ANGELS & DEMONS - ron howard - 2.2 / 10

Ron Howard has always been a competent filmmaker. And while he was never going to make a masterpiece, his films had an amiable quality that made them easy to watch and hard to hate. That was especially true of his earlier work like Splash, Gung Ho and The Paper. None of them were particularly good, exactly, but they were well made, well acted and pleasant enough. Not the kind of thing you’d rush out to see again or to tell your friends about, but not a bad way to spend a couple hours. There was never going to be anything controversial or provocative, nothing risqué or even all that challenging, but a Ron Howard film could always be counted on to be entertaining. In fact, that was sort of the trademark of a Ron Howard movie.

But that all changed when Howard hooked up with Akiva Goldsman in 2001. Goldsman, perhaps the least talented, most simplistic writer currently working in major studio movies, is the man responsible for destroying the old Batman franchise (having written Batman Forever and Batman & Robin), no mean feat considering Batman might be the world’s most popular and enduring fictional character. He’s never met a cliché he didn’t love and writes as if he has a screenwriting textbook next to his laptop at all times. The man has never written anything that wasn’t oversimplified, diagrammatic and just plain boring.

When Goldsman and Howard teamed up for A Beautiful Mind and were inexplicably rewarded with a fistful of Oscars, it solidified their creative partnership. Since then they’ve collaborated on The Da Vinci Code, Cinderella Man and now Angels & Demons, growing more formulaic and dull with each film. Where a pre-Goldsman Ron Howard movie could be counted on to be entertaining and pleasant, even occasionally affecting, a post-Goldsman Ron Howard movie can be counted on to be bombastic, boring and borderline insulting in its pandering to the lowest common denominator.

In the specific case of Angels & Demons, it means that every vital piece of information is repeated at least three times so that even the least attentive viewer can follow along (e.g. the fact that the bomb is set to go off at midnight is said at least four times by four different characters). It means that there are long, incredibly dull passages of exposition that make no sense in the context of the film but ensure that the less intelligent members of the audience know exactly what’s going on (e.g. Robert Langdon’s many long digressions about Vatican history to a bunch of Vatican employees who really shouldn’t need to be lectured by some Harvard professor). And it means that making sense falls a distant second behind looking and sounding cool.

It’s filmmaking by idiots for idiots is what I’m saying. And it’s downright insulting to anyone capable of following a plot more complicated than that of the average American Idol episode. And while that might lead to a box office bonanza (indeed, Howard’s collaborations with Goldsman have been his highest grossing movies), it also makes their films nearly impossible to sit through.

I could go on and on about the myriad issues I had with Angels & Demons, like why, for instance, when Langdon and a Vatican police officer are locked in a airless vault and suffocating to death it takes them minutes to figure out that maybe shooting the glass would be a good idea. Or, for that matter, how it’s even possible that two guys could use up all the oxygen in a massive room in just a couple minutes. Or why the power was shut down that long in the first place since a ten second power outage would have accomplished their goals just as easily. But once you start down that road you get sucked into a never-ending spiral of nonsense and idiocy; each instance of absurdity leads to another moment even more ridiculous and on and on. Nothing makes any sense and pointing out the exact ways in which it all fails to cohere would require more brainpower than was used to make the film in the first place so I won't bother.

Suffice it to say that Goldsman and Howard continue their unbroken streak of commercially successful, artistically bankrupt films. And know that if you pay good money to see Angels & Demons and you have more than a couple functioning brain cells, you’re going to be disappointed and extremely bored.

TERMINATOR SALVATION – mc g – 2.3 / 10

When you get right down to it, none of the Terminator films really make all that much sense. Why, for instance, if the machines could send three terminators back through time to kill Sarah and then John Connor, couldn’t they send a hundred? Why couldn’t they send a terminator every single day until they had a whole army of terminators? Why couldn’t they send a terminator further back in time to go after Sarah when she was still a little girl? For that matter, why couldn’t they send a terminator back to the 1800s to kill Sarah’s ancestors? Wouldn’t the technological advantage the terminator would have make them easy prey?

STAR TREK - j.j. abrams - 8.0 / 10

Describing a particular film as a rollercoaster thrill ride is about as cliché as it gets and usually the last refuge of the lazy critic, but that phrase is uniquely appropriate as a description of Star Trek in that the film is as fast moving, exciting, enjoyable, harmless and ultimately forgettable as any ride at Six Flags. To be sure, that’s no small accomplishment. I’m hard pressed to think of more than a handful of films that offer as much genuine enjoyment as this one. But like a rollercoaster ride that’s been enjoyed by thousands of theme park attendees without any real incident, the thrill of Star Trek is just in taking the ride, not in being asked to contemplate what any of it means.

And that’s a really good thing for the film because if you stop and think about what’s actually happening at any given moment, none of it makes any damn sense. For instance, is it really believable that Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood, outstanding) is able to convince Jim Kirk (Chris Pine, appealingly arrogant) to enlist in Starfleet that easily after he’s spent his whole life running away from the institution that took his father? Does it make any sense that a stowaway on the Enterprise (Kirk) would be promoted to First Officer before having done anything to deserve it? Is there really no one on that massive ship more qualified? (The same could also be said for Uhura and Dr. McCoy who go from cadets to bridge officers in what has to be world record time.) Or, for that matter, what the hell is Winona Ryder doing in old age makeup playing Spock’s mom? Couldn’t they have found someone age appropriate to play the part?

Thankfully, however, it’s pretty hard to concentrate on these questions and inconsistencies while the film is unspooling. It’s only afterwards in thinking about it that they crop up. During the film, the terrific cast glosses over any holes by having so much damn fun flying a spaceship, teleporting into hostile environments, parachuting from outer space (another thing that I’m pretty sure is impossible) and knocking the crap out of each other. Their sense of wonder, adventure and excitement is so infectious that it’s impossible not to get caught up in it. There’s no guile, introspection or brooding. Everyone is just loving whatever it is they’re doing. From Chekov running down the halls to get to the teleportation room so he can rescue Kirk and Sulu to Scotty’s glee at seeing a fistfight on the bridge to Kirk’s amused grin pretty much all the time, it’s abundantly clear that everyone is on the adventure of their lives. And it’s pretty hard to hate on the film in the midst of that.

Similarly, this shared sense of glee between the audience and the characters is what made Iron Man work as well as it did (and earn as much money as it did). The film might be flawed (hell, it’s really flawed) but Tony Stark is having so much damn fun being Iron Man that the audience has fun too. With so many revered blockbusters of late (The Dark Knight, Superman Returns, etc.) making it seem like being a hero is a lot of work and inflicts some serious psychological damage, seeing the characters of Star Trek almost giddy at the prospect of saving the day is pretty remarkable and extremely satisfying. Just like a rollercoaster, there’s all the fun of actually doing something harrowing and death defying with none of the attendant danger or stress that would come with doing it for real.

That, of course, is also why the film falls short of real greatness (well, that and all the plot holes). There’s just no way that real people put in situations like these would behave the way these characters do. And because they wouldn’t, the film really doesn’t have all that much to say beyond simply entertaining its audience. But given how few would-be blockbusters accomplish even that, Star Trek is sort of remarkable.

If that seems like I’m damning the film with faint praise, perhaps that’s because I wasn’t quite as taken with it as I think I could have been had I known nothing about the Star Trek universe going in. There were a few too many nods to the original TV series and movies for my taste and they kept knocking me out of the film. Any time some tidbit of Trek lore was referenced (the Vulcan death grip, the guy in the red suit dying first, etc.), it momentarily broke the fourth wall and took me out of the film. And I’m not even that big a fan of the original series. I’ve only seen a handful of episodes of the show and only the first two (out of six) of the films. I imagine that if I’d seen them all this film might have been little more than a long string of inside jokes.

That being the case, I wonder if the film is actually less entertaining for hardcore Trekkies (or Trekkers or whatever they’re calling themselves these days). They might be pleased at having been kowtowed to, but having in-jokes constantly taking you out of the film is more annoying than anything else. I imagine they’ll also complain that even though the new film is a lot more visually impressive and emotionally thrilling than anything the original series and films were able to do, that misses the whole point of Star Trek. The point, at least as I understand it since I’m not much of a fan, is that the lack of pleasing aesthetics is the point. The show made its audience work to enjoy it. And though this turned off a lot of people, if you managed to stick with it, the reward was (supposedly) great.

I can’t really speak to that but I think rebooting Star Trek this way, as a fun, enjoyable ride, was the only way to make the series relevant again. The introspection and deeper meaning can came in the inevitable sequels. For now I’m content to marvel at the way in which J.J. Abrams and Co. (a group of people I honestly never thought would create anything of real merit) have reinvigorated an all but deceased franchise simply by making it fun. They made the world of Star Trek—a world that had, in the last decade or so, become all but synonymous with nerdy geekdom—a place that the average filmgoer who has never read a science fiction book in his life would want to visit. That alone is a remarkable feat. But that they did it with such unfettered joy makes Star Trek the blockbuster to beat this summer.

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE – gavin hood – 2.4 / 10

Overstuffed with plot while simultaneously failing to explain some key elements of the character’s mythology, X-Men Origins: Wolverine never really figures out exactly what story it’s telling and because of that turns out to be mostly a muddled mess of a film. So much happens over the course of the film’s two-hour run time that it’s really somewhat amazing how little of it is memorable or interesting. Perhaps even more surprising is that amidst all the vehicular action sequences, hand-to-hand battles, gunfights and explosions, the film never takes the time to explain why these people have superpowers and how exactly their powers work. Anyone who’s seen the X-Men films would, I assume, understand that the world of Wolverine is filled with mutants who each have unique abilities (teleportation, flight, laser beam eyes, etc.) and that Logan’s ability is that he can heal himself. But if you didn’t know that going in, I think it’d be pretty damn confusing as to why he’s been alive for over a hundred years and bullets seem not to have any effect on him.

But those concerns amount to little more than nitpicking when compared to the film’s main problem, namely that John ‘Wolverine’ Logan (Hugh Jackman, trying hard but ultimately forgettable) really has no purpose, no goal. There’s nothing the character really wants to achieve that justifies telling this story. He spends the first hour of the film wandering around from place to place with no real purpose (except maybe to be at peace, whatever that means). And for the second hour of the film, he just wants to kill Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber) who he believes murdered his paramour. Unfortunately, if you’ve seen any of the other X-Men films (which you sort of need to to understand this one), then you know that Victor survives the events of this film. Thus you know that Logan is going to be unsuccessful in achieving the only real goal he has, which sucks all the tension and narrative drive out of the film.

The problems with the film run even deeper than that, down to the very concept at the heart of its creation: i.e. the fact that this is a prequel that seeks to explain what happened in Logan’s past to turn him into the character we met in the X-Men films. But there’s a good reason why, when the character was first introduced, he was never given much of a backstory. This lack of a past was the most interesting thing about him. However good the idea of explaining that past might seem, allowing the viewers to fill in those gaps for themselves was always going to be more fulfilling. It’s the same problem that afflicts the Star Wars prequels. It might have sounded like a good idea to show how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, but not only are the prequels a complete artistic failure, the image of the bratty child Vader had once been carries over into the other films, forever tainting what had previously been a pretty terrifying villain by bringing him down to human level.

There’s really just no way to explain what happened to Logan that would be nearly as interesting as what the viewers could come up with on their own. On top of that, this film has the added burden of having to end with Logan in more or less the same place he begins the X-Men films, that is without any memory of who he is or how he became the killing machine he is. In other words, at the end of Wolverine, Logan has to lose. And it was going to take people with far more talent than the ones assembled for this project to make a big summer blockbuster that ends badly for its hero protagonist but still satisfies the audience. That just wasn’t in the cards for this film.

FIGHTING – dito montiel – 2.2 / 10

There are really only two types of boxing movies: ones about an underdog facing a bigger / tougher / more experienced champion in a fight no one expects him to win (all six Rocky films, Cinderella Man, etc.) and ones about whether or not the hero will throw the big fight for a fistful of cash (The Set-Up, Pulp Fiction, etc.). In a genre this limited and formulaic, the fact that Fighting aims to combine these two plots marks it as at least slightly different. Unfortunately, different does not mean better as Fighting just goes through the motions without any particular verve, passion or momentum. For a film about people beating the crap out of each other with their bare fists, it’s incredibly laid back and doesn’t seem to take anything all that seriously.