Tags: Superheroes & Comic Book Movies
A Superman movie for our times — but is that a good thing?
Man of Steel: my “Reel Faith” 60-second review.
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C+ |
**½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up
To borrow a line from
Man of Steel producer Christopher Nolan’s
The Dark Knight: This isn’t the Superman movie we need, but it’s the one we deserve.
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Iron Man Three in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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Iron Man 2 in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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Iron Man in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
It’s a potentially promising setup for a slam-bang finale to what has been, despite its flaws, one of the brightest and most entertaining franchises around. Unfortunately, the slapdash plot is pretty much a disaster. A string of miscalculations hamper the fun. And a late revelation, when you stop and think about it, undermines most of the preceding drama.
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B+ |
***½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
The Dark Knight Rises is very nearly the thunderous finale that Christopher Nolan’s unprecedented super-hero trilogy needed after the pitch-black nihilism that Heath Ledger’s Joker brought to
The Dark Knight … Yet something crucial is missing — a major omission that lingers over the whole trilogy, a question raised ever more insistently in all three films, and at best left unanswered, if not answered negatively.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
For all that, the new film bungles
who Spider-Man is, where he’s coming from. This isn’t the only problem (there are notable issues around the plot and the interpretation of Spider-Man’s reptilian foe, the Lizard), but for me it’s the most intractable, because it undermines the hero’s
moral center.
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The Avengers in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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In my
Avengers review I wrote, “If
The Avengers isn’t necessarily the
best superhero movie ever made, it is unquestionably the
most superhero movie ever made.“ That, of course, raises the question: What
is the best superhero movie ever made?
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A |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
If
The Avengers isn’t necessarily the
best superhero movie ever made, it is unquestionably the
most superhero movie ever made — and, in that capacity, it is more than well-made enough to take comic-book entertainment to unprecedented levels.
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What do today’s superhero movies tell us about ourselves? For one thing, we’re more skeptical these days about heroes and heroism. In contrast to the stoic confidence of the typical Western hero — or even of Christopher Reeves’ Superman, who
as late as 1978 could unabashedly say, “I’m here to fight for truth, justice and the American way” — today’s heroes have feet of clay, and have to grow into their heroic roles.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
After a rash of immature, bad-boy cinematic superheroes for whom responsibility is a bigger challenge than taking down supervillains — think
Iron Man,
Thor and
Green Lantern — a hero for whom decency, humility and self-sacrifice come naturally is a breath of fresh air.
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C+ |
**½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
If only the filmmakers had put as much creative energy into the character of Hal Jordan as they did into his lovingly rendered CGI-enhanced suit, which pulses and glows as it hugs every bulge and swell on Ryan Reynolds’ impeccably sculpted torso.
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A- |
***½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
Despite missteps,
X‑Men: First Class succeeds in doing in some measure for the X‑Men what J. J. Abrams did for
Star Trek two years ago: Not only does it bring new energy to a tired franchise, it reinvents a familiar cast of characters in unexpected ways, laying the foundations for the defining relationships and conflicts of later chapters, while telling a ripping story into the bargain.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
It starts pretty promisingly, and it stays pretty promising throughout, and at some point you realize it’s never actually going to deliver on that promise. There’s never a moment where it goes really wrong — it just never really gets started.
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B |
*** |
+1-1|
Kids & Up
Megamind is a satiric take on the Superman mythos, seen through the eyes of a supervillain who’s part Lex Luthor, part Brainiac. Instead of a rocket ship bearing an infant survivor from a doomed planet to Earth, there are
two ships from two planets. Fate deals the infant survivors very different hands: One is a super-powered golden boy who grows up privileged and smugly superior; the other grows up on the fringes of society, an outcast with one asset: his super-brain. It seems the two are destined to battle each other forever … or are they?
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All good things must come to an end, but “The Spectacular Spider-Man” ended too quickly, after only two seasons. In mid-April Marvel effectively pulled the plug on the acclaimed series, long on hiatus. A couple of weeks later, Sony released the eighth and final disc in the series, bringing the story to a satisfying yet not fully resolved conclusion.
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B+ |
*** |
+1|
Teens & Up
His suit may be iron, but he’s still got feet of clay. Tony Stark may not be the same narcissistic jerk he was at the beginning of
Iron Man two years ago, but that doesn’t mean he’s someone completely different either. The road to redemption is seldom so straight as that.
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Silent star Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. is still the silver screen’s
ultimate swashbuckling Zorro. Tyrone Powers
ideally embodies the sly subterfuge of a man of iron turning on a dime from foppish languor to finely double-edged banter to masked derring-do. But Guy Williams, hero of Walt Disney’s popular 1950s television series, is the most beloved Zorro of all time.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
If you’re a fan of the material, you’ll want to see it. There are some decent action scenes, and an inevitable, tragic climax. There are also things that make no sense. It’s not bad, really. What it’s most conspicuously lacking is any sense of surprise, of revelation, of creative boldness.
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D |
*** |
-3|
Adults*
The movie is an impressive work of transposition, but I can’t recommend it. Excessively brutal and sexually graphic as well as nihilistic and and antiheroic, it’s a thoroughgoing deconstruction of humanity as well as heroism, one that takes its world apart without putting it back together again. There are things to admire here, but
Watchmen doesn’t make me care. If you can’t care about characters facing the end of the world, perhaps it’s time to turn back the clock and move on.
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F |
0 |
-1|
Teens & Up
The movie version of
The Spirit is a straightforward excursion into the Frank Miller Universe at its most reductionist, self-parodying and content-free. There are no characters or relationships, only placeholders where characters ought to be. There is no drama or conflict, only dueling line readings and cartoony brutality. There is nothing at stake and nothing and no one to care about, only a pointless, shapeless exercise in wildly veering moods and styles.
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By rights, pulp heroes like Batman and James Bond belong to this world of escapism, not the world of
The Godfather. Bond was even one of the original inspirations for Indiana Jones. (“I’ve got something better than James Bond” was how Lucas pitched the character to Steven Spielberg.) Now, though, the boundaries are becoming less clear.
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A+ |
**** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
So deeply does
The Dark Knight delve into the darkness that lurks in the hearts of men that it comes almost as a shock, bordering on euphoria, to find that it maintains a tenacious grip onto hope in the human potential for good.
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B |
*** |
-1|
Teens & Up*
Bigger effects and badder creatures make Del Toro’s second take on Hellboy more entertaining than the original, but something’s still missing in the story of the super hero from hell.
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B- |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Although most viewers will probably find
The Incredible Hulk diverting but — after a strong first act — forgettable entertainment, for Hulk fans smarting from the limitations of the
Ang film, it may just be balm for the soul.
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B+ |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Smart, sardonic and more than a little silly,
Iron Man is a successful super-hero movie that never takes itself too seriously.
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C |
** |
-1|
Teens & Up
Perhaps this is what is most fundamentally wrong with the
Fantastic Four franchise: None of these allegedly “fantastic” heroes has any gravitas, any actual heroic weight or depth of character. There’s nothing particularly noble, compelling or even interesting about them. Far from inspiring admiration, they don’t rise even to the level of thinking, acting and relating like grown-ups.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Spider‑Man 3 is a movie stuffed to bursting — with action, plotlines, characters, humor, energy, moods, spectacle and certainly inspiration. Like its web-headed hero careening crazily through the canyons of Manhattan at the end of a web-line, the film swings breathlessly and without warning from one thing to another, from breakneck excitement to outrageous silliness to comic-book morals about responsibility, sacrifice and now even vengeance and forgiveness.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
For all their evident interest and affinity for the material, though, the filmmakers haven’t made a very good movie. They’ve figured out how to get Blaze (Cage), the motorcycle-riding hellion who makes a deal with the devil, into the same picture as Carter Slade (Sam Elliott), the originally unconnected (and not even supernatural) Ghost Rider of the Old West. But they haven’t figured out either who Johnny Blaze is as a character, or what the Ghost Rider is all about.
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A- |
***½ |
+2-1|
Teens & Up
From the rousing fanfare of the classic John Williams score to the comic book–inspired opening credits, it’s clear that
Superman Returns means to be nothing less than the film that
Superman III could have and should have been, but wasn’t. Except it’s actually better than that.
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B+ |
***½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Superman II isn’t perfect, but in the annals of comic-book movies it remains an indispensable touchstone.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Expressions like “Good things come in threes” and “Third time’s the charm” may have their place in the world, but when it comes to comic-book movies, so far at least, anything after two is all downhill.
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D+ |
*½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
More precisely, it’s a “funny family action film” in the
Fantastic Four mold — that is, a movie whose key qualification as kid entertainment is that it isn’t good enough for grown‑ups. Too bad. Our kids deserve better. For that matter, so do we.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Thrilling, heartbreaking, witty, romantic, and largely family-friendly,
The Mask of Zorro is possibly the best swashbuckler of its decade, a film at once true to the spirit of the classic period actioners and also thoroughly of its own time.
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C |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Critics adored
Batman for its eccentric, Burtonesque take on a pop-culture icon, for its moody, noirish gothic art-deco Gotham City, and of course for Jack Nicholson’s showy performance as the Joker. Comic-book fans, meanwhile, appreciated the film for rescuing the Dark Knight from the over-the-top camp comedy of the 1960s series and making him suitably dark and brooding. For all that, though, the film’s flaws are hard to overlook.
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B- |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Less than a month after Fox’s dumb, trashy
Fantastic Four somehow passed itself off as a family-friendly superhero comedy comes Disney’s
Sky High, a film that actually fits the bill.
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D- |
½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
How bad is
Fantastic Four? So bad that in desperation execs have resorted to trying to spin it as a "funny family action film," as one studio rep put it. It’s the
Kangaroo Jack strategy: When your dumb, trashy film clearly isn’t good enough for adolescents, let alone adults, reposition it as a kiddie flick. It’s an insult to family audiences. Our kids deserve better than Hollywood’s garbage.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
The Incredibles is exhilarating
entertainment with unexpected depths. It’s a bold, bright, funny
and furious superhero cartoon that dares to take sly jabs at the
culture of entitlement, from the shallow doctrine of self-esteem
that affirms everybody, encouraging mediocrity and penalizing
excellence, to the litigation culture that demands recompense for
everyone if anything ever happens, to the detriment of the
genuinely needy.
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A |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
It’s tempting to call
Batman Begins the
Citizen Kane of super-hero
movies; at any rate, it’s the closest thing so far.
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C |
** |
+1-2|
Adults*
The comic-book Constantine is a blond Brit based in Liverpool
(think Sting by way of Christopher Lee in Terence Fisher’s
The
Devil Rides Out). For the film, the casting of Keanu led to a
change of setting to California and LA. Similarly, the casting of
Shia LaBeouf (
Holes) as
Constantine’s ally Chandler turned the character from a seasoned
comrade in arms into a Jimmy Olsen-like junior sidekick.
(Whatever happened to casting actors who fit the part?)
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A |
**** |
+1|
Teens & Up
This is what a
Spider-Man movie should be — freewheeling, rip-roaring, hilarious, heartfelt, over the top.
Spider-Man 2 just might be the single greatest super-hero movie ever; it is unquestionably the wildest, most joyous, flat-out
comic-bookiest comic-book movie of all time.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
From its breathless, cartoony title sequence, with the letters of cast members’ names stuck like flies in a vast spiderweb,
Spider-Man makes its intentions crystal clear: This is one wide-eyed comic-book movie that revels in its pulp origins.
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C+ |
**½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
The best thing about
Hellboy is Hellboy. And he’s a demon.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Not the best or most exciting of comic-book movies to date, but the most thoughtful and arguably one of the most interesting, Ang Lee’s
Hulk offers a new look at Marvel Comics’s green-skinned Jekyll-and-Hyde pulp anti-hero through the director’s poetic, psychologically attuned sensibilities.
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A |
**** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Don Q Son of Zorro, named one of the year’s ten best films by
The New York Times, actually outdoes its predecessor, with a stronger and more sophisticated plot, better pacing, more interesting and complex characterizations, grander production values and set design, and more consistent action.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
You haven’t seen Zorro until you’ve seen Douglas Fairbanks Sr. as Zorro in the 1920 silent swashbuckling classic.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Powers can’t match the original Zorro’s astonishing acrobatics and doesn’t try — but the rousing climactic duel against Basil Rathbone’s villainous Captain Esteban, one of the best swordfights ever filmed at that time, almost makes up for it.
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A- |
***½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
Where other super-hero movies, like James Bond movies, take place in a static universe in which nothing really changes and the essential mythology remains the same,
X2 is set in a world in flux. The plot is part of an ongoing story-arc reaching back to
X-Men and building toward a future
X3.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
A classic tribute to an American pop-culture icon,
Superman is the first great comic-book movie and a nostalgic ode to the ideals of a more innocent time.
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C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults*
Ultimately,
Daredevil works best as a triumph of screenwriting redaction and well-utilized effects over weak characterization and generally uninspired casting. As super-hero movies go, I rank it below
Spider-Man, but above any of the films in the
Batman franchise.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up*
This is a world in which characters are not larger-than-life cardboard cutouts, but human beings with affecting problems, motives, conflicts, and interests; in which opposing ideas are at least as important as clashing super-powers or martial-arts moves; in which super-powers and special abilities are more than mere arbitrary plot shortcuts or empty pretexts for colorful special effects, but are treated thoughtfully as serious story elements with logical consequences in immediate events and also wider social implications.
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C+ |
***½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
Such “hope” as Shyamalan has to offer is less
persuasive and less memorable than the fears and horrors he
conjures; the overall impression created by his film is an
ultimately dehumanizing, depressing one.
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