Review: Deadpool & Wolverine

Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios.

The latest in the Marvel cannon - the very R-rated "Deadpool & Wolverine" - is a cross-franchise attempt to rake in a lot of cash (and it will probably be successful in doing so) as well as a swan song for several Marvel properties that never met their full potential (more on that later). As such, there's some amusement to be had here, but it's not nearly as subversive or witty as it appears to think it is.

One of the first big groans to be had here is that the film follows the traditional Marvel trajectory of involving the over-utilized multiverse theme - whilst also cracking jokes at its expense - and featuring yet another plotline in which the entire world faces a global threat. I could seriously go for a blockbuster one day in which just one city - or hell, even just a city block - is in danger.

Rather than explain the numerous backstories and multiverse crossover explanations and all that, suffice it to say that Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds, whose amusing banter makes some of the film's creakier elements less sufferable) must prove himself to gain the attention of the Avengers (an interview with Jon Favreau's character doesn't go the way he'd hoped) and, as I'd mentioned, prevent some supervillains - first, a bureaucrat and, later, Cassandra Nova (Emma Corwin), the evil sister of Charles Xavier - from destroying the world.

Deadpool decides that the only person who can help him save the universe is Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), who was killed off in the film "Logan," but since there's now a multiverse available to throw away any and all rules, Deadpool finds a version of Wolverine in another timeline and gets him to tag along. But first, there are numerous bloody fights between the two characters, which have no stakes because both characters are invincible.

The film is a not-safe-for-work version of a Marvel movie. As such, there's a lot of risque language and most of it isn't as subversive as the film's creative team seems to think it is, although there was one joke about a Boy Scout master that resulted in some outraged laughter in the theater where I saw this. On the one hand, it's commendable that the film pokes fun at the various tropes we've come to expect of Marvel - and Reynolds often not only pokes fun at the comic book company, but also various movie studios that produce the films, and even the creative choices of actors in those movies. 

At the same time, his poking fun at the tired tropes we've come to associate with Marvel and other comic book movies actually masks the fact that "Deadpool & Wolverine" is pretty much overloaded with them. Deadpool may wisecrack about the ridiculous elements of Marvel fandom, but ultimately his character just wants to be needed by the Avengers. 

Likewise, there's a joke in the film involving Chris Evans, but there's also Deadpool's reverence toward the Captain America character. This film wants to poke fun at all that is Marvel, but have its cake and eat it too. And most of the jokes aren't as rebellious as the filmmakers seem to think. Consider the jokes in last summer's "Barbie" film, which were significantly more pointed at the toy company that produces the famous doll.

There's a moderately amusing subplot in this film involving cast-aside Marvel characters of old, and some actors who portrayed them return to do so once again. Most notable are the returns of Jennifer Garner as Elektra and Wesley Snipes as Blade, although I'm not sure the latter was exactly cast aside, considering there's a reboot on the way. More amusing is Channing Tatum's presence as Gambit, whose movie was canceled after languishing in development hell for years, and the actor's Cajun patois that no one can seemingly understand.

So, yes, I'm sure "Deadpool & Wolverine" will make a killing and people will feel as if they've seen something risky and a little naughty. For a movie in a genre aimed at kids, there are a lot of f-bombs and X-rated jokes on display here as well as some incredibly gory fight scenes. The film is amusing enough, mostly due to its leads, but never quite as clever as it seems to think it is. Ultimately, it relies heavily on cliches, even if it spends much of its time poking fun at them as well.

Review: Last Summer

Image courtesy of Janus Films.

French provocateur Catherine Breillat's latest film, "Last Summer," follows the story of a family's upheaval when its matriarch has an affair with her underage stepson. And you know that the 76-year-old filmmaker is among France's most scandalous directors when a film on this subject is registered as among her more tame offerings.

In the film, Anne (Leah Drucker) is a successful lawyer living in the Paris suburbs with her wealthy, older husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) and she has seemingly works on cases involving young people - in some cases, they are abused; in another, she has helped to reunite a young woman with her estranged father.

All seems to be going fairly well until, one day, Pierre announces that his 17-year-old son from his first marriage, Theo (Samuel Kircher), is coming to live with them for a time. Theo is tall and gangly with floppy hair and often wanders around shirtless, bearing his multiple tattoos and giving off a petulant attitude. He is somewhat rude to Anne, but then he's seemingly somewhat rude to everyone, other than the two young girls who are his adopted sisters.

When a theft takes place at Anne and Pierre's home and is made to look like a burglary, Anne is quick to suspect Theo. But oddly enough, her confrontation with him leads to the two being more chummy. They hang out at a local dive bar and take a trip to the beach with his younger step siblings.

Things remain peaceful in the household until Theo makes a pass at Anne and things quickly escalate into a sexual relationship. It is during this midpoint that the film lags slightly through numerous - and somewhat langorous - sex scenes that are a far cry from the outrageous and graphic ones a viewer might expect from Breillat, whose previous films - "Romance" and "Anatomy of Hell," in particular - are not for the easily offended.

But it's when Theo and Anne's relationship comes to the attention of Pierre, and Anne takes to outright gaslighting to try to hide the relationship that "Last Summer" is at its sharpest and most tense. It's less of a spiral of destruction for Anne - although there are threats around every corner, from her nosy sister to a lawyer that Theo hires to intimidate her - but rather a fascinating glimpse at the lengths one will go to convince others - and, perhaps, even oneself - that the crimes of the past don't exist.

Breillat has always been a provocateur, although I found some of her more outrageous offerings - again, "Romance" and "Anatomy of Hell" - to be less interesting than her period piece "The Last Mistress" and her stunning masterwork "Fat Girl." Her latest might seem lightweight and toned down in comparison - and there are sections when the film lags a bit - but it's an overall effective, if a little slight, addition to her body of work.

Review: Twisters

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Lee Isaac Chung's "Twisters" is another in a long line of sequels that I didn't necessarily think we needed, but surpassed my expectations. The 2022 "Top Gun" sequel was another. Maybe this is a Glen Powell niche.

This sequel - which comes 28 years after Jan De Bont's original picture - doesn't involve any of the same characters of the original film, but is set in the same world of people who chase after tornadoes, if that's an actual thing. 

The film opens with a harrowing sequence during which stormchaser Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her crew test out a theory about how to bring a twister to a halt through science - please don't ask me to explain this. All but Kate and one other crew member, Javi (Anthony Ramos), survive the experience and the picture jumps ahead five years.

Kate is now working in New York, but gets roped back to her home state of Oklahoma after a visit by Javi, who has come up with a new method of using science to stop tornadoes - again, please don't ask me to explain. Although wary at first, Kate finds herself once again chasing storms and finds a worthy rival in Tyler (Powell), a "tornado wrangler" whose crew drives directly into the eye of the storm to shoot off fireworks and generally show off.

But Tyler is a little more worldly than he may originally come across and he and Kate eventually team up for her experiments. The film has some moderate characterization and there's, surprisingly, not really a romance angle as one might expect. No, "Twisters" knows where it's bread is buttered and much of the film involves the various crews chasing after the storms. As such, there are numerous impressively-crafted special effects sequences, including one involving an oil refinery and another in which a theater full of people cling on for dear life.

In one of the stranger transfers from indies to big budget filmmaking, "Twisters" is directed by Chung, whose previous film was the lovely, Oscar-nominated "Minari." But much like that film, he has a sense of life in the Midwest that feels genuine. Ultimately, the visuals in "Twisters" dominates all else, but since much of the film is a marvel of visual wizardry, it makes for some entertaining summer moviegoing. 

Review: Longlegs

Image courtesy of Neon.

The best entries in the serial killer thriller genre - namely, "Zodiac," "The Silence of the Lambs," "Seven," and the gone-too-soon show "Mindhunter" - understand that it's often the atmosphere and vibes, rather than the plotting, that should do the heavy lifting. "Longlegs," the new film from Osgood Perkins - son of Anthony, AKA Norman Bates - takes a deeply unsettling vibe and rides it to great success for about 100 minutes.

The film opens with a scene that I'm unlikely to soon forget. Set sometime in the 1970s - although the majority of the picture takes place in the mid-1990s - we open on a snow-covered farm where a little girl thinks she hears someone calling to her on the property. She finally stumbles upon a man, who wishes her a happy birthday and the scene makes a jolting cut to the film's title card. This may not sound particularly frightening, but trust me when I say that it's all about the vibes.

In the film's version of the present - 1995, I believe - young FBI agent Lee Harker, a taciturn young woman who clearly feels uncomfortable with anyone outside of work-related purposes, and another agent are scoping a neighborhood for a serial killer on the loose. Something unexplainable tells Lee which house is the right one, and she nabs herself a murderer. Her boss (Blair Underwood) seems suspicious of the young recruit's almost psychic instincts, but he also doesn't shy away from utilizing them in a case that has baffled the department.

Lee quickly finds herself drawn into the case - and it appears that she might even have a personal connection to it - as she tracks a mysterious man known as Longlegs, a serial killer with a T. Rex fixation (Marc Bolan, not the dinosaur) who leaves notes at the scenes of crimes that he doesn't so much commit, but rather inspires, that are filled with coded language and references to Satan.

Longlegs is played by Nicolas Cage in a manner that is bizarre and inspired in the way that only that particular actor can do bizarre and inspired. There's a scene in which he shrieks out a series of plaintive yelps about his mommy and daddy while driving in a car, and it wouldn't surprise me if Cage just summoned this up on the spot, rather than it having appeared in the script. 

Cage has leaned into the weird characters he has played in recent years, but this one is a whole other level of bonkers. And yet, it doesn't distract from - in fact, it adds to - the increasingly tight knot the film wraps around the viewer's throat. This is an intense and strange movie.

Without giving too much away, the crime scenes involving Longlegs - which are spread out from the late 1960s through the 1990s - are not so much murders committed by Cage's character, but rather instances in which fathers slaughter entire households, seemingly at the inspiration or command of Longlegs and a mysterious presence that he refers to as "Mr. Downstairs."

The picture bears some obvious resemblances to "The Silence of the Lambs" - a young female FBI agent tracking a serial killer in a film filled with woodland sequences - but Perkins' picture is far weirder and there's a supernatural element that begins to infiltrate the plot increasingly as the picture moves along. 

That being said, there's an information dump late in the film as to what's going on that zaps a little of the mystery out of the whole thing. The film is still overall highly effective, although keeping its plot elements more under wraps might have made it even better.

Perkins' previous work - the eerie "Hansel & Gretel" adaptation and especially the sinister "The Blackcoat's Daughter" - prove that he has a mastery of unsettling horror films. "Longlegs" feels like a major step up for him and it's a triumph of mood and tone. In a summer of (so far) mostly forgettable blockbuster movies, this is one that will likely long stick in the memory.

Review: MaXXXine

Image courtesy of A24.

Low budget horror maestro Ti West wraps up his period piece horror movie trilogy with "MaXXXine," which I liked better than most, ultimately placing it second among the three films. "X" remains my favorite, while "Pearl," despite Mia Goth's committed performance and its technicolor flourishes, was my least favorite. I know I am in the minority on this.

"MaXXXine," which is set in 1985 in Hollywood about six years after "X" concluded, finds West drawing inspiration from Italian giallo thrillers, 1980s slasher films, and the work of Brian De Palma. It opens with an invigorating burst of energy, a series of news clips covering everything from Ronald Reagan speeches and reporting on the British Video Nasties film list to '80s satanic panic and Twisted Sister's Dee Snider testifying to congress amid calls for censorship in popular music, all set to the tune of ZZ Top's raucous "Gimme All Your Lovin'."

Maxine (Goth), the only survivor of "X," has relocated to Los Angeles, where she's been working in adult films but hopes to get her big break in a serious movie. For now, she is in the running for a lead role in what at the time must have been the equivalent of elevated horror - a fictional series known as "The Puritan."

Several associates of Maxine meet untimely deaths and are found carved up and deposited in various places around the city, leading detectives (Bobby Canavale and Michelle Monaghan) to keep a close eye on her. Is Maxine somehow mixed up in these deaths, or does it have something to do with The Night Stalker, a serial killer with satanic impulses who is terrorizing the city by night?

A sleazy detective (Kevin Bacon) shows up and begins tormenting Maxine, claiming that someone from her past is looking for her. Despite ample doses of gore - there's a particularly grueling murder at a video store, a head exploded by a shotgun, a person crushed in car compactor, and groin dismemberment that you won't soon forget - "MaXXXine" has much more the vibe of a mystery. Is our heroine being pursued by someone involved in the Texas Porn Star Massacre, as it's depicted in a newspaper, or does it have something to do with a video seen at the film's beginning in which Maxine's preacher father talks to her as a girl on camera?

West has successfully created a film covered in '80s vibes, from the synth score that reminds me of something that might have accompanied a Michael Mann film from that era to the clothing, the home video vibe of some of the shots, and video cover art in the store where one of Maxine's friends works. There are a number of great needle drops (Animotion, Ratt, and Kim Carnes are among them), although the usage of "Man in Motion (St. Elmo's Fire)" is easily the most memorable.

Not everything ties up as neatly as I might have liked in the film's frenzied finale, but overall I thought that "MaXXXine" was a solid closer to this series. I listed "X" among a batch of other solid horror movies from 2022 (including "The Black Phone" and "Watcher") in my top 20 of that year. "Pearl," which is the favorite of many critics from this series, boasted a great Goth performance and some solid technicolor-styled cinematography gave it the feel of the most lurid movie Douglas Sirk never made. But it was otherwise my least favorite entry in this series.

"MaXXXine" may fall short of the first picture in the series, but it's a solid sendoff. Goth's work in these three films lend credence to Maxine's pronouncement that she's a fucking movie star. It's often difficult to gain recognition for a performance in a horror movie, but her work in this series has been impressive. And West has given us the only (mostly) successful horror movie trilogy that comes to mind. This was a fun movie.

Review: Fly Me To The Moon

Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

There have been so many representations on film of the 1969 moon landing - from the Neil Armstrong biopic "First Man" to that wonderful "Mad Men" episode - that one might one wonder what more needs to be said about it. Greg Berlanti's "Fly Me to the Moon" draws on historical events but is a mostly fictional story set against the backdrop of NASA's plans to launch three men into space.

The film opens with Scarlett Johansson's Kelly Jones, an advertising whiz, trying to land an account through various means of trickery - her rues throughout the film include pretending she's pregnant, putting on a Southern accent, and claiming to attend a college - and drawing the attention of Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), a shady government operative in the Nixon administration.

Berkus enlists Kelly to work at NASA in Cape Canaveral, Florida, claiming that zeal for the mission to the moon is on the decline among the public. He believes that a public relations campaign will drum up excitement once more and, therefore, convince congress to set aside more money for the project.

From the moment she lands in Florida, Kelly runs afoul of Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), the self-serious launch director who was a former Air Force hero and who holds himself responsible for the deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts whose mission failed. Kelly wants NASA employees to be on camera and to essentially sell their work to the public, while Cole intends for them to keep their heads down and to just do the work.

"Fly Me to the Moon" is a fun romantic comedy in the vein of an old Doris Day/Rock Hudson picture due to the chemistry between its two leads; Johansson's whirling dervish portrayal of Kelly and Tatum's stiff Cole make for a convincing odd couple. There's also a solid cast of supporting players that includes Harrelson's somewhat scary yet strangely charming government man, Ray Romano's too-trusting right-hand man to Cole, and Jim Rash as a diva director with whom Kelly frequently works.

There have been rumors in the conspiracy world for years that the moon landing was faked and that director Stanley Kubrick was the director-for-hire due to his "2001: A Space Odyssey" breaking ground in terms of special effects the year before. "Fly Me to the Moon" imagines a facade known as Project Artemis, into which Moe enlists Kelly and company, but with the caveat of keeping it a secret from Cole. 

The project involves faking the moon landing on camera, just in case the actual mission of Apollo 11 in July 1969 fails. There's a fair amount of humor to be found in this scenario, from Rash's director's ridiculous demands to a stray black cat that torments the crew, especially during its big moment.

"Fly Me to the Moon" is a film that could be described as light and breezy, but it's more than just a trifle. Much like the best films and TV shows that have covered the moon landing, it captures the awe and delight that the world must have felt at that moment in time. This ground has been trod so many times that it's a genuine surprise that yet another film could succeed in doing so.

And in the tradition of the Day/Hudson rom coms of old, it's filled with witty and well-delivered dialogue as well as solid performances and a clever hook that blends the facts and fictions of this particular period in time. This summer movie season has been a mostly mixed bag so far, but "Fly Me to the Moon" has flown in under the radar as a pleasant surprise.

Review: Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F

Image courtesy of Netflix.

There's a whole lot of '80s nostalgia going around these days, from the surprisingly solid "Top Gun" sequel to an upcoming "Dirty Dancing" follow up. So, when I saw that a fourth "Beverly Hills Cop" film was on the horizon, it came as no surprise.

The thing that is surprising, however, is that "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F" - which leans heavily on nostalgia (Glenn Frey, Bob Seger, and the Pointer Sisters are among the flashback needle drops) and is not necessarily doing anything new plot-wise - is pretty fun. In fact, it's the best "Beverly Hills Cop" movie since the original.

The film opens with Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) back in his hometown of Detroit, causing trouble. He follows a group of criminals to a hockey game where they are carrying out a heist. His pursuit in a snowplow leads to a whole mashup of cars and a lot of consternation from Axel's retiring boss (Paul Reiser). 

Axel is estranged from his daughter, Jane (Taylour Paige), a lawyer in Los Angeles who has found herself in trouble after taking on a pro bono case to defend a young man accused of killing a cop. It seems there is proof that the cop found dead in the young man's presence was crooked and there's a group of rogue cops determined to ensure that the case never makes it to trial.

Axel's old pal Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) calls to inform him that his daughter's life may be in danger, prompting Axel to return to Beverly Hills, where he quickly finds himself on the wrong side of the law and being questioned by a cop named Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who as it turns out is Jane's ex-boyfriend. Meanwhile, she's not too happy to see her father.

The film's central villain is a slick cop (Kevin Bacon) whose fancy attire and car is a clue to how corrupt he is. Axel butts heads with him, despite Taggart (John Ashton), another old pal, seeming to have confidence in him. 

Not a whole lot happens that you don't expect - father-daughter angst, a lot of Eddie Murphy wisecracks, and shootouts (one set in the middle of Beverly Hills traffic is quite tense) - but "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F" is a fun diversion. 

The original film was a smash hit that launched Murphy into the stratosphere. Its sequels were an example of the law of diminishing returns, so it's a pleasant surprise that this fourth entry is enjoyable and not just an attempt to cash in on nostalgia, although there's a little of that as well. I'm just surprised that this went straight to streaming, rather than opening in theaters.