Ant-Man

Walking out of Ant-Man, my oldest engaged me in the following conversation:

“Whadja think, Dad?”

“It was fine.”

“Why didn’t you like it?”

“I did like it.  It was fine.”

“But not good.  What was wrong with it?”

“Nothing.  It was fine.”

It really was fine.  It starred Michael Douglas and Paul Rudd, both of whom are always welcome presences.  It featured solid supporting work from Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Bobby Cannavale, Judy Greer, and especially Michael Peña.  I laughed at the jokes.  I grooved to the visuals.  I lost track of time.

However, Ant-Man never entirely captured my imagination.  It set itself up as a caper movie, then paid off the caper at the end of the second act and segued into just another superhero fistfight picture.  Granted, Ant-Man has some fun with this trope by setting the fight on a toy train (the combatants are ant-sized, after all).  However, this just led me to wonder why the villain’s laser beams blow up the train set’s wooden models, as opposed to simply burning holes through them.  Were the models filled with gunpowder and gasoline?  Who makes toys like that?  And at what point were we supposed to find dog-sized (relative to the protagonist) ants charming, instead of revolting and scary?

Perhaps I’m tiring of the genre for the same reason I never got into superhero comics in the first place.  The outfits and motivations may change from title to title, but they all seem to boil down to the same thing: men in silly costumes punching one another.  I’d just as soon watch one of the better Rocky movies.

That said, the actors *are* fun to watch.  The jokes *do* land.  The visuals *are* cool.  I really did lose track of time.  Ant Man is by no means a bad movie.  It’s pleasant.  It’s fun.

I liked it.

It was fine.

Pain & Gain

I've never been a fan of Michael Bay's movies, but I've never thought of him as a bad person.

Until now.

Pain and Gain is a bad movie made by a bad person who operates under the assumption that his audience is full of bad people who enjoy laughing at other bad people.

Pain and Gain is a bad movie because it's a thuddingly unfunny comedy. Not one funny thing happens during its entire run time, and I didn't so much as grin from the opening credits to the close. Pain and Gain was made by a bad person because only a bad person thinks that a true story of kidnapping, torture, and multiple murder can be played for laughs. This bad person assumes that his audience is full of bad people because it is, simply, wrong to laugh at stupid people for being stupid: they can't help it.

Here's the story: Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, and Anthony Mackie are stupid bodybuilders who, motivated by a stupid get-rich-quick schemer, go in on a stupid plan to kidnap and torture a rich guy until he gives them his money.

Yes, there's some commentary on materialism and confusion between wealth and happiness, but it's slight. Mostly, the film serves as an opportunity for its audience to spend ninety minutes feeling superior to a bunch of morons.

You know who finds that entertaining? Bad people. I regret reneging on my resolution never to see another Michael Bay movie. Bad decision.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier fuses the paranoid political thriller and the superhero action showcase. That it does so well, in part and in total, is a remarkable achievement.

Here's the setup: Cap & Black Widow (Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson) are the two most attractive people in government service. They're also a superhero team that flies around the world doing secret missions for SHIELD. SHIELD is basically the DHS, but competent, international, and much better funded. SHIELD, however, may have a hidden agenda. Will Cap & BW sort things out in time?

Well, yeah, of course they will. That's not the point. The point is how well the film tells their story. Robert Redford (as, basically the Secretary of SHIELD) and Samuel L. Jackson (as himself) carry the political thriller aspects of the picture with aplomb. Evans & Johansson, who team up with Anthony Mackie (of the criminally underrated Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) to battle Frank Grillo (Warrior) and Sebastian Stan (Black Swan), make a great action duo. They combine athleticism with real acting chops, selling both their battles and their dialogue.

That said, the real star here is the story. It's like a finely tuned machine, shifting from character beats to action set-pieces and back again smoothly and gracefully. It parcels out information at just the right pace to allow us to keep up, and it hangs together well enough that it still makes sense a few days later.

In short, this is a successful motion picture. It clips along briskly, it's well engineered, it involved me in the lives of its characters, and it kept me engaged the entire time.

But that isn't what I'll remember about it.

I'll remember two particular moments (the second of which is a spoiler). The first is minor piece of set-dressing. When Redford's character opens his kitchen refrigerator, the astute viewer will notice that he stocks his fridge with Newman's Own marinara sauce. That's a nice touch. The second is the most powerful scene in the movie. Villain Frank Grillo, all muscles, veins, and menace, is pointing his gun at the back of a computer technician's head, commanding him to enter a code that will make bad things happen. The technician, whom I'm guessing is played by Aaron Himelstein, squirms with terror. Nevertheless, he refuses to enter the code. That's fine, but the part that sells the moment is that he doesn't refuse nobly, standing up to the meanie and telling him to get stuffed. He practically squeaks his refusal, trying to melt into his chair and probably $#!^ting his pants. It's the bravest damn thing I've seen in a movie all year.


Well done.

Real Steel

Real Steel.  It’s a fighting movie without any actual fighting.  Yes, enormous animated robots duke it out in various venues, but they’re just robots.  This could be a movie about slot car racing or flying model airplanes.

Here’s the deal: it’s the near future.  Hugh Jackman plays a derelict drifter, one whose sole possessions appear to be a semi truck, a rock ‘em sock ‘em robot, and a 6-pack of cheap beer.  Oh, and he must have a full gym and a nutritionist and a personal trainer and some actual motivation in there, too, because I’ve never heard of a derelict drifter in the kind of shape this guy’s in.  Anyway, he drives from town to town, putting his ‘bot in small-time bouts for chump change and making bets he can’t cover.  He’s bad at it.  Enter a long-lost son.  Time to grow up.  Time to make something of himself.  All that.  You’ve seen it before.

Look, Jackman’s a super-talented man, Dakota Goyo, who plays the son, is a super-talented boy, and it’s hard to screw up the “man-child grows up and bonds with his kid” storyline.  But that storyline is really just a framework for the film’s showcase battles between various androids, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about them.  Not because I didn’t care about Jackman père et fils, but because a fight in which the contestants neither tire nor feel pain is no fight at all.  I’m not holding myself out as an expert fighter, here – I’m basically going on memories of Plebe boxing at USNA.  But I remember how I felt after only three rounds, when it was all my opponent and I could do to keep our gloves up and lob feather-light jabs at one another.  Real Steel’s robots can’t know what that’s like, so I couldn’t care about them.  And since I couldn’t do that, well, the movie’s marquee moments fell flat.

I think Jackman and Goyo could have carried a movie about a down-on-his-luck boxer who needed someone to believe in him.  The very conceit of Real Steel, however, left me with no skin in the game.