Captain America: Civil War, The Heat, The Nice Guys, Sicario

Friends, I've been taking a break from flying to work on a special project.  No flying = fewer nights in hotel rooms, pecking away at my keyboard.  Still, here are some short notes on some films I've seen these last few weeks.

Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War features a battle between different factions of The Avengers, the team of superheroes we in the audience have come to root for over the course of Marvel’s films.  It marks the first time I’ve ever felt conflicted watching one of these superfights, and that is a remarkable achievement.  In this fight, nobody’s evil; nobody wants to kill anybody; everyone just wants it to stop.

It's heartbreaking.

“Heartbreaking” isn’t a word I’d ever expected to write in regards to a superhero movie, but there it is.  Civil War presents us with an “everyone’s right” scenario that forces noble people into a conflict they don’t want and that can’t be resolved with a simple, “Old Man Withers is the real villain here” reveal.  That’s the stuff of heartbreak.  Well done.

The Heat

The Heat is a simple buddy-cop comedy elevated by sharp writing and the significant talents of Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock.  It’s laugh-out-loud funny, moves right along, and practically begs for a sequel.  Sign me up.

The Nice Guys

Shane Black can do no wrong.

Sicario

Sicario stars Emily Blunt as an FBI agent with PTSD.  She’s in the middle of a major counter-drug operation, however, so she doesn’t have time to deal with it.  This leaves her accruing more and more damage as the film progresses, lending a harrowing shading to an otherwise unremarkable film about ultraviolent cartels and the agencies who combat them.

Spy

I’ve been slow to climb aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  Her performance in Bridesmaids reminded me of Chris Farley, who made a string a successful movies built around fat jokes.  Sadly, Farley was consumed with self-loathing, and the drugs to which he turned eventually killed him.  Thus, it felt cruel to go to the movies just to laugh at the fat lady.  Cruelty is not my idea of a good time.

And yet, there I was: stuck in Coach on a long flight, having already seen most of the pictures the in-flight entertainment system had to offer.  I remembered that Spy garnered good reviews, so I decided to give it a (skeptical) shot.

I laughed all the way through Spy, from the first silly gag involving bats in the CIA Comm Center through the silly gags involving various sequel ideas that played through the closing credits.  Spy is not 90 minutes of laughing at the fat lady.  It’s 90 minutes of laughing with the clever, capable woman who just happens to be a little larger than normal.  Oh, and lots of laughing at Jason Statham.  Jason Statham.  Who knew?

Here’s the setup: McCarthy is a “back room” CIA agent along the lines of Mission: Impossible’s Simon Pegg.  Like Pegg, she winds up doing field work even though nobody (including her) thinks she’s up to the task.  Like Pegg, she turns out to be awesome.

Spy, of course, plays this setup entirely for laughs.  To do so, it recruits a murderer’s row of some of the finest supporting talent working in movies today, from Jude Law to Rose Byrne to Bobby Cannavale to Morena Baccarin to Peter Sarafinowicz to Allison Janney.  And this isn’t the kind of movie in which various big name supporting actors just turn up to cash a paycheck: each of them endows his or her character with enough personality, enough life, to make every moment pop.  Even the Big Bad, while dangerous enough to present a credible threat within the context of the film, exhibits just enough silliness to put a smile on our face.

I loved this movie.  Spy is raunchy and goofy and laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end, and it’s all that not only without demeaning its star, but with making her absolutely awesome.  Writer/Director Paul Feig nails it, and I’m now firmly aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  I can’t wait to see what the two of them do with Ghostbusters.