Superheroes

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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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: The Tortoises and the Flair

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

The success of the Spider-Verse pictures has ushered in a new style of animation that doesn’t yet have a name. Where the computerized creations of Pixar and its ilk exhibit hyper-realistic detail and punctilious precision, this burgeoning technique is playfully imperfect and openly fantastical. Rather than attempting to mimic the look of live-action cinema, it leans into its artifice, emphasizing its cartoonish quality through blurred edges, exaggerated features, and chaotic motion. The goal is to approximate the childhood experience of reading a comic book—not so much the literal sense of integrating thought bubbles and splash panels, but the more youthful wonderment of entering a world of obvious invention and boundless possibility.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the latest entrant in this subgenre, and its aesthetic is successful insofar as it’s notable. The movie looks like… well, it looks like something. It’s nowhere near as cleverly designed or rapturously conceived as Across the Spider-Verse; its colors can be muddy, and its action sequences are generally incoherent. But it at least possesses a visual identity—a degree of pictorial flair—that distinguishes it from other animated productions aimed toward younger audiences. It has character. Read More

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From the Vault: Hulk, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews
Eric Bana in Hulk

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

The Hulk is perhaps the first comic-book adaptation that could ever be labeled pretentious. What we have here is not your run-of-the-mill, formulaic action flick in which exposition takes a back seat to explosion – far from it. Instead, acclaimed director Ang Lee brings us a film that generally forgoes action, alternatively attempting to present a more stylish, sophisticated picture. He endeavors mightily to create complex characters and place them in an emotionally involving story. It’s an admirable effort, and it’s encouraging that Lee refuses to be bound by the usual confines of the genre. But he fails. And when someone with the cinematic stature of Ang Lee fails, he fails hard.

The problem with The Hulk is that it lacks a center. There is no focal point, no pivot upon which we can focus our attentions and concerns. Lee is so fixated on style and uniqueness that he overlooks his characters, none of whom is nearly as well-developed as he pretends. Thus, as the machinations of the storyline unfold, we are not intrigued but isolated, hopelessly disconnected from the film’s events. This, combined with a plodding pace, render the movie a lackluster journey that struggles just to keep our interest. Read More

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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: What a Spangled Web We Weave

Jeremy BeckReviews
Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

It’s cinematic law that sequels need to be bigger, which presents a daunting challenge for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Its predecessor, the spry and snazzy Into the Spider-Verse, was awfully big to begin with, taking a familiar superhero origin story—this one centering on Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), an affable Brooklyn teenager who receives that famous radioactive insect bite—and then bombarding the screen with many more Spider-Men (well, actually Spider-People… OK, technically Spider-Animals) who arrived from different realms in the multiverse. It was a whole lot of movie, as noteworthy for its energetic style—busy, boisterous animation that evoked the splash panels of comic books without devolving into pastiche—as for its hectic, cluttered narrative. How could a follow-up one-up such vibrant maximalism?

Quite cleverly, as it turns out. Fueled by a powerful cocktail of joy and ambition, Across the Spider-Verse steers into the multiversal skid, embracing its own storytelling paradoxes with delirious abandon. It’s a dizzying and at times exhausting movie, and it doesn’t entirely evade the trap of saturation that foils many blockbusters; as the latter Avengers pictures proved, more superheroes doesn’t always equate to more fun. But the filmmakers here—the credited directors are Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers (from Soul), and Justin K. Thompson, while the screenwriters are Dave Callaham and the ubiquitous team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (makers of The LEGO Movie)—have located the sweet spot between playfulness and gravity. It isn’t that Across the Spider-Verse refuses to take itself seriously; it’s that it seriously commits to itself as a work of childlike invention and artistic imagination. Read More

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Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3: Journey to the Center of the Mirth

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldaña in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3

James Gunn is best known for his eclectic needle drops, but he also has a visual signature: the Right Stuff-style shot of a troop of swaggering warriors striding forward in slow motion as a pop song blares on the soundtrack. He delivers that image twice in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, and while the second is more conventionally satisfying—the final prelude to some long-awaited interstellar ass-kicking—the first is more memorable. It’s noteworthy in part because the characters aren’t walking but floating, having just leapt from a spacecraft onto a bulbous planet (kindly shelve your astrophysical fact-checks), but what’s really striking is that each hero is outfitted in a bulky suit of a different bright color. There’s a simple beauty to the image, an eye-catching quality that’s rare for the Marvel Cinematic Universe—a cultural behemoth which, for all its commercial savvy and box-office supremacy, isn’t exactly a pioneer in terms of visual innovation. In this context, it’s oddly gratifying to be watching a superhero movie that actually cares what it looks like.

Let’s not pretend that Guardians 3 is some sort of aesthetic revelation. It’s still an MCU flick, which means it traffics heavily in green-screened locations, weightless special effects, and haphazard streams of light and fire. When an unknown gold-skinned invader (Will Poulter) zooms through the atmosphere and crashes into the chest of Rocket—the computer-generated mutant raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper, and again embodied on set by the director’s brother, Sean Gunn—the impact is as forceful as that of a coder clacking away at their keyboard. But the value of James Gunn—the canny maneuver that helps distinguish the Guardians pictures from their costumed brethren—is his knack for minimizing the genre’s inherent drawbacks (sloppy action, dull world-building) while emphasizing his own vibrant strengths (sharp dialogue, giddy imagination). Sure, Volume 3 is yet another chaotic adventure involving a desperate rescue mission, a precious MacGuffin, and a megalomaniacal villain. But mostly, it’s a family vacation comedy. Read More

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