KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, but more like Kent's A Few Weeks Ago in Film...KAFWAF?
This Week:
Blue Beetle (2023, d. Angel Manuel Soto - Crave)
Parker (2013, d. Taylor Hackford - AmazonPrime)
Repeat Performance (1947, d. Alfred L. Werker - Criterion Channel)
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There may not be a massive collective of Blue Beetle ultra-heads out there, but it seems writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer is one of them. The amount of comics-derived Beetle lore he injects into this script, and thus forcing the production to visualize all this madness, is utterly remarkable. As a guy who is one rung down from being a Blue Beetle ultra-fan myself (both Ted Kord and Jaime Reyes are on my top 5 all-time favourite superhero characters list), I delighted in every ounce of it, even when the script makes a few blatant left turns, like introducing Ted Kord's daughter(!?), and shifting the relationship Jaime has with his scarab.
I don't mind what they did with either, but I really wish, in the exploration of what makes Jaime's relationship with his family so special, they also explored what makes his relationship with the scarab so special. In the comics and Young Justice cartoon, the scarab is a super weapon intent on being a super weapon, but Jaime has the ability to keep it under control. Here, the scarab takes a marginally passive role, bending to Jaime's wishes rather quickly, but also acting as advisor to him. It's a less dramatic relationship but the film probably wouldn't work the same way with it being more contentious. Even still, it doesn't spend enough time with Jaime and the scarab coming to terms with each other (I think about the scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming where Spidey's engaging with his onboard AI and we don't really get a scene like that here). The alien-ness of the scarab is used a little too sparingly.
I found the humour of the film largely fell pretty flat and was very dependent on screaming (as Toasty pointed out). Given how the film leans in very heavily on these humourous moments for basically the first two acts, it's kind of a shame we're actively yelled at for much of the film's run time. But you know who likes yelling-as-comedy? The kids, if half the animate programming on TV is any indication.
I like that this film made little attempt to world build outside of its own neon-drenched El Paso-analog pocket of the DC Universe. A brief mention of Superman and the Flash (and calling Batman a fascist) is more than enough to tell us what world were in. Jaime's not vying for a spot on the Justice League roster, he's just a college grad, deeply in dept, looking for a job, who happens to get an alien bug weapon integrated into his spine. That old saw.
I wish I could downright love that a Blue Beetle movie exists, although I do genuinely appreciate that this one does. I've wanted for years for there to be a Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle movie, hoping it would be a smash success and see little kids wearing the scarab backpack, running and jumping around screaming "I'm Blue Beetle". This wasn't a big enough hit for that, unfortunately.
I think the translation of the suit from comics to screen is incredible, and I like the cast, if not all the yelling in their performances. I'm not fully enamoured with the final product but that's at least in part because, as Toasty said, superhero fatigue is real. I think 20 years ago I would have embraced this much more fully...but then Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle didn't exist until 2006 (RIP Keith Giffen).
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That Jason Statham plays a character named Parker in a film titled Parker, something Westlake's widow agreed to with the producers, somehow seems like a slap in the face to Westlake's wishes. Maybe it only is in hindsight, given how frustratingly awful the end result is.
I'm no superfan. As I am with most things, I'm an avid tourist, just popping in, absorbing and appreciating some of the experience, without dedicating myself to it. In this case, just prior to watching Parker I had just finished reading the omnibus of Darwyn Cooke's loving adaptations of a few of Richard Stark's Parker stories. This certainly isn't that.
It's not even that Statham's Parker doesn't at all seem to be the same character I just read, or that Statham's Parker is indistinguishable from almost any other Statham character, or even the unambitious Hollywoodizing of a Parker story (it absolutely stalls out whenever it jumps to Jennifer Lopez's character...not JLos fault, it's the script), it's that Taylor Hackford shoots the goddamn thing like its an episode of NCIS. It's one of the ugliest, sloppiest 30-million dollar production I've seen in a long while. It's got an incredibly stacked support cast (Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce, Clifton Collins Jr., Nick Nolte, Patty Lupone, Bobby Cannavale) that all deserve much better than to be treated like tertiary local hires. It's also got a godawful soundtrack that made me feel slightly ill, and horrendous editing that seemed to do nothing to help the story progress with any finesse.
It was very difficult transition going from Cooke's incredible passion project of delicately translating Westlake's stories and characters so precisely and creatively, with a gorgeously illustrated, stylized 50's setting, to this atrocity in which nobody at all seems to care about the quality of the final product.
Rumour has it Shane Black's attempting a series of Parker stories with Mark Whalberg as the lead. From Black's repertoire, it's clear he can do justice to this material, but I cannot stand Whalberg, and he's an immediate deterrent for me watching a film (even more than Statham, Whalberg's a guy who can't really play anything but the same character over an over).
Skip it all, go read Cooke's comics (or the original novels).
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There are still others to watch, even ones that clearly identify themselves as Christmastime movies, but I chose this one first since it features some timey-wimey shenanigans that are obviously totally in my wheelhouse.
Here Sheila (Joan Lesley) is an actress subjugated by her husband, Barney (Louis Hayward). She winds up shooting him on New Year's Eve in self-defence. She's distraught, and in the process of heading to her play's producer looking for help, she wishes she could do the year over again, and by the time she reaches the top of the stairs, the clock has rewound by a year. It takes her a while to realize that she is not going mad, and upon returning home, seeing Barney alive, she starts trying to manipulate the timeline, to prevent Barney (a struggling playwright) from meeting Paula (a successful playwright played by Virginia Field ) and having an affair that both kills their marriage and, quite literally, kills one of them. But every effort to change the tides of fortune result in either further cementing the inevitable or maybe even making things worse.
True to Criterion Channel's assessment, Repeat Performance does feel like a prototype for The Twilight Zone complete with an opening voice over narration that sounds similar to (but isn't) Rod Serling. It's a fairly compelling film despite some pretty hammy acting (Hayward leading the charge on that one) and being absolutely drenched in sexism, both outwardly in the story and intrinsically in the script. The whole movie is really not about Sheila trying to stop the events that wind up with her killing Barney, but, instead trying to save her marriage to a drunken, depressed, jealous, washed-up, pathetic man that she inexplicably loves to the point of reversing time to try and save. It's a noir, so it sustains its fatalistic tone pretty well, but it's hard to root for a character who spends an entire year making one big mistake.
I was really hoping at the very end to find that Sheila kills Barney again, heads to the same stairs only to find herself, once again, a year earlier...stuck in a horrific time loop she can't emotionally escape. Alas, it twists the ending into a tale fooling fate, just enough to be quite satisfying.
A fascinatingly terrible story, but a good production overall.
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