Superheroes

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The Wolverine

thewolverine

Grade: B+

Superhero movies are at an interesting crossroad. The sheer novelty of seeing our favorite heroes on screen, in live-action, has worn off. The days where the joy and exhilaration of just seeing them fly through the sky, swing above buildings, or materialize from the shadows are over with. Film makers seem conflicted about how to handle this problem. For the most part, their answer is more, more, more. There must always be a global catastrophe looming, and the fate of every human being must be in peril. This is a pretty easy way to up the stakes without really trying too hard. Human annihilation not enough for you? Then they’ll give you more superheroes, more villains. Just keep stacking more of them on a single screen and the fan boys will be appeased. The fan boys must be appeased. The other, smarter, solution is to scale things down and just tell a good story in what is already a rich and entertaining universe. Luckily, The Wolverine does just this, cutting the mutant total down and not threatening genocide (An interesting note on that is the movie starts with the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, which is the single greatest threat of genocide in the real world, but little more than a flash in the pan in a world with god-like beings constantly at war with one another). What we get instead is a more personal story about the indestructible clawed man with the bad temper, a simple save the girl and revenge kind of tale with fun twists and turns, which is exactly what we want from Wolverine.

Hugh Jackman resumes his now iconic role, though the character is a little different from the last time we saw him. This movie takes place sometime after the events of X-Men 3, and Logan, no longer acknowledging The Wolverine side of him, has retreated into a self-imposed exile. He dreams of Jean Grey, the girl he loved and killed to stop her from destroying the world, every night and is riddled with too much guilt to face his past. An invitation to say goodbye to an old friend on his death bed brings him to Japan where, naturally, nothing is as it seems. He encounters a bitter power struggle over Asia’s largest corporation, beautiful women, and ninja assassins. Through a suppression of his powers, Logan must face his own mortality, something he’s never had to do before. Setting up the scenario where Wolverine could actually die, even if we never believe it will actually happen, is a fun and welcome change from previous installments where he is absolutely indestructible and his only weakness is his super grumpiness. Needless to say, the conspiracy is unveiled and Logan must once again find the inner Wolverine in him to save the day and rescue the girl.

Jackman slips into the role easily, and even though this character is far removed from the comic book Wolverine, he has made the movie Wolverine so much his own that it’s hard to complain about it. I don’t think we needed the forced love story between him and Mariko (Tao Okamoto), mostly because Jackman is finally starting to age and the romance comes off a tad creepy, though it doesn’t make a ton of sense from a script standpoint either. For the most part, the rest of the cast are solid in their roles as well. Okamoto brings a stoic vulnerability, while Rila Fukushima gets the most fun role as the bad-ass sidekick Yukio. Svetlana Khodchenkova as Viper, though, was not very good. Her villain belonged in another movie, not this one. She was hamming it up a bit too much when everybody else in the movie is more or less playing it straight. This made it a bit distracting whenever she was on screen.

It’s hard to say that this is a small scale movie when the fate of Asia’s largest corporation is at stake, and there is a post credits scene teasing Days of the Future Past, which appears to be insanely grandiose in its scope, but The Wolverine feels very self-contained and not interested in the fate of mutants as a whole. This is quite refreshing and whereas I was skeptical of James Mangold directing (I absolutely hated Walk the Line), he shows skill at keeping the story in focus and creating exciting, and actually believable in their own way, action scenes. Here’s hoping that, going forward, superhero movies understand that the story is more important than the explosions. There were only three mutants in this movie, and I never felt wanting for more.

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Iron Man 3

iron-man-3-official-hd

Directed by Shane Black

Starring: Robert Downey Jr, Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley

Grade: A-

I don’t know if Shane Black loves Christmas or hates it, but I’d love to know the psychology behind his obsession. You see, I love Lethal Weapon and firmly believe that it, along with myself, is one of the few truly great things to come out of the 1980’s. The movie didn’t invent the buddy cop genre, but it set a standard, one that hasn’t been reached again since. Black brings his directing talents (only his second directorial endeavor, he only wrote Lethal Weapon) to Iron Man 3 and adds his familiar tropes to the tested superhero formula. Everything is there, the buddy cop stuff, Christmas imagery, pitch-perfect dialogue, and a lead character that is barely keeping his shit together. The third, and presumably final Robert Downey Jr. led, film makes a startling discovery: that human beings are infinitely more interesting than machines. It’s hard to say a movie where there are insane amounts of explosions and literally (I think) hundreds of different Iron Man suits, is toned down or subtle, but it actually feels that way most of the time.

The plot picks up in a fairly logical place from where The Avengers ends. Tony Stark doesn’t quite know how to deal with what happened in New York. He’s seen too much, done too much, and can’t explain any of it. He can’t sleep most of the time and when he does he has nightmares. His relationships are crumbling around him and he’s becoming increasingly isolated. A superhero movie dealing, in its own way, with PTSD is a rather remarkable thing and not the stuff of your typical summer blockbuster. In addition to all this existential angst Tony is dealing with, there’s also a well-funded, lunatic terrorist named The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) who wants to kill him and a whole bunch of other people, and to make it sting just a little bit more, Pre-Iron man drunken asshole Tony Stark may have inspired this new villain to a lifetime of evil.

In the third film of a trilogy the hero must lose everything and be nearly ruined in defeat, only to rise from the ashes and continue the fight because he or she figures why they did this heroing stuff in the first place. In this respect, Iron Man 3 doesn’t disappoint. Tony Stark does not have an easy time in this movie, in fact it follows a fairly similar arc to The Dark Knight Rises in some ways. The difference is that Stark is a lot more fun to be around than Bruce Wayne so when he goes most of the movie as himself rather than his costumed identity, we don’t really mind. Downey and Don Cheadle, who reprises his role as James Rhodes, have a lot of fun together, trade banter, and even raid a rich guys compound (more buddy cop stuff) in order to save the day. If the third act is kind of a let down, well that always seems to be the case with the Iron Man movies. Lots of explosions and infinite metal suits punching things is just not quite as much fun as Tony Stark trying to solve a mystery while fighting off panic attacks anytime someone mentions New York. Yes, the movie eventually devolves into our hero having to save his girl, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the President of the United States, but it provides nice enough twists to these familiar tropes that it feels somewhat fresh, if not completely unique.

As usual, Downey is a perfect Tony Stark and the supporting cast are just as great. Kingsley, Cheadle, and Paltrow all know they’re in a comic book movie and are having a great time with it. Guy Pearce, playing a slimy character, because of course he is, is a much more believable threat to Stark than Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer from the second film.

Iron Man 3 is an interesting follow up to the sheer spectacle of The Avengers, if only because it doesn’t try to top it. It tells a character driven story and has a complete absence of, except for some namedropping, other superheroes. This movie succeeds because it doesn’t try to do too much, and despite the somewhat too easy resolution, it’s a worthy addition to Marvel’s new film canon and a good way to introduce the next wave of Avengers related movies.

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Ex-Heroes

Ex-Heroes

Written by Peter Clines

Grade: C+

The nerds have won, people. Gone are the days when the acne-riddled, asthma-infused, coke-bottle-glasses-wearing, obese kid in a Land of the Giants T-shirt was regulated to the collective corner of our society. Mainstream audiences are now well versed in subjects such as Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek and all kinds of other estrogen-repulsing things. This isn’t a bad thing. We now get high-budget stories from quality writers and directors and actors and a guy that writes a blog nobody really reads is allowed to have a relationship with a real-live girl. Of course there is a problem, otherwise I wouldn’t have written the last few sentences. That problem is oversaturation. We’ve finally gotten to a point where we can simply reference pop-culture and that is enough to appease the crowds. To be fair, Peter Clines Ex-Heroes isn’t completely guilty of this, he just falls a little short of something better.

This premise of this novel is simple: Superheroes vs. zombies. It’s an awesome enough set-up, and well-written too, though some of the dialogue is a little forced. It’s set in a Los Angeles where super powered beings have risen up and started doing super hero like things, protecting the populace and forming alliances and rivalries that are amazingly destructive. There’s St. George, or The Mighty Dragon, Stealth, Gorgon, Cairax, Cerberus, Zzzapp, and a few others that are of varying degrees of importance. Then the zombie apocalypse comes and the heroes, at least the ones that survive the onslaught, are forced to carve out a slice of the city and protect their new civilization, naturally in the safety of a movie studio lot, they call The Mount. Things go about as well as you can hope, the citizens are mostly safe other than a few minor incidents, until a gang builds up power in another end of the city. They want the resources of The Mount, and they might have a few tricks up their sleeves, including some super-powered beings of their own.

Clines offers up some new additions to the two respective mythologies. The origin of the zombies intertwines with the rise of the superheroes and is a pretty compelling angle. The survivors of the apocalypse, since they’re in Los Angeles, have a running game of who can kill the most famous celebrity zombie. These feel fresh and bring something new to well-worn concepts. This is where the novel shines, but unfortunately it just doesn’t do enough of this kind of thing. For one thing, anybody who knows a decent amount of superhero lore, will be able to spot variations on both DC and Marvel characters in these original heroes. With a few tweaks St. George is Superman, Stealth is Batman, and their relationship is nearly identical to the classic heroes though admittedly with a nice twist of sexual tension. Among others, The Hulk and Iron Man are both essentially there and Captain America is even teased at in the preview for the second book in the series. There’s nothing wrong with this necessarily, except for the fact that I don’t think I would’ve picked up on these similarities if I wasn’t such a nerdlinger myself, which feels a little dishonest to me.

Zombies have had a rough go in pop-culture of late. They’ve never enjoyed more popularity than they do now, but they’ve lost something in the process. Gone are the mindless, soulless nightmares that are terrifying metaphors of ourselves and what we could all become, and in their place are mindless monsters who want to eat humans. They’re more gory, but less scary. Superheroes fighting zombies has the potential to be an amazing allegory for this contemporary world. Gods have come down to protect us from the monsters threatening to turn us completely into a mindless consumer society. Our very souls are at stake. What is too often missed is that it’s not our lives that are on the line in a zombie apocalypse, but our humanity. And to be fair, Clines does address this, and at times he does it well, but it feels like an afterthought for the most part, and just an excuse to lend a story some weight that’s really just fixated on how hard a super strong guy can punch a zombie.

Overall this is an enjoyable, if kind forgettable, read. It’s apparently the first book in a series, and I liked it enough where I will probably read the next book when it comes out.


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