10 for 10: Migraine

[10 for 10... that's 10 movies which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie or TV show we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable?] 

In this edition:

The Mask of Zorro - 1998, d. Martin Campbell (Netflix) 

Jumanji: The Next Level - 2019, d. Jake Kasdan (AmazonPrime)

F9 - 2021, d. Justin Lin (rental)

Turbo Kid -  2015, d. François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell (AmazonPrime)

Dog Days - 2018, d. Ken Marino (on demand)

Unstoppable - 2010, d. Tony Scott (Disney+/Star)

Charade - 1963, d. Stanley Donen (Netflix)

Police Story - 1985, d. Jackie Chan (Crave)
Police Story2 - 1988, d. Jackie Chan (Crave)

Wing Chun - 1994, d.  Woo-Ping Yuen (dvd)

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I really wanted nothing to do with a Zorro movie when it came out 20+ years ago. The property was so old-world to me, that I questioned why, why revive a property that had been long in the tooth even 15 years earlier? I now realize that the franchises of any era are built on the childhood nostalgia of the producers who are in their 40's and 50's at the time, so with pulp heroes like The Phantom, The Shadow, Dick Tracy and Tarzan all getting a go in the 90's, of course Zorro was an option. 

Also no property is ever dead if there's the possibility of making money off it. 

Even at that time, 1998, I knew there was something off about casting British (Hopkins) and Spanish (Banderas) actors as a Mexican folk hero (especially when the Spanish are the enemy in the film).  Were this made today there would certainly be some noise about it (I think there was even at the time but calling out that kind of casting barely made a dent back then).

But, you know, that aside, (if you can put such things aside) it's a pretty fun romp about legacy and choosing to serve greater good over self, and of course both Hopkins (who I assumed was a mistake) and Banderas are just charismatic as fuck.  Zeta-Jones, though a big part of the film, is basically the cliched reactive female of these sorts of things.  I was hoping she would have a more to do.

It's perhaps a smidge overlong, but quite, quite watchable, a testament to Campbell's keen sense of adventure and a script that plays nicely with themes of legacy.

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Jumanji: The Next Level is a surprisingly entertaining return to the video-game reality established in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. Spencer, having seemingly come out of his shell after the last Jumanji adventure finds that his newfound bravado was short lived, and he longs for the Rock-like strength and willpower he had in the game.  After he disappears into the game his confused romantic interest Martha joins him, but so do his grandpa Eddie (Danny Devito) and Eddie's antagonistic friend and former business partner Milo (Danny Glover).  And unfortunately for Spencer, it's Eddie in Rock's body and Milo get into Kevin Hart's compact frame.

Honestly, after many months, I can't really tell you too much about the events of the film, except to say that Dwayne Johnson's Devito impersonation is great fun, but it's Hart's Danny Glover impression made me laugh every single moment on screen.  The avatars of Jumanji are a suitable mask to explore the emotional subtext of the exterior world, the only problem being we don't really care so much about those characters in the exterior world.  While Spencer's feelings of disappointment and insecurity are pretty much expected, it was the emotional underpinning of Eddie and Milo's septuagenarian friendship that really lifted this movie out of its middle ground.  There's a whole body-swapping bit in the middle of the picture which gives all the main performers a chance to play as each other, with Karen Gillen getting to really show off her versatility.

There's a plenty of action, most of it fairly non-descript and excessively video-gamey (apt for a video-game movie but not altogether exiting).  Overall, enjoyable, but, like the first one, ultimately forgettable, or, at best, kind of indistinguishable from one another.

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F9, the Fast and Furious Saga, just as with each film in the series before it, takes things to another level.  Somehow the budgets get bigger, the action more unbelievably ridiculous, the mythology more intricately (though far from delicately) woven, and the family keeps expanding.

In F9, we get our first ever flash-back sequences, to a young Dom Teretto and his heretofore unheard of brother Jakob as they help their father as pit crew for his race car.  But when Dom learns that Jakob helped his dad rig his car to fail, thus throwing the race, but causing a fatal accident killing their dad, well, family apparently doesn't mean enough to young Dom.

Now, the world's in danger because Jakob (in the form of John Cena, supposedly Vin Diesel's older brother) has allied with some maniac and a returning Cypher (Charlize Theron in a veeery bad wig) and only Dom can stop him.  There's some other nonsense with the rest of the gang too, including bringing back supposedly dead Han and, independently of that, some of the other crew from Tokyo Drift who are now rocket scientists for the sole reason that they'll need to launch Roman and Tej into space.  Yeah, they go to space... in a car... what of it?

Helen Mirren gets a driving sequence (and wakes Vin Diesel out of his acting coma, seriously there's infinitely more heat between Mirren and Diesel that between Diesel and any of his other female co-stars in any of his other films...he kind of lights up when she's around...but I mean, who wouldn't?) and there's a whole wonderfully absurd sequence involving magnets that has to be seen to be believed (but even then you won't believe it).  Dom at one point even pulls a whole building down upon the dozens of bad guys rushing him because he performs herculean feats now.

I'll pull no punches, this movie is insanely dumb, but it knows it's dumb and doesn't care.  In fact it embraces it, and has fun...it's really only Diesel, for the most part, who is taking the whole thing seriously, bless him.  I can't believe they make these films. I can't believe I watch these films. I can't believe I like these films. I can't believe so many other people like these films too.

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Toasty really seemed quite taken with Turbo Kid in his review years ago, and it stuck with me.  But I couldn't get past the very Canadian appearance of it's poster...plus Michael Ironside is who Canadian low-budget filmmakers get to add gravitas (because they can't afford Bruce Willis or Nic Cage). As I've established many times in this blog, I have Canadian inadequacy issues, and it keeps me from even attempting to enjoy most Canadian film and television.  

But, sometimes all one really wants is something familiar, but also new.  You know, a simple order for a Sunday afternoon.

Turbo Kid is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction adventure film about a lone teenager who manages to survive the roving gangs and toxic lands with dreams and aspirations of being a hero like Turbo Man from his comic books.  He meets a quirky, perky, yet completely capable girl named Apple who follows him around like a lost puppy despite his protestations.  They get in trouble with the big mob boss of the wastelands (Michael Ironside) but team up with a rambling vigilante to fight him change the landscape of the wasteland.

The aesthetic of the film is intentionally retro 80's futuristic, as it's post-apocalyptic time period is 1997, which for a film made in 2015 is just so cheeky but they do a great job with it.  While being a pretty clean adventure film with a young protagonist, the storytelling aesthetic is paired with a ridiculously cartoonish level of gore.  It takes what would otherwise be a PG movie into a hard R rating.  It's quite absurd, the blood spray and kill gags which seem so out of step with this otherwise kind of innocent seeming po-ap-for-kids story.  I think it's ultimately what distinguishes it, but it's also quite a barrier to get over.

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Dog Days is yet another quasi-anthology/ensemble cast romcom in the vein of Love, Actually or New Year's Eve or Valentine's Day or any of those other holiday themed romcoms.  Here, it's centred around people with dogs (or people without dogs, as it were). 

Nina Dobrev (Love Hard) is a morning news show host who has a big time will they/won't they with her new cohost (Tone Bell) which becomes more "they will" when their  dogs take a shining to one another.  Meanwhile, Vanessa Hudgens (The Princess Switch) is a coffee shop employee crushing on the cute veterinarian (Michael Cassidy) who patronizes her establishment, but befriends the dorky Jon Bass (who has been crushing on her) and starts volunteering at his animal care shelter.   Eva Longoria and Rob Coddry are new parents to an adopted 9-year-old with whom they are having trouble connecting, but when a stray dog is brought home, the girls starts to open up.  But that stray dog is the beloved pet of lonely widower Ron Cephas Jones, who winds up befriending his nuisance teenager, Finn Wolfhard as he helps him look for the dog.  

These are the main threads, but the cast is stacked with others in LA's comedy scene (and from the sketch comedy troupe The State which director Ken Marino was a part).  These include Adam Pally, Jessica St. Clare, Thomas Lennon, Lauren Lapkus, Jon Gemberling, Ryan Hansen, David Wain and Tig Notaro.

Given the talent involved, this should be a far funnier film than it is, but it's not actually trying to lean into the rom or the com.  It's just trying to be like every one of these romcom anthologies, which means it's just the same mixed bag that they all are.  It's not an outright disaster but it leans too hard into the sentimentality and tries too hard to tug at the heart strings and you can see the results coming a mile off.  The main Dobrev story is weakend by the terrible attempt at recreating a morning talk show vibe (they're typically unscripted and this is so scripted).  Hudgen's arc is much better mostly because, well, it's Hudgens, but it suffers a bit with just how dorky Jon Bass plays his role...it's supposed to be charming, but always smacks a bit of desperation.  The adoptive parent story and the runoff into the Jones/Wolfhard story are both emotionally resonant, but don't fit well into the romcom mainline vibe. 

It's not the worst of this style of film.

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In 2010, Tony Scott made a movie about a runaway train with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine called Unstoppable.  Through a series of silly misfortunes, a train manages to take off, gaining speed, without a conductor.  It's carrying hazardous materials, and at a certain point it will hit a bend which will cause it to tip over and contaminate a whole Pennsylvanian town. The events of the film follow the various employees and the corporate train overlords, as well as a couple of hero conductors as they all independently plot on what to do about stopping that dang train.

It's not an outright silly movie concept, and were it made in the 70's there would be a very grounded feel to it, as well as a very modest amount of action.  In Tony Scott's hands, this thing just keeps ramping up, with the train crashing into things and helicopters and hopping from train to train and all sorts of blue collar heroics.

The film tries very very hard to feel like it's at the blue collar level, peppering the dialogue with "train speak" and union talk, and it looks to speak directly to the blue collar workers of America.  But how many of them look like Chris Pine, Denzel Washington or Rosario Dawson? There's got to be a few right, and of course if anything bad were to happen, the prettiest ones would step up to save the day.  But that's Hollywood.  Scott wants this to be both grounded in lower-middle class America and also have all the glamorous facade of Hollywood.  He achieves both but they really don't fit together well.

I don't know if this film birthed the term "peril fatigue" - describing how the increasing stakes and dangers of a story ultimately become tiresome and tedious - but it definitely fits the bill.  I found this film to be more exhausting than exciting.

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I'll be honest, I started writing this, the last 10-for-10 ever (or so he says), about 6 weeks ago.  I also stopped writing it about 6 weeks ago.  Why? Because I've kind of forgotten everything about Charade, which I watched over half a year ago now.

Looking to pilfer what I wrote in Letterboxd, all I came up with was:

Is it worth watching Audry Hepburn and Carey Grant be witty and playful with each other for almost two hours? Yes, it absolutely is.

Seriously, it's like a charm duel between these two, and everyone's a winner.

I mean, I kinda just want to watch it again.

I just took another 5 minutes to read the Wikipedia synopsis which did remind me that, yes, in spite of my failing memory, I had seen the film.  The plot is fairly fleet involving death and deception, but it's sort of a pithy comedy.  On the romantic side, Hepburn and Grant should seem like an ill-suited pair, given their age difference, and yet, they basically speak the same language the same way, so the attraction quickly becomes palpable. 

It's obviously not keenly memorable -- visually, nothing sticks out in memory -- but it remains quite enjoyable nearly 60 years later.                                                                                                                                                                                                 

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The other day I was thumbing through my "Diary" on letterboxd to see just how many movies I gave 5* to, and the results were...well, not many, but more than I thought.  Star rating is not something we do here on the blog, because I think Toasty and I agree that those kinds of ratings systems are problematic.  I mean how do you give a classic like The Third Man 4 stars, and also give a cheapy holiday romance like Under The Christmas Tree the same 4*.  Well...it's because it's not the same 4*.  Those two movies are ranked on completely different scales in relation to one another. 

Much in the same way a decent, if forgettable, holiday romance would get 2* but also Jackie Chan's classic stunt-fest Police Story also only gets 2*?  It's a Criterion selection, and the letterboxd average puts the film at a 4.0?  What's going on here?

Well, here's the deal.  Police Story isn't a very good movie.  It's not even a good movie.  It's a very bad movie with some amazing stunts.  

I was so very excited to watch Police Story and I was definitely not expecting what I got. I tried so hard not to view this with the detached western ironic gaze but I couldn't help but laugh and laugh at so much of the early scenes, but the police breakdown of the targets, the subsequent bungled surveillance mission and resulting clusterfuck of a shootout. I often couldn't tell the difference between what was intentional comedy and what wasn't. That made me feel bad.

It's an ugly looking movie with an atrocious soundtrack, but obviously everything to do with Jackie Chan's physicality  --and the life-endangering stunts by he and his team -- are always marvellous to watch .  They are absolutely the draw and Chan's comedic abilities should also never be undervalued, with all the skills of a silent film master. But the majority of this was just so painful to watch, and I don't mean in the "oof, that's gotta hurt" kinda way. That courtroom scene was so cringe inducing. 

If you were to just watch the compilation of stunts on youtube, you wouldn't be missing anything.  

I was told Police Story 2 is superior, and well, that's true, it is, as reflected by my letterboxd rating of 3 1/2 (which puts it squarely in league with the top tier cheapo holiday romances) but if you were to ask me what stood out, what I took away, it would mainly be that Chan's character Chan Ka-kui is such an awful boyfriend to Mai (a fully put-upon Maggie Cheung) and it makes him rather unlikable.  

The comedy in this second feature is certainly much more heightened (and perhaps more obvious) than in the first, as well the characters here are much better defined (even if we like them less as a result).  Even the storytelling is more cohesive and not *just* a framework for building towards stunts.  The production quality is better, but Chan is only marginally a better director than the last go around.

I really like Jackie Chan's on screen persona, he's got a million-dollar smile, and his energy is infectious.  His physical talents and comedic sensibilities are beyond reproach, and yet I really don't like either of these films.  I appreciated more attention to story on the second, but it seems to have come at the expense of stunts, and the first one's singular fixation on phyiscal gags makes the story a slog to get through.

The third police story co-stars Michelle Yeoh, and though I have yet to see it I can absolutely declare it the best of the franchise....

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I've had a little crush on Michelle Yeoh since first seeing her in Tomorrow Never Dies, but cemented when someone, not long after, invited me to a screening of Wing Chun.

If you're not absolutely steeped in wuxia films all the time, then I have a sneaking suspicion that your favourites are almost always going to be the first few you see.  Wing Chun, Iron Monkey, Legend of the Drunken Master, and Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain are going to be hard to ever top, because they are cemented in my mind as the best of the genre... maybe it's because they were presented to me as such.  I don't watch wuxia often (or often enough) and I find it tedious to wade through the melange of cgi messes in order to find the gems that still get made (I'm sure).  I don't even watch classic wuxia enough because I don't really have a guide to help me wade through the miasma of dreck that surround the stone cold classics.  And I don't even watch the ones that I have genuine affection for enough, because my precious screen time these days is so given over to watching new things.

That all said, I think Wing Chun is my favourite.  I dig it so hard.  And it's not just that Michelle Yeoh is so pretty, and graceful, and badass in this movie (ok, yeah, it's mostly that) but it's also really, sincerely funny.  It's basically a 1980's style sex comedy/rom com in wuxia form that dabbles in misguided, backwards gender politics but comes out the other side sort of ok.  I mean, it's patently absurd that Wing Chun's childhood best friend (I mean, Donnie Yen, c'mon!) would return some ten years later and both not recognize her but also mistake her for a man... I mean...Michelle Yeoh, one of the most beautiful women in the world...a man... right.  

Directed by master choreographer Yeun Woo-ping, this is just an astounding display of what he does best.  I like the wire work here better than The Matrix or Crouching Tiger...better than most movies.  The cast here does everything asked of them perfectly (no matter how regressive it may be),  and in the end the three female characters are decidedly the strongest of the feature, each in their own distinct way. 

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I started this post months ago with a migraine, and now I'm ending it with a headache, so...progress?
As noted (somewhere) this will be the last 10-for-10.  It's proving to be more inhibitive to posting than helpful in getting more reviews done. I'm sure I start some other similarly stupid means of trying to crank out more posts that won't hold water after the first few attempts....

-fin-

(we disagree-ish) Black Widow

 2020, d. Cate Shortland - Disney+

It's funny that both Toast and I needed a second viewing of Black Widow before we could write about it (Toasty popped his review out unexpectedly the same day I planned to write mine). We both certainly agree that the quieter moments of the film are its greatest strength, and we both agree that the necessities of being a Marvel Studios production make it more generic rather than enhance it, but I think where we disagree is strictly a matter of how the film resonates with us, and there's not really anything to debate there. How it hits us is how it hits us.

It's possible that it resonates more with me being that I'm in a seriously pro-Black Widow household (the wife is a big fan of Natasha, her third MCU favourite next to Winter Soldier and Captain America), but I'd like to think that I can be quite objective despite her enthusiasm (see my Falcon and the Winter Soldier review).  

But in trying to think about Black Widow, there's first a lot of noise that one must work past:

-- Natasha's death in Avengers: Endgame is still a sticking point for many fans (shoulda been Clint)

- It's a film that story-wise takes place between Captain America:Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War which, in its retroactive insertion into the timeline, makes it a bigger ask for the casual Marvel filmgoer to make sense of.  Old school comic book nerds are used to having to think about continuity, but casual viewers who aren't investing in watching youtube breakdowns or having extensive nerdy conversations or writing blogs may find this frustrating.

- This solo movie was long, long-overdue (Natasha was the only original Avenger besides Hawkeye not to have his own movie [if there was still any doubt a recent What If...? episode confirms The Incredible Hulk is considered canon ]).  The character has appeared in 7 films prior to this, almost all of them in large ensembles as a featured player, only once as a co-starring character (in Captain America: Winter Soldier) though having only nominal arcs of her own.

- It was delayed due to the pandemic for over a year.  I don't know if that increased expectations or decreased them, as pre-pandemic a film being delayed over and over again was usually a sign of poor quality, and people were kind of trained to expect that a long delayed film would not be very good.

- It did debut in theatres but also on Disney+ as a premium purchase.  A lot of people are skipping the theatres for safety reasons and watching these massive-scale movies (Wonder Woman 1984, F9, Godzilla vs Kong etc) at home and I think much of the awe and wow factor is lost as a result.  We're watching these massive scale productions for the first time on the same screens as we watch Sportscenter or The Bachelorette or Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

- ScarJo filed a lawsuit against Disney for lost share percentage because of their decision to do day-and-date streaming.

- Scarlett Johansson has said some pretty dumbass things in the year-plus leading into this release.

Whether we want it to or not, all of this baggage weighs on the film, and will continue to weigh on the film until people are able to come at it, and the MCU films, cold.

If I pack all the meta baggage aside, what I have left is a pretty fun movie.  Is it the movie we should have about a superspy who hangs with superheroes...?  I'd say about 80/20 in favor of yeah, but it's also film that "fits" with the MCU.  As much as I would have liked a sterner, more severe espionage thriller, I can't help but be pleased by the candy coated action flick we received.

Natasha Romanov's story has been dispensed in very small nuggets over her previous films, but here all of those threads are wrapped in a bow.  The Red Room, where Black Widows are trained, has been hinted at in the past, but it's cruel, deplorable, misogynistic practices and ethos are laid bare.  

The film opens decades earlier with a young Natasha three years into a seemingly normal American life in Ohio with her "kid sister", Yelena, and "mother", Melina (Rachel Weisz).  When her "father", Alexei (David Harbour), comes home, their placid, suburban existence is upended as they race to escape the feds.  Upon reuniting with their Russian countrymen the girls are torn from their manufactured family, and each other, and placed back into the Red Room program.  The opening credits roll to a haunting rendition of Smells Like Teen Spirit, and a horrifying montage of some of what the Red Room subjects the girls to, some evidence of their manufactured
American family life, and hints at the patriarch (Ray Winstone) of the Red Room program and the tendrils that connect him to politics across the globe.  

It's hard, as a 40+ person, to not have a wincing reaction to this re-imagining of Nirvana's biggest hit (although Tori Amos did a very similar rendition 25 years ago).  The song carries too much context to be effectively used.  I think it would have been more exciting had they went for a more Bond-esque original torch song.  That said, the imagery of child abuse is pretty disturbing.

An unfortunate consequence of Natasha dying in Endgame is they had to place her story between appearances, which leads to an introductory sequence that, rather than introducing you to Black Widow as a character, introduces you to the chronology of the story, setting it shortly after the events of Civil War.  Is it essential to know what went on in Civil War? Not really, the film tells you what you need to know, basically that Natasha is on the run, no longer an Avenger, no longer an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., she is on her own.  But what it does reveal is she's set up to be on her own, she has contingencies, Nat is a planner (but as we've seen previously, as well as later in this film, also quite a resourceful improviser).

Meanwhile we also catch up with her "younger sister" Yelena, who is working with a team of Black Widows to take out a rogue Black Widow.  In the process we find out the Black Widows are being chemically controlled (as a result of Natasha's defection years earlier) and Yelena is exposed to the antidote.  Yelena, like Natasha, is now on the run.

Yelena draws Nat to her, and they fight, unsure if they can trust one another.  What's evident is that Natasha's more resilient where Yelena is a more precise fighter.  The two women, now on the run together, are haunted by their past familial relationship.  The subtext of their relationship -- both having been brought into the Red Room as infants, torn away from their lives as all Widows were, subjected to mutual horrors -- is there should be an ingrained sisterhood to the Widows, yet, the idea of "family" also seems to be a vulnerability that was unsuccessfully beaten out of them.  The fact that Yelena and Natasha had 3 years of "normalcy" together does bind them, but they've both been well conditioned to ignore it.  For Yelena, it's a much rawer nerve, having felt abandoned by the only family she ever knew.  For Natasha, she had already been through some Red Room training, she knew their time in America was fake, but she still succumbed to it.  The pain of having it ripped away was so great that she effectively shut down all sense of connection to it.  

Toasty isn't the only one to comment that Natasha's seems a secondary character in her own movie, that the need to establish Yelena as the new Black Widow of the MCU was perhaps a greater drive than giving Nat her own major arc.  I think these comments are wrong though.  Yes, Florence Pugh is outstanding, and she dominates her scenes.  She's skilled, driven and tough, but vulnerable and emotional especially with her family connection reestablished.  She gets to have the wild emotional arc.  Natasha, though, is the center, and her story is all subtextual, for better or worse.  

Nat, the world's premiere super-spy, has had a long time to develop her calm, cool, collected demeanor.  Her characterization here is absolutely on point with what we've seen of her before.  There's still a sense that she wants to be unknowable, unconnected.  Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Age of Ultron were jobs.  Even her relationship with Bruce Banner was less about intimacy then about Nat controlling her fear (confronting the Hulk was the one thing that terrified her, so she sought out a way to control him).  But he left her.

Her tightest connection, to Clint Barton, is still a very chilly kinship, one that still has layers that need revealing.  She's "Aunty Nat" to his kids, she's fiercely loyal  to him and will go to any ends for him, but still it's more comrade-at-arms/endebted affection (same that she has with Steve Rogers) than familial.  And Clint has a home to retreat to.  She doesn't.  So at a certain point the Avengers became something she had to take care of, a group of individuals who might not otherwise cohere without her.  In Age of Ultron she's talking motherly to them, and by the time Endgame begins has completely adopted the matriarch role.  But in the time Black Widow, her manufactured Avengers family has fallen apart, Tony has thrown her away like her faux Father and Mother figures did years before, so she shuts down again.  Subtext.

This film is still all about Natasha's journey, from being cold and closed off and wounded and resentful, to embracing the people that want her love, and to love her.  At a certain point she convinced herself that those years in Ohio were just a job, a job she may have been too young to handle emotionally, but a job nonetheless.  The lesson she learned was to not get attached.  In rekindling with her family and having their help in destroying both the force that brought them together but also, in a sense, broke them she learns that families remain families even when separated by time or disagreements or ideological differences, and for all the pain that can result from having emotional connections with people, it's better than not having any at all. 

Natasha is the quiet one in the scenes with Yelena, with Alexei, and with the family.  She's the one sitting back from the bickering trying desperately to stay on mission, to not get involved, to not let emotion get the better of her, to not love these people.  It's only upon seeing that Melina, a veteran Black Widow, has kept a memento of their time in Ohio that Natasha starts to think that maybe it's okay to have connections and feelings and a past worth remembering rather than regretting.  

Johansson at the time of filming Black Widow had played the character for 10 years.  While it's possible that she was on autopilot in playing Nat, to me it's more a skin she's comfortable living in.  She knows Nat, what she's been through and what the effect it's had on her.  It sure would have been a different movie had we had it in, say, 2014 before Age of Ultron, but I think it would have only been a slightly different performance from Johansson had this come out in 2017 between Civil War and Infinity War. 

The action set pieces here range from good to good.  They're all pretty good.  None of them are mind blowing but none of them are duds either.  Not watching it on the big screen, I don't really know what exactly I'm missing from these action sequences, but I can't help but think that the hovering-in-the-clouds Red Room satellite complex would have been a much more awe-inspiring reveal on the big screen.  

The fight choreography here is smart and well thought through.  The Widows are all fairly evenly matched, having all been trained the same way, so that when they go head-to-head there's a lot of aping.  The Taskmaster, a notch above perfunctory mook villain (the identity of which is meant to be a bit of a reveal is spoiled in the opening credits thanks to a notable actor who was not part of any promotional material), has studied (and had uploaded into their brain) the skills of many different fighters. including the Avengers, which means they know all of the Black Widows tricks, as well as having Hawkeye, Captain America and Black Panther's gimmicks, among others.  

Even without more globe-trotting, undercover, espionage type aspects, the film captures the over-the-top Bond-ness with a big secret base/destruction sequence, the number 1 goon, and the plot to take over the world tropes which satisfy more than enough.  I wasn't expecting so much humour, which is now very much the Marvel style, for better or worse.  Much of the comedy falls at the feet of Harbour, who plays an out-of-shape super-soldier, codenamed Red Guardian, who thinks himself much like Russia's Captain America, only without the international celebrity.  That he wallows in obscurity is as likely a result of being a bit of a goofball vainglorious idiot teddybear as it is that his showmanship of individual exceptionalism is not something Communist governments care much for.

I really quite enjoy this movie.  Its really quite fun, all the inescapable meta-context aside.  The major regret is that it comes after the death of the main character, just when an absolutely fantastic supporting cast and expanded world is introduced for her.  There was potential for maybe a sequel that could take place between Infinity War and Endgame  but given the lawsuit, I'd say that ScarJo's time in the MCU has likely come to an end.

3-2-1: Fast X

2023, d. Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) - IMAX theatre

The Plot 100:
142 minutes of sensory overload. Aquaman, who really was in Fast 5 the whole time, really, does revenge. But he doesn't want to just destroy the "Family", he wants Riddick to suffer...by destroying the "Family". Snake Plisskin is MIA from the "Agency", Jack Reacher has taken over, placing the “Family” on the "Agency's" most wanted list, but Captain Marvel is there to undermine him. Baby Boy,Ludacris, Missandei and Han are doing their thing. Girlfight gets captured, makes frenemies with Atomic Blonde. XXX’s off on his own doing his thing. Peacemaker, plays funcle. It ends with cliffhangers, I guess? 

3-2-1:
3 Good:

(1) Big. Loud. Dumb. Sometimes, you just want to escape whatever is going on in your life. Sometimes you really need an excuse to tune out the voices and drown out the noise. Fast X is loud enough to drown out any noise, and it's so dumb that you absolutely *must* shut your brain off.  And it's big enough, meaning they sunk a hundreds of millions of dollars into wanton chaos and destruction for a nearly 2 1/2 hour movie that never really lets up on it, because none of the story in this film or film series is ever going to sustain the audience's attention for more than 30 seconds at a time without some engine revving or explosion happening. It's a big, loud, dumbass movie, and it's really not trying to be anything other than that, and that's why it's good. Your mileage may vary.
(2) The End. Oh my god, the ending is so stupid. The inspiration for this two-part finale to the Fast Saga was obviously Avengers: Infinity War as they try to cram as many existing characters as well as a whole bunch of new ones into the framework of an otherwise bare bones story idea. The ending is supposed to be a downer/suspenseful ending (did they just die? Did they just come back from the dead? How are they possibly going to get out of this one?) but it's some real weak tea, '66 Batman "see you next week" kind of plotting that took some real cojones to spend 140+ minutes leading into. It's seriously one of the most ambitiously stupid or stupidly ambitious moves a film has made in a long time. I'm think it's all terrible and I loved it.  Especially if you stop and think about what happens if another one doesn't get made. The hubris is hilarious. Do I genuinely enjoy this movie or is it just ironic enjoyment, and is there a difference?
(3) The players. With a franchise cast of regular players already a couple dozen deep they just keep adding more. Alan Ritchson, Brie Larson, Daniela Melchior, Pete Davidson, Rita Moreno, and everyone has a family tie to somebody else. It's always all about family, and it makes me giddy how they manage to shoehorn the theme in over and over and over again. They keep bringing people back too, like Scott Eastwood and Helen Mirren and Cardi B who you would be forgiven for forgetting that they were even part of this franchise. And of course there's some surprises saved for the very end.  It's like those over-stuffed star-fueled disaster movies of the 1970's, but with espionage and cars and razor-thin character work. It's Roger Corman movies if they had 200 million dollar budgets. It's really hard to be angry with these earnestly dumb movies.

2 Great:

(1) Jason Momoa. I sometime think Jason Momoa isn't, well, a great actor. Since he popped out of the Khal Drogo role, he's basically been a gigantic, handsome slab of meat with incredible tresses and a lot of charm. I've seen a lot of roles I've liked him in but at the same time I'm still wondering "Is he a good actor?" Aquaman, still DC's biggest success(?!?) kind of succeeded in spite of him being in the lead. He was surrounded by better actors there. It's kind of the opposite here. When he's sharing the screen with Vin Diesel or Ludacris or a checked-out Michelle Rodriguez, he's really got a leg up. Being the new guy, and the villain, he just unzips and goes balls out (metaphorically, we don't actually see his balls...I think).

As I watched Momoa traipse (oh, he traipses, honey) around on screen, taking wardrobe change after wardrobe change, providing dainty flourishes to his peppery language, and just being a total slice of spiced ham, I couldn't help but wonder...what is this performance? It's definitely in the gender-fluid, sexually-ambiguous realm, played with giddy menace, winding with a sort of a maniacal Dean Pelton vibe. And then it hit me... it's the Joker. 

Ah, but which Joker, you ask? Jack Nicholson? Cesar Romero? Heath Ledger? It's ALL OF THEM. Every Joker ever is employed in Momoa's gleeful performance. Hints of Mark Hamill's cartoon joker, touches of Joaquin Phoenix, even some of the dead-eyed lunacy of Jared Leto. It's super fun and basically the draw of the movie.

(2) John Cena, the fun uncle. In the last movie, F9, John Cena debuted as racially ambiguous (but confirmed definitely part-Latinx in this film, with Rita Moreno playing his Abuelita) Domenic Toretto's very, very white brother, Jakob. It was never mentioned before that Dom had a brother (besides his brother from another mother, Paul Walker's Brian) so the shoehorning of him in was pretty hoary, and positioning him as a petty, jealous, angry villain who is just desperate for Dom's attention and easily redeemable was pretty dorky all things considered. You kind of forget he even exists in the Fast Franchise until he just pops up.  Cena's such a ridiculous looking guy to begin with...like he's as wide as he is tall, with a face full of soft edges that makes him much easier to accept in a comedic role than a serious one. Cena has done some really crappy films in his career, but also some great work, and I feel like having spent much of the past four years with James Gunn on Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, he's really grown as a performer, with a shamelessness and gusto that translates well on screen. His appearance here, he gets to be physical at first, but most of the work he does with Little Brian (Leo Abelo Perry) is just charming as fuck, and Cena, once again checks his ego at the door. There are a lot of little pairings of actors in this film where the chemistry really works (Rodriguez and Theron, Diesel and Mirren, Bridges and Gibson) but I think this pairing worked the best, and I could see a Lone Wolf and Cub/Mandalorian-style comedy-action series with Cena and a child really working well.

"Family"

1 Bad: 
I'm not big into the "Fast Franchise" lore. I've seen most of the films once (Fast Five two or three times, as it's easily the best) and they're all stupid and enjoyable but keeping track of any of the continuity is just. not. worth it. You can tell these are scripts written with zero forethought and barely any immediate thought. They're not really thought through, they're just an action RPG brought to life with dice rolls deciding whether any of the action sequences work, not physics or science or the laws of nature.  Anyway, yeah, haven't the "Family" been working for the "Agency" since, like, Fast 5, or, like, a decade or so? They're contractors, sure, but isn't the "Agency" the good guys?

So, when Alan Ritchson's Almes takes over (because Kurt Russel's Mr. Nobody has apparently done one of his "famous" disappearing acts) and labels the "Family" as wanted fugitives, why then is it just perfectly acceptable to just start shooting "Agency" goons in the head, stabbing them in the neck, slicing open femoral arteries, exploding them, running them over with cars, knocking buildings down on them? I know the "Family" didn't start out on the right side of the law, regardless, they could have been friends with any of these faceless goons, but no, without asking any questions or looking under the masks at the humans beneath, they just start bodyslamming them through floors and spear diving them through walls.

I basically shut my brain off for the film and just went along for the ride, but, this one aspect really bothered me.

META:

not yet family

So, days before release, he-whose-head-looks-like-a-thumb announced, somewhere, that the epic 2-part finale to the Fast Franchise was now going to be a trilogy.

As much as I proclaim to love the dumbness of this series, turning whatever story this is into a trilogy seems both terrible and unsustainable. The plot of this film was threadbare as is, with literally no characters arcs happening (maybe Cypher learns something?). Momoa's rampage of revenge has basically led to the "Family" being on its last legs, but of course there's an easy out for everything, and nobody ever dies in this series, and every bad guy seems to become part of the "Family" eventually anyway, so what are we even doing here?

Hopefully FF11 wraps in a lot of the Hobbes and Shaw cast (would love Vanessa Kirby to return...for...reasons) and we can maybe welcome Hobbes' now probably-adult daughter into the fold. Plus Shaw's brother, Luke Evans, still hasn't been seen since 6, so he needs to come back, and those goofs from Tokyo Drift (Lil Bow Wow and Lucas Black) need to reappear again too.  Of course either Mr. Nobody is coming to the rescue, or it was he who was kidnapped setting a lot of the dumb plot of this film in motion. But I don't really even see 2 more hours coming out of Fast X (it seems like a half hour resolution is needed at best), nevermind another 4 or 5.  But then, this is a series about excess, and pushing limits, and everyone coming back from the dead...so why not the bad guys, like Idris Elba, or Djimon Hounsu,  or Dom's baby mama Elsa Pataki, or even Vince.  Remember Vince? No? Me neither. What about if Dom's dead dad was the bad guy this whole time and they try to tie this all together, Spectre style? That would phenawfulmenel.

Behind the scenes there's been a lot of talk over the years about how Diesel's ego has taken over the series, and for all the talk of "family" he sees himself as the sole creative driving force. Justin Lin, whose filmmaking sensibilities are largely responsible for the franchise having become the juggernaut it is, and was planned to be the director of the two-part finale, was driven out of the director's chair early in the shooting of this production, presumably over creative differences with Diesel. It's a lot less public than the fued between Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, but both are telling on what it's like working with him. It's also telling how much of the film Diesel spends apart from the main cast (which, besides the opening scenes, is all of it). Diesel is the driving force of the series but he's also the burden which the series must carry. He's the star, but biggest presence, but also the weakest performer. Dom seemingly has like a dozen lines of dialogue the whole film, despite dom-inating the screentime, which is probably for the best, since Diesel's emotionless performance leads to such a back-of-the-throat, low growl as to be borderline inaudible at this point. 

This was the first F&F movie I've seen in theatres since Fast 5, and I do have to say that the experience in theatre is so much better than watching from home. Big, loud, dumb, expensive movies are built for it. I can't say if the quality of the film is improved or if it just winds up being a better time when you've committed yourself to this one thing.