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The LEGO Batman Movie Review

March 4, 2017 by JD Hansel

SPOILER WARNING

This film’s strengths and weaknesses both pertain to the issue of “heart” in film.

If not for the fact that this is a spin-off of The LEGO Movie, the writers would have been free to simply fill the entire film with fun Batman jokes and absurd mix-ups and lunacy that only make sense in an animated comedy.  The LEGO Movie, however, has a lot of heart to it that tied the film together nicely and offered a solid foundation for its comedy.  I argue that LEGO Movie is probably one of the better examples of heart done well because, by that point in the movie, it feels needed and welcomed, as opposed to being forced down our throats at the very beginning like in other family films.  I often think back on an argument between Siskel and Ebert (which I explained in my Scrooged review) in which Gene Siskel said Back to the Future II should have stopped to take the time to add more heart.  I think this is a fairly stupid position to hold seeing as how a movie should really bring in heart at times when it is necessitated by (and it necessitates) the story, but unfortunately, The LEGO Batman Movie makes its heart-warming scenes feel almost out of place, even though they inform much of the story and supply the main character motivation.  Somewhere in the crazy, convoluted mess that was the writing process for this film – consisting of a grand total of five people getting screenwriting credits – the story kept getting reworked until the final result felt like certain scenes were in the script simply to satisfy a “kids movie checklist” of some sort, and most of the bullets on the list pertained to grabbing the heartstrings.  Since I watched this film in a theater filled with children, it was very easy to tell that these scenes simply did not succeed at grabbing the audience.

The rest of the movie, however, is filled with the best kind of heart: passion.  LEGO Batman is one of those films with the rare quality of feeling like a great fan project was given a Hollywood budget and free range.  The film may be loaded with fan-service and a little too dependent on the laughability of previous incarnations of Batman, but it just loves its world and its characters so much that the passion is infectious.  The beauty of the thing, of course, comes from the fact that this is a LEGO-based film, so it can do things with Batman that couldn’t work with the real Batman, and that couldn’t work with a parody, but work perfectly in the space in between.  After all, who doesn’t want to see the Dynamic Duo fight off the gremlins, the Joker recruit Godzilla, or freaking Voldemort casting spells in the Bat Cave?  In a Batman movie that audiences took somewhat seriously, this would enrage people, and in a YouTube parody, it wouldn’t have much power or meaning, but in this movie, it is both official and non-canon at once.  Consequently, the writers were able to put Batman against all of his greatest enemies at once at the start of the movie, making the audience wonder where on earth they could possibly go from there, and then live up to that question by raising the stakes to a level that we never knew could be part of the game.  The movie somehow managed to bring back so much classic Batman material dating back to the 1940s (including an obscure villain played by Vincent Price on the 1960s series) and bring in great new material (Batman vs. King Kong, a touching Batman/Joker bromance, etc.) without feeling overcrowded.

My one regret is that the theater didn’t have more excited, happy Batman fans in it to laugh with me.  Please see it with friends and have a good time.

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 2010s Movie Reviews, 2017, Action & Adventure, Animation, Batman, Comic Book Movies, DC, Family, Four Stars, Parody, PG, Super Heroes

Batman Begins Review: Upon Further Consideration…

October 25, 2016 by JD Hansel

Most of the time when I review a movie on this website, I’m doing it because I hadn’t seen the film before.  “Upon Further Consideration…” is the series I use once in a blue moon when I feel like sharing my thoughts on a film I haven’t seen in a long while.

Since I talk too much about how I generally disapprove of what Christopher Nolan did with Batman, I thought it would be best for me to finally sit down and watch The Dark Knight all the way through – which I probably should have done before I started complaining about how it’s the film that’s ruined the theatrical beauty of cinema.  However, when I went to the library to pick up a copy of The Dark Knight, I realized that I was uncertain as to whether or not I had seen its predecessor, Batman Begins, also by Nolan.  For this reason, I picked up Batman Begins and watched that instead.  As I watched the film, I continued to be unsure as to whether or not I’d seen it before, because the beginning was very familiar, but I didn’t recognize much of what happened after Bruce went back to Gotham.  Since I knew the ending and seemed to recall various parts scattered throughout, I came to realize that I must have seen it before – or at least most of it – but it’s just a really forgettable film.

First of all, there’s that blasted visual style.  In this movie, it’s not quite as gray as I expected, instead focusing a lot on brown, but it seems the color scheme turns to the Nolan light-bluish-gray for Dark Knight, and finally to blackness for Dark Knight Rises, giving each film in the trio its own color.  It’s a neat way of doing it, but what it’s made me realize is that my conception of the “Nolanization of cinema” is not entirely accurate – while I had always assumed that Nolan’s grayed out Batman update was responsible for the rest of cinema turning gray, I know understand that this does not work out chronologically.  Batman Begins came out in 2005, and Dark Knight came out in 2008, while Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was released in 2004.  This means that I have been incorrect in accusing Nolan of leading to franchises getting retooled for the worse the way that the Potter franchise was, when in fact it was Azkaban that can be blamed for what Nolan did to Batman, and arguably Pan’s Labyrinth is another of the first main culprits.  For this reason it is no surprise that the movie is forgettable – it was just following a trend by adding grays and browns and killing the greatest hits of the color spectrum.  Some shots in the film, on the other hand, surprised me by looking very good, but these were interestingly the shots that very closely resembled Tim Burton’s first imagining of Gotham, and I must ask: what is the point of making a new visual style that looks its best only when it closely copies the old visual style?

Not only is it visually forgettable, but its characters are forgettable.  I really like Morgan Freeman’s character in the movie, but that’s only because he’s Morgan Freeman, and there is nothing special about that character on paper – his only value is the actor who plays him.  The villains are threatening and mildly scary, but overall they lack some sort of villainous “it factor.”  I could see myself wearing a T-shirt bearing the face of The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin, or any number of other DC villains, but not The Scarecrow, and certainly not whatever Liam Neeson’s character is supposed to be called.  Don’t even get me started on Katie Holmes’ portrayal of Rachel Dawes, which I mostly blame on the writing, but there is no excuse for how insufferably bland she is.  Dawes is a device, and one that I never cared about.  At all.  Part of the problem with Dawes is that she’s primarily designed to spew out cat-poster morality at are morally confused protagonist, which gets old and feels preachy.

This leads to one of the film’s greatest weaknesses: its moral confusion.  Never before have I seen a film that spends so much time exploring morality without having any coherence in moral philosophy by the end of the film.  One could argue that this just means the film is “complex” or “complicated,” but it doesn’t have an intelligent kind of incoherence at the end of the film, like what is presented just before the closing credits of Do the Right Thing.  Instead, it feels like listening to a sermon written by a child who just took different moral sayings he heard and threw them all together, without any clue what he was talking about.  Example: at the end of the film, Dawes kisses Bruce, but then says she can’t love him because he has become Batman, while she’s in love with the good man he was before he became Batman, but then she say’s she’s proud of what he’s done as Batman.  So . . . does she like his personality and behavior or not?!  What’s worse is that the film celebrates Bruce for having empathy when he saves Neeson from falling off the cliff in the first part of the film, even when the villains try to convince him that empathy is bad, but at the end of the film – after all this talk about how wrong it is for good people to do nothing – he decides he will not save Neeson from dying in the train.  It is now his choice to withhold his empathy and his goodness that is considered a positive trait, which makes the film give out more mixed signals than Dawes does.

I think it goes without saying that I think this movie is, in many respects, a train wreck.  Nolan tried to make the audience take Batman very seriously, but, ya know . . . HE’S A GUY IN A BAT COSTUME – it’s inevitably going to be either campy or awkward, so he should have had more fun with the character.  So, so much of this film just feels off, strange, flat, or inconsistent, and the film adds virtually nothing of value to what Burton had so perfectly established as the cinematic Batman in 1989.  Yet, in a way, it still feels like a Batman movie, and that makes it fun.  Not as fun as it could be, but fun.  It’s interesting and amusing enough to be enjoyable, so I think that, all things considered, it’s okay.  Not great – maybe not even good – but okay.  I’ll give it a good rating because I find it entertaining enough, but does this mean I’ll have to stop giving Nolan such a hard time?  Oh, wait – no it does not – I still have to watch The Dark Knight . . . .

ufc-02-batman-begins

 

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews, Upon Further Consideration Tagged With: 2000s Movie Reviews, 2005, Batman, Christopher Nolan, Comic Book Movies, DC, Nolan, PG-13, Super Heroes, UFC, Upon Further Consideration

Captain America: Civil War Review

June 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

What can I say that hasn’t already been said?  Well, okay, here’s one thing that no one else has said: I didn’t go into this movie taking a side.  I did declare myself as Team Cap or Team Iron Man at any time, because I tend to be on Team Shut Up and Talk Like Civilized People, but I suppose that wouldn’t make for as interesting of a movie.  It’s challenging for a movie like this to make the audience very understanding of both sides, and then turn around and make us want to see everyone we love in this franchise beating the snot out of each other.  Remarkably, the movie not only accomplishes this daring feat, but also puts the characters on the wrong sides (without making the audience bat an eye at it).  Allow me to briefly explain what I mean.

Please, consider the following: Captain America is the one who would ordinarily want to work with the government, especially since his roots are with the U. S. military, and Stark is the type of person who would never want to give control over himself to anyone else, since it would hurt his ego to be the U. N.’s puppet; and let’s not forget that Romanoff has weirdly decided to fight against Cap’s team, at least for the most part.  In the end though, I think the most impressive thing about this is that, in the midst of all this drama, the movie is a heck of a lot of fun.  It may be rather awkward at some points and tedious at others, but between the creative action sequences, the perfect cast, the smart dialogue, the surprising twists, the bizarre inclusion of Ant Man, and the spectacular Spider-Man, Civil War hits all the right spots.  It’s one of Marvel’s finest films – quite possibly its best to date.

121 Captain America - Civil War

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 2010s Movie Reviews, 2016, Comic Book Movies, Four Stars, Marvel, MCU, PG-13, Super Heroes

The Rocketeer Review

May 24, 2015 by JD Hansel

(MINOR SPOILERS)

I really like Timothy Dalton.  I greatly enjoy watching Jennifer Connelly.  This movie was recommended to me by a friend, and I was pretty sure I would love it.  Unfortunately, the movie was largely dull and uninteresting for the first half.  The protagonist was a bore, and the antagonist was honestly more likable and charming.  The concept could have been very interesting, but I just couldn’t get into it for quite some time.

Then, much like in Hannah and Her Sisters, there was a redeeming scene.  Finally, when the story was starting to get interesting, they gave a scene to Jennifer Connelly’s character, who had to give the best performance of her life.  The scene was an absolute delight, largely because I could finally focus on a couple of the characters that mattered to me.  Seeing this scene in this movie felt like the geeky kid on the sidelines had just jumped up and did a slam dunk, so I couldn’t help but applaud.

On the whole, it’s not a bad movie.  Some of the characters are interesting, the concept is rather unique, the screenplay gets better and better throughout, the visuals and soundtrack are frequently impressive, and I could easily see why someone would really like this movie.  For me, however, I like a protagonist who’s likable.  Say what you want about film being a visual medium, but let’s not forget that visuals alone are not the point – otherwise you could just go to a Smithsonian art museum for free and see better visuals than most great films have to offer.  The point is storytelling, and at the heart of every story are its characters.  If the movie had a stronger main character, the story would have been much stronger, which would have made the film rise above “okay.”  The one redeeming scene, however, earned this film an extra half a star above par.

55 The Rocketeer

Filed Under: Film Criticism, Tumblr Movie Reviews Tagged With: 1990s Movie Reviews, 1991, Action & Adventure, Comic Book Movies, Disney, PG, Three and a Half Stars

Avengers: Age of Ultron Review

May 20, 2015 by JD Hansel

First of all, everyone needs to see the first Avengers movie, preferably after seeingCaptain America and Iron Man.  Then, watch Avengers, and after that, Capt 2 and maybe a few of the others in between.  After that, you care about all the characters in Avengers: Age of Ultron.  That’s really all that matters with this movie.

The movie is an excuse to hang out with the characters.  That’s all.  The story is not really special, and the visuals are typical for this kind of film.  (I will give it props for its excellent opening, which is very impressive, but I prefer the look of the current Daredevil series to the look of the Avengers films.)  The movie is really a blast so long as you really enjoy seeing what the characters throw at one another (figuratively and literally) and you enjoy good bantering, drama, one liners, and character development.  The story is, at the very least, set up so that the audience is very interested in seeing what the characters will do next, and how they’ll get out of tricky situations.  It’s a fun summer movie, and that’s all it needed to be.  I highly recommend it.

54 Avengers Age of Ultron

Filed Under: Film Criticism, Tumblr Movie Reviews Tagged With: 2010s Movie Reviews, 2015, Action & Adventure, Comic Book Movies, Four Stars, Marvel, MCU, PG-13, Super Heroes

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Review

December 19, 2014 by JD Hansel

I’ll try to keep this review simple and spoiler-free.

It’s funny how I’d give Cap 2 about the same rating as Guardians of the Galaxy, but for completely different reasons.  Basically, Guardians worked because it was silly and fun, and it knew how to handle that.  Cap 2 worked because it was dramatic and mysterious, and it knew how to handle that.  I generally like my super hero movies to be light and fun, but this one just keeps the audience engaged in the mysteries of S.H.I.E.L.D. and its enemies, and I felt compelled to try to figure it all out.  The drama between characters strangely works because it is handled very carefully, and the light banter between Cap and Black Widow is brilliant.

It’s hard to say why I’m not giving this film a higher rating, but even though I think the stressful time I was having while watching it (for unrelated reasons) may have skewed my view of the film, the fun, colorful feeling I like a superhero movie to have (see Guardians, Burton’s Batman, ‘66’s Batman, Doctor Who: The Movie, Big Hero 6, etc.) just isn’t there.  It feels rather pale, like it’s trying to look a little bit like The Dark Knight in terms of lighting and color.  While there are certainly fun moments, the movie might be taking itself a little too seriously overall.

If you like a movie that keeps your mind working and is packed with surprises and suspense, you’ll enjoy this one.  (Just be sure to catch up on the Marvel films that precede it – otherwise it won’t be half as fun.)

32 Captain America - The Winter Soldier

Filed Under: Film Criticism, Tumblr Movie Reviews Tagged With: 2010s Movie Reviews, 2014, Action & Adventure, Comic Book Movies, Marvel, MCU, PG-13, Super Heroes, Three and a Half Stars

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