Superheroes

Birds of Prey: Harley’s Angels

Jeremy BeckReviews
Margot Robbie and friends in "Birds of Prey"

She just wants breakfast. In an era where noble superheroes and dastardly villains are constantly preoccupied with saving the world or burning it down, all that initially matters to Harley Quinn—the brilliant but unstable psychiatrist, and the former squeeze of a certain lunatic called The Joker—is that she be able to chow down on a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich in peace. Naturally, Birds of Prey, the hectic and uneven and largely diverting new addition to the dreary DC Extended Universe, strews plenty of obstacles in her path, continuously delaying her date with culinary bliss. But while Harley’s mania for locally sourced McMuffins (“Maybe it’s the Armenian arm hair,” she muses) is just one of countless random flourishes in the film, it’s also symbolic of the movie’s playful tone and plucky spirit. If you want tedious footage of solemn warriors grappling with the crushing existential weight of their powers, go watch Endgame. Birds of Prey is all about fun.

The DCEU has tried this before, most recently with Shazam!, a lightweight yarn whose cheerful silliness functioned as a welcome corrective to the relentless turgidity of leaden adventures like Batman v Superman. Shazam! was pleasant enough, and it featured a wonderfully limber comic performance from Zachary Levi, but it was also decidedly unmemorable, with flat humor and tiresome fight scenes. Birds of Prey, which was directed by Cathy Yan from a screenplay by Christina Hodson (Bumblebee), is a significant improvement on both fronts. It channels its flamboyant irreverence in ways that periodically resemble actual wit. It also happens to be a surprisingly good action movie. Read More

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Joker: Violence. Murder. Insanity. It’s a Riot!

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix in "Joker"

Borne on the waves of controversy and leaving a trail of smoggy fumes in its wake, Joker is arguably the movie of the year. Not the best movie of the year, mind you—not even close. But while the events of this strange and faintly maddening film take place in 1981, in the fictional realm of Gotham City, it is plainly designed to tap into the anxieties of the present moment, to Say Something significant, whether about art, commerce, politics, or society. It screams to be pored over, analyzed, debated; it’s a movie that also feels like the belabored setup for a podcast. Does it glorify incel culture, or is it a pointed critique of toxic masculinity? Is it a scabrous attack on the wealth gap, or an ardent defense of the established social order? Is it a violent fantasy, or a repudiation of violence?

In theory, these are interesting questions, but Joker, which was directed by Todd Phillips from a script he wrote with Scott Silver, has no interest in answering them. That may in itself sound bold; after all, some of the world’s greatest art is open to vigorous interpretation. Yet the great irony of this movie—the gag that surely has its maker imitating its antihero, cackling in high-pitched glee—is how meaningless it is. It feints at profundity, but it does not trouble itself with forming actual ideas. It is less a Rorschach test than a brightly colored finger painting. It splashes the frame with divisive topics—police brutality, mental illness, social unrest, powerful men, victimized women—and then passes off such haphazard daubing for the articulation of genuine themes. To the extent Joker has a philosophy of any interest, it is that it proclaims itself to be interesting. Read More

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Spider-Man: Far from Home: Still Neighborly, Even Across the Pond

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Holland in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has metastasized into an American institution, as sacred as apple pie or the Super Bowl or Beyoncé. Its supremacy is absolute. Still, following the seismic finale of Avengers: Endgame, it was fair to wonder if cinema’s most colossal franchise might have some difficulty regrouping, might fumble to develop a newfound sense of purpose. It takes all of 30 seconds for Spider-Man: Far from Home to obliterate that fear. Following a lightning-quick prologue set in Mexico, this jaunty new adventure opens with a cut-rate “In Memoriam” slideshow paying tribute to our fallen heroes. The crappy presentation of the images—the plastic look, the tacky music, the Getty Images watermark—proves to be intentional, as it’s quickly revealed that we’re watching a student newscast at Midtown High. And with that, in the span of just a few screenshots and some curmudgeonly narration from the immortally sour-faced Betty Brant (Angourie Rice), Far from Home dismisses any supposed continuity concerns—those who vanished in “The Blip” at the end of Avengers: Infinity War have barely aged since their return, those who remained are now five years older, please keep up—and also establishes its light, breezy tone.

This is no small feat, even if it’s one that the director, Jon Watts, also managed with Spider-Man: Homecoming, the prior Spidey installment whose first main scene brilliantly reimagined the famous airport fight from Captain America: Civil War as glimpsed through the chintzy, vertical iPhone camera of an anxious teenager. Liberated from the laborious world-building that encumbers so many comic-book crossovers, Watts and his writers (Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers) prove agile with both atmosphere and exposition. Sure, there are a few scenes where warriors congregate in dimly lit clandestine bases and worriedly chat about the latest catastrophic threat to the human race, but even allowing for these bits of superhero scheming, Far from Home’s primary concern is its characters. Read More

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Dark Phoenix: Rise from the Ashes, or Just Burn It Down?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophie Turner as Jean Grey in "Dark Phoenix"

To paraphrase Patrick McGoohan’s line from Braveheart, the trouble with superhero movies is that they’re full of superheroes. On the flat pages of comic books, readers can rely on their imagination, translating two-dimensional splash panels into vibrant, kinetic action in their mind’s eye. But on film, the crude literalism of the screen requires directors to convey often ambiguous powers—psychic energy, beams of light, metaphysical toil—in blunt cinematic language. The result tends to be a strange sensation of detachment, as though you’re watching stage actors pantomime their performances in an early rehearsal, knowing that the production flourishes will be locked in by opening night.

Jean Grey, whose malevolent alter ego gives the film Dark Phoenix its name, presents an especially formidable challenge in this regard. She wields her mutant abilities, which in the comic-book lexicon carry fancy terms like astral projection and telekinesis, not via any visible external method but through internal concentration. She can practically rip the world apart with her mind, but how do you articulate that process with any spatial coherence or physical weight? Read More

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Avengers: Endgame: Marching to the End, and Back to the Beginning

Jeremy BeckReviews
Heroes assemble in "Avengers: Endgame".

In one of the very first scenes (spoiler alert!) in Avengers: Endgame, Tony Stark—marooned in deep space, with hope and oxygen levels dwindling—beams out an interstellar valediction that doubles as a cinematic prophecy. “This is going to be one hell of a tearjerker,” declares the playboy inventor who more than a decade ago donned a metallic suit and launched the mother of all franchises. Setting aside the industrialist’s dire circumstances, the supposed catalyst for those tears is right there in the title. After 11 years, 21 movies, dozens of costumed characters, and billions in box-office grosses, Endgame is designed to bring the Marvel Cinematic Universe to a close.

Whether this in fact brings tears to your eyes is a matter of personal taste, but what cannot be denied is the enormity of this enterprise. Endgame, again directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, is an absolutely massive movie, so full of stuff—fights and flights, flash-forwards and leaps backward, deaths and resurrections, callbacks and cul-de-sacs—that its three-hour runtime seems almost slender. It may not be the best superhero movie ever made—in fact, I’d wager Tony’s conspicuously placed Audi against it—but it is unquestionably the biggest. Read More

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