Game Review: Spider-Man PS4

Fans of Spider-Man will be happy to know that the new PS4 game does for their favorite wall-crawler what the Arkham series did for Batman, but hardcore gamers may be disappointed that in terms of groundbreaking gameplay Spider-Man on PS4 doesn’t swing too high above the watermark that Arkham set. The open world gameplay is heavily indebted to open worlds past, specifically those inhabited by Batman, Ubisoft’s many Assassins, and the Infamous gang. Spider-Man‘s Manhattan is littered with colorful icons indicating side missions to delight, distract, and occasionally bore the player. Of course this is all par for the course for the modern open world gamer. What sets Spider-Man apart is the sweet sublime feeling of swinging through the city streets, a kind of divinely relaxing routine that allows the player to forget their worries and get lost in the fun.

The story will be hard to discuss without spoilers, but I’ll try my hardest to keep this review spoiler-free. Suffice it to say that in general, the narrative takes an awfully long time to reach some familiar places, pitting Spidey against supervillains while his alter ego Peter Parker is dealing with guilt, grief and relationship woes. The game opens with Spidey on the verge of a criminal bust after eight years of work. Once a renowned mob boss is in jail, Spider-Man is forced to deal with the power vortex he’s created. A new supervillain rises to power, Mr. Negative, a photo-negative look-alike who can zombify people by unleashing their inherent darkness. This darkness idea isn’t really explored so much as it is shoehorned in amongst all the other madcap nonsense involving Dr. Otto Octavius and Norman Osborne, characters so thoroughly established that they feel like an odd mix of nostalgia and redundancy here. The story isn’t as artfully crafted as the dialogue, and eventually the crime narrative rubber-bands to a rapid conclusion, one feeling a bit short and sluggish. Thankfully the character moments are charming and nuanced enough to counter-balance these flaws.

Underwhelmed by is offerings, I rushed through the story so I could dig into what I cared about the most, swinging around the city and stopping crimes. Once the story is complete you’ll have plenty of time to explore, collect backpacks, try on new super-powered suits, and do whatever a spider can, even though sometimes ‘whatever a spider can’ feels oddly familiar to ‘whatever a bat did yesterday.’ The stealth mechanics aren’t quite as polished as Arkham‘s, but they get the job done. Combat is a bit looser and doesn’t feel as much like a rhythm/puzzle game as Arkham. Once you get a hang of the many different mechanics and how they can be hybridized to create your own natural rhythm, things get fun and fluid. Sometimes you’ll find yourself scrambling for that perfect swing or shot and inadvertently doing something more spectacular than you could have imagined. That moment of discovery and the glee that comes with it is enough to make any comic book fan feel like a kid again.

For the Spidey Squad this game is a clear no-brainer, but for everyone else I’d offer a caveat. Spider-Man feels more like a game that might have been released prior to Breath of the Wild or The Phantom Pain in terms of its workhorse aplomb. It never tries to push any boundaries or exceed expectations. It merely tries to match them and provide a game worthy of the name Spider-Man. By that metric it succeeds, and likely will pave the way for DLC and sequels that push the game engine to exciting new heights.

Movie Review: Ant-Man and The Wasp

Trash. Utter unmitigated trash.

Those were my thoughts during the first forty or so minutes with the laughless and listless pairing of Ant-Man & The Wasp. Chief among its many problems is that it barely lives up to that uninspired title. There are remarkably few scenes in which Ant-Man & The Wasp do something as simple as kick butt together in costume, and so many dull-ass-dead scenes where characters explain what happened last movie or fifty years ago. Performances by Paul Rudd and Hannah John-Kamen get stretched beyond their breaking points, untethered to the flimsy words that make up this painful excuse for a script. After the surefire blockbuster success of Infinity War, this feels like a fart in the wind.

Paul Rudd seems to be a font of youthful charm normally, but here he plays backseat to the ongoing events around him. Nobody thought to give Ant-Man something to do or care about in his own movie, beyond wanting to vaguely rekindle friendship/romance (unclear) with The Wasp, aka Evangeline Lilly, and of course, as he reminds us every fifteen seconds, he needs to get home to his daughter who doesn’t even live with him, because she’s in the loving stewardship of the effortlessly more charismatic Bobby Cannavale, who is used so poorly it almost made me want to scream- why is he not the star of his own hero movie? Then again, if it was scripted by the five (5) brilliant minds who crafted this gem, it might be a turd too.

The most insane detail of the movie is also the most constantly rehashed, as if the screenwriters were so pleased with how badly they buried the evidence they decided to roll around on the bones like a dog in the yard. The entire movie hinges on Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man being under house arrest because he was captured by the FBI after the events of Civil War (which again, feel Marvel-wise like fifteen years ago). Old Ant-Man (Michael Douglas) and his daughter The Wasp 2.0 are on the lam because of their association with Paul Rudd. They are also very peeved that they weren’t invited to Civil War (no joke) and hold this against Paul Rudd for three-quarters of the movie. Just thinking about the details of this movie, of which there are many, is breaking my brain.

Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lilly are on the run from the FBI. They have a shrinkable building (which becomes the fucking Maltese Falcon of this piece of shit movie) that looks like a prop from a Ninja Turtles toy commercial that they have the audacity to roll around like a luggage suitcase just to further emphasize how lame it is. They have the power to shrink to the size of ants, which is a pretty good power to use if you are in hiding. So what do they do? They set up shop right in San Francisco, right where Paul Rudd still lives, so they can keep an eye on him, even though he is on house arrest with an ankle bracelet, and has the FBI swarming him every fifteen seconds as a running gag and a way to put Randall Park in the movie.

So Ant-Man, who again, has the power to shrink to the size of a fucking ant, that’s like his main power, gets immediately caught by the United States government and rather than put into prison- in spite of being an ex-con already and associating with known terrorist Captain America- is put on house arrest in an ankle bracelet as a slap on the wrist. This is of course, insane. If you have the power to shrink, how would you EVER get caught? You could get away from situations so easily, especially if you could control ants and fly away while small. Granted, the seagull problem this movie presents is frightening- and a seeming nod/blatant theft from The Simpsons bit where the puppies keep eating Homer’s chips- but beyond that, I’m saying the premise of the movie, the set-up for everything that happens, makes no sense. How did Ant-Man get captured so easily? Why didn’t he tell his pals he was going to help Captain America- as if he was good at keeping secrets- when another plot point of this movie hinges on the fact that he compulsively tells Michael Pena where they are hiding so it can be extracted by the villain later? So he loves to blurt this stuff out sometimes, and loves to keep schtum other times. There’s no emotional journey to justify this switch. It’s just bad writing. The writers of this movie want us to buy Paul Rudd’s depiction of a bumbling security expert, which isn’t a thing.

It’d be one thing if Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man were Don Knotts and his incompetence were played purely for laughs. But Ant-Man isn’t Ron Burgundy, and if he’s going to be the hero of his own movie you should probably focus on making him have an interesting personal journey. Even wack-a-doo Marvel fare like Doctor Strange, Thor: Ragnarok, and Guardians of the Galaxy 2 managed to shoehorn in some comic book melodrama that felt just the right level of overblown to be compelling. Here everything is played for laughs that never materialize, like a bad episode of a tv series. This movie is nobody’s passion project. It’s just everybody’s fifteenth superhero movie, and it reeks of old cheese.

Visually Ant-Man and the Wasp has more in common with Spawn or The Power Rangers Movie than a regular, more expensive Marvel movie (including the first Ant-Man). Action sequences are shot from the point of view of someone who wanted to make sure they could break for lunch on time. The lack of attention to detail in the script is present in the cinematography as well. There’s a shot of Lawrence Fishburne walking across the room that looks like it was filmed on someone’s cell phone. There’s a fight sequence in a kitchen that makes the one in X-Men: Days of Future Past look even more brilliant by comparison. The one moment of shine in this dubba-dubba-WB wannabe is a first person shot of our heroes (?) traveling into the quantum realm a.k.a. the realm of really tiny things, which looks like a better version of the 2001 or Avatar zooming into a time tunnel effect. Otherwise, blah.

Michael Pena delivers the movie’s first laughs about forty-five minutes into the movie, and they are such a relief. He is the most wasted performer in a sea of them. His lines about wanting his own hero suit seem more justified than the movie itself. It’s not that he is purely a better performer than Rudd (though he very well might be) but that Rudd is asked to do both everything and nothing, while Pena is offered the easier and more snugly fitting role of showing up to make us laugh and say, hey, it’s not all that bad right? At least I’m here to cut a few jokes that sometimes work. When you are about to fall asleep in the theater, Pena becomes the good cop holding you hostage, the one who wants to be your buddy. Rudd is more like the bad cop who wants you to watch him reenact Mommy Dearest in full.

The plot of the movie, beyond the we’re bad at shrinking things thing, is that Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lilly want to save the original Wasp, Douglas’s wife and Lilly’s mother, portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer in what can only be described as a bittersweet performance. It’s great to see her, and so sad to see her wasted, much like Karen Allen in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. When they finally do save her- spoiler alert, please don’t see this movie- she is somehow wearing perfect eye make-up, in spite of being trapped in a hellish floating dimension with tardigrades for decades. This is a nit-pick, but the hair and make-up folks on this movie did an atrocious job. I know it’s ridiculous for a bald man like myself to comment on hair, except to say how jealous I am of those who have it- treasure your locks, people!- there is something so weird about half the hairstyles in this movie. Evangeline Lilly’s hair is less cartoonish than before, but somehow looks like a weirdly styled wig rather than the more natural (stranded?) look of Kate from LOST. Everything just feels a bit off- like whoever they hired had fifteen minutes to get these actors to set and was struggling to manage updos with a donut in their mouth. And because the movie is so boring, you sort of get lost focusing on the details that really stick out to you, because, what else is there to do?

I’ve described this movie for what feels like an eternity, and in that I’ve done the movie justice, as it also feels like an eternity. I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Walton Goggins plays a ‘southern gentleman’ who is a bad guy for some reason. I think he has some piece of technology that Evangeline Lilly needs? Unclear. He keeps showing up and hassling our heroes like a Beverly Hills Cop side plot, and even when his henchmen provide the for-some-reason necessary truth serum, it’s the other villain, Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, who benefits. Yes, the “real” villain is Ghost, who is another unrelated tangential plot line stemming from a weird relationship Michael Douglas had in the past with a scientist he fired who started doing experiments in a third world country and accidentally exploded his daughter during bring your daughter to unregulated science lab during potential explosion day. That little girl becomes Ghost, an assassin who worked for the government and then went rogue, and is slowly phasing out of existence. This is another one of those special effects that looks like it probably could have been done the same way in a made-for-tv-movie, along with the hot wheels cars and everything else that’s supposed to be cute that just comes off as tired and hollow and cheap.

There’s a good moment of performance from Hannah John-Kamen when she confronts Paul Rudd, a good hero/villain exchange. The only problem is the two characters have nothing to do with each other. Her beef is with Douglas, who is unconscious nearby. So she has this whole sexually charged little speech that brings in a weird thriller element of the movie- is this villain a toxic fan? Is this a moment of commentary? Did this movie just slow-burn being interesting? Nope, she’s just doing a good performance to make a go-nowhere exposition scene more compelling. It works, and will be great for her reel, but this scene ultimately ends in Lawrence Fishburne explaining a lot of psuedo science and our heroes and villains realizing that they really have different goals, and that they really are quite different, you and I.

This movie sucks. That’s the tl;dr. It’s only notable in that it is such a shift in quality from normal Marvel fare, which even when boring can be at least competent filmmaking or have a few good jokes or something going for them. This is just a phoned in, lifeless sequel to fill a summer slot. I’d claim this was Marvel’s Batman and Robin, but at least that movie had the excuse of camp to back up its awfulness. This is just lazy, bland filler. Hey- maybe James Gunn can come over to this franchise and turn it around! Oh wait.

Movie Review: Avengers: Infinity War

In truly spectacular fashion the masterminds at Marvel have cracked the code of putting comic book action on the big screen. Not only does Infinity War capture the jaw-dropping visuals of classic comic books, it also captures the medium’s devastating twists and turns. Your expectations may be decimated, and you may feel heartbreak- that is if you’re willing to put your cynicism aside and let yourself be moved by nearly three hours of superhero carnage. I know it’s not for everybody, but for those who have kept up with the connective tissue between all these Marvel movies, Infinity War feels like a knock-out punch.

But of course it isn’t the end. Another Avengers movie comes out next year to continue the story left behind in this installment. Clearly the filmmakers wanted to ape Empire Strikes Back, but even on its own terms Infinity War feels like the definitive Marvel movie. Nitpicks aside- Peter Dinklage phones in his performance- this movie hits on practically all cylinders and is packed to the brim with so much explosive action and crazy cartoon cross-overs that it almost feels like the fever dream of a five year old. Most surprisingly, this fever dream threads together plot lines from countless superhero stories and crafts them into something inexplicably consummate. In that weird way that the Fast and Furious franchise inexplicably started feeling more necessary over time, Infinity War is the best justification for superhero cinema yet.

I urge you to run out and see Infinity War, even if your understanding of the Marvel movies is tenuous. It’s a litmus test for the power of these movies. If you can sit through Infinity War without a shred of interest in any of the plot lines, then let Marvel be damned. Curse it to the winds. But for the rest of us, this is paradise.

I cannot go forward without spoilers, so just stop reading now and go reserve your seats if you have not seen it.

(SPOILERS BELOW:)

Good riddance. Now we can get to the real meat and potatoes.

So wow, that ending, huh?

Pretty great. Thanos just chilling out, enjoying himself.

I have heard it before and I really agree: It’s Thanos’s movie.

Josh Brolin is barely evident. It is the story of Thanos, not some actor. Thanos is a kind-hearted soul who merely wishes to nobly destroy half of all living things to bring balance to the universe. Cool.

Steve Rogers and Tony Stark have a bug up their butt about that, so they launch an interstellar wizard / spider-team into space, then send everyone else to Africa. Thor asks a giant dwarf for help with a star axe. Nat fights interstellar warriors with judo kicks. The Guardians of the Galaxy are perhaps the funniest they have ever been, especially when Pratt and Hemsworth are both on screen. There is so much going on in this movie that it is almost an afterthought that Spider-Man dies.

Web-head is one of maybe dozens of heroes who die in the final scenes of Infinity War. Everybody gets turned to dust. Except for Gamora, who has already been fucking brutally murdered by her own father. Also Idris Elba dies like five minutes into the movie. Thanos is so scary that the Hulk won’t even come out anymore.

Everyone dies. Thanos warps back in time and kills everybody. Only the original Avengers and Michonne are left. But wait a minute- didn’t Black Panther make crazy money at the box office? How could they kill him? Unless…

UNLESS EVERYONE COMES BACK FROM THE DEAD NEXT MOVIE! OF COURSE!

And that’s why I’ll be there opening day, weeping and screaming.

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Homecoming

Like Wonder Woman before it, Spider-Man: Homecoming is a fun-filled adventure that falls apart under scrutiny, more a movie theater equivalent of a Disneyland ride than a fully formed story. What keeps the action piping along is the charismatic acting and winsome dialogue that manages to genuinely capture the quippy character of Spider-Man. Star Tom Holland works well, but baddie Michael Keaton shines especially brightly in this flick. It’s just that- as the third film incarnation of Spider-Man in the past fifteen years, and the umpteenth film under the Marvel Cinematic Universe umbrella, certain aspects of the movie feel tired, if not wholly redundant.

Much was said about how Homecoming wouldn’t be an origin story, but in terms of how adept the web-slinger is with his abilities, it might as well be. Spidey stumbles, slips, slides and argues his way out of jams so consistently that he feels more like Spider-Twerp than Man. Again, Keaton is the real star of the show here. Not to disparage Holland’s performance, which is wonderful in its own right, but Keaton pushes the MCU into Oscar-worthy acting, a feat previous performers have failed to accomplish. His sinister sneer and hard-luck, working-class-hero routine alternate keenly to give the MCU something it’s been sorely lacking- a villain with some measure of depth. Keaton has the skill of taking even the most generic dialogue and infusing it with real, relatable character. Holland’s performance, for all its charm, never exceeds the bounds set in Captain America: Civil War.

Beyond the leads, Homecoming’s supporting cast is packed with lovable character actors and comedians. The casting and referential writing do a good job of playing bait-and-switch with the audience, hinting at the potential for certain players to take other forms in future films, but never revealing more than they need to. Most of these players inhabit Peter Parker’s school life, making the movie more coming-of-age comedy than superhero adventure. Compared to other Spider-flicks there’s less time slinging webs, and more time slinging one-liners.

The action is well-conceived, fairly inventive and occasionally well-shot, but never so iconic as the train sequence in Spider-Man 2. The movie is light on melodrama, choosing cerebral comedy and a few brief moments of visceral tension instead. A better Spider-Man movie might have borrowed some of the physical humor of Raimi’s films to fit more snugly into the same vibe as the raw physicality of Keaton’s drama, but that’s more of a nitpick than a glaring error.

The real glaring error is the hovering parental supervision of Tony Stark. The gag here is that Tony has Spidey on “training wheels” protocol, and the storytelling reiterates this fact constantly. Whenever there’s an opportunity for Spidey to be- dare I say, spectacular?- Tony swoops in and provides his trademark brand of ‘do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do’ lecturing. For a hero who was totally okay throwing Spidey against Captain America last time, (not to mention having a ten-year old rebuild his suit in Iron Man 3) this new, sterner Stark is more a deus-ex-killjoy than a wise-cracking mentor. Those hoping for scenes of Tony and Peter soaring through skyscrapers after a winged foe (and solving their differences) will be sorely disappointed.

The messaging of the movie is kind of corrupted by the randomness of Tony’s intrusions and the fact that character motivations stop mattering by the three-quarter mark. Keaton’s Vulture vows to kill Spider-Man around the same time a twist provides reason for him not to, but due to the necessity of a surprisingly sinister car ride scene, this logicality is ignored. Who needs to make sense when you have Keaton acting his ass off? A friend once criticized my writing by saying, “I guess nothing else matters so long as it’s funny,” and I see the point of his sarcasm here. Sometimes an acrobatic hero like Spidey bends so far backwards to get a reaction, the reasoning for it suffers.

This is not to say you will not enjoy Spider-Man. You’ll likely have a blast, as I did, for the most part. This just isn’t that perfect Spider-Man movie fans have been waiting for, in the sense that The Dark Knight is the perfect Batman film for many Bat-fans. Nothing in this movie sings as loudly or as memorably as that great airport fight in Civil War, though overall this story is more consistently enjoyable. And certainly this is leaps and bounds above the travesties of Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. This is more of an improvement on Amazing Spider-Man 1, a fun, watchable entry mostly distinguishable by its villain. But like many a Marvel movie, I was left hoping they’d get to the “really good part” in the next one. Knowing Marvel, there’ll be no short supply of “next ones” to keep that hope alive.

Movie Review: Deadpool

Deadpool stands out from other superhero movies in that its title character is a raging weirdo. He’s not adverse to blasting through a bad guy’s head with bullets, and he has a rabid disregard for other people’s comfort zones. Just like in the comics, Deadpool has the Bugs Bunny ability to break the 4th wall and talk to the audience. He addresses the audience by looking at the camera or narrates with colloquial voice-over. Most of the story is standard superhero origin mumbo-jumbo, but when Deadpool is suited up and the action is piping hot, the movie hits its stride.

In terms of performance, adaptation and realization, Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool is pitch perfect. The on-screen Deadpool is identical to his comic book counterpart in terms of movement, humor and unpredictability. The tone of the movie can be best described as violent, irreverent and zany, a step beyond The Kingsmen but not quite as wacky as The Mask. Reynolds delights in the role like a kid in an elevator pressing all the buttons. There is a strange seamless chemistry between actor and character, as if the humor of the comics was personally designed for Reynolds’s delivery. It almost goes without saying to praise Reynolds as there is so much non-stop full-force Deadpool voice in the movie that it nearly becomes overwhelming. If only Fox had given the filmmakers enough money to get Hugh Jackman as Wolverine we might have gotten a B-plot somewhere.

The story is so cookie-cutter it almost makes Wolverine look like Hamlet. But the humor is the real driving force here, so your enjoyment of the movie will largely depend on how deeply you know your comic books and how much you enjoy watching Reynolds talk about a bullet hole in his ass. It’s unfortunately an obligatory origin story, paint-by-numbers. Odder still, the romantic and body horror elements of the plot are treated with strange reverence when compared to the Duke Nukem style action sequences. I could have done with more tongue-in-cheek humor during these pseudo-scary moments.

The villain isn’t interesting, but Deadpool’s jokes at his expense make up for it. We’ve got a bajillion X-Men bad guys to choose from and we get this bad guy? He doesn’t even have a clear evil scheme. Stop Deadpool? Avoid Deadpool? Attract Deadpool? The movie veers off into giving side characters screen-time rather than explaining the plot. Then again, do we really need another story about a villain trying to blow up the world? It’s a straight-up grudgematch in Deadpool, and that serves the Merc with a Mouth quite well. There are some logical gaps overlooked to fit the film’s shrinking budget and ballooning insanity, but it all works in a screwball way. The average American filmgoer is pre-programmed to understand superhero origin stories by now, so a tweaked one is a welcome mix-up.

That being said, the jokes could use a little tweaking too. For as much of the comedy works, the screenwriters are fearful to poke fun at Sony and Disney, competing studios that also own Marvel properties. The film could have used its meta-humor to make broader satiric points about the state of superhero movies, but it chose instead to make jests at Reynolds’s expense. It’s self-effacing and funny, but it doesn’t have the same satiric edge as the comics or even The Simpsons. There is a sense that the writers pulled those punches and stuck to X-Men formula to keep the studio happy, which makes sense, but keeps the film from reaching the comedic heights of Tropic Thunder. It also locks the movie’s humor in sophomoric territory without the wit or precision of South Park. It’s more of a scattershot Mel Brooks approach. I’m impressed that the writers managed to give the film any romantic or dramatic tension at all considering how wild it is.

Deadpool himself sticks out like a sore thumb in the movie’s dour blue-grey visuals, and that’s perfect for a character trying to distance himself from the X-Men and their generally humorless heroics. Fans will be pleased that the film does the titular character justice, even if it spends so much time setting up his origins that the rest of the story feels hollow. Though its appeal might be lost on general audiences, there is just enough charm for Deadpool to coast by as a unique and memorable film, if not a particularly meaningful one. It’s worth noting that my friday night crowd was filled with too-young tweens and kids accompanied by their parents, in spite of the film’s gore and nudity. The audience was packed and roaring with laughter at times, so maybe for whatever reason, this is just the right place and right time for Deadpool, Christmas or not.