Tags: Make Mine Marvel
Iron Man Three in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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Iron Man 2 in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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Iron Man in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
It’s a potentially promising setup for a slam-bang finale to what has been, despite its flaws, one of the brightest and most entertaining franchises around. Unfortunately, the slapdash plot is pretty much a disaster. A string of miscalculations hamper the fun. And a late revelation, when you stop and think about it, undermines most of the preceding drama.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
For all that, the new film bungles
who Spider-Man is, where he’s coming from. This isn’t the only problem (there are notable issues around the plot and the interpretation of Spider-Man’s reptilian foe, the Lizard), but for me it’s the most intractable, because it undermines the hero’s
moral center.
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The Avengers in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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In my
Avengers review I wrote, “If
The Avengers isn’t necessarily the
best superhero movie ever made, it is unquestionably the
most superhero movie ever made.“ That, of course, raises the question: What
is the best superhero movie ever made?
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A |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
If
The Avengers isn’t necessarily the
best superhero movie ever made, it is unquestionably the
most superhero movie ever made — and, in that capacity, it is more than well-made enough to take comic-book entertainment to unprecedented levels.
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What do today’s superhero movies tell us about ourselves? For one thing, we’re more skeptical these days about heroes and heroism. In contrast to the stoic confidence of the typical Western hero — or even of Christopher Reeves’ Superman, who
as late as 1978 could unabashedly say, “I’m here to fight for truth, justice and the American way” — today’s heroes have feet of clay, and have to grow into their heroic roles.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
After a rash of immature, bad-boy cinematic superheroes for whom responsibility is a bigger challenge than taking down supervillains — think
Iron Man,
Thor and
Green Lantern — a hero for whom decency, humility and self-sacrifice come naturally is a breath of fresh air.
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A- |
***½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
Despite missteps,
X‑Men: First Class succeeds in doing in some measure for the X‑Men what J. J. Abrams did for
Star Trek two years ago: Not only does it bring new energy to a tired franchise, it reinvents a familiar cast of characters in unexpected ways, laying the foundations for the defining relationships and conflicts of later chapters, while telling a ripping story into the bargain.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
It starts pretty promisingly, and it stays pretty promising throughout, and at some point you realize it’s never actually going to deliver on that promise. There’s never a moment where it goes really wrong — it just never really gets started.
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All good things must come to an end, but “The Spectacular Spider-Man” ended too quickly, after only two seasons. In mid-April Marvel effectively pulled the plug on the acclaimed series, long on hiatus. A couple of weeks later, Sony released the eighth and final disc in the series, bringing the story to a satisfying yet not fully resolved conclusion.
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B+ |
*** |
+1|
Teens & Up
His suit may be iron, but he’s still got feet of clay. Tony Stark may not be the same narcissistic jerk he was at the beginning of
Iron Man two years ago, but that doesn’t mean he’s someone completely different either. The road to redemption is seldom so straight as that.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
If you’re a fan of the material, you’ll want to see it. There are some decent action scenes, and an inevitable, tragic climax. There are also things that make no sense. It’s not bad, really. What it’s most conspicuously lacking is any sense of surprise, of revelation, of creative boldness.
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B- |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Although most viewers will probably find
The Incredible Hulk diverting but — after a strong first act — forgettable entertainment, for Hulk fans smarting from the limitations of the
Ang film, it may just be balm for the soul.
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B+ |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Smart, sardonic and more than a little silly,
Iron Man is a successful super-hero movie that never takes itself too seriously.
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C |
** |
-1|
Teens & Up
Perhaps this is what is most fundamentally wrong with the
Fantastic Four franchise: None of these allegedly “fantastic” heroes has any gravitas, any actual heroic weight or depth of character. There’s nothing particularly noble, compelling or even interesting about them. Far from inspiring admiration, they don’t rise even to the level of thinking, acting and relating like grown-ups.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Spider‑Man 3 is a movie stuffed to bursting — with action, plotlines, characters, humor, energy, moods, spectacle and certainly inspiration. Like its web-headed hero careening crazily through the canyons of Manhattan at the end of a web-line, the film swings breathlessly and without warning from one thing to another, from breakneck excitement to outrageous silliness to comic-book morals about responsibility, sacrifice and now even vengeance and forgiveness.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
For all their evident interest and affinity for the material, though, the filmmakers haven’t made a very good movie. They’ve figured out how to get Blaze (Cage), the motorcycle-riding hellion who makes a deal with the devil, into the same picture as Carter Slade (Sam Elliott), the originally unconnected (and not even supernatural) Ghost Rider of the Old West. But they haven’t figured out either who Johnny Blaze is as a character, or what the Ghost Rider is all about.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Expressions like “Good things come in threes” and “Third time’s the charm” may have their place in the world, but when it comes to comic-book movies, so far at least, anything after two is all downhill.
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D- |
½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
How bad is
Fantastic Four? So bad that in desperation execs have resorted to trying to spin it as a "funny family action film," as one studio rep put it. It’s the
Kangaroo Jack strategy: When your dumb, trashy film clearly isn’t good enough for adolescents, let alone adults, reposition it as a kiddie flick. It’s an insult to family audiences. Our kids deserve better than Hollywood’s garbage.
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A |
**** |
+1|
Teens & Up
This is what a
Spider-Man movie should be — freewheeling, rip-roaring, hilarious, heartfelt, over the top.
Spider-Man 2 just might be the single greatest super-hero movie ever; it is unquestionably the wildest, most joyous, flat-out
comic-bookiest comic-book movie of all time.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
From its breathless, cartoony title sequence, with the letters of cast members’ names stuck like flies in a vast spiderweb,
Spider-Man makes its intentions crystal clear: This is one wide-eyed comic-book movie that revels in its pulp origins.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Not the best or most exciting of comic-book movies to date, but the most thoughtful and arguably one of the most interesting, Ang Lee’s
Hulk offers a new look at Marvel Comics’s green-skinned Jekyll-and-Hyde pulp anti-hero through the director’s poetic, psychologically attuned sensibilities.
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A- |
***½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
Where other super-hero movies, like James Bond movies, take place in a static universe in which nothing really changes and the essential mythology remains the same,
X2 is set in a world in flux. The plot is part of an ongoing story-arc reaching back to
X-Men and building toward a future
X3.
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C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults*
Ultimately,
Daredevil works best as a triumph of screenwriting redaction and well-utilized effects over weak characterization and generally uninspired casting. As super-hero movies go, I rank it below
Spider-Man, but above any of the films in the
Batman franchise.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up*
This is a world in which characters are not larger-than-life cardboard cutouts, but human beings with affecting problems, motives, conflicts, and interests; in which opposing ideas are at least as important as clashing super-powers or martial-arts moves; in which super-powers and special abilities are more than mere arbitrary plot shortcuts or empty pretexts for colorful special effects, but are treated thoughtfully as serious story elements with logical consequences in immediate events and also wider social implications.
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It’s a potentially promising setup for a slam-bang finale to what has been, despite its flaws, one of the brightest and most entertaining franchises around. Unfortunately, the slapdash plot is pretty much a disaster. A string of miscalculations hamper the fun. And a late revelation, when you stop and think about it, undermines most of the preceding drama.
Read more >