Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) **/*****

It’s not long into the first post-credits scene of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that you realize you’re actually reliving the climactic events of director Zack Snyder’s previous filmic foray into the world of DC Comics, Man of Steel. This time around we’re not seeing things from the perspective of the heroic Superman (Henry Cavill) and the villainous General Zod—who are busy pounding on each other while the city of Metropolis gets destroyed around them—though, we’re seeing things from the perspective of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), who has choppered himself into the city and is running around trying to help people on the ground. Immediately the scenario provides you with the sort of grounded drama and human stakes that it was criticized for lacking in Man of Steel, and it feels like Dawn of Justice might be a big time improvement over its predecessor.

Then you realize it makes no sense that Bruce Wayne would chopper himself into a city under attack by aliens as a civilian instead of flying there as Batman in his bat-shaped fighter jet that’s equipped with all manner of missiles and chain guns, and the wind pretty instantly goes out of the movie’s sails. The moment doesn’t make any sense from the standpoint of character motivation, or even from the standpoint of basic logic, and neither do any of the many moments that follow in this long, confusing slog of a film. Dawn of Justice isn’t the sort of movie that doesn’t make any sense if you stop to think about it, it’s the sort of movie that constantly rubs your nose in the stink of what little sense it makes, to the point where you’re more confused about what you did to deserve such treatment than you are mad about it.

Deadpool (2016) ***/*****

During the lead up to the release of Deadpool, I started to feel left out in the cold. Everyone seemed to be really excited for it, amused by its off-kilter marketing, and I just couldn’t care less. Ryan Reynolds has never worked as a leading man. The oh-man-so-random humor that serves as Deadpool’s trademark is the sort of thing that’s only funny to cackling teenagers. Plus, action sequences that are full of characters weightlessly flying around, doing unrealistic flips, and CGI destruction that lacks any impact or danger are just about the most boring things to sit through, and its trailers were full of that sort of garbage. I went into Deadpool already convinced it was going to be the worst. A funny thing can happen when you keep an open mind though—you can be surprised—and after I gave the movie an honest chance it turned out that Deadpool wasn’t terrible at all. It’s actually pretty mediocre. 

So what is Deadpool, anyway? He’s a motor-mouthed mercenary named Wade Wilson (Reynolds) who was put through traumatic experiments that not only gave him healing powers and left his entire body severely scarred, but that also shattered his mind and left him in a state of constant hallucination and mania. This movie is an origin story, so you meet Wade before his procedure, you meet the acid-tongued hooker he falls in love with, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), and you meet the evil scientist who turns him into a monster, Ajax (Ed Skrein). What follows is a pretty typical revenge story with a little damsel in distress heroics thrown in for good measure. But, you know, colored with that trademarked Deadpool raunchy randomness.

Ant-Man (2015) ***/*****

With the most recent release that exists as part of their “Marvel Cinematic Universe”, Marvel Studios hit a snag. Just when it seemed like audiences might be getting tired of the superhero-origin-story-leads-to-a-big-fight-to-stop-a-world-ending-event-from-occurring-above-a-populated-city formula, they subverted things a bit by making movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, which felt more like a 70s-era political thriller and a comedy-driven space opera than they did traditional superhero movies, and are probably the best movies the studio has put out yet—but then they released Avengers: Age of Ultron, which stuck to their established superhero formula too closely, and which felt tired and played out compared to the two movies that came before it. Age of Ultron wasn’t a bad movie, per se, it just felt like more of something we’d already had enough of. 

So, given the less than unanimous praise for Age of Ultron, how does their new superhero movie, Ant-Man, fair when it comes to changing up the superhero formula and giving us a fresh enough spin on the traditional comic book tale to prove that the gigantic slate of superhero films they’ve got planned is not only going to continue to be successful, but is going to continue to be so enthusiastically welcomed by audiences that they continue to break box office records? It does a middling job. In some ways it dabbles enough in the heist genre to feel like a freshening up of the now standard superhero movie, but in others it falls enough into formula to feel like an economic inevitability rather than an adventure the audience is being invited to go on.  

Short Round: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) **/*****

Just the title Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is probably enough to turn mainstream audiences off of this crazy property. It’s ridiculous—the kind of stuff that only kids could ever like. The fact is though, ever since the original TMNT comic books were turned into a toy line and a cartoon series in the late 80s, the turtles have become a worldwide phenomenon on the back of its little kid fans alone. It’s likely Platinum Dunes had higher aspirations when it came to relaunching them as this live action, big budget, possible franchise-invigorator though. Now there’s a possibility that the Turtles can be followed by new kid fans as well as nostalgia-seeking former fans, which could possibly make it the sort of genre-crossing, money-earning hit that the Marvel movies or the Transformers movies have become. The idea is a sound one, except for the fact that any movie about turtles who mutate into pizza-loving, Renaissance artist-named, ninja teenagers is going to have to primarily concern itself with being a mindless good time in order for broad audiences to really embrace it, and a mindless good time isn’t what this new TMNT movie is at all. As a matter of fact, it’s mostly an exposition-filled bore.

It doesn’t do everything wrong. The special effects that bring the Turtles themselves to life are generally impressive, and may even be an improvement over the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop efforts that brought the Turtles of the 1990 film to life (when we’re watching character-building scenes where they’re just sitting around), and the script seems to have a strong handle on who the turtles are as people—some stream lining and rewriting has been done in respect to their origins, but each Turtle is still easily recognizable as the distinct personality we’ve known them as, and the group dynamic is still largely in tact, so it’s hard to complain about anything that’s happened to the characters. But, on the other hand, this movie sticks so closely to what we’ve gotten in the past, character-wise, that it feels like a huge mistake for it to spend so much time explaining itself. Hollywood has made bad Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies before—really bad ones—but this is the first time they’ve made one that’s completely boring.

This Turtles movie comes after an entire trilogy of live action Turtles movies, countless animated series, countless comic books, countless video game spin-offs, and even an ill-advised holiday special, and yet we’re still asked to wait for a good half hour until we see the characters, as if we’re watching Jaws for the first time or something. This is a movie that has a rock-simple plot—mutants are created, mutants escape, their creators need to get them back—but it spends so much time explaining itself with flashbacks and expositional dialogue that you get a good hour in before the plot moves forward at all. Ninety percent of TMNT is its writers explaining away what Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are, like we’re not already aware, and like any excuse could ever be made for how ridiculous a concept it is in the first place, and the other ten percent is inert action sequences where the CG nature of all the effects rob everything of any reality, weight, or urgency, so that none of what you’re watching ends up mattering in the first place. This movie is everything that’s wrong with modern blockbusters, rolled into one big failure. It’s a remake of something we’ve had enough of, it’s derivative of everything else that’s come out in the last five years, it’s concerned more with empty spectacle than character-building, and it insults the audience’s intelligence at every turn. This was the Turtles’ big opportunity to move past its child-aimed roots and become a mainstream property, but if you happen to be past the age of a small child and you find yourself satisfied by this film, then you need to take a long, hard look at what exactly it is you do or do not demand from your entertainment. If you like this one, chances are you might be a Philistine.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) ****/*****

Up until Marvel came around and changed the game, the approach to making a modern superhero movie seemed to be to strip the material of all the pulp, humor, and color that appeared on the original comic book page, strip down the mythology to only its most grounded, realistic elements, and then to fuse the few fantastical concepts left over to a reality that looked as thoroughly like our own as possible. The theory seemed to be that the bright colors and broad adventure of comic books lost their appeal and became inherently cheesy after getting translated to live action. A quip was made in the first big superhero success story, the original X-Men film, about how ridiculous it would be if they wore bright colored superhero costumes rather than dark, leather, battle suits. Christopher Nolan’s grounding of the Batman character in a world that looked more like the gritty crime dramas of the 70s than any comic book ever printed made more money than basically any other series ever. The strategy was a winner. 

During the period between the releases of the original Iron Man and The Avengers, Marvel once again changed the game though. They proved that bright colors could work on the big screen, as long as they weren’t exaggerated to the point of being disorienting, that humor could fit perfectly into superhero properties, as long as the scripts you write are actually funny, and that big, broad adventure was something that never really went out of style in the first place, so any urge to suppress it was a silly one. Marvel figured out how to make the biggest, best, and most beloved superhero movies of all time, and they did so by sticking closer to the stories’ comic book origins than any movie had before. Which brings us to Guardians of the Galaxy.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) ****/*****

There have been so many X-Men movies at this point, to try to explain what they are to someone who doesn’t already know would be insanely frustrating. To put it simply though, they’re adaptations of a long-running Marvel comic that explains away its characters’ super powers by saying that they derive from mutations. Mutants pop up and do incredible things, regular people get scared, and then there’s conflict. The whole thing is basically an allegory used to explore intolerance in society. The head of the good guys is Professor X, who is kind of the mutant Martin Luther King, the head of the bad guys is Magneto, who’s kind of the mutant Malcolm X, and caught in between them is our hearts and minds.

The bad news about the latest film in the series, X-Men: Days of Future Past, is that director Matthew Vaughn, who made the recent X-Men prequel that was a soft reboot of the series, X-Men: First Class, and who added a much-needed sense of style to the franchise, didn’t come back for this sequel. The good news though is that Bryan Singer, who made the first two X-Men movies and who set the tone for the series, came back to replace him, so you basically know what you’re going to get here. The story starts in a dystopian future where robot “Sentinels” built to hunt and kill mutants have taken over the world and have turned it into a smoldering wasteland. Only a few mutants remain in this hellscape, so a plan is hatched where old Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and old Magneto (Ian McKellan) send old Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to recruit their younger selves (James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender) so that they can help stop the mutant shapeshifter Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from committing an illegal act that gets the production of the Sentinels put into motion in the first place—which proves to be something of a problem, because the young Professor X and Magneto are still very much at odds with each other. Yeah, this is a time travel movie, and yeah, it’s kind of confusing.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) **/*****

Early on in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 there are a handful of scenes where Spider-Man is doing some web-slinging and crime fighting through the skyline of New York City that are absurdly expensive-looking and absolutely thrilling to watch. They represent the most fully-realized and comic book-authentic images of Spidey that have appeared onscreen to date, and they would have gotten the film off to a good start, if they were actually how it opened. Instead though, the opening scene of this movie is an action scene featuring Spider-Man’s parents, from years earlier, that doesn’t really resonate because we don’t know what kind of people they were or even what they were up to during the sequence, and that serves as an early indication that the film would eventually get bogged down in a quagmire of plot and mythology-building. Which it does. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is kind of a chore to watch.

Before we turn this into a bitch-fest though, let’s address the aspects of the movie that worked, because there were a few of them—though they get so thoroughly overpowered by the surrounding crap that they don’t ultimately matter. As anyone who saw the first Amazing Spider-Man could tell you, Andrew Garfield is very well cast as the title character, who’s otherwise known as Peter Parker, and Emma Stone is very well cast as his love interest, Gwen Stacy. Their teenage romance made for the best bits of the first film, and their continued relationship drama is also the best part of this sequel. Not only are these two attractive and charming, but they’re able to handle dramatic material well, they both have excellent comic timing, and they even work well as a pair. Marc Webb couldn’t have asked for a better couple of young actors to direct.

Short Round: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) ****/*****

Now that we’re this deep into Marvel Studios’ ongoing efforts to create a connected and constantly growing film universe, it’s pretty clear that a pattern has started to form. The pattern being that, as their universe gets better established and these superhero movies get more of a chance to build off of what has come before them, the more successful they become. I had planned to write a bit more at length about their newest film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but just a day into its release, doing so has already started to feel a little bit pointless. Given its box office projections and its performance at all of the review aggregation websites, it seems like everyone in the world has already seen this second go-around with a solo Captain America movie, and everyone has absolutely loved it.

Wherever you look, the reactions seem to be the same. The Winter Soldier is being called the biggest and most engaging thing Marvel has done since The Avengers. It’s being said that the film succeeds not just because it’s a great superhero movie, but because it’s also able to blend the intrigue of 70s-era political thrillers and the adrenaline of modern-day spy movies seamlessly into its formula. Much is being said about how well-cast the principal players are, and how effectively they’ve settled into their characters now that they’ve had a chance to play them a few times and to develop them a bit. Everyone seems to be talking about how surprising it is that co-directors Anthony and Joe Russo were able to make pulling off an action movie this huge in budget and scope look effortless, given that their experience lies in TV comedies. All of these observations are spot on, irrefutable, so I won’t waste anyone’s time by being the one millionth person to wax on about them.

Instead, I’ll just use this space to step back from the movie a bit, and to appreciate what it is Marvel has accomplished here. I grew up in the 80s, which was the Golden Age of genre-heavy, big budget blockbusters, and even then the best we ever hoped for was that a movie studio could keep its act together long enough to produce a classic trilogy. And though the industry back then had no qualms with making a million movies that were full of comic book elements, like monsters, aliens, ghosts, and time travel, for some reason it always stopped short at making an actual superhero movie that spent the money necessary to get things right, and that played everything with a straight face. That Marvel has now released nine movies (and counting) that not only bring superhero action to dazzling life in the way young nerds always knew it could be realized, but that also all exist in the sort of rich, expanding universe that we used to only be able to explore through comics and literature, is just a godsend to the little geek that exists inside all of us. Just imagine the kids who are growing up watching all of these Marvel movies today. Twenty years from now they’re going to think of them the same way their parents came to think about Star Wars, only with the nostalgia multiplied by about ten. And, heck, if the studio keeps up the levels of quality they’re hitting right now, we of the older generation might too. Make Mine Marvel, indeed.

Thor: The Dark World (2013) ****/*****

The way Marvel Studios has been able to link each of their individual film releases into a coherent universe that continually builds on itself and continually increases the anticipation for what they put out next has astounded a lot of people who follow the film industry, but for comic book fans it’s merely been a long past due realization of the potential that they’ve always known comic book movies have had. Over time Marvel has perfected their superhero machine, to the point where you probably already know whether or not you’re going to enjoy the second go-around with their version of the Norse God of Thunder’s adventures, Thor: The Dark World.

The reason it’s predictable how you’re going to respond to this film is that, despite the fact that each of their releases are handled by different directors, Marvel has proven that they have a handle on hiring filmmakers who can get on board with the direction they’re moving in creatively. And, more importantly than that, they’ve really grown comfortable with what that direction is—with what tone they’re looking to set with their films. The difference between their stuff and the usual crop of blockbuster films we’ve been getting over the past decade or so is that their tone is a little more adventure driven and a little less concerned with being epic. Marvel movies combine big, fun action sequences with heavy doses of humor, which doesn’t leave much room for naval-gazing or melodrama. If you enjoy turning your brain off, not worrying about brooding anti-heroes, and experiencing a brightly colored theme park ride of a movie, then probably you’ve enjoyed the recent crop of Marvel films, and probably you’re going to enjoy Thor: The Dark World as well.

Man of Steel (2013) **/*****

Superman is one of the most beloved and recognizable pop culture icons created in the last century. Everyone knows his symbol, his powers, and his origin story. But because Hollywood never saw an origin story it didn’t want to retell, they’ve decided that in order to reboot the Superman movie franchise, the public is going to have to be retaught everything about the Man of Steel. It’s all here: the baby sent away from the exploding planet in a rocket ship, the nurturing couple who find him and raise him on their Kansas farm, the alien structure in the frozen north that teaches him about his origins, and the job in the big city that comes complete with a high strung love interest/rival. The only difference here from what’s come before is that the origin story of Richard Donner’s 1978 film Superman has been mixed with the evil-Kryptonian-General-comes-to-Earth story of his 1980 sequel, Superman 2, and the results are a movie that gets pretty crowded, even with a 143 minute run time.

To be fair, the Man of Steel script by David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan does make an effort to skip some of the origin story in order to get right into the meat of the conflict, but it makes the mistake of skipping over the stuff we still need to have reestablished while painstakingly detailing all of the stuff that everyone knows. To be more specific, it shows us the events on Krypton that led to his being sent to Earth, it shows us how he finds the hologram of his alien dad that explains to him who he really is, and it shows us how he gets a super suit and decides to start using his powers to be a superhero, but what it fails to do is establish for us who this Superman/Kal-El/Clark Kent is as a person. We go straight from his being an infant to his being a fully-formed man, only getting to know him through a small handful of flashbacks to life on the farm that are spread evenly throughout the film. The effect is that we’re looking at Superman the icon, the pop culture figure that exists on Underoos and lunch boxes, but it never quite feels like we’re being told a story about an actual person.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) ***/*****

If you’re going to relate the latest entry in Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise to the two that came before it, then Batman Begins is the baseline. Nolan’s first crack at the character was the most sturdy, standalone entry in his franchise. It tells the most solid story and it exists as the most complete film. But its also the most mundane and forgettable of the three. The Dark Knight was far more sprawling, and way more of an epic. With this added scope came a messiness and some logic issues, but it also brought sublime filmmaking moments that will be added to the canon of cinema history. The highs in that second film are so high that you never even consider the mess that they leave behind. Comparatively, The Dark Knight Rises is the most uneven of Nolan’s trilogy. It gives us some of those crazy moments of pure movie joy like The Dark Knight did—moments that are rare and need to be cherished—but it doesn’t give us quite as many, and it offers up the lowest lows that this series has to offer. There are chunks of this movie that are flat-out boring, and, even worse, there are moments that are just plain bad.

Most of the complaints that one might have stem from the fact that Nolan and his brother Jonathan just haven’t written a very good script. The basic story is that its been 8 years since the end of The Dark Knight. The death of Harvey Dent has been spun into being an inspirational tragedy, and has resulted in the signing of the Dent Act, a sweeping legislational reform which gave Gotham P.D. unprecedented power to clean up the city and crush organized crime. During this time the caped crusader has been inactive and Bruce Wayne has been secluded in his mansion, growing weak and hobbled. But now a mysterious cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), who’s shown up at Wayne Manor to steal his mother’s pearls, and a mysterious mercenary named Bane (Tom Hardy), who’s shown up with a small army and intentions of taking over Gotham, have forced Wayne to once again don the cape and cowl, and become the Batman.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) ***/*****

Nerdy kid bit by a sciency spider gets spider-based super powers. His uncle dies due to his irresponsibility, teaching him responsibility. Then this newfound sense of responsibility makes him feel compelled to save people from the evil plans of a super powered bad guy. At this point, you know what a Spider-Man origin story looks like. The difference, this time around, is that Spider-Man and his alter-ego, Peter Parker, are being portrayed by The Social Network’s Andrew Garfield, his girlfriend is the blonde one, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), and the bad guy he’s facing is the one-armed scientist turned rampaging were-lizard, Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans). Plus, it’s all being put together by (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb, so it’s got something of a teen romance vibe going for it.

The question everyone seems to be asking about The Amazing Spider-Man is whether or not we needed a new telling of the Spider-Man origin, seeing as everyone has already read it in countless comic books, and a film version of the tale was made just ten years ago—very famously—by Sam Raimi. In order for a complete reboot of the Spider-Man story to not feel like a retread, Webb was going to have to take a radically new approach to the material, risk alienating comic book purists, and prove to everyone that his vision of the Spider-Man world couldn’t have been brought to the screen any other way. So, how does he do? Not well. The only difference between this Spider-Man and Raimi’s seems to be that the hero’s web shooters have been restored to their rightful, mechanical origins, and the chronology of his girlfriends has been restored to its rightful, Gwen first order. Other than that, you get all the same uncle drama, all the same getting to know his powers sequences, all of the same nervous flirting, and all of the same rooftop crises. Asking us to be wowed by Spider-Man’s powers coming to life on the big screen is a little ridiculous, seeing as we’ve just watched it happen in three recent movies. But asking us to once again sit through the same origin story that everybody already knows, for seemingly no reason, is kind of unforgivable. Webb and company would have been better off just doing their recasting and treating this as an unofficial sequel to Spider-Man 3 that doesn’t explicitly reference Raimi’s take on the material.

The Avengers (2012) ****/*****

Now that he’s got a mainstream franchise film under his belt, Joss Whedon will probably be best known as the guy who directed The Avengers. But before this he was best known for being the guy who created cult TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. That might not look like a good enough resume to entrust him with what is potentially the biggest movie of all-time on paper, but if you revisit his career up to this point, and you study what he did with those genre-bending TV shows, it suddenly becomes clear why he’s the only guy on the planet who could have taken on a project as big and complex as The Avengers and made it a success.

Over the course of Whedon’s television work he perfected the art of filling a room full of characters with wildly divergent personalities, having them chafe against each other, and using their conflicts to create both drama and humor. In everything he did he started with a handful of loner, individualist characters and had them develop into a family over time. And over-and-over again he figured out how to present fantastical, over-the-top genre material without any of the cheesiness or cheapness that usually comes along when it’s served up by someone else. His recipe looks something like: one part character development; one part balls-to-the-wall action; one part respect for the story he’s telling; add a dash of mock-heroic humor. Faced with as daunting a task as making a movie with a cast as large and a scope as epic as The Avengers, Whedon’s potion was just what Marvel needed to make sure they didn’t fall flat on their faces.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012) */*****

The first Ghost Rider movie, directed by Mark Steven Johnson, is a contender for worst comic book movie ever, which pretty much puts it in line to be a contender for worst movie ever. When that massive turd hit theaters it didn’t seem very likely to anybody that a sequel would ever be made. But, you know, that’s the magic of opening weekends and overseas grosses. Pull in enough that first weekend, before people know what they’re dealing with, and pull in enough overseas, where big, broad stupidity seems to be the thing that best crosses language barriers, and even the crappiest of movies can be viewed as a success. So here we have Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, a sequel brought to us by Crank directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. Now that the Ghost Rider character is in different creative hands, how does it fare? Not well. This fetid sequel is nearly as bad as the original, but seeing as it is a bit more self-aware about its badness, not quite as laughably so; which pretty much ruins the whole point of going to see a Nic Cage movie.

That’s the second thing you need to know about this sequel. One might think that if you were going to take a second crack at Ghost Rider you would want to distance yourself as much from that abysmal first film as possible; start things completely over, put together a completely new cast... but here he is, Nic Cage, once again playing Johnny Blaze. This time he’s wrapped up in a plot that involves the Devil who turned him into a demon (Ciarán Hinds) hunting down a woman (Violante Placido) and her child (Fergus Riordan), because the kid is his spawn, and the fresh, young body he plans on transferring his consciousness into. Along for some of the ride as well is Moreau (Idris Elba), some sort of leather jacketed, French monk who’s presence in the story seemed completely unnecessary (though I can’t complain because, hey, Idris Elba), and a secondary bad guy who is hired to track down the boy and his mother, and who later gets turned into a demon named Ray (Johnny Whitworth).  

Chronicle (2012) **/*****

The three protagonists of Chronicle are relatively normal kids until they find a mysterious hole in the ground. Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is the outcast, Steve (Michael B. Jordan) the popular guy, and Matt (Alex Russell) the uh... guy who quotes things. That all changes once they foolhardily spelunk into the hole, which is emitting a strange hum, however. While exploring they come across a big glowing something or other, and after touching it they develop the extraordinary ability to move things with their minds. What follows is the tale of what these young men decide to do with such strange and powerful abilities. And, surprisingly enough, nobody puts on a spandex outfit, no code-names are chosen, and the fate of the world never hangs in the balance. Instead, despite its super power conceit, Chronicle makes the atypical choice of keeping its focus squarely on the teenage experience. That sounds refreshing on the page, but there’s a catch... concept is the only place where this movie manages to be anything other than typical. And the further you get into its run time, the more of a been there, done that experience it becomes.

Chronicle does have its good points. The sequences where the boys explore their powers offer up quite a bit of escapist fun and actually take up a much larger portion of the movie than they usually do in these teens who become super tales. And the sequences where they decide to use their powers to make the nerdy one popular felt like they were about to become a fun twist on the girl with glasses and a ponytail lets her hair down and becomes a hottie trope (even if the concept of high school kids going gaga over a nerd doing an impressive magic act at a talent show made me roll my eyes a bit). But, unfortunately, the bad eventually outweighs the good.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) ***/*****

Marvel’s newest super hero film, the last on the road to their big hero team-up movie The Avengers, sees veteran director Joe Johnston take on the adventures of Captain America, the super soldier. The year is 1940whatever and the Nazi’s are the scourge of freethinking, compassionate people everywhere. Cap starts out as scrawny Steve Rogers, a kid from Brooklyn who has tried to sign up for service and been denied five times due to his diminutive stature and varied health problems. Salvation comes when he is recruited for the government’s super soldier program, which promises to take a normal man and inject him with a serum that will make him the ultimate Hitler-punching force in the universe.

The main conceits of Captain America’s origin are pretty dated, they look a bit corny to modern eyes, but they deal with fundamental enough issues that they should still be relatable. Everybody can sympathize with the little guy. Everyone gets the same cathartic thrill when they see him stand up and defend himself against bullies. When you factor in that the Nazis are pretty much the ultimate bullies, the Cap story still has a lot of potential to thrill. All you have to do is handle the material with some respect. Captain America: The First Avenger does that. It’s a straight faced take on the Captain America mythos that gets the look, feel, and casting right on the money. I think a lot of people are going to come out of it liking it for that reason. But when you strip all of that modern mythology stuff away and view it as just a standalone film, I found it to be rushed, lacking focus, and in need of a couple rewrites. I don’t think Captain America is a movie that’s going to age well at all.

Green Lantern (2011) **/*****

The Green Lantern Corps are an intergalactic police force that harness a powerful green energy composed of the universe’s collected willpower to keep peace across the cosmos. This isn’t a new crew of guys, they’ve been around for a long time, and they’re the brainchild of a group of little blue immortals called The Guardians. Despite the lengthy history of their organization, never before has there been a human member. Humans are a young species, weak and stupid, like the galactic version of infants. We’re so ignorant of what’s going on out there that we’re not even sure if there are other life forms in the universe or not. And there are. Ones that look like big fish, big bugs, big pigs, ones that look like mean guys with pointy ears and pencil thin mustaches. The Corps’ most deadly enemy is an entity named Parallax who harnesses the yellow energy of fear. He’s been imprisoned for quite a while, but now he is free, feeding off the fear of the universe, and planning revenge against the Green Lanterns who imprisoned him. Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a free spirit, maybe a bit of a lost soul. He’s not so great with the responsibility thing, but he’s one of the best test pilots out there, and he’s the first human to be chosen to become a part of the prestigious Green Lantern Corps, at a time when their most powerful enemy is threatening the existence of the entire universe. It seems like Hal should be in for a pretty wild ride, but he’s not. Actually, Green Lantern is boring as hell.

Thor (2011) ****/*****

Of all the top tier Marvel Super Heroes that have been established over the decades, Thor has always been my least favorite. Many of the other guys have powers that put them on the level of Gods, but at the end of the day, they’re just regular people who have been put in extraordinary situations. There’s something relatable about that, maybe even something inspirational. But Thor is actually a God. He’s from another realm, he is the product of a culture completely alien to us, and his everyday trials and tribulations look nothing like our own. Tony Stark is just a cocky inventor dealing with the demons of his addictions and the destructive force of his own vanity. Peter Parker is just an insecure kid bogged down by guilt. But Thor is a mystical warrior whose place in comic stories generally just boils down to being the strong guy that stands in the background hitting stuff with his hammer and saying “thee” and “thine”. So when a feature film chronicling Thor’s solo adventures was announced, I wasn’t so enthused. The best-case scenario, I figured, would be that we get a sword and sorcery story set totally in Asgard that might, if we’re lucky, work as well as something like the Lord of the Rings trilogy did. The worst-case scenario, as I saw it, was that Thor would be a fish out of water story about a lumbering oaf coming to Earth and having a bunch of wacky misunderstandings while trying to integrate into our society. What I got instead was about a fifty-fifty mixture of the two. And while I didn’t feel like the fantasy world worked quite as well as something like the Lord of the Rings movies, the fish out of water stuff on Earth was far more effective than I imagined it would be. What that left me with was a satisfying summer blockbuster that doesn’t break any new ground, but which delivers the goods when it comes to big adventure and competent crafting.

I Am Number Four (2011) **/*****

I Am Number Four engages you from its very first frame. It plops you down in the middle of the jungle. The camera lingers over the nooks and crannies of an impossibly remote jungle shack. Two men sleep in beds covered in mosquito nets. A noise is heard outside, they jump into action, and before you even know what you’re watching somebody has met their grizzly end. Not only does this sequence get your blood pumping from the sudden violence, but also it instantly introduces a ton of intrigue. Who are these men? What are those things that came to them in the night? What am I in for with this movie? And then you get a jump from a nocturnal ambush in the bush, to a scene of a group of impossibly attractive American teenagers tooling around on jet skis. Water splashes, they flash their gleaming smiles, some sort of generic rock music plays over the soundtrack. It feels like the movie you were watching got interrupted by a soda commercial. But the soda commercial doesn’t end; and then you start to realize that you paid to watch the soda commercial.

The Green Hornet (2011) ****/*****

I don’t know exactly what I expected to get going into this movie, but I didn’t expect it to be good.  I had already gotten burned by Cop Out and The Other Guys last year, two spoofs of buddy cop movies that didn’t live up to their potential.  Did I need to see the whole thing all over again but with superhero masks instead of badges?  I’ve liked the films that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote together before.  Superbad was funny, and they teamed up with indie director David Gordon Green to make the solid Pineapple Express; but the trailer for this one didn’t look as much like a straight comedy as those previous films.  It looked like another boring superhero origin story with a bit of a lighter tone.  I need to sit through another superhero origin story like I need another hole in my head (the ones I have now are fine).  For The Green Hornet they’ve teamed up with another indie director, but this time it’s one that I’ve never really responded well to in Michel Gondry.  By the time I had seen the advertisements for this thing a couple of times I had already written it off.  I didn’t even want to sit through another commercial for it, let alone see the entire movie.  But, I did anyways.  And I’m glad I did, because The Green Hornet didn’t turn out to be the film I was pigeon-holing it as at all.