Tag: superhero
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Rewind & Reboot: X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Much of what’s wrong with X-Men Origins: Wolverine can be traced right back to its confused conception, indeed beginning with its clumsy title. The ungainly prefix is clumsily bolted on solely for it to alphabetize adjacent to the three previous X-Men films on Walmart shelves, iTunes, Pay-Per-View, and torrent trackers. The two halves split by…
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The Mutant Menagerie: X2: X-Men United
In retrospect, the first X-Men movie did an incredible job of managing the introduction of a wide array of characters to mass audiences likely unfamiliar with the decades’ worth of continuity established in its comic book source material. But the sequel X2: X-Men United crowds the stage with too many new faces in addition to…
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Hancock begs to be read as a metaphor, but for what?
Peter Berg’s Hancock refreshingly begins in the middle, bypassing the superhero genre’s now-standard structure. But that leaves a great deal of mythology to relate later, especially for a story not based on an already well-known household name like Spider-Man or Batman. But like most superhero movies, it neatly lays groundwork for potential sequels and prequels.…
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Robert Downey Jr.’s got a bum ticker in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man
Jon Favreau’s Iron Man finds just the right tone for a superhero movie, pitched somewhere in the sweet spot between Spider-Man’s emotional melodrama and Batman’s grim vengeance. This blogger, a former lover of comic books (that stopped keeping up with them partly out of frugality, and partly lack of brain bandwidth), sees two high water…
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A god walks among us in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns
It’s probably my own fault for buying into the hype, but Superman Returns left me cold. There’s not a lot of drama implicit in the story of an omnipotent alien from another planet, and I just can’t buy the “god walks among us” metaphors. Spider-Man is a real, troubled human being burdened with great responsibility;…
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Brett Ratner’s X-Men III: The Last Stand is lost in a densely self-referential world
God help me, but I agree with Harry Knowles’ review. Sometimes you need a fanboy to point out what’s wrong with a movie crafted for fanboys. He picked up on the absurdly sensitive Wolverine, the important Phoenix backstory cursorily related in hammy exposition, and the sudden and arbitrary shifts from day to night. But the…