X-Men

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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Deadpool 2: Lacking in Wisdom, But Still Cracking Wise

Jeremy BeckReviews
Zazie Beetz, Ryan Reynolds, and Terry Crews in "Deadpool 2"

The dirty little secret of Deadpool was that, for all its supposed subversiveness—the meta commentary, the vulgar jokes, the extreme gore and relentless profanity—it largely proceeded as a straightforward superhero origin story. So it’s only logical that Deadpool 2 abides by the Law of the Sequel, doubling down on the original’s purported irreverence while also methodically expanding the franchise’s universe and setting the stage for further installments to come. If you deemed the first Deadpool to be an anarchic laugh riot, you’ll likely be sated by this follow-up’s well-stocked buffet of ad-lidded one-liners and bloody carnage. And if, like a certain humorless critic, you found the original to be a mildly clever, philosophically vacant sketch concept that quickly wore out its welcome, well, at least you still get to spend a few hours hanging out with Ryan Reynolds.

Reprising his role as Wade Wilson, the potty-mouthed assassin with a red leotard and a severely burned face, Reynolds receives a co-writing credit this time around (shared with Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who scripted the first film), suggesting that the affable actor improvised acre-sized swaths of his dialogue. (In fact, given that Wade spends most of his time wearing a head-to-chin mask, it’s fair to wonder if Reynolds just muttered “insert wisecrack here” while on set, then looped in his gag of choice during post-production.) Here he favors a high-volume approach that seems rooted in the ZAZ school of comedy, the notion that if you keep the jokes flying fast enough, you’ll land enough punches to keep the audience in stitches. And he does land his fair share; apologizing to his girlfriend for arriving home late, Wade explains, “I was fighting a caped badass, but then we discovered that his mom is named Martha too.” Read More

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Logan: For Ailing Hero, a Road Trip and a Reckoning

Jeremy BeckReviews
Hugh Jackman returns one last time as the Wolverine in "Logan"

The most valid criticism of Marvel movies is that they’re all the same. That’s an exaggeration, certainly, but there’s an undeniable whiff of formula that pervades the MCU, a familiarity that sometimes slips into complacency. The oversized casts, the pithy banter, the FX-laden fight scenes, the mundane aesthetic, the cameos and the fan service and the post-credits stingers—all of these combine to form a brand that, while powerful and successful, threatens innovation and disdains originality. (My favorite MCU entry, Guardians of the Galaxy, is delightful in part because it is only tenuously connected to its eponymous universe.) Some of the individual titles are good, others are bad, but few even try to be great.

Logan, the seventh movie to feature Hugh Jackman as the Wolverine (ninth if you count his single-scene appearances in X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Apocalypse), is not a great movie. Its villains are bland, its action sequences are mediocre, and its pacing is occasionally sluggish. These are flaws that would cripple most comic-book movies. But Logan, which was directed by James Mangold from a script he wrote with Scott Frank and Michael Green, is not most comic-book movies. A welcome outlier in a cinematic landscape of alarming uniformity, it is decidedly unlike its peers: bold, thoughtful, and surprisingly powerful. Above all, it is distinctive. Read More

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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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Deadpool: A Wisecracking Superhero Takes Aim at Bad Guys, and a Genre

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Reynolds as a smartass superhero in "Deadpool"

There’s truth in advertising, and then there are the opening credits to Deadpool. Soundtracked to Juice Newton’s ’80s ballad “Angel of the Morning”, the camera pans and pulls slowly through a frozen still of interrupted carnage, and amid the suspended bullets and geysers of spurting blood, there peeks out a People Magazine cover. In that 2010 issue, People named Ryan Reynolds the sexiest man alive, so this would seem to be an opportune time for the title sequence to announce Reynolds’s presence in this madcap meta movie. Instead, the credits read, “Starring: God’s Perfect Idiot,” followed by other trivializing labels that summarize the remaining cast members: “a hot chick,” “a British villain,” “the comic relief,” “a CGI character.” The sequence concludes by informing us that Deadpool was produced by “asshats”, written by “the real heroes here”, and directed by “an overpaid tool”.

Is this anarchically funny or pitifully defensive? Who says it can’t be both? An ultraviolent superhero origin story filtered through the self-aware parody of send-ups like 21 Jump Street, Deadpool seeks to eviscerate the formula that pervades the Marvel Cinematic Universe while simultaneously hewing to that very template. (For the record, Deadpool is a Marvel production but is not formally associated with the MCU.) This means that it comes wrapped in a shield of protective irony that makes it virtually impervious to criticism. That is, how do you judge a pointless comic-book movie that so clearly knows it’s a pointless comic-book movie? Many MCU pictures are like schoolyard bullies, browbeating their mass audiences into submission through brute force. Deadpool is more like the class clown; accuse it of being stupid, and it’s likely to retort, “I know you are, but what am I?” Read More

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