REVIEWS IN BRIEF: MARCH 2016

Being a collection of capsule reviews of some of the films released in 2016, watched by the blogger of late

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Deadpool (Miller, 2016)

The gap between what a film wants to be and what a film is doesn't get much finer than it does with Deadpool, which I suppose makes it a success? It's hard to imagine a film less prone to leaving audiences disappointed: the thing you walk into it expecting it to be is completely and in all ways the thing that it is. This can be taken as both a good thing and a bad thing.

The most commercially-successful film based on a Marvel superhero to be released by 20th Century Fox to date (handily eclipsing the entire X-Men franchise to which it is adjacent, even adjusting for inflation), Deadpool adopts a non-stop, fourth wall-breaking attitude to the entire genre of superhero movies that is, if nothing else, a refreshing change. Mind you, it's in absolutely no way, shape, or form a meaningful challenge to that genre, and I'm fairly sure it's not gunning to be - Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick's screenplay happily mocks itself, the X-Men movies, star Ryan Reynold's notoriously ill-fated starring role in DC's stillborn Green Lantern, and Marvel/Disney's quatrillion-dollar Avengers universe (but only poking in the most subtle way at Reynold's previous, officially non-canon spin at playing the character of Wade "Deadpool" Wilson, in the dreary X-Men Origins: Wolverine), but at the same time it oh-so-neatly lays the grounds not just for its own sequel, but for a new phase of movies in the X-Men universe, which is currently set to run out after this summer's contract-fulfilling X-Men: Apocalypse. Deadpool can make fun of the lazy tropes and bloodlessly commercial attitude of comic book cinema all it likes; it's still, ultimately, contributing to them, functioning as a completely straightforward origin story built around a vigorously R-rated, but otherwise completely sincere romantic plot.

As my regular readers are fully aware, there's not better way to irritate me than to play the "because we know that we're making a stupid movie, it's no longer stupid" card, and Deadpool does itself no favors by showcasing a one-note sense of humor: Deadpool says something sexually vulgar to embarrass bad guys, or sometimes he just says "fuck". The word "fuck" is funny, right? We're all 12 years old? And cursing in incongruous settings is bracing and hilarious?

The saving grace of Deadpool is that, in fact, it kind of is. Comic book movies have become so ossified in their approach of late (is it humorless and ugly? Warner Bros. released it. Is it shiny, quippy, and totally devoid of a personality or any sense of internal stakes? Disney released it. Does it feature people doing nothing while waiting for Hugh Jackman to deliver his lines? Fox released it), that anything to shake things up is welcome, and what the hell, florid vulgarity will suit as well as anything else. Reynolds, thankfully, is tremendously good at it, shifting from high-pitched sarcasm to tender (albeit smutty) humanity with very little effort, though God knows what proportion of "his" performance, almost entirely behind a full-body suit, is CGI or stuntmen. And weirdly, the Deadpool mask is one of the most enjoyable expressive pieces of costuming I've ever seen in a superhero movie, doing the whole "solid white eyes" thing while also building in enough flexibility that the character can act with his face, just like they do in actual comic books.

I did laugh, neither often nor deep; but the vivaciousness of the crudity, and the pitch-perfect befuddled responses by cameoing X-Man Colossus (played by an array of mo-cap artists and visual effects techs, but voice actor Stefan Kapičić is the one who shows up in the credits), give the film a good cheer that works well enough for a first-quarter release. Am I looking forward to more adventures with Reynolds's Deadpool? Eh. More than I am to a lot of films starring a lot of superheroes, at least. It's trashy, harmless fun, and that's better than nothing. Still, the fact that this will end its run as the highest-grossing comic book adaptation in history not starring Batman, Iron Man, or Spider-Man is totally baffling.

6/10

Reviews in this series
X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Hood, 2009)
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)
The Wolverine (Mangold, 2013)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
Deadpool (Miller, 2016)
X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer, 2016)

Other films in this series, yet to be reviewed
X-Men (Singer, 2000)
X2 (Singer, 2003)

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Ride Along 2 (Story, 2016)

You've got to love the purity of the sequelling that's happening in Ride Along 2, which re-eams director Tim Story with ubiquitous comic imp Kevin Hart and suitably glowering Ice Cube (who has perhaps concluded that the best way to fuck tha police is to portray them as slapstick clowns). What people loved about the hugely successful Ride Along, at the time the biggest wide release in January history, was the interplay between the manic Ben Barber (Hart) and the snarling James Payton (Ice Cube) as, respectively, a wannabe cop and his temporary partner, a whip-smart Atlanta detective, already feuding on account of Ben's romantic relationship with James's sister. So why not just re-run all of that, even if Ride Along resolved pretty much every one of those points? No reason the sequel couldn't just rush to fill the gap before Ben and Angela (Tika Sumpter) got married, and while Ben was still a probationary newbie.

No reason at all, except that Ride Along 2 thus comes across with a powerfully musty, stale smell, a patent sense that we haven't seen "basically" this - we've seen exactly this. For all that we might like to complain about the omnipresence of unimaginative sequels, such a beat-for-beat retread is actually rare; this is how they used to do sequels in the '80s, like, and given that the Ride Alongs are transparent riffs on the action-comedy buddy cop pictures of that decade, I have to admit that it generally fits. It doesn't make it any more exciting to watch, particularly since the first movie was already more vaguely amusing than particularly great or memorable.

Still, that film wasn't without its pleasures, and the sequel at least manages to avoid fucking them up: Hart and Ice Cube still have terrific chemistry, with Hart in particular working better with this particular scene partner than he has with anybody else in his well-stuffed career. And for his part, Ice Cube is actually quite a bit looser and more prone to smiling and poking at the character, who this time gets the most vestigial shape of a romantic plotline in the form of a tough-as-nails Miami cop played by Olivia Munn. Leftovers or not, it reheats well (there's a deliberately bad joke on "brothers-in-law" that, bad person as I am, made me giggle out loud every time it came up).

It's still a wholly generic and predictable cop movie, not just in its plot but down to the tiniest details of its aesthetic - with Ben and James having to trek down to Miami this time around, the filmmakers are so free of shame as to throw Gloria Estefan's 31-year-old "Conga" on the soundtrack, which is such a colossally unacceptable decision that I actually admire the hell out of them for doing it. Actually, I think I could have saved myself some time writing if I'd frontloaded that: Ride Along 2 is a Kevin Hart movie set in Miami, with "Conga" on the soundtrack. You now know everything.

5/10

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Rams (Hákonarson, 2015)

I would say, "once you've seen one Icelandic domestic comedy-drama, you've seen 'em all", but perhaps that's making very wrong assumptions about the English-speaking cinephile's consumption habits. Still, the point stands. Grímur Hákonarson's Rams, winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, has a great many things about it that are more than worthy of the utmost praise. None of them, however, are the unexpected thing, and the only point at which the film veers into the unpredictable is with a, well, predictably mordant European Art Film™ ending, the kind that catches you off guard more because it is so damned anxious to be anti-commercial than because it necessarily follows.

For all that, let's accentuate the positive: I thoroughly enjoyed Rams, maybe even more than I enjoyed last year's Icelandic dramedy coming off a hot film fest run, Of Horses and Men. It's less singular, but its one-track focus arguably gives it more insight. The setting is a nearly hermetically-sealed valley populated chiefly by sheep ranchers; the film's opening sequence gives us a nice little snapshot of how these people live and thrive in their remote, self-perpetuating enclave, with prizes being given out for the year's best shepherding among a half-dozen people who all clearly know each other, in what appears to be the only room in what appears to be the only bar necessary for the community. It's dry, whimsical, and completely heartfelt - a glimpse into the hearts and minds of Colorful Locals that leaves us emotionally invested in the community by the 10-minute mark.

The plot itself hinges on a pair of brothers and next-door neighbors, Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson), who have steadily nursed an unspeaking hate for the last 40 years; they are forcibly made allies when a case of scrapie breaks out in the valley, which means that in short order, every single ram and sheep in that very close-knit, self-sustaining community must be destroyed. As the oldest and most cantankerous inhabitants of the valley, Gummi and Kiddi are the most angered by this change, and uncomfortably band together to resist it however they might.

Rams sure does look like a comedy; it sure isn't one. Besides its arguably overdetermined ending, the most memorable pieces of it are the most sorrowful: the sense of crushing gravity that comes about when one of the characters prepares to kill his sheep as a sign of his love and respect for the animals, a slow-pacd and ritualistic scene that leaves the physical violence entirely offscreen, focusing all its attention on the emotional violence. The quirkiness that seems omnipresent in much of the film falls away to reveal something hard and brutally meaningful in moments like those, deftly played by the actors in a highly limited, minimal way that's focused on action and behavior, almost Hemingway-like in their attention to surfaces, which means that the few open expressions of feeling are far more potent than they could be. There's nothing as-such "fresh" about anything here, but it's a beautifully well-executed variant on a stock form.

8/10

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Gods of Egypt (Proyas, 2016)

There is a critical conceit that I'm sure you've all bumped into, where certain filmmakers get a number of "freebies" - at one point in their career, they made a single film so impressive that the critic in question has decided that they get to make several bad films before we give up on them. As recently as a week ago, I'd have said that on the strength of the glorious Dark City, had earned enough credit that he would never end up running out of freebies, and I don't care that he's only made crap since then. Then I saw Gods of Egypt, and it turns out I was wrong, and Proyas has burned through every molecule of goodwill I had reserved for him - and then some.

Before I carry that line of thought any further, a caveat; Gods of Egypt is tremendously entertaining, and completely worthy of your time. It's just that it's not good. Ack, no; not "just" not good. It is titanically not good. It is not good in the kind of once-a-year way where for reasons that are totally unclear, a studio took a look at a screenplay that was plainly not going to result in a film with the tiniest chance of appealing to any realistic audience, and said "yep, we want to be in the business of making that." And then instead of giving it a skimpy little B-picture budget, they dump piles of money on, just piles. The film's design resembles a cross between a terrible fighting game based on Chariots of the Gods and an aneurysm, but by Christ they spent the money to make that look as sleek as is was ever going to.

Gods of Egypt neatly sidesteps the whitewashing controversy that's been brewing since last fall by taking place in a setting that has as much in common with any culture that has ever occupied the Nile valley as it does with the merry old land of Oz. Once upon a time, giant people about twice the size of normal humans, except for the approximately 90% of shots in the film that ignore or forget about that fact, lived millennium-long lives and ruled as gods a population of people of every skin color, shape, and background imaginable, as long as they speak with BBC English accents. The god Osiris (Bryan Brown) is about to pass the kingship of Egypt to his dilettante son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), but Osiris's brother Set (Gerard Butler) has become well and truly pissed off at being stuck as the rule of the vast, lifeless desert all these hundred years, ever since the brother's immortal father Ra (Geoffrey Rush) assigned them those roles. So he takes over Egypt, blinds and banished Horus, and busies himself with a plan to destroy the universe. Horus, crabby and petulant, teams up with deeply irreverent thief Bek (Brenton Thwaites) to go on a fetch quest and set things right.

The gods, meanwhile, can turn themselves into giant fucking chrome animals, like characters in an overclocked '80s cartoon, and also Ra flies a spaceship and has a magic staff that shoots the sun at people. Assassins wielding snakes the size of city blocks come along, there are pyramids with death traps that are dead ringers for the levels in a 3-D Mario game, and the whole thing is quite arbitrary, inconsequential, and very much like wandering into watching somebody playing a video game that they don't understand, so what the hell are you supposed to do about it? Laugh like an infant playing with his parents' keys, if you're me; this is at any rate the most fearlessly gaudy bad movie in ages, a bombardment of inexplicable style directed in the chaotic mold of Uwe Boll, or Roland Emmerich in his most manic phases. Butler tries to treat this as a dead-serious matter and fails hilariously; Rush treats it seriously and actually creates a weird bubble of Shakespearean tragedy around himself; Coster-Waldau) simply slums around drunkenly, and gets almost the best of it. The very best, beyond a doubt, is Chadwick Boseman, making a thoroughly fucking random swerve from playing every historically prominent African-American in history to decide that since this is all camp, the only way to avoid looking like a twerp is to play Thoth, the god of knowledge, as a drag queen. It's the most successfully inspired weird choice in a boundlessly demented film.

2/10