Category: Reviews

American Gods arrived on Starz with a stellar cast and terrific source material, the novel by Neil Gaiman. It had pedigreed producers in Bryan Fuller, who ankled his shot at Star Trek: Discovery to devote himself fulltime to this; and Michael Green, a superb writer with tons of genre credits. It was visually arresting, emotionally moving, and stunningly weird.

Then there’s the second season. Fuller and Green were jettisoned amidst problems with the skyrocketing budget that exceeded $10 million per episode and their increased deviation from the novel. When Starz finally settled on Jesse Alexander to showrun the season alongside of Gaiman, a novice at television production. They scrapped the first six scripts while Starz cut the order from ten to eight episodes to save money and delayed release marking two years between seasons. Kristen Chenoweth and Gillian Anderson left in support of the ousted producers so their roles needed to be recast.

What viewers received this spring was a mess. Plodding, dark, hard to decipher – pick your adjectives. It got to the point where you find yourself putting off watching it and doing so more out of loyalty to Gaiman and/or the novel than genuine affection for the show.

Out now as a three-disc Blu-ray box set (with Digital HD code) from Lionsgate Home Entertainment, the series does hew closer to the novel as the stakes in the war between the old gods and modern gods escalates.

It’s still a delight to watch Ian McShane, Orlando Jones, Emily Browning, and Pablo Schreiber play their parts. The guest cast was strong with the radiant Cloris Leachman, William Sanderson, Lee Arenberg, and Laura Bell Bundy among others.

And yet…

The concepts remain strong and the extra time compared with novel has allowed for characters to grow and evolve, but the pacing is deadly slow, scenes are too dark to follow, and the emotional intensity is lacking pretty much until the penultimate episode when a beloved character is dispatched. It’s been reported that McShane and Jones wound up adlibbing many of their lines, so much so that Jones received screen credit.

Ex-con Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) remains caught between factions, more confused than an active participant in the struggle. He also has to struggle with spending time with his dead wife Laura (Emily Browning), who has eclipsed him as an interesting personality on the series.

For a struggle of ideologies, ancestral memory versus current experiences, its often spoken of more than played out, much to my regret. It is nice, though, to have more than your typical assortment of Norse and Greek gods, and at least we have an international assortment that will send some scurrying to the Internet to learn more about. Episode six, as we watch the gods arrive in the New World, was perhaps the season’s strongest episode.

It would have been nice to have a mythology primer as a special feature. Instead, we have The House on the Rock: Setting the Stage (Patton Oswalt hosts a San Diego Comic-Con panel), The Second Coming: Neil Gaiman on Season Two (oh, the jokes we could make here), and Gods and Ends: Random Musing from the Cast, which could describe one or two of this season’s episodes.

The 1080p video transfer in the 1.78:1 aspect ratio looks nice and rich on a home screen. The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 sound is a fine match.

Stepping in to showrun season three, yes there will be one, is The Walking Dead’s Charles “Chic” Eglee, which finally will take us to the Lakeside portion of the novel. He and Gaiman, who is not a showrunner this time, have broken down the third season and even laid out plans for a fourth. So you may want to watch this as homework for better times ahead.

The Hush storyline by Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee, and Scott Williams was a smash sales success because it safely followed the Loeb formula of a 12-issue mystery that enveloped every major member of the rogues’ gallery. First, there was the Holiday killed and the making of Two-Face and here we have the new threat of Hush which connects to young Bruce Wayne’s childhood.

To fit this into the connected Animated Universe, Batman: Hush, out now from Warner Home Entertainment, a host of changes had to be made. The one that did not need alteration is the one that entirely spoils the final third of the 82-minute film.

I’ve not been fond of veteran animation writer Ernie Altbacker’s previous forays into the DCAU, but this contains some of his finest moments. Coupled with above-average source material and fine character designs, this is one of the stronger-looking films in a while.

I have no problem with the replacements: Lady Shiva (Sachie Alessio) for Talia, Batgirl (Peyton List) for Huntress, and Damian for Tim Drake. The latter has the film’s best moment, a hilarious dialogue between Batman and Damian (Stuart Allan) about the Bat now dating the Cat.

Altbacker shifted the emotional center of the film from the comic’s relationship between Bruce Wayne and Tommy Elliot to Batman (Jason O’Mara) and Catwoman (Jennifer Morrison). Given last year’s attention to the wedding that wasn’t, the romance between the pair remains ripe for exploration. The evolving relationship between the two throughout the film makes it eminently watchable. It’s fun watching Selina Kyle adjust to being part of the extended Batman family with some of the film’s nicer moments, Voice actors O’Mara and Morrison blend very nicely together.

Hush has an elaborate scheme involving Batman’s foes, a revenge mystery that keeps Batman guessing until the beginning of the ill-conceived final third, that ignores the comics in favor of something that makes little sense and feels wrong on multiple levels.

Nicely replicated from the comics are the confrontations with Poison Ivy (Peyton List), Superman (Jerry O’Connell) (with some fine Lois Lane [Rebecca Romijn] (lines), and Harley Quinn (Hynden Walch). The emotional toll reaches a crescendo when Batman nearly beats the Joker (Jason Spisak) to death even though, ironically, he’s innocent this time. One could argue that emotional outburst really needs to come later in a moment between Batman and Tommy Elliot (Maury Sterling) but the latter is seriously underdeveloped.

The whole Jason Todd back from the dead thread, something that has never sat right with me in any medium, is absent here, having been covered previously in the series’ Batman: Under the Red Hood entry.

The film is available in all the usual combinations. The Ultra HD 4K edition is in the standard 16×9.1 ratio, nicely capturing the shadows and muted color scheme throughout. The Blu-ray version is equally strong so either edition would be fine for hoe viewing. The accompanying DTS audio track is up to the task, making explosions and sound effects work well with the effective Frederik Wiedmann score.

On the Blu-ray disc, extras include the welcome return of the DC Showcase series of shorts featuring secondary heroes. We have here a Sgt. Rock adventure (14:51), written by Louise & Walter Simonson and Tim Sheridan. It’s fun seeing the combat happy joes of Easy Company, the Iron Major, and the Creature Commandos although I have my quibbles with some story choices. I’d much rather had had a straight war story for variety.

Rounding out the special features, we have Batman: Love in Time of War (16:52), with an assortment of talking heads exploring the Batman/Catwoman relationship in comics, television, and film. There’s a Sneak Peek: Wonder Woman: Bloodlines (9:59) and, finally, “Catwalk” from Batman: The Animated Series.

I’m not a major Manga fan but am certainly aware of the most popular and enduring properties, such as Gunnm, a.k.a. Battle Angel Alita, which ran from 1990-1995 and was adapted into two-part anime. By 2000, James Cameron had been made aware of the series and immediately wanted to bring it to the big screen. He allowed himself to get repeatedly distracted so he eventually handed off the directing chores to Robert Rodriguez, who took the mammoth script Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, and honed it down to something 20^th Century Fox could afford.

After all that build up, several other Japanese stories had made it to American audiences, with few making a positive splash (Ghost in the Shell, anyone?). So, when Alita: Battle Angel finally arrived this year, audiences were primed to be awed or disappointed. Had the film arrived two decades ago, it would have been a far more interesting and arresting story, but by now so many of its elements had been mined elsewhere that it felt less than fresh.

Alita (Rosa Salazar) is a cyborg with a human brain, discovered in Iron City by Dr. Dyson (Christoph Waltz), who brings it back to life and names her after his deceased daughter. We’re in a world three centuries after an alien attack devasted the world in what is now called The Fall. Life is cheap, criminal enterprises run rampant, and survival is always iffy.

Alita remembers nothing of her past but over time discovers her battle instincts so while she’s a on a quest to establish herself, she fights in order to control her destiny. While Dyson is a positive influence, his ex-wife, Dr. Chiren (Jennifer Connelly) is less so, working for the criminal entrepreneur Victor (Mahershala Ali). With junk dealer Hugo (Kennan Johnson) as her only friend, Alita enters the Motorball games to earn money to help him, which is where many of the set pieces occur.

It’s a visually rich story and the worldbuilding is fine, no surprise from Rodriguez, who shifted from his Grindhouse days to his special effects-laden kids films. It’s nice to see him blend interests here. The cast is certainly diverse with some big names in an unusual genre offering. Uncredited is Edward Norton’s criminal Nova, seeded here for the hoped-for sequel, and other familiar faces include Jackie Earle Haley, Rick Yune, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jai Courtney.

The problem beyond the feeling of having seen it all before, is that the characters don’t snap to life, playing their parts without complexity or variety, deadening what could have been fascinating.

The film, out now from 20^th Century Home Entertainment, is available in the usual varieties, including the Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD combo pack. The AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1 is perfectly fine, if unexceptional, just like the film itself. It does capture the color palette quite well even if the CGI portions are just a little soft. Better is the DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 track, helping bring the world to life.

While the packaging boasts two hours of extras, they’re more perfunctory than revelatory.  We have a variety of behind-the-scenes pieces ranging from short to medium-length starting with The Fall (5:05), Iron City (3:19), What It Means to be a Cyborg (2:28), Rules of the Game (2:52), From Manga to Screen (20:47); Evolution of Alita (19:43) is an overview of the character. Motorball (6:02), London Screening Q & A (26:38) with Cameron, Rodriguez, Salazar, Waltz and Connelly; 10 Minute Cooking School: Chocolate (5:28); and the confusingly named 2005 Art Compilation (2019) (14:20).

The most fun extra is Scene Deconstruction (10:47), which allows the viewer to use the remote’s color buttons to toggle through various levels of digital rendering for four sequences: I Don’t Even Know My Name, Just an Insignificant Girl, I’m a Warrior, Aren’t I?, and Kansas Bar.

Since Mike Mignola created Hellboy in 1993, he has been a fan favorite character, growing his own mini-universe of characters and spinoff series. Mainstream audiences certainly got to know him in a pair of features from director Guillermo Del Toro, who put his own spin on the world. Over the last decade, Del Toro and star Ron Perlman talked about a third film but one thing or another kept getting in the way. Then, BOOM! founder Andrew Cosby and Mignola got to work on a script and Del Toro walked, followed by Perlman so it morphed into a full-fledged reboot.

Did we need a reboot? No. Did we need this film at all? Probably not and the poor box office has shut the doorway to Hell for subsequent installments. Perhaps he works best in print with Mignola being the sole voice.

David Harbour is having a moment. This month he had a terrific character arc in season three of Stranger Things and last night on Netflix, he was seen in Frankenstein’s Monster’s Monster, Frankenstein, which I hear good things about (and we’ll see him next year in Black Widow). He brings a fresh approach to the demon, less world-weary than his predecessor but just as snarky. His relationship with Dr. Trevor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane) is a far warmer one and less one-sided.

The story is drawn from Dark Horse’s Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt, and The Storm and the Fury with material pulled from Hellboy in Mexico. The short version is that here, Nimue (Milla Jovovich) was the world’s deadliest witch and it took King Arthur (Mark Stanley) and Merlin (Brian Gleeson) together to defeat her, using Excalibur to chop her into six pieces. Each was boxed, blessed, and buried. Some two decades ago, a fairy, Gruagach (Stephen Graham/Douglas Tait), was left in place of infant Alice Monaghan. Hellboy arrived and beat the boar-like beast, rescuing the baby. After all this time, Gruagach wants revenge and collects Nimue’s parts and has witches sew her together for a new round of terror. Joining Hellboy in stopping Hell from coming to Earth are the adult Alice (Sasha Lane), a powerful medium, and BPRD’s Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim), a man with a secret, who also distrust Hellboy, especially after learning of the prophecy he is intended to be the demon who lays waste to the world.

And we’re off. There’s blood and gore and guts. There are special effects, transformation sequences, fantasy flashbacks, reading Lewis Carroll and more. But there’s nothing special here with a seen-it-all-before feel. Director Neil Marshall makes it all look good but gets uneven performances from the cast (although it’s great seeing Thomas Hayden Church as Lobster Johnson).

Nimue is a one-dimensional witch and the relationship between Hellboy and Alice is under-baked. None of the characters feels fresh, none of the dialogue sparkles. And that’s where Cosby’s script fails the creator and audience.

The film is out this week from Lionsgate Home Entertainment in the usual varieties. The Blu-ray presents the film in its original 2.39:1 aspect ratio and has a strong high definition transfer. For a film like this, it has to look good to work on a home screen and this does not fail. The subtle colors and deep shadows are all nicely balanced. The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is up the capturing every grunt, flicker of flame, and explosion. Watching this at home was rather good despite the content.

On the other hand, you can tell Lionsgate lost faith in the film by the dearth of special features. We get Tales of the Wild Hunt: Hellboy Reborn (1:11:28), a three-part featurette on the production; a handful of Deleted Scenes (7:56), and Previsualization (7:18).

When DC Comics revived Captain Marvel in the 1970s, it was out of step with the audience and struggled to find success. Ever since, the publisher has been trying to find a formula to make the character and his world relevant to the readership. With Carol Danvers’ popularity as Captain Marvel ascendant, DC finally capitulated and began calling Billy Batson’s alter ego Shazam to keep the two from being confused.

With Captain Marvel out in March and Shazam out in April, there’s a good reason to rename the latter. (No one back in the day would ever have imagined either getting a big screen treatment or coming out so closely together.) Warner Home Entertainment has released Shazam in all the usual formats this week and it remains a fun, but not perfect film.

After countless screenwriters tried to crack the light-hearted world created by Bill Parker and CC Beck, it appears that Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke found their clues less in the classic work and more in the contemporary incarnation from Geoff Johns. As a result, if you loved the older stuff there’s plenty to like and even more of you love the new take.

We have the wizard (Djimon Hounsou) seeking someone with a pure heart to take his powers and defend the world from the Seven Deadly Sins. So far so good. After rejecting poor little rich boy Thaddeus Bodog Sivana (Ethan Pugiotto), he waits until he finds Billy Batson (Asher Angel), a homeless teen seeking his birth mother (Caroline Palmer). In trouble, Billy is taken to a group home run by Rosa and Victor Vasquez (Marta Milans, Cooper Andrews) and meets his foster siblings. As he struggles to adjust, he also is given the powers of the gods.

The whole foster family is a Johns addition and introduces a new sense of family, skewing far from the source material where Billy and Mary Bomfield (Grace Fulton) turn out to be twin siblings. Later, when they all gain rainbow-colored costumes it dilutes the Marvel Family feel.

Anyway, Billy turns into the World’s Mightiest Mortal (Zachary Levi) and has trouble acting like adult. While Billy tugs at your heart strings and Shazam is funny, they act as entirely separate beings rather than symbiotically connected. We see him trying to make money by putting on lighting shows (a power he doesn’t have in comics nor needs). To me, this is the biggest fault with an otherwise entertaining film. The sheer exuberance the adult displays is totally absent from Billy and the wisdom of Solomon seems entirely missing from the film.

Just as he’s getting acclimated to his power set and trying to find a name for himself, an amusing thread, the adult Sivana (Mark Strong) has been corrupted the Seven Deadly Sins and uses their power first for revenge against his father (John Glover) and then trying to gain the powers he feels are rightly his.

The problem here is that Sivana was a scientist and the conflict between them since 1940 was always science versus magic. Here, it’s magic versus magic and the David and Goliath riff is exchanged for muscle versus muscle. Strong does a fine job, but feh,

The siblings all have their moments to shine before Shazam shares his power with them, turning one family into another, just in time for the climax at the carnival. I’ll admit, the varying kids are all interesting, engaging varieties and their adult versions are good-looking heroes, but the adult heroes are just boring.

Overall, the movie works just fine when viewed as Big with Super-Powers but it could have been so much more. Director David F. Sandberg does a fine job making us care for the characters and keeps the action pieces moving, a growing challenge with every subsequent super-hero film. I’d be curious to see what he does with a sequel.

The high def transfer retains the 2.39:1 aspect ratio and is a strong image. The colors pop, the blacks are deep, and the lightning crackles. This definitely retains its comic book look and feel which goes a long way towards the enjoyment. The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is possibly a touch better than the visuals so the music and special effects pop.

The Blu-ray comes complete with an above-average assortment of special features starting with Exclusive Motion Comic: “Superhero Hooky” (4:05) which reminds us why motion comics have never taken off as a medium although its nice the cast does the voices in this short. We than have The Magical World of Shazam (26:56) which briefly covers different aspects of the film’s production; Super Fun Zac (3:13); Deleted & Alternate Scenes (37:27 total), with Sandberg explaining why he reshot or edited out each scene giving you additional insight into the production; Gag Reel (3:16); Who is Shazam? (5:42), a too-brief history of the character in comics; Carnival Scene Study (10:22); and Shazamily Values (6:06) pairs the kid and their adult counterpart for some fun commentary.