Grade: C minus

X-Men: Apocalypse—It’s the End of the World, and They Feel Whiny

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence, and Nicholas Hoult in "X-Men: Apocalypse", with the kids in the background

Evil’s days may be numbered, at least if Marvel’s X-Men: Apocalypse is a harbinger of things to come. No, I’m not suggesting that this creaky, silly movie has solved the world’s problems, or even cinema’s. Instead, it seems to be inadvertently tolling the funeral bells for comic-book villainy, that once-robust institution of camp and calamity. To be fair, the forces of evil were already looking a bit frail. The good recent Marvel movies—namely, Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America: Civil War—succeeded not because of their villains’ appeal but their absence; both films were essentially hangout comedies that derived their pathos from rifts between their heroes, not battles against fearsome foes. Now, future filmmakers might well be tempted to go that route, as X-Men: Apocalypse illustrates the perils of hitching your movie to a lackluster heavy. Comic-book characters may be virtually invincible, but there is nothing more fatal to the vehicle that carries them than a lousy bad guy.

The baddie here is En Sabah Nur, though he’s better known as Apocalypse. (He ominously informs us that he’s been called many names throughout history, though “His Blandness” is not among them.) We first meet him, during a screechingly awful prologue, in ancient Egypt, which he rules as a pharaoh. A sort of vampiric mutant, Apocalypse has acquired enormous power by siphoning the abilities of lesser mutants into his own body, a process that director Bryan Singer conveys through amateur laser displays and muddily conceived 3-D visuals. During one particular transfusion of super-blood, things go awry, and Apocalypse finds himself entombed in one of his pyramids. Humans being the meddlers that they are, a cult eventually disturbs his slumber, and he emerges in 1983, ready to let loose five millennia worth of pent-up aggression. Read More

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Money Monster: Angry Investor Wants Answers, or Else

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jack O'Connell and George Clooney in Jodie Foster's "Money Monster"

Money Monster is a fanciful parable rooted in a real-life catastrophe. In December of 2007, the U.S. economy crashed, and the Great Recession began. People lost their homes, their jobs, and a whole lot of their money. The financial markets have since rebounded, but for many, the acrid scent of the collapse still lingers. Attempting to capitalize on this continuing bitterness, Money Monster paints a portrait of Wall Street as a rotted abscess, festering with corruption and venality. You’ve never seen America’s big banks depicted in such an unflattering light. Well, unless you’ve seen The Big Short. Or Margin Call. Or Too Big to Fail. Or Inside Job. Or a newspaper article or blog post that was written at any point in the past eight years.

You get the picture. This movie, which has been directed by Jodie Foster from a script by a trio of screenwriters, isn’t saying anything new. But topicality is hardly a requirement of cinematic worth, and while Money Monster isn’t remotely insightful, it is rarely uninteresting. Some of this is to its benefit: It sports a decent premise, it’s surprisingly funny, and it features excellent actors who take their craft seriously. But the real fascination surrounding this silly, vacuous, ultimately disastrous thriller is of the morbid variety. Watching it, you are compelled to wonder just how a picture of such pedigree could disintegrate into such a puddle of idiocy. Perhaps it’s all a clandestine metaphor designed to mirror the tumultuous nature of the recession itself. It raises your hopes through bluster and recklessness before it crashes—hard. Read More

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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 — The Revolution Is Being Propagandized

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Dormer directs Jennifer Lawrence in the final installment of "The Hunger Games"

The Hunger Games is a franchise about progress. It chronicles a revolution, in which the effectively enslaved rise up against the ruling class, striving to topple a ruthless system of oppression and install a more democratic form of government. It is bitterly ironic, then, that each successive movie in the series has been progressively worse than its predecessor. The original Hunger Games, based on the first of Suzanne Collins’s three taut novels, was a bracing dystopian drama, hypnotically terrifying in its assured depiction of a society that used children for blood sport. It was a feat that the first sequel, Catching Fire, largely repeated—it lacked the initial installment’s spark but compensated with craft. The third movie, continuing an artistically dubious but commercially inviolable studio practice, covered roughly half of Collins’s final book, Mockingjay; it struggled to infuse energy into relatively lifeless material, but it nevertheless had its virtues, with strong performances from a phenomenal cast and an electric final 20 minutes.

And now we’ve come to the end with Mockingjay, Part 2, which ought to bring the franchise to a bold and powerful conclusion. Instead, this fourth and final film feels woefully inert, not only lacking in excitement and intrigue, but also missing the reliable filmmaking competence that suffused the prior entries. It’s as if the director, Francis Lawrence, who has helmed each of the three sequels (the original was made by the enigmatic Gary Ross), simply became too exhausted with the labor of transmuting Collins’s terse prose into moving pictures. The most damning thing about Mockingjay 2 isn’t that it’s bad—it’s that it feels so tired. The franchise may have its faults, but it galvanized a legion of teenagers with its punchy themes and robust storytelling. It deserved better than to go out with such a pitiful whimper. Read More

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Insurgent: What’s in the Box? It’s the “Divergent” Sequel, Dressed Up and Crashing Down

Jeremy BeckReviews
Shailene Woodley stars in "Insurgent"

When did young-adult movies become so childish? Look, it makes perfect sense that adaptations of YA fiction have experienced a boom at the multiplex. Teenagers go to the movies in droves, and so studios are constantly scrounging for the next mega-franchise, hoping to transform fantastical allegories into real profits. And when done right—as in the Harry Potter movies (the subgenre’s preeminent jewel) and, to a lesser extent, the Hunger Games films— these properties can be artistically valuable as well as commercially successful. The problem with Insurgent, the second installment in the Divergent series (based on a trio of novels by Veronica Roth), isn’t that it’s set in another futuristic dystopia or that it’s populated primarily by blandly attractive adolescents. The problem is that it’s dumb.

Part of my issue with Insurgent may be that I’ve never read any of Roth’s novels. Perhaps if I were familiar with the source material, I’d be more responsive to the gibberish about “Abnegation” and “factionless” and “sims”. But I tend to doubt it, and besides, it’s the job of the screenwriter (or screenwriters, in this case, as the script is credited to Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman, and Mark Bomback) to translate a novel’s prose into the language of cinema. Here, the more the characters blather about the five factions (and the so-called Divergents who transcend their boundaries), the more infantile the whole thing seems. Worse, where Divergent at least indulged in some opportunities for dopey entertainment—like a nighttime game of “Capture the Flag”, or a pedagogical knife-throwing session—Insurgent is aggressively dour, with a false sense of solemnity that stifles the storytelling. If you can’t make your hapless tale of boilerplate heroism smart, at least make it fun. Read More

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Maps to the Stars: Where Satire Meets Schlock

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Wasikowska and Julianne Moore in David Cronenberg's "Maps to the Stars"

David Cronenberg is a profoundly talented filmmaker, and he’s never made a normal film. But originality isn’t itself a good, and as gifted as Cronenberg may be, his ability to heighten the natural language of cinema—to create movies saturated with intrigue and weirdness—can work both ways. When he starts with a strong premise and an intelligent screenplay, he can make operatic marvels like The Fly, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises. But give him a leaky script and false characters, and his instinctive intensity will only magnify the material’s flaws, resulting in stultifying dreck like Crash, Spider, or Cosmopolis. It’s this innate capacity for augmentation—for blowing up a picture to gargantuan size—that makes Cronenberg perhaps the worst possible choice to make Maps to the Stars, a half-baked Hollywood satire that gradually morphs into a tacky horror movie. With a less capable director, Maps to the Stars would have been little more than a harmless bore. Under Cronenberg’s lurid stewardship, it’s a fascinating atrocity.

The movie begins as a disorienting blur, introducing us to its major players and forcing us to discern their connections ourselves. We meet Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a burn victim clad in a black dress and matching elbow-length gloves, who arrives in Los Angeles and immediately hires a chauffeur, Jerome (Robert Pattinson, who headlined Cosmopolis), to whisk her to the homes of various celebrities. Then, we’re suddenly inside one of those homes, where 13-year-old Benjie (The Killing‘s Evan Bird), a Justin Bieber-like child star, speaks lewdly with his mother, Christina (Olivia Williams). His father, Stafford (John Cusack), appears briefly and babbles about Tibet, then disappears to engage in a bizarre training session—an apparent combination of massage and hypnotherapy—with Havana (Julianne Moore), a hysterical actress with severe mommy issues. Read More

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