Don't Sweat The Small Stuff

Year: 2018

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Peña 

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

So this is how the Marvel movie year ends, not with a bang but with Michelle Pfeiffer. A scant two months and change after Avengers: Infinity War ravaged theaters worldwide, we're getting Ant-Man and the Wasp, a wispy summer treat before the MCU goes dormant until 2019, giving us some much needed rest. In which time we'll be getting Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, Teen Titans GO to the Movies, Venom, Aquaman, Hellboy, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. 

Never say Hollywood doesn't try to capitalize on a trend.

So, we pick up nearly two years after the events of Captain America: Civil War (remember those? me neither). Ant-Man is on house arrest for violating the Sokovia Accords (yeah, I don't know), and he is three days away from being allowed to return to the world. Unfortunately, right about this time is when he discovers a quantum entanglement with Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), the long-thought-dead wife of original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). This reunites him with Hank and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly, who for continuity's sake has to wear her original bowl cut wig in several scenes, causing me to giggle for about twenty minutes straight because I did not remember how stupid it looked and it really caught me by surprise), and they struggle to rebuild their relationship while figuring out how to rescue Janet from the quantum realm. I promise I reduced as much pseudo-science gobbledygook as I could from that paragraph. It was a Herculean effort.

While our heroes run through a video game-esque gauntlet of "Need Object A? Acquire Object B to gain access to Object C to get it," they must avoid the FBI officer Jimmy Woo (my boy Randall Park), the rogue tech black marketeer Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins), and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a girl whose particles keep expanding and contracting, allowing her to phase through objects, but keeping her in intense pain. She thinks she can cure her condition by sucking the science juice out of Michelle Pfeiffer, or something.

Though honestly, the pain seems like a fair trade for such a rad evil suit.

So far both Ant-Man movies have felt like a bit of a break from the MCU at large. The first one had a stronger separate core for its own story (namely, the heist element), whereas this one does have to deal largely with the implications left behind from a previous spinoff, but for the most part it's equally contained. The plot itself is a bit more sprawling, but it doesn't spill over into any other characters or plot lines, which is a welcome respite after the world-shattering character collisions of Infinity War  that required an MCU encyclopedia to get through.

And also much like the first one, there isn't a lot of meat on these bones. Anytime the story turns its focus to its feeble character drama, it becomes almost laughable. Lilly and Rudd's total lack of romantic chemistry exposes the mechanical artifice of the script. Whenever they exchange a glance or a kiss, you can hear the plot gears chunk into place. These things don't happen because they want them to, they happen because the narrative needs them to. The same goes for this film's wrinkle, the fact that Ant-Man's suit is a prototype and sometimes malfunctions, randomly changing his size at inopportune moments. But this happens only when its most convenient to the plot for a joke, and doesn't cause any major strife other than yet another one of the film's endless video game side missions.

"Alright, who ordered the plot contrivance?"

Honestly, I'd be more content if this was just a comedy about being on house arrest, because as usual the humor is by far the strongest element of the movie. The bulk of this is delivered by Michael Peña, who returns to once more prove that the entire movie lies in the palm of his hand, but we also, blissfully get an appearance by Randall Park. I've long been a proponent of Park, but this is the first side role he's gotten in a comedy where he really gets to shine, allowing his character's businesslike exterior and seriousness convert into awkward ineptitude and confusion at the drop of a hat. It's his best work in a long time, and he's always doing his best work.

Paul Rudd is of course on fire as well, but whenever he has to deal with Lilly and her bleating nothing of a character, he flounders a little bit. He flounders a lot bit during a scene where [SEMI-SPOILERS] he channels a woman's spirit into his body, which he plays like a high school freshman trying drag for the first time in drama class [SPOILERS OVER]. But come on. He's Paul Rudd. He acts his way back out of that paper bag over and over again. And then there's Michael Douglas, who at this point is just expensive window dressing. 

At least they fixed Hope's hair. This is an even bigger triumph than Jurassic World correcting Bryce Dallas Howard's footwear.

But even if the drama is firing on zero cylinders, the action is solid enough to provide a satisfying popcorn superhero romp. They really lean into our heroes' abilities to change size here, turning various small rooms and San Francisco cityscapes into wonderful Alice in Wonderland playsets, finding new, creative uses for everyday objects that is tremendously satisfying, even if it's not particularly groundbreaking.

Really, Ant-Man and the Wasp does what it needed to do. It provides us a (blissfully short, for one of these movies) two hours of distraction from the world outside (and, if you live near me, the blistering heat wave we got last Friday). It doesn't try your patience or test your brain in any way, it just lets you sink into a morass of fun, funny people doing spectacular things and not asking you to feel too much about it other than excitement. It won't go down in the pantheon of great summer movies, but it hits the spot, for sure.

TL;DR: Ant-Man and the Wasp is a forgettable popcorn movie, which is exactly what it needed to be.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1048
Reviews In This Series
Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015)
Ant-Man (Reed, 2015)
Captain America: Civil War (Russo & Russo, 2016)
Doctor Strange (Derrickson, 2016)
Black Panther (Coogler, 2018)
Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

Popcorn Kernels: Get To Da Choppa!

In which we review the Predator trilogy, because the forces of my life have conspired to make it a requirement to watch it. Keep an eye out for my Dread Central column and Geek K.O. podcast appearance, both about this franchise, both coming soon!

Predator

Year: 1987

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Kevin Peter Hall 

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An elite military squad on a mission in the Central American jungle runs afoul of a bloodthirsty alien creature bent on hunting them down.

Predator sure is a boy movie, innit? This whole franchise has definitely been one of the biggest gaps in my genre film knowledge, and it probably stems all the way back to the fact that I didn't play with toy trucks as a tot. This movie is the cinema equivalent of a blue onesie patterned with footballs, assigning a great deal of meaning to the sheer act of existing as a biological male. We get doting closeups of biceps flexing during arm wrestling (mid-air arm wrestling I might add, the lamest way to go about that particular display), lots of sweaty yelling in sleeveless/fabricless/shameless military vests, and a whopping one female character who has maybe two lines.

You don't hire Arnold Schwarzenegger by accident. Predator knew what it was doing and it sure as hell went and did it. But I do have to say... The man certainly cuts a striking figure onscreen, but he's a liability the second he opens his mouth. And I'm not talking about his accent. Look, I super duper knew the man couldn't act, but watching Predator, it's not so much something you know as something you feel deep in your bones; a primordial, ancestral revulsion that leaves you quivering in your seat.

Simply put, Schwarzenegger is an enormous liability in this movie (in every sense of the word "enormous"). He has way too much dialogue that isn't quippy one liners, which he shoves out through gritted teeth like a constipated school principal. The rest of the cast is fine, although the only reason anybody but Shane Black is here is to wear a vest that shows off their biceps.

Honestly, I found Predator pretty boring. The non-action scenes are numerous and entirely indistinguishable. People mutter nonsense in an endless expanse of green jungle while walking around with machetes. It's not compelling visually or narratively, it just exists, in much wider swaths than one might hope. The action itself is totally fine though, especially when the gore quotient amps up about halfway through.

However, there is no denying that the Predator itself is an unholy triumph of monster-making ingenuity. Stan Winston sure as hell knew what he was doing when he put together the wholly inhuman look of the creature, both masked and unmasked. With the mask on, he cuts the figure of a space-age knight, and with it off he's an unnaturally fleshy collection of organic odds and ends that you just believe. That is the true triumph of Predator, and the reason the movie earned itself (god) five additional movies at this point. You don't get that without a cool monster, no way no how.

Rating: 5/10

Predator 2

Year: 1990

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Cast: Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Kevin Peter Hall 

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

This time, Los Angeles!

Because L.A. is the urban jungle, geddit?

That's about as deep as Predator 2 ever gets, not really utilizing its arbitrary near-future setting to make much commentary other than "things is violent in the cities." Instead, we get a Predator film grafted onto a Lethal Weapon as Danny Glover stalks through the LA streets taking the law into his own hands when the titular extraterrestrial gets in the middle of a gang war that tears through the city streets. This is emphatically not a bad thing.

Sure, Predator 2 is stupid, but so is Predator 1, and at least this movie has a kick-ass lady cop with actual dialogue. This is probably the only time director Stephen Hopkins has actually improved a franchise, but I'll take it. Predator 2 is weirdly demure in its violence (the 90's were a rough time for gorehounds), but the action is varied and fun (an early street shootout has some delightful stunt car work), kicking up the energy with its loony antics. And the dialogue scenes benefit from actors with actual charisma, including the reliably weird Gary Busey and the sniveling worm that is every character Bill Paxton played in late 80's.

The Predator's weaponry has also received an upgrade, and although his invisibility booster is still annoyingly on-the-fritz (I understand he needs to be invisible for a long time because that's expensive as hell otherwise, but the brief glimpses we get of the Predator early on are annoyingly obvious audience pandering), his new space arsenal is a creative expansion of the universe of the first film. Here, the design team turns traditional hunting weapons like nets and spears into alien weapons of mass murderization, combining the primitive with the high tech in a satisfyingly brutal way.

As always, the Predator is the most important element of this film, and they do get it right. Sure, it's an empty 90's action flick, but that's a sweet spot for bad-good cinema, so you won't catch me complaining.

Rating: 6/10

Predators

Year: 2010

Director: Nimród Antal

Cast: Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A group of strangers find themselves fighting for their lives on a Predator hunting reserve.

Is Predator the only trilogy that improves as it goes along? OK, probably nobody would agree with me, but I've finally found an entry in this franchise that I like! Predators is a delightful popcorn thriller, dumping a fistful of character actors (also including Walton Goggins, Mahershala Ali, and Danny Trejo),  into a scenario that's part Cube, part Lost, and full of Predator mayhem. Yes, these folks are also randomly wandering through a jungle, but this time there's actually a mystery to solve outside of "what is shooting us with lasers?"

Predators throws a lot of bizarre, dime-store Annihilation imagery at its characters before it reveals what's actually going on (given the title of the movie, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out), and the dynamics of the characters as they're funneled through a gauntlet of sheer revulsion and terror is a fun way to spend the plotty bits. And the cast really is game for bringing these crude, one-dimensional characters to life. Goggins channels his skills at chaotic evil, Trejo does his Trejo thing, I actually really like Topher Grace and he turns in some solid comic relief, and Adrien Brody gains 25 pounds of muscle and dang if that isn't a good distraction from how boring his character is.

Predators does fall apart somewhere in the middle of the third act, where the plot starts taking twists and turns that come out of nowhere to jostle the movie off its track, then vanish without a trace. But before that it's a tremendously satisfying one-time watch. Its subtext about how all the human beings themselves are "predators" falls flat too, but I can't say I expected much to start with, and at least it's trying something.

Then there's the Predators themselves! The design of the new Super-Predator isn't a particularly inspiring piece of work, but for the most part the film uses improved CGI to smooth out the very few rough edges of the classic design, and this is the first movie where the Predator's heat vision isn't incredibly crude and annoying. You can actually see what the Predator is seeing instead of chunky blobs of red and yellow that you can assume are Arnold Schwarzenegger because the blob has biceps. 

All in all, Predators did it for me, and I'm not ashamed to admit that. At this rate, Predator 6: The Predating is gonna be an out-and-out masterpiece!

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1337

Reviews In This Series

Predator (McTiernan, 1987)

Predator 2 (Hopkins, 1990)

AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)

Predators (Antal, 2010)

The Predator (Black, 2018)

I've Got A Rumbly In My Tombly

Year: 2018

Director: Roar Uthaug 

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Daniel Wu, Walton Goggins

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

So, video games are here to stay, huh? As the format progresses and games like The Last of Us or Far Cry 4 get more and more cinematic with their gameplay-integrated storytelling, it's no surprise that Hollywood is taking another crack at converting them into movies. Of course, the game they chose is the one where the chick with pointy boobs jumps a whole bunch, but you can't expect them to ever entirely get with the times.

We ran out of Hunger Games movies, so why not?

So, in Tomb Raider, we are introduced once more to Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander, the second Oscar-Winning actress to think it was a great idea to immediately sign onto a Tomb Raider project), the daughter of the prominent businessman Richard Croft (Dominic West). He's in the same business as Bruce Wayne, which is... business. You know, companies and stuff. Look, he's rich, OK? And seven years ago, he disappeared.

While Lara refuses to sign his death notice and thus can't receive her inheritance, she spends her time training in MMA (to what end I don't know, other than that it's fun - she doesn't seem to care about any competitions or anything) and delivering food on her bike. Eventually her dad's executor gives her a frustratingly simple riddle that could be solved by anyone who's read at least one Encyclopedia Brown book, which he hilariously fails to understand. This allows her access to her dad's inner sanctum, where she discovers that in addition to being Bruce Wayne, he's secretly also been Indiana Jones this whole time.

She follows his trail to the island of Yamatai, enlisting Chinese boatsman Lu Res (Daniel Wu) to help her. There, she finds the villainous slave-driver Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), whose employers want him to open the tomb on the island, where a mythical Japanese death queen is supposedly buried, hidden behind protective layers of traps and puzzles. Unfortunately, she has brought her father's research directly into his hands, so it quickly becomes a race against time to prevent him from opening the tomb, oh no!

Spoilers: In Tomb Raider, a tomb gets raided.

Literally the only thing that was exciting to me going into Tomb Raider was that it was the big Hollywood crossover of Norwegian genre director Roar Uthaug. A prominent member of the school of Norway filmmakers who consumed ample amounts of American B-movies, then regurgitated those tropes in a much better way than U.S. filmmakers have been able to do for ages, Uthaug has proved his worth beyond a doubt with the delightful 2006 slasher Cold Prey. He also helmed the 2015 disaster movie The Wave, which I have unfortunately yet to see but have heard good things about.

Unfortunately, the last time this happened, it was with Dead Snow director Tommy Wirkola, and he gave us Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. I personally haven't seen it, so I can't share any opinions (honestly, I feel like I'd love it), but that movie didn't exactly set the world on fire. At least that, as a manic horror-comedy, had a chance to show off the guy's personality. Tomb Raider is the exact sort of carefully shepherded intellectual property that will bury any director worth his salt in an immobilizing mound of script notes. And guess what happened? 

Exactly that. That's what happened.

One thing I can say with respect to my beloved Uthaug is that his action scenes do have a certain zippy energy, especially an early sequence involving an urban bike chase. The second best action sequence involves a rusted-out plane pulling a Lost World by dangling off a cliff, and that scene extends the tension for much longer than should be satisfying without feeling drawn-out or boring, even if it's a bit derivative. The combat scenes suffer a lot from the pulled punches of that toothless, bloodless PG-13 rating, but the adventures sequences are mostly satisfying, even if they have all the emotional resonance of tapping X to double jump.

But yeah, pretty much everything else is as dispiritingly average as it's possible to be. The puzzles are alternately overexplained within an inch of their lives or leave us entirely absent from the solving process (also, maybe if people learned to watch their feet and not step on obvious triggering floor panels, the whole thing could have wrapped up much quicker), the villains' motivations are malnourished, and SPOILERS [the plot introduces a rage zombie plot thread out of nowhere that makes me actively root against Lara Croft, because I would love the sequel to this to be a 28 Days Later movie].

The acting isn't even remarkable, not that it really could be. Vikander does her best, at least anchoring the movie onto what feels like an actual human being and not a pile of 0's and 1's in a tank top. I especially love the way she doesn't play Lara as particularly butch. Her mid-fight screams and grunts are girlish and feminine. She's still tough, but she doesn't have to be so in a traditionally masculine milieu. 

As for the rest of the ensemble... I love Walton Goggins, but he gets nothing to do here except glare directly at the camera. Plus, I could never really get a bead on what Daniel Wu was doing. And just when I was starting to get familiar with his sort of peculiar characterization, he starts to vanish from the film for twenty minutes at a time so more white people can step on floor panels like f**king idiots. Honestly, the entire film is stolen by a not-especially-hilarious cameo from Nick Frost that is still far and away the best thing in the movie.

That's not where you really want to be with your Hollywood blockbuster, but at least it's not soul-suckingly terrible, because we all know the way most video game adaptations swing. Unfortunately, there's absolutely no reason to see this movie. Though, if you do get dragged to it, you won't suffer. It's just utterly milquetoast, and slides right through the back of your head the millisecond it enters your eyes.

TL;DR: Tomb Raider is a thoroughly generic bit of popcorn cinema fare, and my affection for the director doesn't change how unimpressive it is.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1065