Wednesday, October 3, 2012

TERRIBLE Comic Book Movie Adaptations (Part 2)

So I'm back from my vacation (on a related note, I can never return to Delaware or Maryland... don't ask) and have Part two of this list ready to go. Oh, did I say this was only a two part list? I meant three. Okay, I didn't really mean three at the time, I just had a lot to say about these next four comic book movies and think its best to not make this one ridiculously long entry. So without further ado, we continue my list of crappy comic book movies:


X-men 3: The Last Stand – Ah yes, another example of a bad movie ruining a franchise. Unlike Spider-Man 3 however, I really don’t like this movie. It was screwed from day one. Bryan Singer, who directed the first two, left to direct the next movie on this list and took with him James Marsden (the actor who played Cyclops). So you got about 5 minutes of Cyclops being emo over Jean Grey’s death and then she comes back from the dead just long enough to kill him. And right away, one of the founding members of the X-men is unceremoniously written out of the franchise… and the movie really just goes downhill from there. You had the introduction of Angel, utilizing great special effects, but ultimately do next to nothing with him. Seriously, he could have been edited out of the movie and nobody would have noticed. Plus, they squandered the perfect opportunity to appease generations of fanboys. X-Men 3 was the first of the movies to feature all 5 of the original X-Men (for those playing at home that was Cyclops, Marvel Girl aka Jean Grey, Beast, Angel and Iceman). It would have been awesome to have a moment where all 5 were on screen together at the same time, like a shout out to the comic savvy audience members… but no. For some reason Jean Grey, as her Phoenix persona, kills Professor X. I suspect part of this was to appease the diva-like complaints of Halle Berry, who felt she was underutilized as Storm, thus thrusting her character into a leadership position. (And with great lines like “Do you know what happens to a toad when it is struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else!” how could you not make her the star?) They built up this great end battle that, like the entire movie, was ultimately marred by massive errors and disappointments. They weren’t Morlocks, they were ‘Omegas.’ Okay, I can let that go just like I let go that Dark Phoenix was Jean Grey’s split personality. (Honestly it would have been a bigger train wreck to try to do the entire space saga anyway.) But why introduce a fan favorite like Psylocke and completely screw up her powers? Why couldn’t we have spent more time getting to know some of these Omegas, after all they were only Magneto’s army of mutants! Why didn’t they include some of the actual Brotherhood of Evil Mutants like Avalanche, Mastermind, Vanisher, Blob, Unus or maybe even Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch… you know, Magneto’s children? Why would Juggernaut, while having his powers neutralized by Leech, get knocked out by hitting a wall with his head when he is wearing a damn helmet? (By the way, after Jonny Prophet and I saw Hard Candy and Juno we both concluded that the film-makers terribly underutilized the very talented Ellen Page.) I will say that there were a few things that X-Men 3 got right. Kelsey Grammer played Beast exceptionally. Vinnie Jones was pretty entertaining as Juggernaut. I liked how they portrayed Multiple Man and how Pyro had come into his own as a villain. However, by the end of the movie, after killing off Cyclops, Jean Grey and seemingly doing the same with Xavier, I kind of looked at it as the final film… partly because I really didn’t want to see the franchise limp through another sequel after effectively maiming the series. (But I really wanted to see the brain-dead black guy from Muir Island with the voice of Patrick Stewart in action!)

Superman Returns – Ah yes, the weird sequel that nobody demanded to a franchise over twenty years old whose main actor is dead. Oh, and it’s only the sequel to the first two movies, not the two I already included on the list. (I didn’t know you could pick and choose what sequels you wanted to observe in continuity!)  Anyway, Bryan Singer’s decision to leave X-Men 3 to direct Superman Returns truly cursed us to 2 bad movies; a shitty X-men movie and a boring and ridiculous Superman movie. Now the film itself looks good, it is shot beautifully and the acting is great. Brandon Routh made a wonderful stand-in to Christopher Reeves and Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor stole the show. The problem I have is with the story. It sucks. It is boring, pretentious, self-serving, and a little disturbing. Why is it boring? Superman doesn’t actually fight anyone… unless you count a mountain of Kryptonite. Everybody loved Superman II because he fought General Zod and his crew of Kryptonian criminals! It had massive battles and destruction! But for some reason the writers thought a big mountain of Kryptonite was a worthy foe to the Man of Steel. I mean, Lex shanks him but all Superman did was leave him and Parker Posey on a deserted island… which seems more than a little irresponsible. Rather than bring Luthor to justice over the massive damage and deaths he caused, Superman says “Nope, I’m gonna leave him on a desert island.” Why is it pretentious? Superman is over glorified as a modern day deity, like a flying Jesus in tights. Why is it self-serving? It delves heavily into how Superman views his duality as Clark Kent and his never-ending quest for justice and saving people; in other words it creates its own drama. Kevin Smith really put it best by saying ‘Superman Returns is the art-house Superman.’ Now why is it disturbing? Oh, I don’t know… how about Superman is a creepy stalker? He seriously floats around outside of Lois Lane’s house using his x-ray vision to watch her and his super hearing to listen in on her conversations with her new man James Marsden. (By the way, you ditch a major role as Cyclops for the much smaller role of Lois Lane’s boyfriend? What the fuck?) If Supes weren’t pretty much unstoppable, he would be in jail! Plus, Superman’s a deadbeat dad? Okay, not really, but who really thought making him a father was a good idea and wouldn’t completely screw up the franchise? Plus, he pulls a breaking and entering into Lois’ home so he can sit by his sleeping son, stroke his hair and say “You will be different.” I know it was supposed to be really sweet, but holy crap was that creepy. Imagine waking up to find Brandon Routh stroking your hair and telling you “You will be different.” You may never be able to sleep again! Oh, and before I move on I must point out that Jonny Prophet was very angry that Kumar (Kal Penn) was in the movie and didn’t even have a line! He could have at least asked Lex if he wanted anything from White Castle!

Ang Lee’s Hulk – Okay, this should tell you how bad Hulk was. When I go to the movies, I never leave the theater except in the case of an urgent bathroom situation. During Hulk, I went to get a refill on my drink… and I took my time about it. I walked around the lobby, even stopped to look at those quarter vending machines. When I got back, I asked my friend if I had missed anything. He said ‘no.’ Another friend told me that he uses the DVD like Ambien; he has never made it through the whole movie without falling asleep. Of course, everyone else can define the failure of Ang Lee’s Hulk with two words… Hulk Dogs. I especially bring up the poodle Hulk Dog. Ugh… Hulk has many villains, why did they have to create something so terrible? And Nick Nolte’s insane driveling speech at the end of the movie is reminiscent of the Python’s paranoid psychotic rant at the end of Stan Lee’s Light Speed (perhaps a future Guilty Pleasure review?). In the same vein of Kevin Smith’s assessment that Superman Returns was the “art house Superman film” then Ang Lee’s Hulk is definitely the art house version of the jade giant. The acting wasn’t bad, the special effects were good (though on Hulk itself, I would rate them as only ‘okay’) and the cinematography was as good as what you would expect from the director of Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But when people see a Hulk movie they don’t want a story of childhood trauma and disconnection between a father and son; they don’t want a soul searching journey to deal with repressed anger before it explodes into an unstoppable force of pure rage. Moviegoers want Hulk to smash stuff and fight monsters and stuff like that. In the end, I wouldn’t call Ang Lee’s Hulk a terrible movie… just really, really boring.

X-men Origins: Wolverine – I will start by saying that this movie isn’t god-awful. It was decently entertaining and featured a lot of great characters for the first time on screen. But when this movie was bad… oh sweet Lord it was abysmal. First off I will say Liev Schreiber was excellent as Sabretooth. Taylor Kitsch made a great Gambit. Ryan Reynolds was awesome as Wade Wilson. (Note that I didn’t say Deadpool… oh I can feel the anger building!) Now that we got that out of the way we move onto what sucked. Some of the special effects were really lacking. For instance when Logan is examining his claws in the bathroom of the elderly couple’s farmhouse, they looked really fake. That’s not the biggest problem to me. The biggest failing of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is how it tries to cover every possible base while cramming in random mutant character cameos along the way. It feels a lot to me like Star Wars: Episode I in that the plot seems forced; everything that happens is to literally get from point A to point B regardless of plausibility and at the sacrifice of character development. They had to reveal how Wolverine got his adamantium skeleton, they had to explain his connection to and hatred of Sabretooth, they had to establish his past with William Stryker, they had to include Gambit, Deadpool (argh), Blob, Cyclops, Xavier, and some other random mutants along the way, they had to explain Logan’s inability to recall his past, they even had to explain how a bullet entered his head in X-Men 2… and what you get is a script that is a mess chock full of random, if not pointless cameos and senseless fighting. The plot itself is a gigantic fuck around to… I guess… trick Wolverine into being a super soldier? I am really not sure what the point was, but in the process they ruined a fan favorite character in Deadpool by making him a bizarre mess of eyebeams, teleportation and swords popping out of his wrists with a healing factor (might I add the only thing they got right about his powers) as well as some others I am choosing to forget. We got a ridiculous plot device that the only way to penetrate adamantium is with an adamantium bullet? Since when do metals with the same molecular density pierce one another? I know this is just a comic book movie and not to nit-pick, but that was not just insulting to the fans, it was insulting to the overall audience’s intelligence! It could have been a vibranium bullet and I would have said ‘okay.’ But no, we had to explain Logan’s memory loss in the stupidest, most ‘Midi-chlorian’ way possible. (Seriously, the comics had his healing factor “heal” his traumatic memories. What was so wrong about that?) But now we can explain how a bullet penetrated Wolverine in the second movie… except I didn’t care. It never occurred to me that the bullet even went into his skull. I figured the bullet hitting his forehead knocked him out and his regenerative powers pushed out the slug as it healed him. Oh, and Silverfox was in on the whole plan? That’s just stupid! And if Stryker had so much faith in Sabretooth doing his dirty work and giving Logan the motivation to partake in the Weapon X treatment, why the hell didn’t he just give Sabretooth the adamantium? Why wouldn’t Stryker have thought Sabretooth would survive? Victor Creed survived the firing squad alongside Logan!  Like I said before, this movie wasn’t the worst thing ever but it was an absolute mess.

Be sure to anxiously await the third installment which will be up whenever the hell I get around to finishing this list. In the meantime, stay strange!

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