Blog Archives
Captain America: Civil War
Captain America: Civil War 2016
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is back with its latest installment of their ongoing franchise. And even though I watched this movie on opening night, I feel like everyone and their mother has already voiced their adoration upon this film, probably just because it was released in many other countries a week early. As a whole, Marvel films have been pretty high on my radar starting off with Avengers as the first MCU that was released since starting this site and most of the Phase 2 sequels were much better than the originals until they hit a bit of a snag with Age of Ultron that felt like they were too focused on setting up future films to worry about focusing on the current one. On that front, I felt like Civil War was a success, while it greatly helped to have knowledge of past films, Civil War felt much more self-contained than Age of Ultron. It has the fun aspect that permeates all of the Marvel films as well as some incredible action and some thought provoking themes, but it just didn’t quite knock it out of the park for me this time. And fair warning since this has just opened in the US, there may be spoilers ahead.
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Ultimate Avengers 2
Ultimate Avengers 2 2006
While I’m still moving at a bit slower pace than I planned to, I’m still moving through the animated Avengers movies before writing down a full fledged review for Age of Ultron, though if you can’t wait to hear my thoughts I was on a recent Lambcast where I discussed it with several other Lamb members. The sequel to the animated Ultimate Avengers brings back the entire cast along with newcomer Black Panther. The sequel tries to amp up the action, the danger, and the consequences but it’s difficult to do with the way this cast of characters is portrayed. It doesn’t help that the Chitauri aliens aren’t any more interesting than they were in the first film. The result it a lot of the same old same old that just doesn’t have a big payoff at the end. There’s nothing terribly wrong with this film, but it doesn’t do anything new, fresh, or exciting throughout its entire runtime.
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Tiger and Bunny: The Rising
Tiger and Bunny: The Rising 2014
Once again finishing up my quest to have watched every single 2014 comic book and superhero movie with this anime film that came out during the early part of this year. It’s a spin-off of the Tiger and Bunny anime TV series which I have yet to watch, though I did watch the first movie, Tiger and Bunny: The Beginning. It came out after the show, but encapsulated the beginning of what happened in the show, as mentioned in the title. This movie takes place after all of the events of the show, but there weren’t too many things that I wasn’t able to follow having not seen anything other than the first film. I would recommend at least watching either “The Beginning” or the first couple episodes of the show to get a better introduction to all of the characters. That said, I really enjoyed getting back into the world of this film where superheroes are both TV stars and methods of advertising, where each hero has their own sponsorship, and usually several. It adds a unique element to the story where we get to see not just the heroes and villains, but the challenge of filming the fights and the people who are watching the events at home. The overall story of the film wasn’t anything special, but it was great to get back to these characters I’m familiar with within this fascinating world. And I did end up watching this in the original Japanese with subtitles.
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Men in Black 3
Men in Black 3 2012
And now it’s time to finish up this alien crime-fighting trilogy with the third installment. Though of course in this day and age it’s doubtful that this franchise will settle with a mere three films though there’s no telling if the next one will end up being a sequel or a reboot. Of course, with the way the film universe is situated, it would be easy to create a sequel with all new characters, but still within the same continuity but I’m getting way off track here. While I did watch this film back when it came out in 2012, that was during my first year of writing for this site and I had a bit more narrow definition of what I was going to be covering. But even if I didn’t think of these films as being superhero films, they are still based off of comics as inspiration if not directly source material. While the first two films had five years in between them, the next two had a ten year gap. And yet, with a larger gap came a fresher outlook on the characters and the setting. Instead of rehashing the plot of the first two films, it went in a different direction and brought up a tried and true sci-fi concept with time travel, brought in Josh Brolin doing a spot on young Tommy Lee Jones impression, and Jermaine Clement doing a spot on young Tim Curry impression. It was just as much fun as the original, and brought in some nice callbacks without feeling rehashed.
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The Return of Swamp Thing
The Return of Swamp Thing 1989
I knew very little about the first Swamp Thing movie, and I knew even less about the sequel which came out 7 years later and the only connection between the two movies are the actor that plays Swamp Thing in the suit and the villain Arcane who supposedly died in the first movie. I would have thought that they would have used the Dick Durock’s voice once again for the Swamp Thing, but for some reason* they chose to hire a voice actor do ADR all of his lines. The tone of this movie is also much more light and comedic. Unfortunately this makes the campy comedy feel much more forced than in the first movie where everyone was taking things seriously. There’s still some cheesy fun to be had, but it’s not nearly as good of a movie overall than the first one.
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Timecop: The Berlin Decision
Timecop: The Berlin Decision 2003
I don’t think I even knew that there was a sequel to Timecop until I started looking up information about the Jean Claude Van Damme version. It’s not surprising because it came out several years later, direct to video, with none of the same stars. Instead of Van Damme, we’re given Jason Scott Lee as yet another foreign lead and Timecop. And the villain this time around is also a member of a group trying to eliminate the Timecop program as a member of the Society for Historical Accuracy, or something like that. There is a bit of a problem with plot clarity, but there is quite a bit more questioning of the possibilities of time travel, including the beginning and titular scene where Brandon Miller seeks to kill Hitler while timecop Ryan Chan stops him in order to preserve the timeline in spite of any possibly positive repurcussions. I also noticed a surprisingly improved fight choreography, as Van Damme is a noted martial artist himself, though there are a few fight scenes that were better than anything from the first one.
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Thor: The Dark World
Thor: The Dark World 2013
Choosing a specific genre for this site brought about some factors that I had’t considered when I first started it almost two years ago now. One is that “superhero” isn’t really a genre, I had briefly considered going for Fantasy as my genre of choice, but there are so few sword and sorcery fantasy movies out there, and even fewer good ones barring the Lord of the Rings. And another is the fact that because I don’t review everything, that means that the new releases that I review are very much dependent on the release schedule, and the superhero “genre” if it may be called that is something of an oddity. It tends to be very summer heavy, with over two-thirds of the big theatrical releases happening in that one three month period, and once the summer’s over there’s a giant dead zone until the next summer rolls around so it’s been almost 3 months since the release of Kick-Ass 2 which was the last superhero movie of the season. Not only that, but this Thor movie itself is a bit of an odd beast when you look at it compared to other superhero movies. It’s very different from the first Thor, where a large part of the film took place on Earth where Thor was the superhero alien god come down to Earth. This movie is much more of a fantasy movie with sci-fi elements where Norse gods and dark elves are fighting each other along with the occasional sci-fi gun and Earth only shows up once in a while. That said, it really played to my love of fantasy movies and I enjoyed every minute of it, from the fantasy battles, the Marvel humor, to the sci-fi monkey wrenches that made it that much more fun. As a note, I tend to avoid tiptoeing around spoilers, and there are a couple surprises in this movie that I will be talking about, you have been warned.
The Crow: City of Angels
The Crow: City of Angels 1996
I’ve been wanting to get to these movies for a while now, even though out of the four of them, there’s only one that I’ve seen and that same one is the only one that’s considered good. For that reason, I wanted to save it until the end, but I also wanted to be able to publish it on Devil’s Night, since the movie takes place around that day. After watching this movie, it really makes me want to skip straight to the original. This is a pale copy that pretends to be a sequel while at the same time apes nearly everything that made the original good, with only a handful of switcheroos here and there. Everything from the effects, to the stunts, even the soundtrack is not nearly as well done or entertaining. And since it’s been so long since I’ve watched the original, I spent most of the time being reminded of moments from the Brandon Lee version that were done immensely better. It has a few interesting moments here and there, but for the most part it tries to be like the original, but really misses the mark.
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What ifs! You could make a sequel to any movie?
What if you had the power to greenlight and fun any sequel to any movie in the world, what would it be? Of course, since this site focuses on superhero related movie I’d love to also hear the answer to which Superhero movie you’d like to see a sequel of. There seems to be a lot of talk lately about the possibility of a Dredd sequel. Even though it received quite a bit of acclaim from fans, it got mixed reviews from critics and only had a less than stellar box office performance. Now there’s a few different possibilities on why a movie might need a sequel. If it’s based on other ongoing work, like most superhero movies are based on comics, then since the comic has continued on then there is still plenty more material to draw from. Even if it’s a stand alone movie, if it’s a good one, then people often wonder what would happen if those characters were revisited. Even in the case of a less than perfect movie, if there’s some element that worked in the original that could be expanded upon at the same time as the weaknesses could be removed. And such is the case for my personal choice for a movie that I would love to see a sequel to. I’ve always had a soft spot for the 2004 Punisher movie with Thomas Jane. Even though I’ve rewatched it last year and it didn’t quite hold up for me in the long run, it was mainly the silliness with the neighbors and the forced love interest that threw me off. I still enjoyed John Travolta as the over the top Howard Saint, and Thomas Jane was a fantastic Punisher, even moreso when he made his own short last year. So let’s hear it, what sequels would you love to see get made?
The Curse of Three
The Curse of Three
aka Why is the Third Superhero Movie the Worst?
Sequels have long been a sure sign of a bad movie. Take an existing popular movie, try it again and see lightning strikes twice. Most of the time it didn’t. Then somewhere along the line, maybe in the late 80’s early 90’s, filmmakers started making sequels that lived up to the original’s expectations. Or oftentimes in the case of superhero movies, exceeded them. Especially in superhero movies, once the origin story is out of the way, the sequel is the best place to get a good action filled story in. But then something else happened, it started with Superman III. Where the sequel was as good as the original, the third movie went way downhill in terms of plot, action, and just overall quality. Is it a curse, often times it doesn’t matter whether the third movie has a bigger budget or a smaller budget, the same people behind the scenes or new ones, they almost always end in crap. Is it a curse, and can it be broken?
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 