KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week Kent has a spotlight movie (or two) which he writes a longer, thinkier piece (or two) about, and then whatever else he watched that week he does a quick little summary of his thoughts. Or that's the plan anyway but sometimes a touch of the flu and an incredibly dense work schedule prevent such things being so timely.
This week:
The Marvels (2023, d. Nia DaCosta - in theatre)
A Haunting In Venice (2023, d. Kenneth Branagh - Disney+)
The Killer (2023, d. David Fincher - Netflix)
The Vanishing on 7th Street (2010, d. Brad Anderson - AmazonPrime)
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There's nothing fun about the meta-narrative around The Marvels and said meta-narrative is nothing but messy.
To get into it... the early word on The Marvels was that it was a troubled production, and extensive reshoots were required, before, ultimately, the director left the edit to the Purple Suits to work on other projects. Now, many, many, many films undergo reshoots for various reasons, but most of these films don't wind up costing nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. We'll get back to the director abandoning the edit.
The last Captain Marvel film, of which this is ostensibly a sequel (alongside being part of the MCU formula as the leappad for the future plans for the overall franchise) made over a billion dollars. This one's tracking to maybe not even make its budget back (but, there is hope), which is unheard of for a Marvel film.
The release date on the film got shuffled, amidst writers and actors strikes. Promotion for the film was greatly reduced as the actors couldn't get out and support the film, and maybe having writers help with the reshoots and/or edit would have made.
The prior film, being the first female-led Marvel production, featuring a lead actress who is an outspoken champion of feminism during peak Trumpism meant the narrative around the film became pretty toxic. The toxicity persists but I think with the actors not promoting the film, that narrative was pretty mute as the trolls didn't have a steady stream of youtube clips and red carpet premieres to react to.
And then there's the "current state of the MCU", which has been a narrative since, oh, 2015 or so, but in a post-pandemic perspective has become nothing but negative.
And that's still not all the baggage this film carries with it. It didn't stand a chance, even if it were a great film.
It's not a great film.
It does have a lot going for it, including a super-likeable cast of both lead and supporting actors and character, a great sense of fun and adventure, and some delightfully quirky ideas.
It reunites Captain Marvel Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) with her best friend's daughter, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), whom she last saw as a child in the 90's. So it's awkward. Monica still calls her "Aunt Carol", even though it's been 30 years, and there's all these abandonment issues. Monica we saw as a child in the last Captain Marvel, and then again in Wandavision on Disney+.
They team up with teenager Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), who is a Captain Marvel and the Avengers uber-fan. She couldn't be any more excited. Her family is less enthused. We first met the Khan family on Disney+ Ms. Marvel, where we also learn Kamala's origin story of gaining powers of hard light construction from an interstellar bangle. One of two.
It's the second bangle that's the maguffin of the story, and its activation by the big bad triggers a quantum entanglement that means any time Carol, Monica and Kamala all use their powers at the same time, two of the three wind up switching places in space and time. This is clearly puzzling to them, to Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson with a lively comedic performance) who was working with Monica when the switching starts, and to Kamala's family, whose home is wrecked as the entanglement brings one of Carol's fights with her.
The dynamics that form between all these characters amidst the chaos of all this switching is the greatest joy of the film. The frustration on display from everyone (except maybe Kamala who just seems to be embracing it all and enjoying the ride) is highly entertaining, and the action sequences are chaotic entertainment.
Carol, Monica, and Kamala then need to seek out the source of their quantum entanglement, while Fury takes care of Kamala's family, bringing them onboard the SABER satellite, along with Carol's alien cat/flerkin, Goose, resulting which is its own adventure.
Again, the best part of the film is how all these characters interact with each other. So it's unfortunate that the fun comes to a grinding halt every time the main villain, a Kree overlord named Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), is on screen. And she is the first character we meet in this film. It opens with her finding the matching bangle to Kamala's and she starts opening up jump gates with it which she uses to steal resources from healthy planets to fuel her own dying one. Her motivations have a loose connection to Carol's past, because it all needs to tie in somehow to resentment and animosity and a big punch up at the end. Yawn.
As I watched The Marvels, and laughed and giggled along with it, I also couldn't help but grumble at how apparent the seams on this film were. The Purple Suits got their hands on it and chopped it up and tried stitching it back together but with no finesse or aptitude for the job. The reshoot scenes seemed pretty evident as there was some quality issues, and the edits wind up making for some pretty absurd leaps in story logic and internal consistency.
The word was testing of the film did not go well, and the Purple Suits got nervous. I have two guesses. First is that the film clocked in closer to 2 1/2 hours, and the new dictum of the Disney overlords is sub-2hours, and so this thing got put on the chopping block, but also the script was so woven between the the very fun, kind of wild set pieces and the drama of Carol's past deeds, Carol and Monica's familial tension plus putting Kamala's hero worship to the test that it was kind of impossible to separate them without butchering the film. Most of the dramatics seem to be handled in reshoot moments which look poorly greenscreened, hastily written, and quickly resolved.
My second guess is that Nia DaCosta delivered a very weird adventure that made the Purple Suits nervous, and nervous executives lead to second guessing their chosen storyteller's creative instincts, and so they either drove her away or took it away from her and had their way with their hatchets.
In my mind, The Marvels has a solid foundation but took the wrong approach. In my mind I see a version where we don't meet Dar-Benn until the third act. We instead spend the first act with quantum entaglement shenanigans, the second act with the women searching for answers to their problem and bonding in the process (Monica and Carol dealing with their issues and Kamala both getting over her hero worship but also learning from Carol and Monica) and the third act discovering the source of their issues and how it's tied with both Kamala and Carol's past. But instead of making Dar-Benn an irredeemable bad guy, leading to a big multi-powered punch up, the Marvels freaking solve the problem and Carol attempts to make up for past misdeeds. You know, not following the trite MCU formulae.
In theory one could get away with having only watched Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel and nothing else in order to enjoy the bulk of this film. Mercifully it doesn't touch at all upon Secret Invasion. But where it ends, it's in very MCU fashion, teasing connectivity to the past in a very meta sense, and teasing the future of the MCU.
The Marvels had the MCU's second poorest opening apparently next to The Incredible Hulk, which is a big whiff. But the film already has its champions. Lady Kent came out the screening absolutely loving it and I've been hearing that is not an uncommon reaction. This thing could wind up with a cult life, which seems odd that an MCU product would have to fall into niche/cult category, but that may need to be the future of the MCU. It needs to start trusting its creatives, and embracing uniqueness more.
It's clear superhero fatigue -- superhero apathy even -- has set in, and I don't think expectations need to be reset. These aren't billion dollar products anymore, and if they want one of these to break out of the pack, it needs to provide something different, not more of the same. The Marvels has glimmers of something different, remnants of big swings taken, but it's been edited and reshot into something that seems so "MCU" in a derogatory way.
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I'll admit, these Kenneth Branagh Poirot films are enjoyable. They came out the gate with an absolutely stacked cast in Murder on the Orient Express that hinted at making a stab at a blockbuster franchise. I think Death on the Nile, however, proved to both Branagh and the studio that if they're going to continue with these that maybe scaling back their expectations and ambitions is going to be necessary if the franchise is going to have a long life.
A Haunting In Venice doesn't feel like a big blockbuster. The stacked cast this time isn't nearly as stacked as the prior two films, with Michelle Yeoh, Tina Fey and Jamie Dornan being the biggest names. And unlike the prior two films, which featured moving vehicles across exotic locations, this one is a closed-door mystery in a singular exotic locale.
What breathes life into this film is its straying away from Christie's original Poirot stories and instead crafting a unique tale that more pays homage to "Hallowe'en Party" than adapts it. In not being faithful to the source material, it frees up screenwriter Michael Green to put more of a personal journey for Poirot into the piece. You could sense in Green's script to Death on the Nile that Branagh wanted more of that, but the two couldn't really work it into the adaptation without it feeling a little clumsy.
Here, Poirot starts the film having cut himself off from the world, and, in a way, his own humanity. An old friend asks for his help in debunking a mystic whose ability to chat up ghosts has stymied her. In getting involved Poirot is challenged in his beliefs in facts and evidence, and his trust in his own senses and better judgement.
Branagh does effectively take you through the picture with no sense of where it might fall on its stance on supernatural phenomenon. Will Poirot come out a believer, or will he completely debunk it? Or will he come out just unsure, and shaken? For a character that supposed to be rock solid in his intuition and observational keenness, it's a remarkably engaging to take him on a ride that shakes that to it core. It's a film with a murder (or two, or three) to solve, but the tension mostly lies in where it takes Poirot.
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The Killer seems of a piece with Se7en, The Game, and Fight Club, but a piece removed... time. The Killer is Fincher approaching his earlier works with a new sensibility. It's based off the French graphic novel series of the same name (by Matz and Luc Jacamon) which makes it Fincher's first comic book movie. But rather than set up a heightened, or even fantastical reality for the world of The Killer, instead Fincher grounds it in the minutiae and mundanity of realism. Not reality, realism. Stylish realism.
Michael Fassbender is our focus of the entire film, an experienced hitman who has a particular perspective of the world that the film neither embraces nor denounces, simply presents via Fassbenders calm, collected narration. There's a kinship with the narration by Ed Norton's "Jack" in Fight Club, except in Fight Club the narration was sermonizing, preaching about the how the world's gone wrong, and how anarchy is the only tool to escape it. Here, Fassbender's killer can only present the world as he sees it, full of structures designed to enforce rules that not everyone has to follow, and notes you can circumvent if you're careful, cautious and dispassionate, but he's neither advising it nor warning against it. He's just figured out something that works for him.
Fincher's early works had a tautness to them, like a rubber band being stretched over 2-ish hours to their breaking point. They were genre films, of a sort, with an aggressive streak to them that certainly keyed into the impressionable minds of teens and college kids of the era, and created devoted fans (and even a few monsters). The Killer seems to be Fincher saying "how would I make any of those today?" The answer is with discipline and mastery of his craft.
The Killer isn't much of a story. The hitman's on a job, it goes wrong, he gets spanked, he spanks back. But Fincher lives with this character, and lives in his mind. We hear the things the killer tells us, but it seems as much as he's telling us, he's telling himself. He's affirming himself. Fincher delights in the disparity between the narration, and the events on screen, even though they aren't intrinsically comedic.
This film sits in a moment, where one of the director's earlier works would have had edit after edit across the same span. There's a surprise airiness to The Killer, and rather than build tension continually, Fincher stretches and relaxes the rubber band only in specific moments. If there's one word that comes to mind that distinguishes Fincher's first era of filmmaking and what may be the start of his third, it's patience. This is not an action film, it's a meditation in disguise.
It looks great, it's unexpected, it's dark, and it's pretty enjoyable.
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Anderson found a place on TV, shooting episodes of The Wire, a LOT of episodes of Fringe, and having a very healthy TV career ever since. I always take notice of his name when it pops up as a credit on a show. You know it's going to be a little different, with starker use of shadows and light. He's continued making films throughout the 2010s and beyond, but nothing has really gained traction. I haven't even heard of most of them. Like The Vanishing on 7th Street.
It's a post-apocalyptic horror film starring Hayden Christiansen, Thandiwe Newton and John Leguizamo, which, even if it's not very good, you would think would still have some awareness factor based on cast alone. Hell, I must have read Toasty's review from 2011, but no, I have no sense I knew this existed.
It's a film that plays into Anderson's strength of light and shadows, but given that this is Anderson's strength, I should have been more impressed. It feels like a TV-budget feature film, with the sense that it was shot rather quickly, and the set-ups were constrained by timelines.
The setup is, in a blink, nearly everyone disappears, leaving heaps of clothes on the ground. In Detroit, we follow a few survivors as they literally battle the darkness for their lives. Finding refuge in a bar on 7th street where a generator is running, keeping the lights on. We have a selfish TV reporter, a mom in despair, an insular film projectionist, and a pre-teen missing his mom. The darkness is coming for them all.
What fails the film is not really budget or time or ambition, but lack of character. The script is trite, full of cheesy dialogue, the characters yelling in anger and/or frustration for lack of anything else to say or do. The script doesn't know how to explore the situation it sets up, so its full of inconsistencies, and winds up doing the same thing over and over again. By the end it's very clearly set up a hopeless situation, and so its failed attempt at delivering an uplifting finale is a wash.
Anderson does get a lot of good visual flourishes in. The perpetually moving shadows, including ones in the shape of people that seem to move towards the camera, are very unsettling, but it's a great effect to little effect, if that makes sense. There's poor mythos building for the scenario, with unsatisfying exploration of it, and no explanation of it.
The biggest crime is giving Thandiwe Newton nothing useful to do.
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