Quick Review: Ant-Man

 Ant-Man is a tricky situation when it comes to reviewing the movie itself, but in the wake of my Fantastic Four review, I feel like it provides a much needed contrast. What Ant-Man had, going in, that Fantastic Four didn't, was a level of expectation on the part of much of Marvel fandom. Maybe not even Marvel fandom, but Edgar Wright fans to be certain. Ant-Man was, by Wright's admission, a passion project, and his very public departure from the film left Marvel and Kevin Feige with a serious PR mountain to climb. Ultimately, it turned out to be more of a molehill, or - wait for it - an anthill. At least for me; there's still some debate about what is vs. what "could have been," and I think that's going to last a lot longer than the "Fox won't show my Fantastic Four, which was a great movie" Twitter war.

 I get the easy jokes directed at Peyton Reed, who was hired to come in after Wright left the film (rumor has it over story changes mandated by Marvel's "creative committee"). Reed directed Yes Man and isn't considered to be much more than a puppet of the studio who hasn't made anything since Bring It On that you've heard of. For me, he also made Down With Love, (a movie only I seem to like) which nearly landed him the Fantastic Four gig the first time around, and would have fit in with the 60s vibe that Down With Love is an homage to. But anyway, visionary Wright out, hack Reed in - that's the narrative you can still see in reviews for Ant-Man. But then there's the tricky part, because the Ant-Man that is turned out to be pretty good.

  There are a few different factors in play that help Ant-Man: one is that is dispenses the "origin story" pretty quickly and integrates it into the narrative in a way that keeps everything moving forward. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is a thief, recently released from prison, who can't get his life back together. He can't get a job because he has a criminal record, so he can't provide alimony payments to his ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer) which complicates his ability to have any leverage to visit his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson). Also standing in the way is Maggie's new husband, police officer Jim Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). This could be played very heavy handed and one sided, but there's a surprising effort to be balanced and not make Maggie or Paxton out to be antagonists. They want what's best for Cassie, and Scott is a thief.

 Like most ex-criminals, he goes back to his old habits to make ends meet, teaming up with his partner Luis (Michael Peña) and his new gang: Kurt (David Dastmalchian) and Dave (T.I.), who are working on a heist of "some old rich guy" who has a safe Scott might be able to crack. Unfortunately, when he breaks in, the only thing Scott finds inside is a suit, which he takes anyway. The "old rich guy" is Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and he wanted Scott to steal his Ant-Man suit, because he needs him to use it for a particular heist involving Pym Industries. His former protégé, Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) has advanced the shrinking technology that Pym hid from his company (and S.H.I.E.L.D.) and he needs somebody to make sure Cross doesn't sell his work to the military (or worse). Pym's daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly) wants to do it, but Hank refuses, for personal reasons.

 The narrative of Ant-Man moves at a brisk pace, with Scott learning how to use the suit and become the new Ant-Man while also planning the heist. There's even time for the reveal of why Hank won't let Hope take the suit, which allows you not only to shrink but also to be able to control ants. It gives you increased power because of the reduced size, so Scott becomes "like a bullet" and has to meter out how hard he hits someone, as not to kill them. Rather than front load Ant-Man with this, Reed / Wright put it in the middle of the movie, and it never bogs down the film. It also helps that Ant-Man is balances comedy with superhero shenanigans in the same way that Guardians of the Galaxy does. It's never too silly or too serious, although Peña pushes it sometimes. Surprisingly, though, not in the rapid cut flashback/monologues he uses to very quickly get exposition across to Scott.

 The special effects are pretty impressive, considering that most of the film is from a very tiny perspective - the sequence where Scott shrinks in his apartment and falls through the floor to a neighbors party downstairs is quite good. His terror at nearly being stomped on while people are dancing and trying to navigate his way out (he doesn't know how the suit works) takes a fairly normal situation and makes it fun for the audience. Also kudos to the de-aging team for making Michael Douglas in 1989 not look like Arnold Schwarzenegger's body double in Terminator Genisys. It's a nice touch and gives the scene with Howard Stark (John Slattery, back from Iron Man 2) added gravitas. It makes sense why Pym would choose a thief over the Avengers, and why he'd have no second thoughts about sending Scott in to steal something from one of "Howard Stark's old warehouses". Of course, the warehouse turns out to be the New Avengers Facility, where Scott runs into Falcon (Anthony Mackie in an amusing cameo). The scene is mostly designed to set up Ant-Man's role in Captain America: Civil War, but I'll allow it because Mackie and Rudd make the scene entertaining. There's a much better use of foreshadowing later in the film, with a very quick reference to Spider-Man (now back in the MCU).

 If there's one thing that really elevates Ant-Man over most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and I'm mostly talking about the Disney releases), it's the scope. Appropriate to its source, it's scaled back, smaller, but not simply because Scott shrinks down to ant-size. The trend, at least since The Avengers, has been to have a giant fight at the end of the movie involving something in the sky that's going to destroy the planet / our heroes / etc. Seriously, just take a look at the finales of Thor: The Dark World, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and even Avengers: Age of Ultron, where they're trying to keep an entire city from crashing down from the sky and killing everybody. Airborne battles are, it would seem, the thing that Marvel loves the most. There are even variants of it in The Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four because, you know, if the formula works, overuse it.

 Ant-Man, on the other hand, sets the climactic battle inside of the bedroom of Scott's daughter, and most of the final battle with Yellowjacket takes place on a Thomas the Tank Engine train set. Reed frequently cuts back from the action to actual scale so you can see what it would look like to normal people. It's mostly for comedic effect, but for this film, that technique works just fine. Ant-Man acknowledges its somewhat goofy premise without ever demeaning what Scott (or Pym) can do while in the suit. When he goes sub-atomic to stop Yellowjacket at the very end, the risk implied with doing so (involving the original Wasp) isn't treated like a joke. There's a fine balance between being silly and diminishing the movie overall. How much of that was Wright, how much was Reed, we're probably not going to know. Wright retains a writing credit, and by many accounts the first half of the film is almost exactly what he wrote. Increasing Evangeline Lilly's role as Hope (to set her up for future films as the new Wasp) is allegedly what pushed Wright away, but she didn't seem to overshadow Paul Rudd or Michael Douglas to my eyes. The only problem Ant-Man really has is the same one Marvel has struggled with since Iron Man: having an interesting villain whose name isn't Loki. Corey Stoll is mostly wasted as "angry scientist villain who is mad at Hank Pym for some reason and becomes Yellowjacket".

 In a perfect world, we might know what Edgar Wright's Ant-Man looked like, and while I'm not happy about his departure, there is some solace in knowing that the version of the film we did get is still a lot of fun. I'd go so far as to say that I enjoyed Ant-Man more than Age of Ultron - a movie I've tried to write a review for repeatedly since May* - and am looking forward to watching it again. It has some of the problems of MCU movies, but eschews many of the "same old, same old" story structures in favor of a more character based narrative. While I wasn't crazy about the villain, Rudd, Lilly, and Douglas made for a fine combination, and I'd be happy to see more of their adventures outside of the increasingly unwieldy "crossover" films. As shoehorned in as it seemed, I actually liked the thieves, mostly because the chemistry between the four of them makes it entertaining enough to overlook the fact that Scott doesn't really need them to get into Pym Industries near the end. Reed also somehow made me feel bad for an ant, and not only that, but one with a terrible pun for a name. Good job.

  More importantly, since I brought it up in the first paragraph, whatever happened between Wright leaving and Reed taking over, the end result is less disjointed than in Fantastic Four. Without looking it up online, I didn't take a mental tally of "which part of the film came from which," and more to the point, I wasn't thinking about it at all. Instead, I enjoyed Ant-Man, Frankenstein-ed as it is. It has the benefit of being altered before cameras started rolling, but the mixture of original vision and studio mandated chicanery doesn't show in the same way it does with Fantastic Four. We're never going to see the pure, unadulterated versions of either film, but at least with Ant-Man I know there's one out there I would see again.




 * While in aggregate, I did like Age of Ultron, every time I sit down to think about it, or to focus on specific points, the draft ends up becoming a fanboy-ish critique of "Whedon-isms" throughout the film. They aren't so bad in their entirety, but when I have to address things like "well, I was born yesterday" or the party scene, it begins to feel like nit-picking. The fact that a HYDRA soldier actually says "no, it wasn't" after Iron Man shoots them and says "good talk," kind of annoys me. Anyway, the short review is that it's a fun movie that suffers from trying to set up too many parts of Phase 3.

Blogorium Review: Haywire

 In the interest of having my review be like the movie, I'll try to keep this short and to the point. Steven Soderbergh's Haywire is a no-frills, bare minimum exposition, ass kicking action film starring Gina Carano. If you don't know who she is (as I did not), I suggest you click on the link embedded in her name. Every review mentions that she was (is?) an MMA fighter with Strikeforce (including this review) and is, accordingly, the "gimmick" employed by Soderbergh in his latest film.

 Very briefly, Soderbergh likes to have one conceit in each of his films that is (presumably) of interest to him and maybe to us, but mostly to film students like me. In The Good German it was using equipment available during the period the film was set. In Traffic it was the color filters. In The Informant it was casting comedians in the boring roles. He is also fond of non-linear storytelling, deliberately misleading edits, and music that is "funky" (Ocean's Eleven, Out of Sight), all of which also play into Haywire. And he's working with Lem Dobbs, who wrote The Limey.

 This time around he's casting an actual cage fighter in a movie about a badass ex-Marine who does contract work for the Government. Admittedly this is not really a new thing, either for action films, or for Soderbergh, who did something similar in The Girlfriend Experience when he cast porn star Sasha Grey as a call girl. It's not really novel or anything to see MMA fighters in movies, what with Randy Couture, "Rampage" Jackson, Oleg Taktarov, Andrei Orlovski, and Keith "The Dean of Mean" Jardine figuring prominently into films in the last few years. Even Zoë Bell, who did stunts for Tarantino, had a prominent role in Death Proof and headlined Angel of Death. So maybe this isn't Soderbergh's most novel "gimmick" to date.

 On the up side, it really doesn't matter because Steven Soderbergh also knows how to frame action and actually does so in Haywire. There's no "shaky-cam" or disorienting fight choreography. He sets up master shots, cuts around the action creatively but always in a way that the hits still feel visceral and the efficiency of the fighting is conveyed. Take the opening scene, where Mallory Kane (Carano) is in a diner and she meets up with Aaron (Channing Tatum), an associate from a job in Barcelona. Aaron doesn't know that Kane's boss / ex Kenneth (Ewan MacGregor) tried to have Mallory killed in Dublin, and when she instead killed Paul (Michael Fassbinder), he set her up. Aaron just knows that Kenneth wants Mallory to "come in" and that Kane doesn't want to. It's an inconvenience to Aaron, so he tries to subdue her. It doesn't work out so well.

 Mallory, after giving a Channing Tatum-sized beatdown in a diner, commandeers the car owned by Scott (Michael Angarano), and provides him with the details of how Kenneth tried to have her killed, what the Barcelona job was, and how she got out of Dublin. In most movies this is just a conceit to catch the audience up, so the other character never asks why they need to know all this and just agrees to help (see: Commando). In Haywire, Dobbs and Soderbergh make sure that all of the story structure serves a purpose, as Mallory knows she's going to need to pass this information to Coblenz (Michael Douglas), the only person she works for that isn't trying to kill or frame her.

 Along the way, we find out how Coblenz and Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas) brought Kane in to the Barcelona job against Kenneth's better judgment, how he talked her into going to Dublin to meet MI6 agent Paul, and about the spying on Studer (Mathieu Kassovitz), which is actually just a ruse. None of this, it turns out, is insignificant to when things pick up in real time, nor is the seemingly unimportant plot point about Kane's father John (Bill Paxton), who is alternately concerned for and impressed with his daughter. She really does handle her own throughout the film, even when the hits register (there's a lot of bruises and cuts in Haywire), or when she falls while climbing a building and has a visible limp when she finally escapes Irish special forces.

 I don't really understand why Haywire is so disliked by audiences. Critics seem to really enjoy it, but if you look at the TomatoMeter, 80% of critics like the film only 42% of audiences did. I know that most of my friends don't like Steven Soderbergh (the ones that like some of his movies are often bothered by the detached nature of direction, writing, and editing from the subjects) and I guess Haywire is maybe not as "crowd pleasing" as, say, The Mechanic, but it's far and by a better movie. Like, no question is Haywire a better movie than The Mechanic. Or The Expendables, or most theatrical "action" movies. It's a little bit like a Jason Bourne movie but with competent camerawork and better fights.

 Gina Carano carries the Haywire with ease, and that's saying something with the cast assembled. I was a little nerd-happy to see Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, and Ewan MacGregor in the same scene, and then Michael Fassbinder and Kassovitz show up. Channing Tatum, who I didn't really think about ever before 21 Jump Street, is also good as the guy who isn't that attentive but figures out Kenneth's story doesn't add up. In the hands of literally any other director, Haywire would probably be a "direct to video" joint starring Carano and Billy Zane or something like that. Luckily, Soderbergh was having trouble getting his version of Moneyball off the ground and saw one of her fights on TV. Carano has both the charisma and the badassitude to run the show as Mallory Kane, and if Soderbergh wasn't leaving films to become a painter, I think he'd have a new franchise ready to go. Adventure novelists need to sweep in and start writing "Mallory Kane" paperbacks, pronto. I worked in a used book store. They'd fit right in.

 It all works out, I guess, because it was recently announced that Carano is in talks to join the cast of Fast Six, another action series with recently impressive entries that can showcase what people are missing by hating on Haywire. Seriously, I don't get it. I get why you maybe didn't like Drive, but even if Haywire isn't wall-to-wall ass kicking and maybe it doesn't have a "final boss" fight, I don't buy the same "it's boring" argument. Not that Drive is boring, but Haywire is even less "boring" by the standards of people who I guess would rather be watching Transformers or something. It's more accessible by Soderbergh standards than even the Ocean's films. Oh well. Your loss I guess. After I see Safe with Jason Statham then maybe the Cap'n will come back and figure out what I'm missing. In the meantime, maybe I'll watch Haywire again.

Blogorium Review: Wall Street - Money Never Sleeps

It would be unfair to say that Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps "almost" works; for one thing, that's not actually true - it does work. It might not work the way audiences were expecting it to, but as impossible and presumptively unnecessary sequels go, the film is pretty close to successful. It shouldn't work, and there are a handful of tiny things that keep Money Never Sleeps from being a great movie, but Oliver Stone pulls off the impossible more or less by continuing the Gordon Gekko saga and bringing it into the stock market collapse of 2008.

Out of prison after serving 8 years for insider trading, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) sets about rebuilding his life by writing and lecturing about the dangers of sub-prime loans and toxic assets, largely falling on deaf ears. What he really wants to do is reconnect with his estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan), a left-wing blogger engaged to Jake Moore (Shia LeBouf), an investment banker / day trader and Green energy enthusiast. When Bretton James (Josh Brolin) sets about the collapse of the firm Moore works at - and the subsequent suicide of its owner, Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) - Jake turns an encounter with Gekko into an opportunity to get even with James. Winnie's increasing discomfort with her father's presence puts a strain on her relationship with Jake, and it Gekko's intentions may not be so pure, either. Meanwhile, the housing bubble inches closer and closer to bursting, and the Federal government may have to bail everyone out...

Honestly, that shouldn't work. Most people heard that a sequel to 1987's Wall Street was in the makings and said "really?" The Cap'n was one of them, although I don't think I ever bothered writing about it here. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps starts with Gekko's release in 2001 and then jumps forward to 2008, right before the collapse. It hits all of the major beats regarding the "why" of the market downfall: Jake's mother (Susan Sarandon) is a former nurse turned realtor that makes risky investments she can't pay off, Bretton causes the collapse of a major bank by leaking information about their toxic holdings, then makes money betting against its own interests. There are two board room scenes set in the Federal Reserve. This movie shouldn't work.

But it does, and that's kind of amazing. The key is that, although Wall Street was about the mentality that allows this film to happen, Money Never Sleeps is about the people. And the people carry the movie, even through a story we already know the ending to. Whether it was serendipity or not that a sequel to Wall Street began development right before the failure of major banks, Oliver Stone is merely using real life as a backdrop to logically extend the story of Gordon Gekko and the stock market mentality, and in that he succeeds.

The success of Money Never Sleeps, in large part, comes from an excellent ensemble cast, anchored by (and this surprises even me) Shia LeBouf. I haven't been too kind on the man in the past, but LeBouf's Jake Moore keeps the whole film running. Everything in the film is told from his perspective, and he stands toe to toe with some of the best in the game and holds his own. Despite appearances, Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko isn't all over Money Never Sleeps; he's a major character, but Gekko is frequently relegated to the background. That being said, his character development doesn't get the short shrift; as (one of) the only returning cast members from Wall Street, Gekko has evolved since we last saw him, in expected and, frequently, surprising ways. When he takes over as Jake's mentor, there's a sense that more is going on than strictly manipulation, and Gordon genuinely regrets the rift with his daughter.

Speaking of which, Carey Mulligan takes what could be a thankless role and really brings humanity to Winnie Gekko. The part could easily be a cipher: daughter of the main "bad guy," liberal blogger who distrusts wealth and those who chase it, but Mulligan gives her an emotional core that keeps you invested in her relationship with Jake. Better still, there's a fantastic scene with Douglas and Mulligan outside a benefit that really sets up the stakes for how the rift happened, and how they see its outcome differently. Josh Brolin is also excellent as Bretton James, a wholly unscrupulous investment banker that takes an interest in Jake but who seems to lack any semblance of basic human interaction. It could be a one-note "villain" role, but like so many other actors in the film, Brolin takes one scene (a lake-side discussion with LeBouf) and elevates the character beyond stereotype.

While they aren't in the film as much, it is worth noting that Frank Langella, Eli Wallach, Jason Clarke, and Susan Sarandon are also fantastic, and each finds something to stand out with in a film swimming with roles. Austin Pendelton makes the most of a thankless role as the director of the Hydro Fusion project Jake is funding, and there's another cameo I'll get to below, which is interesting, although I'm not convinced it was necessary, and I'm not talking about Oliver Stone's small part as an art dealer.

The trailers are a little misleading, in that they set up a more sinister tone for Money Never Sleeps than the film actually delivers. Yes, there is a degree of cynicism and a hint of the cautionary tone of the first film, but Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is an overwhelmingly optimistic film for an audience that isn't expecting that. Gekko is arguably the protagonist of the film, although his role is secondary to Jake's, and even though Gordon hasn't changed as much as he pretends, I still think you're going to be surprised at how Money Never Sleeps ends. It shouldn't be terribly surprising, considering that the mood of Stone's films have been more optimistic since World Trade Center, but I suspect many of the negative reactions have something to do with the fact that Money Never Sleeps is less of an indictment on Wall Street than, well, Wall Street was. Greed isn't good anymore, and while Gekko suggests it's "legal" at the outset, that's very much not the case by the end of Money Never Sleeps.

The reason that Money Never Sleeps only "almost" works is that there are small, but persistent, touches in the film that are a little too "on the nose." Stone has a fondness for visual metaphors, but he pushes it too far by including lingering shots on actual bubbles floating above the New York skyline more than once. If that weren't enough, a shot descending one of the skyscrapers is accompanied by the sound (and eventually a split-screen shot) of dominoes falling, tied to the stock market crash.

Stone is also quite attached to the soundtrack, which consists largely of songs from David Byrne and Brian Eno's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, and has a bad habit of playing songs where the lyrics are perhaps too literal in describing character arcs and plot points. I understand why he chose the songs, and why Stone gravitated towards them, but they may be a little too perfect over the course of a two hour film. There's also a scene where Gekko bumps into Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) at a benefit that doesn't really go anywhere. It's interesting, in that it provides a bridge from the Gordon Gekko in the first film to the Gordon Gekko in the sequel, but the presence of Fox is largely superfluous to the story, and considering that Gekko has plenty of other opportunities to establish growth, it's really more of an excuse to bring another character from Wall Street back.

Of course, not all of Stone's choices fall flat: there is a consistent intertextual connection to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (literally played out as Jake's ringtone, although it works more than it should) in Money Never Sleeps, although it remains up to the viewer to decide who's who (hint: Eli Wallach could still figure into it, if you so desire). Stone uses a myriad of split screens within split screens to mirror the dizzying pace of stock market jargon and floor-level dealing, as well as a clever misdirection involving an iris transition. Honestly, the things that keep the film from being great don't tend to dominate Money Never Sleeps; they simply appear in small doses throughout the film in such a way that you remember them while you're leaving.

The overall impression, however, is that Stone (and writers Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff) crafted a film that defies nearly every negative possibility one could expect from a sequel to Wall Street. The film never feels superfluous or exploitative of the original and, more to the point, logically extends the themes of Wall Street into the twenty-first century. The acting is top notch across the board, and even if the positive tone is disarming at first, there is something to be said for Stone's lack of persistent cynicism in the face of financial crisis.