll just have to see, won't you?

Father, X-Man, friend to all gays... What can't this man do?

We would do well to sit down with the question that is all-important to comedy sequels: Is this schtick still funny? Obviously comedy is in the funny bone of the beholder, but my answer is a qualified yes. I've always loved meta humor in general, and the way it combines with pretty incisive analysis of superhero clichés continues to be satisfying (some times more than others - the movie really drops the ball with its obligatory Thanos joke). And there's plenty of new bits on hand here, including a delightful gross-out recurring gag with a pen, that are just solid examples of comedy writing, comic book movie or not. Sure, some jokes thud to the floor (there's a recurring bit about dubstep that I'm not certain is or was ever funny in any universe), but this is one of those modern movies that throw so much at the wall that most of sticks and you can ignore the rest.

Unfortunately, "the rest" includes most of the jokes that are picked up from the previous film. The biggest one of these being T.J. Miller's comic relief presence. It doesn't help that in the time between the previous movie and now, it has been revealed that the man himself is pretty much an unmitigated asshole, but his jokes have always felt like the blooper reel of a Judd Apatow movie, and they suck out all the air from the film every time he makes an appearance. And although the opening credits sequence is still quite fun, they're almost too shy to repeat the joke from the original movie and cut them short just as they're getting started.

All in all, however, I'm gonna put the humor in the plus column. The scales are tipped especially when you add the weight of new recruits Zazie Beetz and Julian Dennison, who own every scene they are in. Wilderpeople proved that Dennison has the chops and I'm glad he's gotten a bigger platform for his unique brand of Kiwi bluster, but as someone who doesn't watch Atlanta, Beetz is a new encounter for me, and it has been excessively pleasant. Her colossal confidence and screen presence will superglue your eyes to the screen, and her action sequences, which involve the superpower of "luck" creating a series of Rube Goldberg Final Destination deaths around her as she struts by, are truly something to behold.

She's basically what would happen if we put 70's Pam Grier in a superhero movie, and that's the highest praise I can give to any human being.

And though Domino's action is clearly the best, Deadpool 2 doesn't disgrace director David Leitch's history with John Wick and Atomic Blonde at any point. Deadpool's indestructibility allows him to soar through the tropes of action cinema just as easily as superhero movies, circumventing traditional fight setpieces in his own idiosyncratic fashion. Probably the best example (and the one shown in the trailers) is the part where it seems like he's deflecting all the bullets Cable shoots at him by hitting them aside with his katanas, only to reveal that most of them have hit their mark because it's, like, super hard to hit a bullet with a sword. By lowering the personal stakes as to his health and well-being, Deadpool 2 has opened the floodgates to a cartoony sense of fun that keeps these scenes buoyant and propulsive throughout.

So, the comedy and action are present, which is really all you need. Unfortunately, Deadpool has two hours to fill and what it chooses to sandwich in between the fun parts is more than a bit irksome. There's repeated use of a ridiculous heaven-esque dreamscape that delivers foreshadowing and character insight on a silver platter without actually having to earn it, and this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the movie's more dramatic sequences. Ryan Reynolds sells Deadpool's emotional arc, because he really is a solid actor, but the drama here is much too maudlin and self-serious to pair well with the fratty comedy the rest of the movie delivers. There's no foundation for this type of scene in the Deadpool universe, and we get a lot of them here to crumble around us.

Also, sweet baby Jesus, there are so many random soundtrack needle drops in this movie. In the climactic third act sequence it feels like we get a dozen ironic pop songs jammed into our ears, to the point that I'm legitimately surprised we didn't get a joke comparing that scene to Suicide Squad. Some of these juxtapositions of bubblegum pop and action work quite well, but the movie is too flooded with them for the few great moments to actually have any potency.

Neither of these flaws are film-ruining, but they certainly drag this sequel to a lower level than its predecessor, in spite of quite a few things that are working even better than before. I can't wait to see the story continue with the exciting new characters it has added, it's satisfying to see what a Deadpool movie can do with an actual budget, and I had fun. That's really all I need, but there's just those niggling problems that refuse to go away.

TL;DR: Deadpool 2 is a satisfying, fun hunk of diminishing returns.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1359
Reviews In This Series
Deadpool (Miller, 2016)
Deadpool 2 (Leitch, 2018)

(Don't You) Forget About The 80's

Year: 2018

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn

Run Time: 2 hours 20 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Of all the properties that exist out there in this wide world of ours, Ready Player One was probably the one most begging for the Steven Spielberg treatment. A parade of nostalgia triggers for people who grew up in the 80's, who could be a better match than the man who shepherded so many of those childhoods with his visionary blockbusters? Unfortunately, that man doesn't exist anymore. Who we got is the guy who made The Post and Lincoln and The BFG. And I didn't want to do this to you, but let me remind you that Bridge of Spies is a thing that happened.

Now can you relate to people who want to escape their own reality?

In Ready Player One, we meet our hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) in a futuristic Columbus, Ohio trailer park in the gently dystopian future of 2045. Famines and poverty have caused many people to want to shrink back from the real world, so they've become obsessed with the virtual reality open-world game of the OASIS. When the game's creator Jim Halliday (Mark Rylance) dies, he reveals that has he created an Easter Egg hunt, where the first person to find all three of the keys he has hidden throughout the OASIS will become the sole proprietor of the entire game.

This business model clearly has some glaring flaws, the biggest being the fact that the wicked company IOI has hired expert drones, led by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), to crack the codes as quickly and efficiently as possible and thus own the biggest tech resource on the planet. But only the true fanboys and girls know enough about Halliday's past and his favorite old movies and video games to be able to get to the heart of the hunt. As the two factions get closer and closer to the finish line, Wade, under his online alias Parzival, must team up with other players, including his crush Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe, a casting decision the movie doesn't want you to know at first, but the marketing has already blown to ribbons), and the prominent Japanese players Daito (Win Morisaki) and Sho (Philip Zhao).

And the true key to the heart of America, pop culture references. 

It's no use beating around the bush. The novel Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (the screenwriter behind the execrable Star Wars-fellating road comedy Fanboys), is hot garbage. It's an incoherent, blithering mass of pop culture references that is mostly just a list of obscure anime and John Hughes movies masquerading as an adventure plot. It's an insufferable piece that beats the drum of nostalgia so fiercely that it rips right through the very fabric of art.

Ready Player One the movie is a massive improvement, because it almost completely throws away everything the book was working with. Some of this is due to necessity: you can't turn this crap into a movie. And you can't keep a plot moving when every challenge involves sitting down and playing an Atari game for hours. Other improvements are the invention of the filmmakers, like the fact that the egg hunt relies on the players being able to dig into Halliday's past and uncover more about his character, rather than random 80's detritus like his top 10 favorite music cues from Tron or whatever.

I can't say there were a lot of decisions in the making of either the book or the movie that were truly great, but that character exploration is certainly one of them. I'm not sure I'm loving what Mark Rylance is putting down with his performance here (it's very nebbish and Mark Zuckerberg-y, with a certain scatterbrained, naïve charm, but it slips into feeling like a monologue from Dexter's Laboratory a little too often for my liking - although the way this illustrates the difference between the real life version of him and his in-game avatar is truly special), but converting Halliday into an actual character - rather than a Willy Wonka who makes Monty Python references instead of chocolate bars - was a genius move.

That hairpiece not so much, but you can't have everything.

One area however where the film truly fails is the character of Art3mis. It shouldn't have been hard to make her not a Manic Pixie Virtual Reality Girl, but they actually made her role even more reductive and pointless. More reductive and pointless than something in an Ernest Cline novel. Let that sink in. Whereas in the book she was just as knowledgable about 80's trivia as the rest of the egg hunters, to the point that she was incredibly famous in the OASIS (a girl who knows pop culture? I'm quivering already), here she only exists to gasp with delight whenever Wade explains things to her, then reward herself to him as the ultimate prize.

Her position as ego-booster to this nerdy dweeb is demonstrated in this unwatchable scene where he throws on a Bee Gee's track and she grins, complimenting him on being "old school." Girl, this is the OASIS! People give lectures on the biographies of Atari programmers and treat Buckaroo Banzai like it's a cornerstone of world cinema. Everything is old school!

If only any of the people making this movie had an actual woman to consult with.

But enough about characters. This movie is meant to be a visual spectacle, and I guess that's what it is. The unreality of the OASIS prevents the CGI technicians from having to go out of their way to make things seem realistic, which is both a blessing and a curse. It allows things to become stylized in an interesting way (the OASIS' interface and item screens are actually pretty intuitive and fun extrapolations from modern gameplay), but it too frequently becomes a maelstrom of unintelligible pixels flying around in muddy clumps of mottled color. Also, I'm not really even sure what Steven Spielberg had to do on set, because a good 75% of the movie is literally just a cartoon. This explains why he was able to make an entire The Post while this film was still in production.

The only time where the visuals truly come alive and work within the story's pop culture milieu to create something unique and spectacular is a scene that turns The Shining into an interactive minigame, delightfully combining old film stock with 3D CGI in an impressive feat of creativity that easily trumps the analogous moment in the book.

Unfortunately, aside from that scene, not a lot in Ready Player One is anything more than basically watchable. The run time never feels punishing thankfully, but you don't feel fully swept up into the world of the film. Maybe it's the endless, frustrating expository dialogue. Maybe it's the lame plot points involving Post-It notes. Maybe it's the odious cameo from an autopilot T. J. Miller. Maybe its Alan Silvestri's shallow John Williams impression on the soundtrack. But there's a lot here that just doesn't click.

Ready Player One might be a massive improvement on the source material, but that novel was so dire that even taking leaps and bounds above it leaves you in a very average, unimpressive place. That said, it's still the best movie Spielberg has turned out in years, unless The BFG was a secret masterpiece, because I surely haven't gotten around to seeing that one.

TL;DR: Ready Player One is a gleaming popcorn movie, but it can't escape the deep, deadly flaws of its source material.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1275

Turn Down For What?

Year: 2016

Director: Josh Gordon & Will Speck

Cast: Jason Bateman, Olivia Munn, T.J. Miller 

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A great cast doesn’t always equal a good movie. If it did, Valentine’s Day would have swept the Oscars. But damn, Office Christmas Party has a great cast. Jason Bateman is the perfect asshole straight man, T. J. Miller is a standout member of the preternaturally superb Silicon Valley ensemble, Jennifer Aniston is so charming she survived The Bounty Hunter and We’re the Millers, Kate McKinnon has been the shining light of comedy this year, Jillian Bell has been hilarious I everything I’ve ever seen her in, Vanessa Bayer has swiftly proven herself as one of the strongest members of the new SNL cast, and Randall Park has been my underrated idol for forever.

Office Christmas Party might be the exception to that rule. It’s literally the most basic, featureless R-rated comedy ever created (c’mon, it might as well be called Office Party Script Title TBD), but it survives on the strength of its excellent ensemble just being themselves and working their established personalities to the hilt.

Thanks again, Mr. Park.

So, here’s the plot, as if this movie needed one. And it’s quite needlessly complicated, at that. Clay Vanstone (T. J. Miller) is the head of the Chicago branch of Zenotech, a tech company that does yadda yadda synergy. His jealous sister Carol (Jennifer Aniston) has become interim CEO after their dad died and is threating to close the branch unless they can close a major deal with Walter Davis (Courtney B. Vance). She’s slashed their budget and forbids them from wasting money by having their annual Christmas party. But Davis wants them to prove their company culture is vibrant and exciting, so Clay and his freshly divorced right-hand man Josh (Jason Bateman) plan a party behind Carol’s back to woo him.

Things get out of hand as the party grows out of control and various office personalities clash, including the straight-out-of-the-90’s hacker tech queen Tracey (Olivia Munn) – who Josh has the hots for – unlucky-in-love secretary Allison (Vanessa Bayer), and buttoned-up HR weirdo Mary (Kate McKinnon).

Thanks again, Ms. McKinnon.

It’s not fun to watch other people party. It’s just not. That’s why I turn off New Year’s Rockin’ Eve after the ball drops. Watching Fergie and anonymous party people dance around is excruciatingly dull. Office Christmas Party attempts to do something a little different, pulling comedy from the image of more normal, office-esque people doing the same things, but come the f*ck on. Jennifer Aniston is one of the leads. Having one or two frumpy extras with Junie B. Jones bangs doesn’t count as “realism.”

Anyway, I digress. Watching people debauch is boring, which is presumably why they injected so much plot into the godforsaken thing. Unfortunately they overfilled the thin little wisp of a movie and that plot oozes through every crack, threatening to drown the whole thing in sloppy sentimentality. Frankly, it’s idiotic, and the plot moments are played too earnest for them to even pretend they were being intentionally absurd when the going gets hyperbolic. 

Bateman and Munn’s improbable romance is bad enough (especially during a period of anti-drama that requires everyone to act like squealing infants), but when the theme of taking risks and making innovations blossoms into Star Trek technobabble about making the Internet out of electricity or something, it goes too far. If they played it like an homage to 80’s films that treated computers like they were omnipotent sorcerers, it might be amusing, but it’s just plain stupid, as if the business model it’s shackled to (“We’ll give people free Internet and become billionaires somehow! Science!”).

Damn, is that a difficult plot to sift through. It’s a sticky sweet mess that gums up everything it touches. It’s a whirl of inscrutable motivations and trite yet labored setups that are so howlingly forced they distract from the comedy at hand. And yet… that comedy’s still pretty good. 

Thanks again, improv.

Nobody is turning in bad work in this film, all the way down to the smallest bit parts (an Uber driver played by Fortune Feimster is downright hilarious. Even though Kate McKinnon is only paying a one-note sketch character, she pulls from her seemingly endless reserves of offbeat and captivating line readings, Jennifer Aniston proves that she can hold her own against more out-there comedians, and Jillian Bell especially creates a wonderfully unpredictable vibe with her standout performance.

This is a fun cast, and it’s a delight just to watch them mess around with each other. Luckily, that is one thing this movie has to offer in spades. As much as it doesn’t resemble an actual feature film in any way, it actually does resemble an office party. The plot mills about, letting you hang out and celebrate the holidays with some friends, and that’s really not the worst thing a movie can offer.

TL;DR: Office Christmas Party is a passable R-rated comedy thanks to its cast and that alone.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 846

We Can Be Heroes, Forever And Ever

Year: 2014

Director: Don Hall & Chris Williams

Cast: Ryan Potter, Scott Adsit, Daniel Henney

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

I doubt all hope is lost for traditional animation. The last hand-drawn Disney animated feature was Winnie the Pooh in 2011, not quite long enough ago to start carving the gravestone yet. But it is quite apparent that CGI animation is in vogue and we'll just have to go with the flow. It's true that Walt Disney Studios hasn't sufficiently produced digital animated pictures that in any way match the style and aesthetic of their early Golden Age work, but The Princess and the Frog was traditionally animated and look where that got them. It was decent, but nowhere near a masterpiece.

In today's world, we're just going to have to accept the computers for the time being and take the films as they come. Disney is far from its Renaissance in the 90's and while the films certainly have a higher baseline of quality than other studios, nothing has been quite as enduring a classic as The Lion King or The Little Mermaid. Since its last traditional feature, Disney has given us Wreck-It-Ralph - a decently charming pop culture-laden parable, and Frozen - a strikingly uneven, quasi-feminist, wildly popular half-musical that didn't even give Jonathan Groff a real song, the lunatics, what were they thinking. 

Neither of these films could be considered failures and both of them are quite amusing in their own right, but not really up to snuff with the reputation of the studio that produced them.

Big Hero 6 doesn't necessarily break the mold in that regard with its stock situations and comic booky sensibilities (this is the first Disney animated film to be based on a Marvel property), but within those parameters it leaps and bounds ahead of its peers. With a story holding the emotional weight of a cannonball, a nonstop pace, and a team of effortlessly diverse, effortlessly relatable characters, Big Hero 6 gives us hope for Disney's dawning age of Behind the Keyboard animation.

From Gus the Mouse to a computer mouse, we can't stop the company from evolving.

Big Hero 6 takes place in the futuristic city amalgam of San Fransokyo, which (in a filmic cliché I'm all too pleased to indulge in) becomes a character in and of itself as the story progresses. Bot-fighter Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter) is a precocious wunderkind, a savant, a prodigy, whatever language you want, really. His brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) wants to encourage him away from illegal bot-fighting and gambling so he takes him to his laboratory at the local university, where he meets young geniuses from around the world who are working in the field of robotics.

Said geniuses include Wasabi (Damon Wayans, Jr.), a nervous, straight-edged giant who specializes in laser technology; Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), a peppy chemistry genius who has somehow managed to survive in the world despite being made of toothpicks; and Go Go (Jamie Chung), an edgy rebel whose area of expertise is magnetic travel. Said geniuses adamantly don't include Fred (T. J. Miller), a school mascot who's best friends with all of them and has all the stereotypical traits of a stoner but with the edges blast-sanded off by the Disney corporate machine.

[ACT ONE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW] Following a student showcase in which Hiro applies to the school using a team of microbots that he invented, a fire erupts. When Tadashi runs inside to save his beloved Professor Callaghan (James Cromwell), he perishes in an explosion, leaving behind his little brother along with his creation - a cheery robotic health care provider known as Baymax (30 Rock's Scott Adsit, possibly the last man I would have expected behind the mic). When an unknown villain in a kabuki mask steals Hiro's microbots and begins using them for sinister purposes, Hiro must team up with his brother's friends to defeat him and save the town from total destruction.

Kabuki puns are harder to come up with than you think. Feel free to submit one in the comments.

But Baymax's endearing cuteness and eagerness to help Hiro overcome his trauma are more than just a pandering marketing ploy (though this is Disney, so we can't pretend it wasn't intended to function that way - the corporate machine is oiled with the blood of the cuddly). He functions simultaneously as a manifestation of Hiro struggling to overcome his grief and the remnants of Tadashi's altruistic spirit that remain on the earth following his departure from the mortal coil. It's a clever device but not so complex that it will go over its young audience's heads. The film's simplicity is a virtue, providing the ever sought-after link between adult situations and feelings and gleeful childish storytelling.

Some might say that the subject matter is a little too dark for youngsters, and they might be right to a point. Sitting through this movie without having a single tear well in your eye is a challenge on par with eating just one Lay's potato chip. But there's another side to the argument. We all want to protect our children from the bad things in life (look at me, pretending I'm old enough to actually have kids - what a tool), but that's not always possible. We can't prevent a kid from losing his or her parent or guardian and being forced to cope with a tough situation. 

It's films like Big Hero 6 that help children understand that loss can be heartbreaking but overcoming it and pulling oneself together is an important part of life. Hiro is a role model for any struggling kid, and the fact that he's Japanese-American (or, if we're engaging with the singularity of San Fransokyo... Jamerican? Americese?) is another brick in the still all-too-white media wall demonstrating that, despite our differences, the human experience is universal and we can triumph over adversity.

I don't know about you, but I'd want my kid learning that.

I'd also like my kid to learn how to power punch, but that didn't tie into my thesis.

So all that thematic stuff is nice and good, but on the surface level, Big Hero 6 is just as entertaining. From the second it starts, the pace of the film never flags, alternating between solid character moments (even the minor roles are engaging and lively) and action sequences that for the first time in a long while access the potential of the animated medium to provide sights and movements that live action photography is incapable of rendering.

Perhaps this is because it is based on a comic book, but Big Hero 6 relishes being a cartoon. It's still set in the real world realm of physics, but it pushes the envelope of what animated realism can mean in terms of action-adventure superhero movies. The showstopping action sequences bring a fresh eye to the medium and create a villain that has actual menace. At no point do you feel that he is not capable of actually hurting the characters, which raises the stakes so high that they reach out of the screen (side note: this film is not recommended for vampires).

Or adorable-haters.

The film's design combines modern comic book stylings with Japanese architecture and anime aesthetics to great effect. And despite anyone's potential qualms about the inherent ridiculousness of the portmanteau "San Fransokyo," the city itself only wows. Japanese animation is a huge influence on today's young artists and that new cultural ideal permeates Big Hero 6, combining the best parts of the art of two very different styles to provide a vibrant new world.

The plot is about as generically American as one can get ("We're just wimpy nerds, but we can learn to believe in ourselves and harness our unique skills as part of a team."), but the atmosphere is undeniable. It's a new type of family film sandwiched firmly between where we've been and where we're going. And it's a thrillingly fast-paced, delightfully funny glimpse at the future of animated film.

It's not perfect. It's a tad too meta in parts and there's a supremely jarring Fall Out Boy song shoved haphazardly in the middle, but Big Hero 6 is a ton of fun with a meaningful message wrapped inside. Highly recommended for children, adults, and humans everywhere.

And I just can't wait for the Big Heroes Avenging the Galaxy crossover in 2025.

TL;DR: Big Hero 6 isn't as high caliber as a Disney Renaissance film, but it carves its own path with nonstop fun and delightful characters.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1429