Superheroes

The Fantastic Four, First Steps: Blue Is the Stormest Color

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ebon Moss Bachrach, Vanessa Kirby, Pedro Pascal, and Joseph Quinn in The Fantastic Four First Steps

Things are different on Earth-828. I’m not talking about the laws of physics or the division of diplomatic supremacy or the popularity of late-night talk shows; all of that stuff is basically the same. (OK, maybe the talk show thing is a bad example.) No, what’s really jarring about this multiversal variant is that on this planet, nobody has ever heard of The Avengers.

Such ignorance is, if not exactly bliss, at least a small mercy. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the fourth feature to depict Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s superpowered quartet, but it’s the first to formally integrate them into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet any proper crossover that pairs this new/old foursome with our more established caped heroes—an upcoming collaboration that’s teased in the stingers to both this film and Thunderbolts—will need to wait. This movie, for all its interstellar escapades and cosmic hand-wringing, is a relatively self-contained adventure, disregarding the extant members of the MCU and instead focusing exclusively on these four playful, imperiled heroes. Read More

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Superman: Planet of the Capes

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rachel Brosnahan and David Corenswet in Superman

In some ways, Krypto is a bad dog. He doesn’t obey commands. He’s easily distracted, especially by flying squirrels. His affection borders on violence. “It’s more of a foster situation,” his caretaker says, quick to disclaim ownership of this mutant mutt with white fur, a red cape, and asymmetrical ears. Just because Krypto proves crucial in saving the world doesn’t make him any less embarrassing in public.

The spirit of Krypto—playful, excitable, anarchic—is one of the two lodestars guiding writer-director James Gunn in his reboot of Superman, the first feature he’s made for DC Studios since becoming co-chair of the company three years ago. The other animating principle on display is an invisible sense of duty—an obligation to reshape the Man of Steel into a wholesome and commercially pleasing figure. Gunn rose to prominence with his Guardians of the Galaxy pictures, which leavened the grandiose planet-saving of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with impishness and swagger. His challenge here is to retain those films’ sparky vivacity while still delivering a quality-controlled product with mass appeal—to merge comic with comic-book. Read More

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Thunderbolts: Avengers, Resembled

Jeremy BeckReviews
Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, and Hannah John-Kamen in Thunderbolts

Yelena Belova is bored. She’s just elegantly parachuted into a secret laboratory in Kuala Lumpur, swiftly dispatching a crew of anonymous guards before overpowering a hapless scientist so that she can bypass the facility’s facial-recognition security and retrieve… forget it, it doesn’t matter. The point is that she’s done this sort of thing before. To a layman, such strenuous effort may sound exciting, but for Yelena, it’s just another day at the superhero-adjacent office. She needs something fulfilling, something inspiring, something new.

Thunderbolts is the 36th(!) installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the key to its moderate success is its understanding of Yelena’s self-described ennui. The MCU is no longer the global box-office behemoth it once was, in part because there are only so many times self-important men in metallic suits and spandex can save the world from imminent catastrophe. Thunderbolts, directed by Jake Schreier from a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, is not a great movie; it remains overly reliant on franchise mythology, and its storytelling is a little choppy. But it’s an appealing sit—not just for its welcome lightness of tone, but for its willingness to shift away from standard-issue heroes and toward more colorful, esoteric characters. Specifically, it’s about a bunch of losers. Read More

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Venom, the Last Dance: Love at First Parasite

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Hardy in Venom: The Last Dance

Midway through Venom: The Last Dance, the titular symbiote—it’s no longer considered a parasite, given that it’s reached a state of internal harmony with its host, Eddie Brock—gets existential. “Sometimes, I wonder if we could have had a different kind of life,” the personified mass of black goo muses, its guttural growl sounding oddly muted, even gentle. Eddie and Venom are passengers in a van belonging to a dorky nuclear family, and the decidedly quaint behavior they witness—a symphony of dad jokes, stale snacks, and off-key sing-alongs—activates in them a wistful jealousy. If they weren’t always embroiled in superhero shenanigans, might they have a shot at actual happiness?

This is a nice little moment in a movie that is neither nice nor little. As audience members dutifully shuffling into the multiplex for our periodic dose of franchise medicine, we have been primed to anticipate a loud and hectic blockbuster, replete with noisy action and arcane comic-book references and garish special effects. For this reason, Venom’s gesture of self-reflection is purely hypothetical—a temporary respite before we return to the obligatory clashing and crashing. Yet I can’t help fixating on Venom’s fleeting rumination, because I confess to wondering the same thing. Instead of operating as a de rigueur superhero flick, might The Last Dance have subsisted as, well, something else? Maybe a wayward buddy comedy, or a heist thriller, or a road-trip jaunt? Read More

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Joker, Folie à Deux: The Smile of the Century

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie à Deux

For all its flaws, and it has plenty, Joker: Folie à Deux doesn’t commit the sin of lazily recycling the beats of its predecessor. The first Joker, which Todd Phillips directed to multiple Oscars and a massive box-office haul (not to mention an attendant and insufferable discourse), was a piece of faux provocation; it pretended to have interesting ideas, but it really just wallowed in its self-made sea of anger and unpleasantness. It would have been easy—and, if the opening-weekend receipts are anything to go by, commercially advisable—for Phillips to just run that material back, treating/subjecting viewers to another crude fantasy of toxic resentment and violent retribution. Instead, he and co-writer Scott Silver have radically reversed course, delivering a strange and off-kilter movie that’s part courtroom drama, part jukebox musical, and part twisted romance. (The subtitle refers to a shared delusion.) The incel goons who loved the first one must be livid.

For my part, I am less furious than frustrated. Conceptually speaking, Joker 2 is something of a coup, melding genres and skimming comic-book lore in the service of a fairly original and gratifyingly odd vision. So why is the whole thing such a wan and boring affair? Here is a movie where the hero fantasizes about hosting a late-night variety show with his beloved who threatens to shoot him on stage, then later dresses up as a clown before making his closing argument to a jury. That’s weird! Yet while the production should crackle with offbeat energy, Phillips’ execution is so lackluster that the whole enterprise comes off as limp and half-hearted. Read More

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