Superheroes

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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Deadpool & Wolverine: Logan’s Pun

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in Deadpool & Wolverine

Superhero movies invariably deal with threats to the world, but what’s really in peril in Deadpool & Wolverine is the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself. “Welcome to the MCU, by the way. You’re joining at a bit of a low point,” Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) says to Logan (Hugh Jackman), implicitly bemoaning the underwhelming grosses of recent efforts like The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. As a costumed savior, Wade’s track record is spotty—his application was rejected by both the Avengers and the X-Men—but as a box-office analyst, his assessment is hard to argue with. That’s why his mission in his newest picture is less cosmic than commercial: He must salvage the MCU’s viability as an ongoing franchise, even as he constantly mocks its quality and lampoons its conventions.

And I do mean constantly. Scarcely a scene passes in Deadpool & Wolverine in which Wade, whether bobbing his head in his trademark red mask or turning to the camera with his heavily burned face, doesn’t deliver a knowing quip concerning behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Why, after having seemingly retired the character in Logan, is Jackman returning to play everyone’s favorite clawed mutant? “A big bag of Marvel cash.” Why did the X-Force bite the dust in Deadpool 2? “The police say gravity, but just between you and me, they didn’t test well in the focus group.” What is Wade’s conception of his own superheroic destiny? “I’m Marvel Jesus… suck it, Fox!” (After that last one, he literally headbutts the camera.) Forget the comic-book brand immortalized by Stan Lee; the MCU is now the Meta Cinematic Universe. Read More

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The Marvels: O Captain, Why Captain

Jeremy BeckReviews
Iman Vellani, Brie Larson, and Teyonah Parris in The Marvels

The title of The Marvels doesn’t appear on screen until the end, but it’s announced verbally midway through, during a cutesy scene where the three main characters debate potential nicknames for their improbable team-up. It’s easy to condemn such dialogue as unduly meta, but the problem with The Marvels isn’t the Marvels; it’s Marvel, singular. On its own terms, this movie exhibits its fair share of appealing qualities: charming actors, playful humor, a generally buoyant tone. But it can’t really exist on its own terms—not when it’s constantly being pulled into the yawning black hole that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

This is partly a matter of laborious franchise integration. Multiplex attendees have long since accepted the term “threequel,” but logistically speaking, The Marvels is essentially a triple-sequel, providing a conjoined follow-up for its three disparate members. Most obviously, it operates as a successor to Captain Marvel, the 2019 smash hit that introduced Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) as the final piece of the superhero puzzle before the studio delivered the ultimate crossover event with Avengers: Endgame. That behemoth may have concluded with a sense of nominal finality, but while it said goodbye to several of the series’ biggest stars (most notably Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Chris Evans’ Captain America), it hardly turned off the corporation’s lights; there have since been eleven additional feature installments, along with quite a few TV series—two of which factor in here. WandaVision introduced Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), the daughter of Carol’s old friend Maria (who also appeared in Captain Marvel, which actually took place in the ’90s and, look, just go with it); Monica acquired her own superpowers when she waltzed through the force field that was trapping Wanda Maximoff in the fabricated town of Westview, and she now serves as a galactic sentry for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). And then there is Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), the New Jersey teenager who morphed into Ms. Marvel on the show of the same name, and who has long nurtured a celebrity crush on one Captain Marvel. Read More

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Blue Beetle: Say No to Bugs

Jeremy BeckReviews
Xolo Maridueña in Blue Beetle

It feels reductive to label Blue Beetle “the Latinx superhero movie.” But reduction is now the superhero industrial complex’s specialty. Marvel and DC are technically competitors, but their shared universes have operated in tandem, systematically shrinking the field of blockbuster cinema into a carefully cultivated, self-sustaining formula. The studios haven’t wholly eradicated visual imagination or provocative storytelling—search for a well-made comic-book production, and you need only flip the calendar back three months—but those qualities are now secondary, subservient to the commercial imperatives of franchise continuity and fan service. Artistic personality is no longer a goal, just a potential bonus.

So yes, Blue Beetle is the Latinx superhero movie. And it’s not awful! Contrary to DC’s corporate blueprint, its main attraction isn’t its athletic showmanship, its flashy special effects, or its obligatory world-building. (Superman and the Flash, along with their fictional cities of residence, are notably name-checked, as though the script is contractually preserving the right to let its characters play with the big boys in a future sequel.) It is instead the Reyes family, a tight-knit clan of Mexican-Americans who live in a boisterous Texas enclave within the (similarly fictional) Palmera City. Bustling with activity and affection, the Reyeses are rich in love and poor in everything else. When prodigal son Jaime (Xolo Maridueña), a recent college graduate (“How do I look?” “Like you’re six figures in debt”), returns home in ostensible triumph, he encounters a parade of terrible happenings: He’s at risk of losing his ancestral house (“The landlord tripled the rent”), his father’s long-running body shop is defunct, and his now-unemployed dad (Damián Alcázar) recently suffered a small heart attack. Read More

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