2019 superhero movie
Rating: 9/20
Plot: Yet another superhero origin story.
This should anger feminists. After 73 Marvel superhero cartoons, a female character finally gets to be the protagonist in one of them. That's the good news. The bad news is that the movie is a terrible combination of vapid and derivative, and that main character is played by Brie Larson whose lack of charisma causes her to be upstaged by both a Samuel L. Jackson enhanced by special effects and a cat. Oh, and Ben Mendelsohn who is playing a character who could almost have been in Waititi's Thor movie.
Actually, before I really begin, I need to talk about the odd synchronicity with this movie and Us. What are the odds in 2019 that I'd see one movie in a theater, sneak into a second movie, and find out that both movies have shots of VHS copies of The Right Stuff?
If there's a decade worse than the 80's, it might be the 90's. This is filthy with cutesy clever references to that decade, and they didn't succeed in adding to the story or its central character or being funny. I guess I'm supposed to laugh at the appearance of antiquated businesses like Blockbuster or Radio Shack? Is a Nine Inch Nails shirt supposed to get me excited? Those cheap references--the cheapest of all being the use of a too-obvious song during a boring climactic fight scene--added to these Marvel Easter eggs bugged me. A frenemy of mine praised this while slamming the Han Solo movie and the Star Wars prequels for giving us information about C3PO or the origin of Han Solo's name, but Captain Marvel explaining why Fury has an eyepatch or showing us that stupid blue cube again and forcing me to try to remember what the hell that's all about or showing us why the Avengers are called the Avengers seem equally silly.
The female empowerment angle is clumsy, the action scenes are clunky and uninspiring, the sci-fi special effects are mostly ugly, and the disjointed narrative isn't nearly as clever as it thinks it is. This succeeds in a few scenes where Jackson and Larson are buddy-copping it up because their rapport is good, but for the most part, it's a major Marvel misstep heading into this next Avengers movie which I'm pretty sure is going to be hugely disappointing.
2 comments:
Seven points below "Hale County"! (and yes, you graded that a point higher than "Free Solo"...God knows why)... You never seem to "get" these kinds of movies, any more than I get "Hale County" or "Eraserhead".
I disagree with almost everything in your review, except that you are right to defend the excellent "Solo", though maybe that is why you took out your anger on this movie. The scene where we see her always getting up after getting knocked down is one of my favorites from any Marvel movie. A 17.
Do I have to defend Hale County with all of these or do I just focus on the movie you're commenting on?
I'm surprised that "getting up" montage wasn't accompanied with that Chumbawamba "I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again" song. That was the best scene of the movie, but any good feeling there is cancelled out by the use of "I'm Just a Girl" in that fight sequence. Big eye rolls there. This was an embarrassingly generic and pandering superhero movie that seemed to be written by a child. I wasn't angry at all because I don't have any emotion connection to these Marvel movies. I was just really bored. Women deserve a much better superhero movie than this crappy one.
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