AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR: The Best And Worst Of Marvel Movie Motifs All In One Place

Now playing at every multiplex in the MCU:

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

(Dirs. Anthony Russo & Joe Russo, 2018) 

This highly anticipated superhero epic begins with the familiar montage of imagery of iconic characters quickly blending into the logo for Marvel Studios. The “I” and “O” in the capital letters though are highlighted this time as a “10,” which seems to shout “10 years of kicking every other franchise’s ass!”

And it’s true, since IRON MAN came out in 2008, the studio, under the wing of Disney, has put out an interlocking series of nearly 20 blockbusters that have formed a business model that very other movie series, from DC to STAR WARS and beyond, has been trying to emulate. I.e. everybody wants to have a Cinematic Universe just like Marvel’s.

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR has been teased throughout Marvel’s movies mostly in after credits stingers which have featured a big bad ass villain named Thanos (a CGI-ed Josh Brolin, who wonderfully chews through CGI setpiece after CGI setpiece), and the ongoing MacGuffin of the infinity stones – six powerful highly sought after different colored gems that can be used to destroy planets and conquer the universe.

So the Avengers join forces with the Guardians of the Galaxy, Dr. Strange, and Black Panther, among others, to stop Thanos from getting the Infinity Stones through another round of over-the-top battles that really wore me out in its crammed packed last third.

But large chunks of the movie are a lot of fun. Robert Downey Jr., whose ninth time this is in the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man, is again an enjoyably funny presence as he continues his mentorship to Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tom Holland), and snarkily sparring off with Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Strange, and an equally amusing Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Starlord.

The Guardians of the Galaxy, who hit the screen to the Spinner’s “Rubberband Man” (an obvious nod to their ‘70s mixtape soundtrack trope), are granted with a lot of screen-time as Gamora (Zoe Saldana) is Thano’s daughter, something that I guess was revealed in a previous movie but I didn’t remember it, and Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and a now teengage Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) split with the others including Mantis (Pom Klementieff), and Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) to accompany Thor (Chris Hemsworth) to some other realm to get some weapon to take Thanos down with.

The audience I was in cheered when the movie cut to the lavish, and, of course, fictional African nation of Wakanda, ruled by T’Challa/Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), obviously because his film, BLACK PANTHER, which just came out a few months ago was one of the biggest hits of the MCU (and of all-time), and considered a game changer for the franchise. Boseman’s T’Challa brings the goods, but his part despite that Thano’s army of crazy four-armed alien creatures invades Wakanda, is essentially a glorified cameo.

Same goes for Chris Evans returning as Steve Rogers, the retired Captain America, which is maybe because his last movie was basically an AVENGERS entry that he was the star of. Also on the side is Rogers’ buddy Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), along with Paul Bettany as Vision, and Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff /Scarlet Witch, who figure in because Vision has one of the Infinity Stones embedded in his head, but, as committed as Bettany and Vision are in their parts, the characters have never really resonated for me.

What also didn’t do much for me was a lot of strained quasi-Shakespearean exposition between or during action sequences that came off like with the actors over emoting about gods, the cosmos, the universe and everything in order to elevate the proceedings (even Peter Dinklage, in his appearance as Eitri the Dwarf King, lays it on a bit thick). Like everything else in the last 45 minutes or so, this was a bit much.

I preferred the comical elements such as Mark Ruffalo’s exasperating and failing struggle to Hulk out throughout the film, the multitude of one-liners like Quill telling Stark, “Let’s talk about this plan of yours - I think it’s good, except it sucks, so let me do the plan, and that way, it might be really good,” and, no surprise here, the Stan Lee cameo.

So AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR is the best and worst of all of the Marvel movie motifs all in one place. It’s overstuffed, overlong, and at times overwrought, but a lot of it is immensely entertaining, and often hilarious. Most fans will love it – or most of it – while non fans will dismiss it as a bunch of nonsensical bombast. You know, like every other Marvel movie.

James Cameron, who has multiple AVATAR sequels in the works, was recently quoted as saying that he hopes “we’ll start getting AVENGER fatigue here pretty soon.” Well, fatigue has set in before in the franchise (see IRON MAN 2, the first two THORs, DR. STRANGE, etc.) and did indeed set in towards the end of this, but its satisfyingly dark cliffhanger of a conclusion made my second (or third?) wind kick in. That helped to get me through the thousands of names of SFX Technicians, and Digital Artists to get to the post credits scene, which is something you’ll want to wait for too.

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GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2: Overstuffed But Still A Fun Ride

Now playing everywhere:


GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2

(Dir. James Gunn, 2017)

With the summer movie season upon us, it’s easy to be cynical about big ass, CGI-saturated superhero movies clogging up the multiplexes, but the Marvel machine has a pretty good track record. A couple of times a year, sometimes three, that ginormous franchise factory consistently cranks out comic book adaptations that are mostly quality entertainment.

So that brings us to the second installment to one of the funniest, most offbeat entries in the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY.

VOL. 2 re-unites Chris Pratt as Peter Quill aka Star-Lord, Zoe Saldana as the green-skinned Gamora, Dave Bautista as the multicolored Drax the Destroyer, and the voices of Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel as the CGI-ed characters Rocket the raccoon, and the tiny tree-like Baby Groot.

The film starts by introducing us to Quill’s dad, played by a young Kurt Russell. That’s right, in a scene set in 1980, Russell via camera effects and make-up appears as his 30-year old self, and it’s pretty damn convincing. Russell’s Ego (yes, that’s his name) takes his girlfriend (Laura Haddock), obviously later to be Star-Lord’s mother, to see some sort of alien seedling deal he planted in the woods behind a Dairy Queen somewhere in Missouri.


Flash forward 34 years and we meet up with the Guardians of the Galaxy as they battle a huge inter-dimensional creature with tons of tentacles, and teeth on a platform somewhere in space (they probably had a caption saying where but I don’t remember it). The action takes place largely in the background as the film focuses on Baby Groot cutely dancing up a storm to ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” in the foreground.

The gang’s job is to protect some powerful batteries, the movie’s McGuffin, for some gold-skinned people called the Sovereign led by Elizabeth Debicki as the High Priestess. This is in exchange for Gamora’s evil sister Nebula (Karen Gillan) so that the Guardians can take her to Xandar to collect her bounty. But then Rocket steals some of the batteries and a chase ensues with a bunch of remotely controlled drones following our heroes into an asteroid field (it’s not the only time this film apes THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, believe me).

Their ship crash lands on some planet (again, I don’t remember the name if there was one), and soon after another vessel that they had seen during the chase sequence lands. Russell, now identified as Ego, appears to reveal himself as Quill’s father, and asks him to come with him to his planet. Rocket and Groot get captured by Michael Rooker, reprising his role as the blue-skinned Yondu Udonta and his team of Ravagers, but a mutiny gets Yondu imprisoned with Rocket. This leads to another scene, one of the film’s funniest, in which Baby Groot keeps bringing the wrong thing instead of Yondu’s red fin head thingie, which can shoot a laser-like arrow through hundreds of attacking Ravagers.

Meanwhile, Quill is bonding with his dad, Ego (they even play catch together with some kind of light orb), but Gamora isn’t so sure that Ego is to be trusted. He’s not, of course, and his sinister plan, that he calls “The Expansion” involves taking over the galaxy with the seedlings planted on every planet. Ego, a character that dates back to 1966, himself is a living planet, you see.

The freshness of the first has evaporated, but VOL. 2 is a fine follow-up overall, but it’s a bit overlong and overstuffed with way too much going on - I had trouble following some of the chaotic goings on. Also my wife said she thought the father-son emotional content was heavy handed, and I have to agree. I would’ve liked more misdirection surrounding whether Ego is the film’s villain or not as well, but I guess fans of the comic would know that going in.



A new addition to the Guardians is Mantis played by an attenna-sporting Pom Klementieff, who has some funny moments with Bautista’s Drax, who keeps reminding her how hideous he thinks she is.

It was surprising to see Sylvester Stallone in such a small role - that’s right, this movie has both TANGO & CASH – as a high ranking Ravager named Starhawk (Stakar of the House of Ogord), another character that’s been around for decades but I’m just learning about now.

Russell over-acts a bit, but Ego's persona does call for it. The rest of the Pratt-led cast carries out their duties with humorous aplomb, and, like I said on the first one, Rocket may be Cooper’s best work.


GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL.2 is action and comedy packed enough to be the crowd pleaser its director/screenwriter Gunn wants it to be, and the soundtrack - the Awesome Mix Vol. 2 that Pratt’s Quill got at the end of the first one - lives up to its name with a bunch of toe-tapping tunes by the likes of George Harrison, Cheap Trick, Sweet, Jay and the Americans, and Cat Stevens (“Father and Son,” of course). I also enjoyed the David Hasselhoff jokes and cameo – he’s Quill’s father figure idol, you see).

The film’s bloat extends to five, count ‘em, five post credits scenes, so don’t get up when the movie looks like it’s over. I hate seeing those movie-goers that start to walk out and then have to race back or stop in their tracks to watch the stingers. Jeez, everyone should know by now that at a Marvel movie they should stay in their seats until the real finish and the actual studio logo hits the screen. It’s as expected as the obligatory Stan Lee cameo! We’re 15 movies into the MCU, people - get it together!

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PASSENGERS Left A Bad, Creepy Taste In My Mouth

Now playing at multiplexes from here to Homestead II:



PASSENGERS (Dir. Morten Tyldum, 2016)

Despite that the screenplay has been floating around online for a while, and because I didn't click on anything that went into more detail about the plot, all I knew going in was this sci-fi movie’s basic premise - i.e. two spaceship passengers played by Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence on a 120 year voyage to a new earth-like planet wake up out of hibernation 90 years early, fall in love, and work together to solve the mystery of why they were woken up.

What I didn’t know was that Pratt’s character, Jim Preston, actually wakes up from a pod malfunction a year before Jennifer Lawrence’s Aurora Lane, and because Jim is taken with Aurora (he’s never met her; he’s just watched her passenger profile video over and over) he sabotages her sleep pod so that she’ll wake up and they can be together.

Sounds pretty creepy, huh? No wonder the film's trailers, and TV spots gloss over that crucial plot point.

The film, written by Jon Spaihts (DOCTOR STRANGE, PROMETHEUS, THE DARKEST HOUR), bends over backwards trying to justify Jim’s actions. 



It shows us that Jim, a mechanic back home, goes through months of desperately trying to break into the ship’s control room, becoming suicidal from loneliness as he wanders drunk and pantless around the corridors of the ship, which is named the Starship Avalon, where his only friend is a robot bartender named Arthur played by Michael Sheen (a role that in dress and demeanor largely recalls Lloyd, the hotel bartender in THE SHINING).

Jim also doesn’t just wake up Aurora on a whim; he goes back and forth about it for weeks, and talks it out with Arthur, but from him he only gets responses like “Jim, these are not robot questions.”

When he finally decides to wake up who he thinks is his dream girl, he tells Arthur not to tell her, and he makes sure he hides the tools he used to tamper with her pod.

Lawrence’s Aurora is in a daze at first, going through some of the same motions that Jim did involving desperately trying to come up with a solution to being “stranded in space with a stranger” as she puts it.

Aurora is a writer and her plan was to travel to this new world, dubbed Homestead II, live there for a year then return home after another 120 year journey back – that’s right, she bought a round trip ticket – so that she could write the first book about the earth’s distant twin.

Finally, after giving her space, Jim asks Aurora out and before long they are in love – eating at the fancy restaurant facilities, engaging in holographic dance-offs, and going outside the ship in spacesuits where they knock helmets in place of their first kiss.

Then Arthur, that damn robot bartender has to go and ruin it by telling Aurora that Jim deliberately woke her (Arthur misunderstands it when the couple agrees that they “have no secrets”) and Aurora is livid.

Equating it to him murdering her, Aurora angrily withdraws all contact with Jim and ignores his pleas – one of which is broadcast around the ship – for understanding.

This all changes when somebody else wakes up - Laurence Fishburne as Chief Gus Mancuso, one of the Avalon’s high ranking staff members, and they all find out that the vessel is in extreme danger due to more major malfunctions, so the last act is a high octane fiery climax in which our leads fight to save the ship.

PASSENGERS goes from funny (Pratt’s early one man show scenes before he commits his questionable act) to creepy (the couple’s icky, yet stylish, courting scenes) to a routine sci-fi action thriller scenario, to creepy again (the ultra stupid ending, which I won’t spoil).

Lawrence and Pratt are two attractive, likable movie stars whose talents deserve a better, more thoughtful sci-fi platform than this, or at least one that doesn’t leave such a bad, creepy taste in my mouth.

It feels like Morten Tyldum (THE IMITATION GAME) and Co. took the standard rom com narrative, in which the male protagonist does something unforgivable and is rejected in the first half of the film, but redeems himself in the eyes of the female protagonist with a heroic feat in the third act, and they tried to go all GRAVITY and INTERSTELLAR on it.

The aforementioned screenplay for this film has been around for nearly a decade, and at one point was almost made with Keanu Reeves and Reese Witherspoon, and that alone should confirm the rom com-iness of this material.

The film, as shot by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, ARGO, BABEL), is as good looking as its leads, and there are a number of amusing moments, but overall PASSENGERS is a A-list actors lost in space letdown.

If you want to see a great movie starring two talented good looking A-listers, there’s a certain musical opening on Christmas day. I’ll fill you in about it soon.

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