Tagged: Vin Diesel

Emily S. Whitten: GOTGv2’s Family Affair

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 this weekend, and man, did I have a blast. Is it a 100% perfect movie? Maybe not – how many comics adaptations are? But is it a really solid comics flick, an excellent second chapter to the Guardians’ adventure, and one of the most fun Marvel movies out to date? Yes, yes, and yes! And was it also made by creators who had a love for the source material and the actual product itself, knew their audience wanted an even more epic Guardians story, and delivered without falling into the more-of-the-same-only-bigger-equals-underwhelming-sequel trap? You bet!

(Warning: some SPOILERS ahead!)

Guardians Vol. 2 paints its backdrops in broad strokes. It is, as it should be, a space epic. The Guardians planet-hop, crash spaceships, and, at one point, bounce through something like forty space jumps at once. There are also several other groups of space-faring folk to keep track of – different factions of Ravagers, the newly-introduced Sovereign, and, of course, Peter Quill’s long-absent father. And the scenery is vast, unusual, and visually stunning, whether we’re seeing the innards of a collapsing planet or fireworks at a rare Ravager ceremony.

But set into all of this are the smaller scenes that knit this movie together with one thread: family. The theme is everywhere – from the reminder that the Guardians, even when they’re fighting, have chosen to be a family; to the denouement of Peter’s tamped-down desire to know his real father and his confrontation of difficult parental issues; to the rivalry between Gamora and her sister Nebula; to the well-played new friendship that’s struck up between the overly literal Drax and the extremely sheltered Mantis; to the bloody and harsh conflict that plays out between the Ravager factions; to gruff Yondu’s bonding with the equally prickly Rocket, and the redemption arc of Kraglin’s relationship with Yondu; to, of course, everyone’s involvement with The Growing Up of Little Groot (who is, as in Vol. I, one of the best parts of any scene).

Although interactions with Little Groot (no longer a potted baby stick, but still dancing adorably, particularly when set against the intense space-monster battle of the opening credits) are cute as can be (except when he’s killing folk, or, to be honest, even when he is), most of the familial messages are not all sweetness and light. But the overall gestalt of the film is that although families can be dysfunctional, messy, and even sometimes irredeemable, the value of being able to be your true self and still rely on family – whether they be your blood relatives of simply the people who have decided to love you like they are – is the most important thing.

Writer and director James Gunn hammers this home by having characters straight out remind us that the Guardians are, in fact, a family, in a couple of perhaps unnecessary “telling instead of showing” moments. However, unlike in Iron Man 2 where we were told about how Tony had become a better person after the events of Iron Man but the “showing” didn’t really back that up, the moments that Gunn uses to build this movie really carry that message.

And maybe he’s also playing with that “tell vs. show” aspect. Quill’s “real” father tells him all about how much he wanted to find his son as he explains (using a hilariously plastic-y series of museum exhibit-like display pods) his courtship of Peter’s mother; but then shows how little value he has for family through his actions and the harm he brings to Peter. Whereas Yondu, who raised Peter, regularly told Peter fairly awful stuff (“You said you would eat me!” “I thought that was funny!”), but consistently, even to the point of losing the respect and loyalty of his crew, looks out for and will not harm Peter. Likewise, Drax tells Mantis, in his usual tactless way, that he thinks her appearance is ugly and disgusting – but he is consistently kind and gentle towards her, and looks out for her and patiently answers her questions. Gamora takes Nebula prisoner and Nebula swears revenge – but when push comes to shove, neither can let the other go. And Groot – well, Groot tells everyone that he is Groot, and we just love him for it, end of story.

In focusing on the characters and their bonds, Guardians Vol. 2 also avoids the trait I dislike in so many comics space stories (and crossovers). Often, these stories get so caught up in the Grandiose Larger Purpose of what is going on – this planet is fighting that planet which is fighting that other planet over there – that I really stop caring which Planet wins, because they’re all just planets. But Guardians doesn’t throw focus. It doesn’t neglect the spaces within the epic story that is, in fact, also happening as Peter’s father tries to take over the universe.

It recognizes the mundane moments that sometimes show who people are more than a grand gesture or epic fight, and that make the audience care. Gunn being who he is, I’m not surprised that he almost takes this to the next level, to the point where the characters spend several movie minutes searching for Scotch tape. Some moviegoers might be put off by this, but I see it as part and parcel of who the Guardians are, and the unique sense of fun they bring to saving the world. Pretty much like when Rocket assigned Peter to acquire a prisoner’s fake leg for a prison break plan in the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. I, and then it turned out he didn’t need it and simply thought it would be hilarious to send Peter to get it (that still makes me laugh).

Fortunately, Gunn and the rest of the cast and crew didn’t lose that humor in Guardians Vol. 2, and in fact, in some places, amped it up in the best way. Drax (Dave Bautista), for instance, has been developed beyond the already humorous incongruity of his literal interpretations of the expressive way most people speak, to a character who is now more relatable but still unreasonably tactless and blunt at all the wrong moments. The result is that he gets some of the most subtly humorous but also human dialogue exchanges in the film, particularly with Mantis (Pom Klementieff, who is adorable, and stellar in keeping an equilibrium between Mantis’s sweet naiveté and the strong emotions she experiences as an empath).

Rocket (Bradley Cooper) is hilarious for the sheer fun he takes in mayhem and destruction (the scenes of him messing with the Ravagers in the forest are absolutely hysterical). Chris Pratt continues to balance Star Lord’s irreverence for serious moments and almost childlike sense of fun with the responsibilities of being the natural-born leader of the group. And Groot (in some magical combination of CGI and Vin Diesel that is definitely more than the sum of its parts) brings the house down while he tries and epically fails to bring his friends various objects to help them escape from a holding cell.

Of course, some characters are more suited to be “the straight man,” but even though Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Yondu (Michael Rooker), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Peter’s dad (Kurt Russell), and Kraglin (Sean Gunn) tend to be played straighter overall, each of them does a great job and also still gets at least a few moments of humor (and Michael Rooker has one of the absolutely funniest lines in the movie as they’re all falling to the ground towards the end). Heck, even the seriousness of the Sovereign, who exude gravitas and are quick to take offense, is undermined by the fact that they go to war by, essentially, playing space video games (Ender’s Game, anyone?).

But I think a point being made here is that life doesn’t have to be all serious or all fun – like this movie, it can contain everything from deadly Ravagers bouncing through the air like helpless popcorn at the hands of a “trash panda;” to poor little Groot being bullied and sadly squelching away (and boy, did that make me want to punch that whole mean crew in the face); to the leader of the saviors of the galaxy choosing to save that galaxy as a giant Pac-Man; to Yondu’s arrow snaking through the darkness in the most beautiful kind of 80s neon death I have ever seen as it kills those who betrayed him; to the universal trope of every teenager everywhere, no matter what species, being yelled at about their messy rooms; to the whole of space exploding into glorious fireworks to honor fallen family. This movie is, all in a couple of hours, ridiculous, badass, serious, not taking itself seriously, heartwarming, grim, riotously fun, incredibly sad, gloriously chaotic, seriously ugly, and vibrantly beautiful.

Which means that at its heart, despite the epic space setting and multitude of species, Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 is a very human movie – and as Peter says when his father informs him that turning his back on his legacy will make him only human: “What’s so terrible about that?”

Not a thing, and I’m glad that the Guardians will be returning so we can be reminded of that yet again in, I assume, Volume 3 (the soundtrack of which had better be played on a Zune).

Until then, feel free to check out this clip from my further discussion of Guardians Vol. 2 on the Fantastic Forum radio show (the whole episode of which will be up here shortly), and don’t forget to Servo Lectio!

Box Office Democracy: The Fate of the Furious

Box Office Democracy: The Fate of the Furious

I don’t believe in objective reviews of media.  I think the personal subjectivity of the reviewer is impossible to remove and, honestly, that it would be boring if you could.  That said, I am not capable of being remotely objective when it comes to the Fast & Furious franchise.  I find the formula they have stumbled upon since Fast Five to be unbelievably charming and I can’t separate the movie from the joy they’ve brought in to my life and the friendships these movies have enriched.  If this bothers you, I can give you the low down on how I feel about this movie and you can be on your way: if you’ve liked any of the last three entries in the franchise you’ll like this one, and if you didn’t this will not change your mind.  If my F&F obsession does not bother you, come on and let me geek out a little bit.

If you’ve seen the trailer you know the hook for The Fate of the Furious: Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) has turned against his crew, his family, and is now working for the super hacker Cipher (Charlize Theron).  That’s sort of the whole film.  Cipher has a nefarious plan but it’s very nebulous.  She wants nuclear weapons and she wants to launch one, but I’m not sure what she wants to do after that.  It all feels hastily thrown together so we can get the shots of Dom in his evil black jumpsuit driving a more evil-looking black Challenger.  That’s all fine, the plot is only there to hold top the action sequences— but this feels less substantial than usual.  There’s also the idea that Cipher would blackmail someone who has pulled off some of the zaniest heists and car chases in history but only uses him as a glorified bag man that rubbed me the wrong way— but again it’s all about big action sequences and meaningful glances, so whatever.

There are two signature action pieces in The Fate of the Furious and they’re the most important thing to judge the movie by.  There’s a big second act set piece in New York where Cipher hacks a bunch of cars and controls them remotely as a big swarm to take out a motorcade.  This is a visually interesting bit but it might finally be the moment where a Fast & Furious movie got too far out there for me.  I know cars don’t work like that.  More importantly, it doesn’t feature any characters we care about so it’s literally just cars smashing in to each other with no purpose.  The sequence picks up a lot when it becomes about Dom and the rest of the crew, but by that point you’re kind of tired of action.  The movie’s climax is a race across a frozen bay to stop a submarine while being chased by cars firing missiles.  I know I said self-driving cars were straining my suspension of disbelief earlier in this very paragraph, but I loved every ridiculous second of this sequence.  It feels a little like they’re trying to top the tank sequence from Fast & Furious 6 by using a bigger more menacing piece of military hardware and it doesn’t live up to it, maybe nothing ever could, but it’s great in its own right.

Fast Five was a heist movie with all the wonderful twists and turns inherent in the genre, and in the two films since they’ve abandoned that to make straight-up action movies.  While they haven’t gone back to stealing giant safes, they have returned to meaningful third act twists and I’m so thankful for it.  There’s so many things we find out were slightly different than the first time we saw them, and it’s what these movies need to not just be an endless parade of flashy car tricks.  It needs characters, it needs stakes, and it needs to be just a little bit surprising.

Reading this back, I can see how much I’m grading The Fate of the Furious on a curve.  If this was any other movie with the flaws this one has I would probably be here tearing it apart and begging you not to see it.  I love this franchise, I love these characters, and I can’t set that aside.  There are so many little things to appreciate from an eight movie franchise that can’t be replicated.  It’s nice just to hang out with these characters and exist in their world for another couple hours.  It’s fun to pick up on the callbacks and see them pick up threads that were set down years and years ago.  I still find The Fate of the Furious as refreshing as a Corona on a hot LA afternoon— and as long as that’s true, I’ll carry water for these movies.

Box Office Democracy: xXx: Return of Xander Cage

I was extremely excited when I walked out of the original xXx back in the summer of 2002.  Finally, a spy film for my generation.  Something that could mix international espionage and the X-Games aesthetic that seemed poised to take over the world.  I’ve rewatched xXx recently and it does not hold up at all.  Also, I never participated in any extreme sports or watched very much of any X-Games so I have no idea why embracing this culture appealed to me at all.  In retrospect, the original xXx was an okay action movie with some fantastic costuming and an awful lot of dated references.  15 years later xXx: Return of Xander Cage is still trying to traffic in counter-culture hipness, but it doesn’t feel like anyone involved in the production has talked to a cool person or a youth in decades.  Return of Xander Cage is jam-packed with the kind of disingenuous focus-grouped edginess the characters would claim to hate.  Too bad they’re fictional and not writing this or any other better movies.

In Return of Xander Cage everyone who is part of the establishment is bad.  I’m not against this general ethos, the establishment is generally a terrible thing— but the medium has to inform the message.  This is a film made by a major studio, so when the burly special forces soldier who doesn’t care for Xander Cage and his alternative ways taunts him saying that he must love Red Bull and Mountain Dew, I can’t help but wonder if those companies paid for that placement.  I see the two leads of these extreme spy teams being played by two actors with a combined age of 102 and I can’t help but think of that 30 Rock meme with Steve Buscemi pretending to be a high school student.

Return of Xander Cage could be so much more cool if it wasn’t so intent on telling me that it was cool all the time.  (I don’t even want to get in to how 44 year-old Toni Collette is kind of made to look like an old crone next to her older male co-stars but it’s also bad, I just don’t want to be here all night.)

There’s also a sense that Return of Xander Cage is trying to capture some of the magic of Vin Diesel’s other, more successful franchise, The Fast and the Furious, but it’s not clear that anyone involved knows what made those work.  They copied the big multicultural cast, they copied the never-ending banter, they copied the ambitious action sequence, and they copied the requirement of having a few party scenes full of beautiful people dancing to music.  None of it works as well.  Most of the supporting characters feel like quick thumbnail sketches instead of people, and for a movie that literally circumnavigates the world it feels rather small.  There’s a secret sauce in the Fast and Furious movies and it might just be as simple as star power or sharper action choreography or even just familiarity with the universe, but those movies are just as far fetched and just as ridiculous and they work.

I’m usually not on a high horse about sequels or Hollywood running out of ideas, but this feels like a spot that should have gone to a new idea.  Return of Xander Cage feels weighed down with the baggage of the two previous movies and I can’t imagine that enough people where clamoring for more xXx to necessitate this (and the box office results seem to back me up on that).  There are a couple usable ideas here, and maybe on their own they could have blossomed in to something else but instead they’re just drowned out by the baggage of trying to live up to this X-Games early-2000s rebelliousness.  Return of Xander Cage is the cinematic equivalent of the guy in his early 20s hanging around the park with high school kids— it isn’t making him seem cool and everyone there just kind of wishes he was doing something else.

Box Office Democracy: The Last Witch Hunter

The most painful thing about The Last Witch Hunter is how clear it is that Vin Diesel is passionate about the material and is having an amazing time. Almost every profile piece I’ve ever read on Diesel has mentioned his love of Dungeons & Dragons, or that he wrote the introduction for their 30th anniversary retrospective book, or that his character in xXx had a tattoo with the name of his D&D character on his stomach; his nerd credentials are beyond reproach and they’re on full display in this film. Unfortunately instead of turning that knowledge and experience in to a quality fantasy movie, we’re given a film that is about as interesting as listening to the guy behind you in line for Star Wars tell you stories about how amazing his character is in his buddy’s D&D game.

The Last Witch Hunter suffers immensely from a lack of stakes. It features an immortal badass killer, Kaulder, who not only can’t die but any injury he suffers heals instantly Wolverine-style. All of the supporting characters are seemingly introduced immediately before being put in peril so you have to really bond with them quickly to feel anything at all for them. Michael Caine, the only actor in the cast capable enough to overcome this script problem, is imperiled off-screen and is afflicted with some kind of curse that is barely explained nonsense seemingly designed so they could have their emotional moment but still bring Caine back for the sequel. Things ramp up dramatically toward the end of the movie when they strip Kaulder of his immortality and directly imperil the entire world or maybe just New York City (and honestly is there even a difference) but by then I was just too far-gone to care.

Reportedly, this script came about from Vin Diesel telling one of the screenwriters about one of his Dungeons & Dragons characters. While I’m not sure any movie should come about through a story like that, it makes his investment in this movie palpable. He believes in his character and every silly nonsense word that comes out of his mouth. In a weird way, it’s one of my favorite performances of his career because he’s trying to put this movie on his back and just make it better through sheer force of acting. Diesel isn’t on that rare level where he can make a movie better just by trying harder, but I can appreciate that effort even if it isn’t quite enough.

There isn’t enough original stuff in this movie to make it feel worth the time and effort of making it. Fantasy is so well trod these days there’s nothing in the flashback scenes that I haven’t seen in Game of Thrones, or Lord of the Rings, or even How to Train Your Dragon. The contemporary stuff at its very best feels like a slightly reskinned version of Men in Black and at worst like an episode of Charmed. I sort of liked their take on a bar for witches (even if that’s not exactly new ground) but my enthusiasm was dashed when the place is destroyed within five minutes of being introduced on screen. Nothing feels like a fresh take, or a new use of metaphor, or a deeper look at a theme, it’s just recycling stuff we’ve seen and hoping the new arrangement proves compelling and it doesn’t.

I often complain about movies feeling too compact or too drawn out, and The Last Witch Hunter is in a strange limbo in between. Everything feels too rushed and there isn’t any space for the story to breathe or for the characters to reveal themselves to us, but also I left that 106-minute movie convinced it had been two and a half hours long. It might be an impossible task to make this a compelling film narrative. This is a story that would work much better in a novel: it would have proper space to build, internal monologues could make exposition a little less clunky, and the stakes could be more clearly defined.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I would want to read that novel either.

Box Office Democracy: Furious 7

 

Justin Lin was the architect of the most dramatic film franchise turnarounds in my lifetime. When he signed on to make a third Fast & Furious movie the franchise was a laughing stock (I heard more jokes about the name 2 Fast 2 Furious than any movie before or since). He would, over the course of four films, turn the franchise in to the best original action movie franchise of the modern era. Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6 are the best action films of this decade and it isn’t particularly close. The mid-credits scene of Fast & Furious 6 revealing Jason Statham as the villain for the next installment was one of the happiest moments I’ve ever had in a movie theater.   If I knew anything in the world of cinema I knew Furious 7 would be a fantastic movie and that I needed to wait on the edge of my seat for it to come and deliver another transcendent action movie experience.

Then Paul Walker died.

(more…)

Box Office Democracy: Guardians of the Galaxy

  • News
  • August 4, 2014

I have spent months telling everyone who would listen that I thought Guardians of the Galaxy would be the first flop of the Marvel Studios era.  While Iron Man and Thor were hardly household names before their recent turns they were the practically Superman wearing a Mickey Mouse costume compared with Star-Lord and Groot.

There’s also the inherent tendency for cosmic stories to end up feeling pretty nonsensical, maybe not more nonsensical than the Asgard stuff but audiences didn’t connect with Green Lantern and that seemed to be the closest comparable movie.  I thought this would be an emperor-has-no-clothes moment and would unravel the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I’m happy to report I was a complete moron and while many of those ill portents might have been true James Gunn and his cast made such a thoroughly enjoyable movie that they don’t matter.

Guardians of the Galaxy is easily the funniest Marvel movie but it also derives its comedy in such a different way than most super hero movies.  Every super hero movie I can think of either has one character that’s responsible for generating 90% of the laugh lines (your Tony Starks or your Lokis) or by sort of having moments of acknowledging the absurdity of the premise (this was way overdone in the later Schumaker Batman films).  Guardians lets all five members of the team be funny and it helps so much.  It helps the plot (and I’ll get to why the plot needs a little bit of help) but it also lets the actors shine in these characters.

I knew coming in to expect great things from Chris Pratt but I was not expecting Bradley Cooper to turn in the best performance of his career playing a mutant raccoon.  I don’t even just mean he’s funnier in this movie than anything else, although he is, but he disappears in that character and I never thought I was hearing Bradley Cooper.  Vin Diesel steals entire scenes despite only ever saying three words.  This ensemble might not be better than Downey, Evans, Johansson et al. in the Avengers franchise but they fit their roles as good if not better than the big team and it’s stunning to watch.

I mentioned earlier that the plot needs a little bit of help and that’s not entirely fair.  As someone who has been reading comic books literally as long as I can remember I had no problem following what was going on.  The three people I went with who did not have that background had no idea what had just happened.  They enjoyed themselves immensely, and that should be the real measure of a movie, but they could not tell me who the non-Guardian characters were, what their motivations were, or what an “Infinity Gem” did.  They push through a lot of stuff without time for anything to sink in or without providing a lot of exposition and just relied on the general charisma of the rest of the film to carry the plot a little bit.  It worked flawlessly and is the biggest difference from Green Lantern, which explained everything in laborious detail, and had no joy anywhere to be found.

I still think there are flaws in the MCU road map (honestly, who is clamoring for a Doctor Strange movie?) but I can’t doubt them any longer.  I will anxiously await every movie they put out until they prove they can’t do it.  I went in to this movie thinking I wouldn’t like it at all and walked out with only a minor quibble about the use of slow motion.  Make mine movies Marvel.

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