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'Deadpool & Wolverine' briefing

7/26/2024

2 ½ (out of 4)

Deadpool 2 began with a simple “FUCK WOLVERINE” and things aren’t too different now… if you’re coming into the latest Deadpool flick for the clawed curmudgeon you may as well stick to The Wolverine, hell the only Huge Act Man X-Men movie worse than Deadpool & Wolverine is obviously X-Men Origins: Wolverine (a deservedly scorned spin-off with admittedly decent choreography if awful VFX), no bar to exceed considering Wade and Logan play odd couple for about four minutes together onscreen. As technically the first X-Men movie in the MCU, you can’t be too mad at it when there’s a dozen Easter baskets worth of stupid comic-nerd nuggets — for that specific cameo that’ll make you chuckle (for me it was rescuing Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie from the empty sea of developed and unrealized movies) this flick is like an upended cereal box.

Akin to Spider-Man: No Way Home’s playfully unconcerned Multiverse-mucking, D&W has just as little actual story and likewise feels like a pure product rather than a real movie. However, even when 40% of the jokes are falling flat, Ryan Reynolds’ steadfast creative commitment ignites the third Deadpool with at least some marginal sense of unequivocal uniqueness, which is more appetizing than James Gunn’s own irksome irreverence, although Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 may be the only good Marvel movie out of their last seven or so. Deadpool & Wolverine may be a whopper of pound for pound entertainment value — it’s still hard to genuinely say it’s good.

Wolverine is almost more sidelined than Godzilla in that last Kong mash-up, here though I understand more since it’s Deadpool’s unlikely franchise at the end of the day. Because the first film has terrible non-linear narrative structure with a pretty unsatisfying outline of an origin and a quickly outdated sense of what meta means, I think the third is just too double-stuffed with fun not to be superior, even if both are too insanely specific products of their cultural place to age gracefully. Deadpool 2 is the actual movie in the franchise, the bona fide blockbuster, the most seamless mix of impressive action sequences (David Leitch in the driver’s seat helps), crisper self-aware commentary, more effectively base humor and pinch of actual characterization. This movie still has the sword-swinging slapstick in effective bouts between our titular foul-mouthed, virtually unkillable mental cases, and you can’t help but laugh at some of Reynolds’ ridiculous wisecracks (or Hugh giving what he’d give Shakespeare) — next to the way this Cinematic Universe has insisted on one-liners and tension-eviscerating asides, Ryan relatively feels like a comic savant since too much of Whedon, Gunn and the new Spidey shtick has rubbed me wrong.

The real victory is this is an authentic Deadpool movie — despite the way Fantastic Four and of course the rest of the X-Men are starting to seep into the cracks of the GRAND TIMELINE or whatever, you don’t even blink at the first R-rated Disney/Marvel flick by a LONG SHOT (the closest was a weak F-Bomb in Guardians 3), or wait around for MCU cameos when they could bring back Pyro, Toad, Juggernaut, Laura/X23, Tatum to finally play Gambit for Christ’s sake and throw in Wesley Snipes and Jennifer Garner as Blade and Elektra for respective good measure, needless as they are, then of course there’s Chris Evans’ sneaky cameo as Johnny Storm rather than Steve Rodgers, a crappy recurring joke turned a solid one. But what matters is that this actor/character switcheroo ties in COMPLETELY to the Comic Con craziness occurring just as this movie easily has the biggest opening weekend of 2024 — if Chris Evans can be both Captain and the Torch in our universe, than Downey Jr. can be BOTH IRON MAN AND DR. DOOM! FUCK IT FEIGE! Yes let us all forget the Kang fiasco which would have been shit even if Jonathan Majors hadn’t become a problem child and everything went according to “plan.” Fantastic Four now has the subtitle First Steps (what like they’re Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2?) because if Phase Four or Five will be remembered, if at all, it’s whiffed one-offs and really paltry, poorly considered attempts to slam the reset button on the MCU’s stalled out, inevitable entropy.

The movie mourns the death of Fox in that evil manipulative arrangement of sentimental behind the scenes footage of better superhero movies Disney had no hand in — they’re flaunting and flexing their not so recently acquired IP harder than ever and this is just the start. I’m just so happy that by sheer financial calculus Feige has to bend over and take Reynold’s quips about Deadpool & Wolverine arriving at a “low point” in the series. That’s no joke though as the last one, The Marvels, in money or moviemaking, is just shit, worst ever for the brand, and even if this movie’s self-awareness about the drop-off since Endgame is a distraction of insincere “honesty,” it’s just delightful to witness onscreen. Fortunately Reynolds is just as inseparable from his character as Jackman form Logan or Downey from Tony… plus there’s that rando Peter (Rob Delaney), the elderly blind roommate (Leslie Uggams) and all the glib, giddy decisions making this a weirdly lovable trilogy contrary to the smarmy swill the first movie suggests on its own.

D&W has reasonable respect for Logan (less for Logan, who is a different animal than we’ve seen before with the same grimaced redemption arc) and yet this second swan song, this meme-able encore (DID WE MENTION HE’S WEARING THE CLASSIC YELLOW SUIT OMG FINALLYYY) is just more gore and mockery and dumb needle drops — I almost don’t even need to mention director (and first-time writer, alongside four others, after twenty-five years of mediocrity exclusively behind the camera) Shawn Levy, most famous for the stinky Night at the Museum trilogy, one-off unfunny Steve Martin vehicles like Cheaper by the Dozen and the 2006 Pink Panther plus crappy crass but still sentimental comedies This Is Where I Leave You and The Internship. His latest era may be his best, as this is his third charming enough/“eh not bad” Reynolds collab in a row, rearing 2021’s late summer sleeper hit Free Guy and the sci-fi coming-of-age Netflick The Adam Project — which family friendly movie with a slavish religiosity toward Star Wars, 80s nostalgia and all forms of mainstream nerd culture would you prefer? Anyway, like Tim Miller directing 2016's Deadpool, there’s really no voice to make out here, and Levy is so tasteless you can’t even lament another director getting tangled up in the Disney turbines.

With eight months after the embarrassment of The Marvels and eight months until Captain America: Brave New World (probably not the first on anybody’s anticipated list) this is a desert stretch for MCU disciples. Then we figure out what’s going on with that asterisk Thunderbolts*'s title before Fantastic Four seemingly directs us to two new Avengers only just subtitled Doomsday for obvious RDJ-related reasons and the unchanged Secret Wars in 2026. As someone totally finished with actually expecting ANYTHING of significance to happen (2020s MCU really is the true TV-identical serialization of cinema) I’m glad Deadpool & Wolverine took the tiresome, messy malarkey of cinematic interconnectivity to more pleasingly flippant and freewheeling places than Doctor Strange in the Mulitverse of Madness or any other failed attempt to widen this Universe’s reach since 2019.

'Twisters' briefing

7/19/2024

2 (out of 4)

Can you really claim a plural title (à la Aliens) when your dumber sequel features half the cyclones spinning in 1996? Jesus, I don’t think there’s a single way in which this soft remake (so soft it's barely holding together) isn’t paling in comparison to the already pretty corny disaster movie thrills of the original Twister — trading “From the director of Speed” for “From the director of Minari” doesn’t make your affair classier, it just makes it a marvel of boredom and wasted effort in search of actual escapism, probably like watching real storm chasers.

If you really were trying to correct certain things about the original, let’s play that game: sure swapping Twister’s crumbier cold open for an even more obvious investment in backstory makes sense, but the plot is utterly lost on Minari man Lee Isaac Chung, the removed antithesis to director Jan de Bont’s restless insistence. The first movie is all about them trying to get their little science balls into the deadly suck zone, in fact the ENTIRE MOVIE is just race to see who can get this dizzying data — it’s frustrating but you’re invested after all the spills and when they accomplish their macho meteorological maneuver it’s so rewarding, exciting, pent up and released like a theme park ride as DISASTER MOVIES GENERALLY SHOULD BE. In 2024 we would apparently rather drown in melodrama, the ‘dead friends’ kind rather than the ‘love triangle between my separated storm chaser wife and the therapist fiancé' routine. Believe me I can barely stomach when Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are screaming about Daddy issues with a ‘nado just down the road, but that goop is still preferential.

It can’t go without saying the action is either unimpressive or nonexistent — only one of its four or so major sequences involves some technical interaction between the practical effects and digital enhancements, and regardless any of the film’s unfussy spectacle still kinda sucks. Again it’s living up to no masterpiece, I can’t even say I even like Twister but when they have to drive a truck through a house they drive a truck through a fucking house. Twisters is so slick and phony, despite real locations and shooting on Kodak film — de Bont’s film had stunning aerial photography this movie can’t even come close to with today’s drone technology, ha maybe you should’ve handed this over to someone who knows their way around both shlock and new tech like Michael Bay.

And although Twisters sidesteps any climate change rhetoric, the film still has to promulgate a message about evil lowballing profiteers pilfering storm-swept lands, something this shoddy script wants to play with morally but won’t commit to… Worse still, the reverence for nature is somehow diminished even when you account for how quiet Chung’s film is in contrast to 1996’s second biggest domestic feature (behind disaster maestro Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day). So what if Twisters features a scene at a rodeo, plays a couple country songs and refuses to let you forget we’re in the beautiful, scenic southern paradise of OOOOOOOOKlahoma where the cows go flying through the aaaiiiiiiirrrrrr. State pride aside Twisters has a smokescreen of authenticity, especially as it is carried by a crop of “rising stars.”

Apart from professional third wheel Anthony Ramos from In the Heights (no mackin’ for you this time), we have Daisy Edger-Jones from Where the Crawdads Sing (her unreadable demeanor is forced to conceal some already communicated trauma and guilt), and Glen Powell (whom you rightfully and wrongly expect to save the day and the movie), of Top Gun: Maverick and Hit Man, as the thrill junkie YouTube personality with a degree AND a heart of gold, too charming and romantic to make into the simple clone of Cary Elwes' original antagonist — Lordy the way this movie tries to eliminate the ‘good chasers vs. bad chasers’ angle isn’t mature or realistic, the tiresome ‘modern moral grey’ is just another of this movie’s forgettable, inferior alterations. Even the 2nd act respite with our lead character’s accommodating Mom is worse — in ’96 Lois Smith offered superb presence and made you care about her character’s survival in a medical rescue moment. In the background no figures here have shit on the former, stupendous supporting ensemble spearheaded by Philip Seymour Hoffman and including Todd Field, Anthony Rapp, Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, Patrick Fischler, Sean Whalen and Joey Slotnick, just a king's ransom of "ah, that guy!"

I can’t believe Joseph Kosinski is responsible for the story (and just just the story as he’s probably too busy directing F1), since Top Gun: Maverick is precisely the textbook Twisters doesn’t follow, namely an emphasis on cinematic realism, warm, genuine emotions, plus Powell as part of a greater whole rather than the only grace note, all in all the legacyquel with dignity. Chung is candid and clever as director, producer, cinematographer and editor of the Rwandan journey of liberation disguised as revenge saga Munyurangabo — regardless this felt like the Universal equivalent of an indie-to-Marvel one-step yes-man process, since hardly any of his sensitivities bleed through even the quieter passages.

The disaster movie was my first love, yet it’s such a dilapidated, dogshit genre that, in hindsight, there are seldom few quality examples. Nostalgia carries The Day After Tomorrow far for me, War of the Worlds contains far too many other genres to include (but it’d be the GOAT far and away if you did), and similarly pandemic flicks (like Contagion or Outbreak) don’t quite qualify and maybe there’s more an argument to be made for harrowing historical features like Titanic or The Impossible or, ugh, The Perfect Storm, lame. As what one would call a desperate apologist for such saturated spectacle and waves of what-would-you-do-in-that-situation cinema, I’ll say the original Poseidon Adventure (and Wolfgang Petersen’s remake damn it!) represents what we crave, otherwise Deep Impact (gtfoh Armageddon) and Dante’s Peak (you can stay Volcano, whatever) are the only really strong excerpts from the genre of suffering as showmanship. Recent attempts to reclaim mainstream attention for popcorn apocalypses like Pompeii, San Andreas and Geostorm certainly don’t speak to a bright future.

The fact that Twisters was maybe only a hair above the made-for-cheap found-footage-plus-tornado-twist Into the Storm is concerning, and frankly if I’m favoring The Core and 2012 above this new summer smash, something’s gone seriously wrong, not just with with critic’s giving this lousy, limp-wristed movie masquerading as a big budget blockbuster thanks to IP with nothing in common besides natural phenomena and a reference to their Dorothy machine. You can find more awe-inducing tornadoes in fucking The Wizard of Oz too.

It’s amazing that the mediocrity of 30 years ago outstrips the well-received slop of today. I thought this would be an overnight shoo-in for disaster movie all-timer rather than a dud you can barely call a distraction — if you’re going to replace sequences of man vs. nature with cheesy character development, just make sure such a exchange in entertainment value is actually worth it.

Cinema Briefing

'Deadpool & Wolverine' briefing

'Twisters' briefing

To keep it brief...

Months in movies

Kino
of the Crop
(A recent selection of
consummate classics)

Cinema Briefing

'Deadpool & Wolverine' briefing

'Twisters' briefing

To keep it brief...

Months in movies

Kinoof the Crop(A recent selection ofconsummate classics)

Kino
of the Crop
(A recent selection of
consummate classics)