The Farewell Tour

We have discussed in the past the topic of the Optimum Interval Before Sequel. My personal feeling is that anything less than about two years is too short, while thirty-six years is definitely too long (though Tom Cruise may disagree with me, of course). It’s been six years since the appearance of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, which isn’t an inordinate gap, but it’s still hard to shake the feeling that this film has somehow missed its moment. There are good reasons for this, of course: Gunn himself got fired after being twitter-mined and went off to make The Suicide Squad for DC’s movie wing before being rehired to make the film after all, and then there was the awkward business of that pandemic which put a cramp in everyone’s style that probably still hasn’t worked itself completely out.

Even so, Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3  has the definite sense of being one last hurrah and a chance to tie up some loose ends before Marvel move on from this particular set of characters: many of the actors have said they probably won’t be reprising their roles, while Gunn himself is off to mastermind the next phase of the rival DC Comics movie franchise (has no-one at Warner Brothers seen Brightburn…?). It certainly doesn’t seem to have any connection to the current meta-plot which Marvel have been quietly inserting into some of their recent movies.

Not that the previous meta-plot doesn’t have a beearing on the story, of course. The film opens with the Guardians of the Galaxy settling into their new base, a giant severed bonce floating in deep space (which if nothing else allows Gunn to include the line of dialogue ‘Kill everyone in that dead god’s head!’ at one point). But all is not well, as team leader Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) has gone into a bit of a slump after the love of his life (Zoe Saldana painted green) was killed in her adoptive father’s attempt to reshape the universe, and replaced by a younger version from an alternate timeline with no memory of him or any of the others on the team. Discussions amongst his friends on how to get him perked up again are predictably chaotic and unproductive. (Also back as part of the ensemble are Dave Bautista, Pom Klementieff, Karen Gillan and Vin Diesel – playing, as before, a tree.)

A more serious problem rears its head when the team comes under attack by Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), who in the comics is the perfect synthetic life form with mystical powers, but here is a sort of omnipotent golden cosmic doofus. It turns out he’s here for Rocket, the uplifted raccoon, as he is a servant of Rocket’s original creator. This proves to be the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), who has form in the creation and augmentation of new forms of life. But why does the High Evolutionary want the raccoon back after all this time, and how are the team going to track him down?

So, yes, another movie, another well-nigh omnipotent megalomaniac to contend with. The High Evolutionary’s particular schtick is the creation of servants out of lower forms of life (the character’s debt to The Island of Dr Moreau is perhaps acknowledged in the fact the comic version’s real name is Herbert) and some of the new film’s most memorable sequences are the flashbacks to Rocket’s youth as a lab experiment: some of these are grotesque, bordering on the grisly. Nevertheless, as villains go, he feels like someone we’ve seen before perhaps a few times too often.

On the other hand, some things never get tired, and one of them is Gunn’s talent for adding offbeat black comedy to cosmic superhero fantasy. The Guardians’ inability to actually work together very effectively most of the time is a big component of what makes these films such fun, and the action frequently grinds to a halt while the ensemble bicker at great length about how to operate their space-suit radios or what the proper use for a sofa is. This is the sort of thing which has made these films so beloved, even within the Marvel canon. It’s certainly not Gunn’s mastery of plot structure, although to be fair this one does feel like it’s flailing around less than most of his films: nevertheless, neither of Gunn’s scripts has the same robustness as the one he co-wrote with Nicole Perlman for the first in the series.

If you were to come up to me, grab me firmly by the lapels, and shout in my face that this is just another piece of corporate Marvel product which sticks to the same formula as most of the thirty-one Marvel Studios films which have preceded it to the screen, my response would probably be ‘Please let go of my lapels.’ And then, ‘Well, you may have a point.’ Personally, I don’t necessarily have a problem with a film being formulaic, as long as it’s a good formula, and I happen to enjoy the one that Marvel have cooked up – I know they’ve had a bit of a post-pandemic, post-Endgame wobble, but their films are usually still smart, funny, pleasing to look at and generally well-played and well-directed. Admittedly, some of the new characters they drop in are obscure even to someone with an attic full of comics (Sylvester Stallone has a cameo as someone called Starhawk) and only seem to be present to set up future instalments (Will Poulter gives a fun performance as Adam Warlock, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a burning reason for him to be in the film), but this is par for the course, really.

What does make this film a bit distinctive within the canon, apart from all the space weirdness, is the genuine sense of warmth and camaraderie between the main characters. They are fun to spend time with, as well as inevitably bringing back fond memories of some of the previous films they’ve appeared in. The film does have real heart and soul to it – the tone is a bit darker than in previous episodes, as the Guardians begin to contemplate moving on from their somewhat irresponsible lifestyle and figuring out what their different places in the universe are. Guardians 3 gets much closer to being moving and poignant than I would ever have thought possible, which is a sign of real growth in James Gunn as a writer and director. (Maybe those upcoming DC movies really could be something special.) This is a welcome additional facet to what was already a terrifically entertaining popcorn blockbuster.

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Extinction Event

Studio blockbusters these days have such massive resources behind them that it is very rare for them to be technically substandard in any appreciable way: art direction, production design, sound, special effects, and cinematography, all of them are usually no worse than extremely competent, and frequently excellent. So if you go to see one of these films you can at least be assured it will be pretty to look at and listen to. For this not to be the case would be about as surprising as the film missing a major sequence simply because they forgot to switch the camera on.

However, because this has become so standard, it follows that achievement in these areas is not in and of itself grounds to praise a movie, unless it really does feature something exceptional. All that this technical accomplishment has done is throw into sharp relief which films have good scripts and directors, and which are – not to put too fine a point on it – a load of old nonsense assembled by a hack. This brings us to Jurassic World: Dominion, directed by Colin Trevorrow. (This looks very much like a fridge title, like you couldn’t have guessed.)

For once the film takes pity on the casual filmgoer and opens with a brief recap of the state of play following the end of the last installment: following the escape of a dozen or so dinosaurs from a mansion somewhere in North America, four years later the prehistoric beasties have spread worldwide, multiplied seemingly like crazy, and are now a major pest, threatening to cause an ecological collapse. (If you think this doesn’t particularly make sense, well, what can I say, you’re right.)

What’s really striking is how little this situation informs most of the plot of the rest of the film, which has nothing to do with this clash of wildlife from different eras (unless you count the interactions of the multi-generational cast). The first main plot thread instead concerns tough former dinosaur trainer Duke Thundervest (Chris Pratt), who is still very reliant on his ability to calm down any dinosaur just by holding up his hand, and his wife Brenda Bigeyes (Bryce Dallas Howard) [Note to self – double-check character names before submitting final copy]. They have retired to the wilderness to raise their adopted teenage clone (Isabella Sermon) and are also occasionally looked in upon by one of Duke’s pet velociraptors, which has been through a sort of virgin birth experience. Bad guys working for an Evil Corporation kidnap both the clone and the baby velociraptor, which makes Duke and Brenda both cross and sad.

Meanwhile, and you may well be noting that dinosaurs do seem to be a bit tangential to everything that’s happening, giant locusts are threatening to devastate the world’s food supply – or at least those parts of it not controlled by the same Evil Corporation from the other plotline. Working the case is Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and to help her, in a strikingly vague and general way, she recruits her old boyfriend Alan Grant (Sam Neill). We get another take on that scene where a character repeatedly says ‘I’m done, I’m finished with all that’ before immediately going off on one more adventure, which in this case also includes one of those moments where two characters call each other by their full names just for the audience’s benefit (‘Ellie Sattler!’ cries Alan Grant. ‘Alan Grant!’ cries Ellie Sattler).

Grant and Sattler are knocking on a bit for blockbuster movie characters, but they date back to the original 1993 Jurassic Park and so they have been allowed in for reasons of pure nostalgia. Sure enough, when they fly off to the Evil Corporation’s hide-out, it is with the help of their old acquaintance Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who is one of the boffins in residence there. Needless to say, Duke and Brenda are heading in the same direction, but can there be anything more than a spurious and contrived link between the kidnapped clones and the giant locusts? (Answer: no, not really.)

The original Jurassic Park still stands up really well today, I would argue, mainly because it understands how to do a story about dinosaurs: the scientists responsible are misguided and quickly got rid of, and the film becomes a simple question of how not to get eaten. There is a unity of focus and purity of intent which is completely absent from the more recent films in the series. This film has an actual villain with a nefarious plan and various henchmen; stopping him and dealing with the minions is initially far more prominent in the movie than any dinosaur-related peril. From being the focus of the film, the dinosaurs become a kind of set dressing – the first act and a half often resembles a Bourne or Mission Impossible film in which people just happen to keep driving past a triceratops. Some of these sequences are very well staged – for example, a car-chase around Malta featuring laser-guided attack-dinosaurs – but it’s hard not to get the impression that somebody somewhere is missing the point.

Towards the end the dinosaur-related peril does improve a bit, with dialogue like ‘Are there dinosaurs in the mines?’ (the answer turns out to be a surprising ‘no’, technically, as the beasties in there are actually synapsids) and the usual chasing about. However, the decision to bring together the entire surviving principal casts of both iterations of this franchise, and also to include a bunch of new protagonists to broaden out the ethnicity of the genome a bit, results in some heroically unwieldy sequences, almost resembling a coach tour gone astray rather than the heroes of a blockbuster movie. (In the practically obligatory helicopter flight to safety at the end of the film, people are very noticeably having to sit on each other’s laps as there just wouldn’t be enough space otherwise.)

The whole thing is actually quite unwieldy and off-kilter, and conspicuously badly-written in places (one character, presented as a hard-bitten and self-interested mercenary when they first appear, undergoes a rapid and complete change of attitude and loyalty for no obvious reason at all). At least there aren’t any made-up dinosaurs this time – a tyrannosaurus gets wheeled on, rather like the Rocky Balboa of the Cretaceous Era, for a climactic tag-battle against a giganotosaurus, along with a therizinosaurus (another slightly off-the-wall choice). It seems like we are supposed to feel some kind of sympathy and attachment to this grizzled old thing, simply because it also was a fixture of the older films.

Speaking of grizzled old things… as noted, the eventual message of the film is the importance of life-forms from different geological ages getting along with each other. The only way it actually incorporates this idea is by putting Sam Neill and Chris Pratt in the same scenes during the final act. I have to say that the three elder stars really do make the most of their opportunity here and manage to be funny and charismatic and generally lift the film; it’s not a great experience even so, but without them I can only imagine it being a horrendous slog. Something awful seems to have happened to Chris Pratt: a light has flickered out behind his eyes and he is notably boring all the way through (he’s much, much more entertaining in the Thor trailer which is running before Dominion in most places).

(In my head I imagined an entirely different Jurassic Park sequel with Neill and Dern’s characters: a touching autumnal romance about two characters rekindling their relationship during an entirely peril-free visit to a quiet and extremely well-run dinosaur sanctuary. I’d pay to watch that. It would have more going for it than Dominion does, anyway.)

In the end Jurassic World: Dominion is the kind of sequel that feels like it exists only because the people responsible felt obliged to make a sequel. It doesn’t feel like there was a bold new idea or a radical reinvention of the concept burning in anyone’s mind. It just takes up all the bits from the recent films, adds a few really old ones, along with some new ones that don’t really belong, and idly shuffles them all around a bit half-heartedly. The result is a film which happens in front of you for a couple of hours, gradually getting louder, and then stops. Possibly you will have been entertained occasionally during all of this. But it feels like the work of a franchise which has gone extinct and just hasn’t noticed it yet.

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Some Blocks off a New Chip

My deceptively cherubic seven-year-old nephew has, obviously, inherited nothing from me in terms of actual genetic material, but he did receive several large containers full of Lego. I should mention that much of these are now third-generation bricks, as I got them from – I believe – one of my own uncles when I was young. Nephew is at the age where he is consumed by his passion for Lego, and I must confess it is one of the things (along with his youth, financial prospects, and interesting hair) that I am almost envious of. There was a time when 6627 Convertible or 6685 Fire Copter 1 was enough to set fire to my own imagination, and to be honest I sort of miss that.

Speaking of missing things, I also managed to let the first Lego Movie pass me by, along with the Lego Batman Movie and so on. Well, it was a computer-animated children’s movie about little plastic bricks, what could there possibly be to interest a serious, mature pretend film critic? Possibly quite a lot, judging from the glowing reviews most of these films received. So with the coming of The Lego Movie 2: the Second Part (directed by Mike Mitchell, who I feel obliged to mention also did Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, but don’t let that put you off), I felt it incumbent upon me to go and check it out. (Lord and Miller, who did the first one and are regrettably perhaps best-known these days for getting fired off the last stellar conflict movie, are still around as producers and writers.)

I had done my due diligence and so had a vague idea of the premise of these movies, which certainly helped: I imagine it might otherwise be a bit confusing for newcomers. What superficially looks like a rather frantic slapstick comedy is actually a story of startling subtlety, imagination and wit, operating on a number of levels simultaneously. On the most obvious level, it concerns the inhabitants of Apocalypseburg, a gritty, harsh settlement inhabited by tough, harsh people – all except for Emmet (Chris Pratt), who has managed to retain his innate sweetness and optimism (so far, anyway). But Apocalypseburg is periodically ravaged by cute pink invaders from the Systar system, who seem to be attracted by anything not gritty and mature. In the course of their latest attack they kidnap Emmet’s best friend Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), along with Batman (Will Arnett), Benny the spaceman (Charlie Day), and several others. The abducted group are whisked off to the Systar system where Batman is threatened with a coerced marriage to Queen Watevra Wa-Nabi (Tiffany Haddish). Can Emmet, despite his general cheery uselessness, rescue them and save the day?

However, what’s also going on – do try to keep up – is that a boy named Finn and his younger sister Bianca are squabbling over how to play with their Lego collection – Finn just wants to make cool stuff, but Bianca likes things that are cute and sparkly, which is a problem when she wants to join in with him. In the end she ends up stealing some of his Lego (including the mini-figures) and incorporating it into her own games. The main plot of the movie is actually an extended metaphor for this.

Now, it’s true that the film isn’t entirely consistent in its presentation of this idea – there are points at which the Lego characters are acting out the squabble between the children, and others when they seem to have an odd, Toy Story-esque independent existence, of which Finn and Bianca seem entirely unaware. Even so, for a film to be based on such an ambitious notion, and execute it as well as it does, is still quite noteworthy. The last thing The Lego Movie 2 is is any sort of lazy cash-in.

Much of this will probably sail over the heads of the younger members of the audience – although perhaps not quite as much as their parents might think. That said, there were no children whatsoever at the showing we went to, just adults laughing uproariously and generally having a great time – this isn’t exclusively a children’s film, either. Kids will certainly enjoy the invention and visual spectacle of the film, along with many of the sight gags, and there is a reasonably straightforward storyline going on here too. But much of the fun of the film also comes from elements that children are almost certainly not going to get. There is a joke about Die Hard, there is a joke about Radiohead; there is a series of jokes about the absence of Green Lantern from the current DC movie series.

Of course, you have to be able to get all these references, but if you have the appropriate grounding in pop culture then this is an extremely funny film. In one of my meaner moments I would have said that playing a Lego figure was more or less the perfect role for Chris Pratt, but he reveals himself to be a notably good sport here, also featuring as a character named Rex Dangervest who is a parody of most of Pratt’s film career to date. The knowingness of the film is relentless and almost irresistible – the song playing over the closing credits is about the kind of song you generally hear playing over the closing credits of films, while the film’s most diabolical creation is a song called ‘Catchy Song’ (refrain: ‘This song’s gonna get stuck inside your head’), which is indeed quite possibly the earworm to end all earworms. (If observational comedy is more your thing, there is also the inevitable gag about how painful it is to stand on a Lego brick.)

Normally, the problem with doing this kind of knowing, self-referential humour is that is robs a movie of the ability to have any kind of genuine emotional impact (see either of the Deadpool films, for instance), and possibly the most impressive thing about The Lego Movie 2 is that this doesn’t quite happen: somewhere in the middle of the madly fizzing visual invention and relentless jokes is what’s actually quite a touching story about growing up (or not) and togetherness. There is also a hugely timely message about how being cool, gritty and dark isn’t necessarily better than being bright, cheerful and slightly daft – one can only hope that the film’s partners at Warner Brothers, makers of the DC superhero movies, continue to take this on board.

I suspect there are still some people who will be sniffy about The Lego Movie 2 simply because it is based on a toy line and is family-friendly. Well, this is their problem and not the film’s. This is a movie with a great script, great performances, great songs, great jokes, and great visuals; I thoroughly enjoyed it. If every movie aimed at an adult audience had this level of wit and intelligence and sophistication, cinema in general would be vastly improved.

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Still Down on the Feathers

‘So, do you think they’ve left the door open for another one?’ asked this blog’s Anglo-Iranian affairs correspondent, as we left our screening of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (I should point out he was not there in his professional capacity). After a picosecond’s thought I was moved to observe that when a film franchise has earned more than $3.5 billion at the global box office, and shows no sign of running out of steam in terms of audience appeal, the door will most likely not just be left open but carefully taken off its hinges and burned. Whichever way you cut it, the Jurassic Park films (as I still think of them) do make squijillions of dollars, although why they continue to be quite so successful I have no idea: the original movie had Spielberg at the height of his powers, plus gobsmackingly innovative special effects, but none of the others have really done more than remix the ideas from that movie.

Is this true of Fallen Kingdom? Well, for this outing, previous director Colin Trevorrow has been replaced by J.A. Bayona, whose last film was the (really good) A Monster Calls. So you could be forgiven for cautious optimism (it is never a good idea to be uncautiously optimistic when dealing with major movie corporations and $170 million budgets). Things kick off with a highly promising, genuinely scary prologue as a team returns to the ruins of the Jurassic World park in order to retrieve the genetic material of one of the engineered hybrids from the previous movie. Lightning flashes, shadows lurk, people get chomped; hope begins to flutter in the chest of the jaded so-called film critic (hope is the thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson observed, unlike Jurassic World’s dinosaurs – but we went over that last time around).

Well, from here we’re off into the film proper. It turns out that Isla Nublar, where Jurassic Park and then Jurassic World were located, is volcanic, and fixing to blow up and kill all the dinosaurs, and people are not sure what to do about this. (Just what happened to the dinosaurs on Isla Sorna, the setting of Jurassic Parks 2 and 3, is not addressed.) Many, including former park visitor Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum, but don’t get too excited, as he appears for literally only about two minutes), are of the opinion that this is very much not a problem. Others disagree, including former park manager Claire (Bryce Dallas Cowboys, who clearly had one of those ‘make my character less irritating’ discussions between films), who is now a dinosaur rights activist. Helping her are a couple of new characters, a young man who is a somewhat craven comic relief clown, and a young woman who is incredibly feisty and competent – such is the way of the modern blockbuster, as any disgruntled stellar conflict fan will tell you.

Claire is contacted by representatives of an old business partner of John Hammond, who was involved in the very early development of the technology that recreated the dinosaurs. This man (James Cromwell) has a plan to transport the dinosaurs to a nature preserve where they can live peacefully, but he needs Claire’s knowledge of Jurassic World’s systems and also the help of her old beau Owen (Chris Pratt), the animal behaviourist and raptor trainer. (Owen has retired to the countryside to build a cabin, clearly unaware of the iron law that nobody who starts building a cabin in this kind of film ever gets to finish it.) Well, Claire recruits Owen and off they all go to the island to save the dinosaurs. What could possibly go wrong…?

It is a bit naïve to suggest that a tentpole blockbuster such as this is motivated by anything other than financial concerns – the studio’s notes to the director really only have one line, which reads ‘Make as much money as possible.’ But it always seems to me that this is particularly obvious with the Jurassic Park films – if there are any genuinely interesting or unexpected new ideas in any of these films, it is because they have managed to sneak in without anyone noticing, rather than being put there on purpose. Well, perhaps that’s not quite true, because I did note a slightly knowing and rather subversive element to the last one, albeit kept under extremely strict control.

The directors of these latterday movies do seem to be trying to move the series on, for all that the first half of Fallen Kingdom adheres strictly to the Jurassic Park formula (characters go off to an island infested by dinosaurs). Here things go pretty much as you would expect, with many imposing beasties, an altogether too nonchalant attitude to being thirty centimetres away from molten lava, and so on. People inclined to disparage Chris Pratt’s range as an actor should bear in mind the material he is usually given to work with – at one point in this film he is required to run stoically downhill, pursued not only by stampeding dinosaurs but also a volcanic eruption. I’m not sure even Sir Ralph Richardson could have given much nuance to that.

It’s where the film goes after this which is curious, as it becomes less of a traditional monster movie and more of a kind of faintly surreal gothic suspense thriller, with killer dinosaurs lurking in and around a stately old manor. But there’s also almost a sense of the film trying on lots of different ideas to see which, if any, fit: there are elements of an action thriller movie, a subtext in which the dinosaurs become symbolic of the natural world and its treatment by man, some (carefully veiled) criticism of Donald Trump, and even a move towards a much purer form of science fiction (it turns out that not just the dinosaurs have been genetically interfered with). The narrative ticks all the required boxes, but it still feels like a really mixed bag, and one reliant on some dubious plotting in places.

The key difference, I suppose, is that whereas the previous films operated purely in terms of ‘run away from the dinosaurs!’, this one is much more ‘save the dinosaurs!’ There are scenes involving our extinct friends solely intended to elicit pathos from the audience. Goldblum’s character, it is implied, is wrong to want to see all the poor dinosaurs killed off, despite the fact that these films have mostly been about dinosaurs causing trouble and eating people. It’s a curious shift and one the film struggles to negotiate elegantly – the workaround is that ‘natural’ dinosaurs are noble creatures which deserve to survive, it’s only the genetic hybrids created by man which are monsters with no right to exist (this film features an especially preposterous laser-guided prototype military dinosaur). It’s a rather artificial distinction, if you ask me.

Still, as I say, Fallen Kingdom does pretty much what you want it to, even if the first few minutes are by far the most impressive. The special effects are impeccable, and there is actually a really impressive cast – Rafe Spall is in there, along with Toby Jones, Geraldine Chaplin, and Ted Levine. I don’t think the studio need worry too much about getting their money back, even if the film is only competent rather than genuinely great. And the ending implies that the next one will be a thoroughly different kind of film, even if the basis for this doesn’t really hold up to serious examination. In the end, this is a capable blockbuster with some curiously weird touches.

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That Difficult Second Album

It’s easy to forget that, about three years ago, predicting the imminent failure and embarrassment of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy was a popular pastime amongst a wide range of respected and sensible industry commentators: Marvel couldn’t keep on making huge hits, after all, and this was a step into the unknown for the studio – a comedy SF adventure featuring quite possibly the most obscure group of Z-list superheroes ever committed to the big screen? With Vin Diesel playing a tree? Come on.

Of course, following critical acclaim and a box office take of nearly $775 million (not to mention a bunch of other substantial hits in the interim), no-one is saying the same kind of thing about Gunn’s sequel, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: quite the opposite. Expectations have risen to a level that might give some folk pause. But not, it seems, Marvel Studios – the new movie has received the plum late-spring release date, even ahead of the new Spider-Man film, a considerable vote of confidence. But is this justified? Are people going to stroll out whistling the soundtrack, or not even stay for the first couple of post-credits sequences (there are a lot of these)?

James Gunn has never really been one to avoid unusual creative decisions, and the first of many in Vol. 2 is to explicitly set the film in 2014, even though the story has only the most marginal connection with anything happening on Earth. (All this achieved, really, was to make me wonder what the timeframe and chronology is as far as all the other Marvel films is concerned – do they take place in real time? On-screen evidence suggests otherwise. Drawing attention to this topic may be a mistake.) Anyway, that the new film is going to really be more of the same is indicated almost at once, as the opening credits showcase a dance routine to ELO, occurring in front of a backdrop the likes of which Jeff Lynne can surely never have dreamed.

Having been successful in their latest mercenary exploit, Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (Dave Bautista), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), and the currently pot-plant-sized Groot (Vin Diesel, apparently, not that you can actually tell) head off, intent on turning Gamora’s insane sister Nebula (Karen Gillen) in for a substantial bounty. However, the kleptomaniac tendencies of one of their number land the Guardians in serious trouble, and result in their former associate Yondu (Michael Rooker) being hired to hunt them down.

Help of a sort arrives in the unexpected form of mysterious space entity Ego (Kurt Russell) and his assistant Mantis (Pom Klementieff). Ego reveals he is actually Star-Lord’s long-estranged father, and whisks him off to his domain to explain his true heritage and tutor him in the use of his cosmic powers. However, Yondu and his band of ne’er-do-wells are closing in… but is all quite as it seems?

It does not take too much effort to interpret much of Vol. 2 as a resounding ‘Ha-HAH!’ from Gunn, directed at all those people smugly predicting the first film would be a disaster and that he was just not suited to directing mainstream movies. All the things that made the first film tonally distinctive, not to mention odd – the garish production designs, the 70s and 80 pop cultural references, the oddball, tongue-in-cheek humour – are here again, and more prominently than before.

However, one change which has not been much commented upon is the fact that Gunn has written and directed this film single-handed, whereas the script of the first volume was partly the work of Nicole Perlman. One of the reasons the first film worked so well was that all the weird stuff was built around a story with an absolutely rock-solid structure, and I am compelled to assume that most of this came from Perlman’s initial work, not least because (having seen Slither and Super) narrative discipline is not something I would necessarily associate with Gunn, and it’s certainly absent from long stretches of Vol. 2.

The film opens strongly, but relatively soon feels like it’s losing direction – there’s no sense of what the story is actually about, or where it’s heading. This is partly necessitated by the nature of the plot, I suspect, but perhaps that just suggests the plot itself is inherently flawed. Instead of a sense of progression in the narrative, the film proceeds through a succession of eye-catching directorial set-pieces, somewhat earnest character scenes, and outrageous comedy sketches.

Now, let’s not get confused about this: the film looks great, is filled with fine actors doing their stuff, and when it’s functioning as a pure comedy it is often very, very funny (though certainly not a film to take small children to see) – Vol. 2 doesn’t fail to entertain, distract, and amuse. However – and here’s the ironic thing – it feels more like a compilation tape than a movie in its own right. All the stuff you really enjoyed from the first one is here, and turned up to the max; but many of the less-noticeable elements that helped to make it function so well as a satisfying movie have been a bit skimped on.

In short, it’s a mightily self-indulgent beast, though forgiveably so for the most part – though new viewers (and even some casual ones) are likely to find it slightly baffling. Some of the characters seem to be here more because Gunn likes them than out of any necessity to the plot: here I’m looking particularly at Nebula, to be honest. Speaking of self-indulgence, as is not unusual in this sort of film, the final battle/climax seems to go on forever, and is followed by a lengthy and somewhat sentimental coda that I’m not sure the film works hard enough to justify. Then we’re off to all five of the post-credits sequences, if you can believe that.

There’s something not-unimpressive about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2‘s adamantium certainty that the audience is going to be utterly beguiled and swept along by it, but at the same time it does almost feel a little bit smug, especially given the lack of narrative impetus in that long middle section. This movie is by no means a failure, because it does function as a spectacle and a comedy (Dave Bautista is, by the way, consistently the funniest thing in it), and it’s by no means the weakest of the sequels that Marvel Studios have released. But it’s not in the front rank of the movies that they’ve released, by any means. Cut it a degree of slack and you’ll have a good time watching it – and rest assured that no matter how much slack you cut it, that’s still almost certainly less than the amount of slack it cuts itself. In the end, this is only a moderately awesome mix.

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Premature Reanimation

It’s a reasonable working assumption that Disney and its stellar conflict franchise are going to own the Christmas cinema release schedule for the foreseeable future – at least until audience fatigue sets in, anyway. Until then, it will be a brave studio that puts out anything in the way of popular mainstream genre entertainment, especially in the SF or fantasy genres – although, on the other hand, there will be a lot of fruitful territory for counter-programmers to operate in.

Nevertheless, here is Morten Tyldum’s Passengers, courtesy of Columbia Pictures, Village Roadshow, the amusingly-named Original Film Company and a bunch of other entities, a mainstream SF genre movie which has the cojones to go pretty much directly head to head with Disney’s latest offering. The script has apparently been knocking about for nearly ten years, so this may just be a case of oh-I’m-sick-of-waiting-let’s-just-release-the-damn-thing, but I doubt it.

I rather suspect the producers are relying on the cachet and star power of what is, on paper at least, something of a dream coupling of two of today’s most charismatic performers, Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. One of my friends is fond of proclaiming that Lawrence and Pratt are, essentially, the same person, in terms of their appeal, but I tend to disagree: if this were so, there would be more pictures of Chris Pratt wearing a snake on my laptop’s hard drive. Besides, Lawrence has received more Oscar nominations at such a young age than anyone else in history, while Pratt is, um, the amiable leading man guy from a bunch of comic book movies, remakes, and sequels. (It’s telling that Lawrence is receiving a considerably bigger paycheque for this movie than her co-star.)

Despite all that, it’s Pratt who has by far the bigger presence in the first act of the movie. He plays Jim, a passenger on an interstellar flight to a remote colony world. As the trip takes 120 years even at 50% of the speed of light, the passengers and crew are spending most of the voyage in suspended animation – yet a series of unprecedented events results in system failures that leave mechanic Jim (Pratt) and journalist Aurora (Lawrence) wide awake with almost 90 years of flight time still to go and no-one else for company except an well-mannered android bartender (Michael Sheen).

Well, as you might expect, there is soon a degree of chemical engineering in progress between our two stars, but not quite enough to take their minds off the looming prospect of living out the rest of their lives in total isolation on the giant ship. Plus, the ship’s systems are growing increasingly glitchy, which may also cause them some problems in a rather nearer future…

If you’ve just seen the trailers and so forth for Passengers, you may have come away with the impression that this is a fairly disposable piece of mainstream Hollywood entertainment, a vehicle for the two stars with some cute relationship stuff, a little light physical jeopardy round about the climactic regions, and as many shots of Jennifer Lawrence in something clingy and/or skimpy as they can reasonably get away with. And much of this is indeed the case.

However, those trailers (along with all the other promotional material I’ve come across) have been quite carefully fashioned to obscure one fairly major plot element. Fair play to them for trying to give the audience a proper surprise, for once, if this is indeed the thinking here – but I rather doubt that’s the case. It’s quite tricky to write about this without blowing the gaff on the stuff the trailer’s keeping quiet about, but basically it gives the film a whole new angle, and one which is not unproblematic. Without going into too much detail, it makes the film rather uncomfortable and creepy to watch.

One consequence of this is that Chris Pratt gets rather better material than Jennifer Lawrence. As I mentioned, I’ve always found Pratt to be a very amiable screen presence, but I would have said the jury was definitely still out on his ability as an actor of significant range. Well, he’s okay here, he doesn’t embarrass himself, but on the other hand it’s not a revelatory performance either. Lawrence is as immaculate as you might expect, but I doubt her award-nominations tally will be going up this year.

In both cases this is largely the result of the script just not being quite there. The main driver of the first two acts is the issue of loneliness and isolation and how people react to it, but you can’t base an action-packed finale on something like that, so there’s a rather inelegant shifting of the gears, with the appearance of a new character played by Laurence Fishburne, and a sudden onset of peril and excitement. Now, the film does work quite hard to ensure this doesn’t appear completely out of nowhere, and indeed it’s also trying its best to smooth over some of the issues with the awkward material mentioned earlier. But in the end just a bit too much is discounted just a little too easily.

(It’s a minor issue, but the film’s world-building seems a little suspect to me, too: quite apart from the horrible corporate future depicted here – this is almost the colonisation of the galaxy as envisioned by Donald Trump – the ship looks more like a cruise liner than a colony vessel. We are told there have been ‘thousands’ of trips in the past. Assuming 120 years is standard for each voyage, who is crewing these vessels? Who would want to work on a ship where every round trip propels you the best part of 250 years into the future? It’s like The Forever War with nicer decor.)

The film is visually lavish and Morten Tyldum does his best with it, but I don’t think it’s up to the standards of either The Imitation Game (his last film) or Headhunters (the one before that). Pratt and Lawrence keep things watchable, naturally, but I came away with a strong sense of a film shying away from properly engaging with all the issues it was raising. It’s not just that the film brings up some awkward questions – it’s that it seems fully aware of these questions and is actively trying to pretend they don’t exist. I wouldn’t call this a bad film, quite – but I couldn’t call it a good one, either.

 

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A Fistful of Sevens

In an unprecedented development, the blog finds itself reviewing two westerns on the spin. Once upon a time (in the west), this might not have seemed so notable, for the cowboy movie was a Hollywood staple for decades, with literally thousands of films being produced. Not so many these days, of course – and the films that do get made are usually reinventions, or low-budget deconstructions, or remakes, or films that creep into western territory without genuinely being truly of the genre (is The Revenant a western? Is Cold Mountain?).

So it should come as relatively little surprise that the movie under review is Antoine Fuqua’s new version of The Magnificent Seven, as this is one of the very few westerns with any name recognition these days that wasn’t made by either Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood. This would usually be the place for me to complain about Hollywood’s habit of doing pointless remakes of brilliant extant movies, but (possibly annoyingly) the new movie has a ready-made defence: the 1960 John Sturges version of The Magnificent Seven was, of course, already a remake, of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film Seven Samurai. (Neither Sturges nor Kurosawa gets a credit on the new film, by the way.)

The thing is that Seven Samurai is, not to put too fine a point on it, one of the greatest movies ever made, and the 1960 Magnificent Seven is also a classic in its own right, an almost-perfect film. (The story has been pastiched many times since, too, and some of those were also pretty good – I really should look again properly at Battle Beyond The Stars one of these days.) Surely the new film is just asking for a critical drubbing up by going up against this sort of competition?

The story is more or less recognisable. The year is 1879 and the inhabitants of the small town of Rose Creek are being driven from their homes by ruthless businessman Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), but being a tidy-minded sort of villain he sets a convenient three-week deadline for them to pack up and get out. Feisty young widow Emma (Haley Bennett, who is a perfectly acceptable actress but whom I suspect will mainly succeed in her career due to her resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence), whose husband has been killed by Bogue’s men, refuses to be cowed and sets out to find help in resisting him.

And, well, she ends up with seven gunmen, as you might expect. Denzel Washington plays Yul Brynner, Chris Pratt plays Steve McQueen, Ethan Hawke plays Robert Vaughn and Byung-Hun Lee plays James Coburn. (The film is trading off the popularity of the Sturges version, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make this sort of comparison – though I should mention that character fates from the 1960 version aren’t necessarily repeated in the new one.) Vincent D’Onofrio, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Martin Sensmeier complete the septet, though their characters are essentially original.

Well, that’s one way of putting it. As you may have noticed if you’ve seen the trailer, one of the seven is now a native American, one is a sort of Korean ninja, and various other ethnicities are in the mix too. Some have gone so far as to describe the new film as a ‘diversity western’ (as opposed to what, I wonder), and there’s a slightly laboured scene drawing attention to just what a mixed crew they’ve ended up with. Still, at least this film hasn’t drawn the tsunami of abuse directed at the all-female Ghostbusters remake, possibly because there’s at least a tiny element of historical accuracy here, and the original film and its sequels took a few steps in this direction, too, featuring black, disabled, and Russian gunfighters.

It’s perhaps illuminating to consider just what has been changed in the new movie: well, first off, the whole film is set in the US, rather than the seven going off to Mexico to defend some villagers – but this is hardly a surprise, given the Mexican government objected to its citizens being presented as so weedy 56 years ago, before we even get onto present-day US-Mexican relations. On perhaps a related note, the villain is no longer a simple bandido but a super-rich industrialist intent on despoiling the landscape for his own betterment, but I think suggestions that the bad guy is a thinly veiled caricature of the current Republican presidential nominee are probably pushing a point. Perhaps most significantly, in story terms, this is no longer just a story about a bunch of guys going off to do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing: there’s some Questing For Vengeance going on here, because being virtuous for its own sake is apparently not a proper motivation any more.

I’m not sure I agree with this: one of the things I like about the 1960 movie is that it’s such a simple story of good guys pitted against bad guys, without a great deal in the way of moral ambiguity. Then again, this is very much a post-Unforgiven western, with the west presented as a hard, somewhat squalid place: nearly everyone has a beard and looks like they probably smell quite bad. At least the good guys are still pretty good, although what were subtle touches in 1960 have become hammer blows here – the knife-throwing member of the seven is festooned with blades, the one whose nerve has gone is afflicted with the screaming ab-dabs, and so on. The bad guy is, regrettably, fairly terrible: he’s an absurdly underwritten cartoon villain and it’s very jarring when he eventually starts coming out with some of Eli Wallach’s dialogue from the original script.

This doesn’t happen too much: only a few lines and a couple of bits of business are retained, but I can’t decide whether this is for the best or not. These moments are fun, but do you really want to be reminded of another, better movie? Where the film really struggles is in its soundtrack, which was one of the final projects worked on by James Horner before his death. Writing a completely original Magnificent Seven soundtrack would challenge the greatest composer who ever lived, for Elmer Bernstein’s music is surely one of the most famous and best-loved scores ever written – it’d be like trying to write a new Star Wars soundtrack without being able to utilise any of the elements written by John Williams. Sure enough, the music spends most of the film trying as hard as it can to surreptitiously suggest Bernstein, before the movie caves in and plays the main theme of the 1960 movie over the closing credits. Of course, by this point it just feels rather incongruous, almost like a contractual obligation.

In a sense this extends to much of the film – it’s really compelled by its very nature to reference the Sturges movie, because that movie’s continuing popularity and fame are the main reasons why this one exists at all. But it never really feels comfortable doing so – it wants to be dark and gritty and psychologically complex where the 1960 film was breezy and light and entertaining (The Magnificent Seven is itself a very 1960 sort of title – no-one gives their movies such on-the-nose names these days).

In the end the new Magnificent Seven isn’t a particularly bad film, but it isn’t going to rock anyone’s world either, I suspect. I think part of the problem is that Hollywood studios stopped making westerns on a regular basis so long ago that they’ve kind of lost the knack. It does feel oddly self-conscious about the classic genre elements, and much more comfortable with its modern-style action sequences (suffice to say much stuff blows up amidst automatic gunfire). The cast are pretty good (Ethan Hawke probably makes the biggest impression) but most of them still look more like grown men dressing up as cowboys than authentic western heroes. Perhaps the classic western is truly dead and it is time to stop interfering with the corpse; this movie passes the time fairly agreeably but if you want to watch this story, you have other, far superior options available to you.

 

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Not Entirely Without Feathers

Advance publicity and good word-of-mouth are very important these days, and bearing that in mind it has been interesting to follow the pre-release fortunes of Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World. The multiplexes and merchandising companies are clearly anticipating a big payday from this one, perhaps fondly recalling the squijillion dollars made by the original Jurassic Park in 1993, and have even done things like print up novelty 3D-glasses-covers and fake ‘Day Passes’. Expectations from other sectors has been rather different: the production has been soundly condemned for not making its dinosaurs as scientifically-accurate as possible, while even the esteemed Joss Whedon took to the internet to criticise one previewed scene for its old-fashioned gender politics (ironically, this was before Whedon was driven from Twitter for the heinous crime of making Age of Ultron a competent superhero movie rather than some kind of feminist tract).

Well, hey ho, here we are, and very shortly the box office will speak for itself. Steven Spielberg has some sort of behind-the-scenes role this time around, with the co-writing and directing duties going to Trevorrow, whose only previous film was Safety Not Guaranteed – a little indie borderline-SF film with only about 0.5% of the budget of this one. (That’s a movie which everyone seems to like but me.) At times Jurassic World does feel like the work of a someone grabbing his shot at the big time with both hands, not that this is always necessarily a good thing.

The film opens with (in defiance of all sanity) Jurassic World in full operation, based on the same island as the original park. Business is, as they say, booming, but a steady stream of new attractions is required and the pursuit of novelty has led to the company cooking up their own bespoke new dinosaurs in the lab. This is fine as far as overachieving exec Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is concerned, for she is primarily interested in the bottom line, but animal expert and raptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) is deeply alarmed by the psychopathic genetically-engineered monster that the park is preparing to unveil to the public. Sure enough, the (named by a focus group) ‘indominus rex’ busts out in short order and sets out on a gory reign of terror. It is just the baddest of bad luck that all this happens while Claire’s young nephews (Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson) are spending the weekend in the park…

So, needless to say, we’re dealing with a real brute of a hybrid here, utterly relentless in trying to get what it wants – and the GM dino in the film is pretty nasty too. Apparently one of the reasons for the long interval since the release of Jurassic Park 3 in 2001 was the perceived need to find some new ideas to freshen up the franchise. Well, there are certainly some new ideas here, but whether they should all be in the same film is another matter.

One of the possible consequences of the long gap between sequels is that Jurassic World feels the need to make explicit call-outs to the first film: quite apart from snatches of John Williams’ wonderful music, there’s a statue of Richard Attenborough’s character, and some locations are revisited. There’s even a reasonably significant role for B.D. Wong, who played one of Attenborough’s boffins back in 1993 – Wong gets the plum assignment of having to explain just why, in defiance of all scientific understanding, Jurassic World’s theropod dinosaurs are plumage-free.

To be fair, it’s a pretty clever explanation and adds to a sense of self-referentiality that Trevorrow occasionally deploys during the long build-up to all the running and screaming and chomping. Everyone is always looking for the next big spectacle, we are told, regardless of logic or good sense, and plain old dinosaurs just don’t have the gosh-wow effect they had back in 1993. (Which is true: Jurassic Park’s special effects have stood up well, but viewing it now, it has nothing like the same gobsmack factor it had on its first release.) Inevitably, though, the film can’t venture too far down this particular avenue, for fear of seeming too knowing or even hypocritical. The soulless corporate types in the movie have cooked up the new GM monster in a cynical attempt to attract people to their big cash cow, but Jurassic World can’t be too satirical about this, for that pretty much describes the thinking behind the making of the movie itself.

There’s not a great deal of this material in the film, as I say, but it has a level of intelligence and wit that is noticeably lacking from other sections of the movie (though, to be fair, the film’s jokes have a pretty good hit rate). Once the beast gets loose, we are pretty much in business-as-usual territory for your typical blockbuster. However, it feels like there’s some genuine uncertainty as to what kind of film this is meant to be – is it a ‘running away from the dinosaurs’ film like the first three, or a more traditional monster movie? A bonkers subplot involving a scheme to sell weaponised raptors to the US Army suggests the latter. Jurassic World can’t seem to decide which one it is, resulting in a slightly iffy dramatic structure and some real tonal oddities at various points: lots of different ideas are thrown at the screen, perhaps too many, and I must say in terms of sheer enjoyment I didn’t have as good a time as I did watching the much simpler and less-inventive Jurassic Park 3.

This lack of focus might be less noticeable if the two teenage boys were engaging characters (they’re not) while the female lead is actively annoying. The central relationship between Howard and Pratt is, quite simply, utterly unconvincing. One thing I will say is that this film should confirm Chris Pratt as a bona fide star, as he remains completely watchable even when delivering some fairly dubious material. (Sadly, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that great actors like Irrfan Khan and Omar Sy are sadly underused, further down the cast list.)

Hope is the thing with feathers, according to Emily Dickinson, which should therefore mean that Jurassic World, with its non-plumed dinos, is a pretty hopeless case. Despite everything that I’ve said, I still don’t think that’s entirely true: it has a good leading man, it’s visually lavish, and Trevorrow manages to seed it with little moments of wit and visual invention. But overall, you can’t escape the impression that wider corporate concerns were keeping the director from making the darker, smarter, funnier, more focused film he probably wanted to. The weird thing about Jurassic World is that this is a movie which goes out of its way to explain to you exactly why it was made and what the resulting problems are. Ten out of ten for honesty, but minus fifty for self-awareness, guys.

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The Strange Potency of Cheap Music

Any gambler, whether professional or recreational, would be in awe of the run of luck enjoyed by Marvel Studios since 2008. These people have released film after film in the notoriously unpredictable superhero genre, only to be met with ever-increasing popularity and financial reward. They have attempted what looked like the impossible, in the form of a fully-connected, open-ended series-of-series, and not only seen it work, but expand to include a growing number of TV programmes and other spin-offs. You get the impression, almost, that the top people at Marvel have become intent on pushing their luck to see just how far it will go.

This could be one reason why, with relatively major characters like Doctor Strange still untapped, Marvel have chosen to make their latest original release an adaptation of an obscure comic book featuring a selection of characters virtually unknown to anyone but dedicated fans of the genre. The result is Guardians of the Galaxy, directed by James Gunn (just to compound the boldness of this gamble, Gunn is the director of the bravura-icky horror film Slither and the deeply twisted superhero satire Super).

Central to the action is Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), who was abducted from Earth as a child in the late 1980s and who has risen to become a minor-league space pirate in a wild and wacky cosmos. A mysterious orb comes into Peter’s possession, which is his bad luck as it is also being sought by powerful cosmic forces: principally the genocidal alien warlord Ronan (Lee Pace), a sometime ally of Thanos (the behind-the-scenes villain in The Avengers). Peter finds himself pursued by Ronan’s renegade enforcer Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and the unlikely bounty-hunting duo of uplifted procyonid Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and tree of few words Groot (the great Vin Diesel). The four of them are packed off to prison where they make the acquaintance of monomaniacal psychotic Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista).

The ill-matched quintet hit upon a plan to get rich by selling the orb to enigmatic alien the Collector (Benicio del Toro), little realising that Ronan is still in pursuit and plans to use its cosmic powers to devastate a large chunk of the galaxy. Does this disparate band of thieves, killers, lunatics and imbeciles have it in them to actually become heroes…?

It is quite difficult to overstate just what a departure Guardians of the Galaxy is from the last few Marvel Studios movies. It’s their first non-sequel in three years, for one thing, and there is notably less connective tissue to other projects – much has been made in certain circles of the presence of Josh Brolin as Thanos, but this isn’t much more than a cameo appearance to keep the character on the radar. There are only highly oblique references to other movies in the series and even the obligatory post-credits scene is telling a joke rather than trailing a future film (for all that it features a notable Marvel character unseen in movies for a number of decades).

Then again, perhaps all this is fortuitous from Marvel’s point of view, given that it’s their first release since the departure of Edgar Wright from next year’s Ant-Man amidst what sounds like some bad feeling. There was much speculation that Wright’s vision had been deemed to be too far removed from the house style of the other Marvel films, which some – myself included – took to be confirmation that maintaining the massively profitable Marvel brand had taken precedence over making genuinely interesting, creative films.

Ant-Man is still looking like a troubled project for various reasons, but in its own way Guardians of the Galaxy delivers a mighty rebuttal to any suggestion that Marvel are simply opting to play it safe when it comes to their movies: for, readers, Guardians of the Galaxy is absolutely bonkers.

The film opens with a genuinely moving sequence depicting a youthful Peter’s final moments with his dying mother, before blasting off into space and jumping forward to the present day. Here we see Star-Lord on a hostile alien world, apparently intent on a serious search for something – until he pops on a vintage walkman and proceeds to bust some funky moves across the surface of the planet. This is closely followed by a lavish, FX-slathered action sequence.

This generally sums the film up: moments of apparently sincere emotion jostle with full-blown space opera pyrotechnics and absurd comedy. Gunn has cast Bradley Cooper as a raccoon and Vin Diesel as a tree, and those characters are every bit as preposterous as they sound. As you can probably tell, this is by no means intended to be a serious drama, but it is highly-accomplished entertainment.

The plot itself – a struggle for control of an apocalyptic McGuffin – is not exactly innovative, and you can probably predict the team’s trajectory from misfit outcasts to responsible defenders of liberty yourself. Certainly the climax, which has about three different battles going on simultaneously at one point, is done very much by-the-book for this sort of film and seems in no hurry to conclude itself, and the presence of a remarkable supporting cast (including Glenn Close, John C Reilly, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Djimon Hounsou and Peter Serafinowicz) can only do so much to cover for the familiar nature of much of the story.

What really lifts the film and makes it work, other than its comedic elements and a revelatory, star-making performance from Chris Pratt, is the decision to give Star-Lord his walkman. This allows Gunn to soundtrack the film with a selection of rousing, feel-good tunes from the 70s and early 80s that add tremendously to its cheery, freewheeling atmosphere: Guardians of the Galaxy has a sense of fun about it that’s incredibly infectious and almost impossible to resist.

Once again, Marvel are probably looking at a massive hit (and a sequel has already been announced, to say nothing of various other spin-offs and crossovers) – if these guys had been visiting a casino, they would surely be being politely asked to leave town by now. This is a deeply atypical Marvel movie, and certainly by no means perfect, but as a piece of entertainment it’s incredibly difficult not to like.

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