Aquaman: Waterlogged

Aquaman (2018) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, and somewhat generously, for considerable sci-fi action and violence, and occasional profanity.
By Derrick Bang

This film has serious issues with tone and balance.

Far too much of director James Wan’s narrative — he shares writing chores with Will Beall, Geoff Johns and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick — sags beneath the weight of overly florid, Shakespearean-style dialog that most cast members lack the gravitas to pull off.

Having burrowed deep beneath the Sahara Desert, to discover the remnants of a long-
lost undersea kingdom, Arthur (Jason Momoa) and Mera (Amber Heard) activate a device
that will provide the next clue to the whereabouts of the fabled Lost Trident of Atlan.

And which is compromised further by the mildly earthy comments tossed off by star Jason Momoa. Mind you, he’s good with a quip, and Wan apparently felt that such contrasting elocution styles would be amusing. Instead, it’s merely awkward.

Then there’s the matter of villains. A superhero is only as good — as interesting — as his adversaries, and Momoa’s Aquaman has two. By far the more stylish, and far more dangerous, is a high-tech pirate known as Manta, played with savage malevolence by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. He’s a baddie to be reckoned with: a rage machine who radiates danger and has serious issues with our hero.

But Manta is relegated to B-villain status: an afterthought who isn’t much of a problem, and ultimately becomes a joke.

Which is ironic, because the true joke is Patrick Wilson’s laughably awful handling of the alpha villain: Aquaman’s half-brother Orm, would-be despotic ruler of all the undersea kingdoms. Wilson is atrociously out of his depth — pun intended — and radiates about as much menace as damp Kleenex. He looks and sounds like a whiny little boy who’s about to have his toys taken away.

This film collapses every time Wilson speaks a line, or faces off against the far more formidable Momoa.

I’m guessing Wan brought Wilson along for the ride, because the two of them have worked together on a bunch of nasty little horror flicks (the Insidious and Conjuring series, The Nun). Which points further to Wan’s poor judgment.

Aquaman also suffers from excess been there/done that: the inevitable result of too many superhero films piling atop each other. The regal look and sound of Atlantis, with its massive statuary and guarded “approach bridge” — and its position as one of seven mythic undersea kingdoms — are blatant echoes of Thor’s Asgard and its neighboring eight realms.

Aquaman’s mano a mano duels with Orm, over control of the Atlantean throne, are straight out of the Black Panther playbook … where, rest assured, the clashes were handled far better, and carried much greater emotional weight.

The Commuter: Catch the next train

The Commuter (2018) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for action violence and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang

When Lewis Carroll’s Alice quite reasonably suggests that one can’t believe impossible things, the Queen of Hearts insists that “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

The queen would have been right at home with this movie.

When Joanna (Vera Farmiga) — a total stranger — sits opposite Michael (Liam Neeson)
and proposes a mysterious "what if?" scenario, he assumes that she's merely passing the
time during their commute. Increasingly unlikely events quickly will demonstrate that
she's completely serious...

Director Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Commuter is a hilariously ludicrous start to the cinematic new year: a thriller that makes absolutely no sense and survives on momentum alone ... until it doesn’t.

The script — assign the blame to Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi and Ryan Engle — sails right past improbable and far-fetched, and heads straight into preposterous. It demands a suspension of disbelief far beyond the capability of mere mortals.

Theater ushers will have quite a task after each screening, carefully scooping up all the viewer eyeballs that have rolled right out of their sockets.

This storyline probably began with the intriguing notion that regular commuters — despite sharing (in this case) the same New York train, five days a week, 52 weeks a year — really don’t know much about the folks with whom they exchange cheerful greetings twice each day. What secrets might be concealed behind those superficial smiles?

Insurance salesman Michael MacCauley (Liam Neeson) finds out one day, when his late-afternoon trip home is interrupted by an enigmatic woman (Vera Farmiga, as Joanna) who sits in the opposite chair and strikes up a conversation. She behaves like a friendly, flirty psychologist, posing a “What would you do for $100,000?” scenario.

Michael indulges her (already unlikely, on a New York City train).

Perhaps, being well read, he recognizes this riff on Richard Matheson’s 1970 short story, “Button, Button,” in which a mysterious man gives a poverty-stricken couple a box with a button, promising $200,000 if they push the button, which will kill “someone whom you don’t know.” (It was filmed as an episode of the 1985-86 revival of The Twilight Zone, and then again in 2009, as the feature film The Box.)

Joanna departs at the next station, with an ambiguous comment that suggests her scenario isn’t all that fictitious. Michael, curious, investigates ... and finds a percentage of the cash, hidden right where she promised. At which point, she calls his smart phone, insists that he now has no choice but to comply with her demands ... lest his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) and son be harmed.

Michael’s task: to find the person on the train who “doesn’t belong,” is carrying a bag, and answers to the name of “Prin.” Before the train reaches the end of the line.

Watchmen: Tick-tock...

Watchmen (2009) • View trailer for Watchmen
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, and quite generously, for nudity, profanity, sexual content and urelenting graphic violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.6.09
Buy DVD: Watchmen • Buy Blu-Ray: Watchmen (Director's Cut + BD-Live) [Blu-ray]


Fans of Alan Moore's Watchmen are in for a ripping good time, because director Zack Snyder's big-screen adaptation of this seminal 1980s graphic novel is geek paradise.

The film is impressive faithful to its source material, and at just shy of three hours, Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse have plenty of time and a massive canvas on which to reproduce all the important details, large and small, that made Moore's ground-breaking deconstruction of superheroes so memorably engrossing.

Having decided to defy the government's ban on their activities, the costumed
heroes Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) derive
considerable pleasure from quelling a prison riot while searching for one of
their comrades.

You will not, however, find Moore's name anywhere on this project, which claims simply to have been adapted from the work by Dave Gibbons (the original 12-part comic serial's artist) and "DC Comics." The notoriously eccentric Moore, no fan of the film industry — despite what I'd argue are honorable big-screen renditions of his other works, From Hell and V for Vendetta — refused to allow his name to be used to help sell this film.

Hey, his loss.

Watchmen belongs to the recent trend that reasonably questions whether super-powered beings automatically would be virtuous beacons of integrity. Obviously, they wouldn't all be; a certain percentage of any subset of humanity would include those with opportunistic streaks and even criminal tendencies.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely ... or, to employ one of this story's catch-phrases, Who watches the Watchmen?

Moore's saga, obviously written in a white heat of rage prompted by his perception of where the world was going in the 1980s, takes place in a slightly altered universe where "Masks," as superheroes have been dubbed, began operating in public during the WWII years. Oddly, they're a mostly American phenomenon, which generates considerable nervous tension on the part of other world powers.

When President Nixon later calls on the Masks to help the United States win the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union's perception of American arrogance escalates a nuclear missile build-up that prompts worried scientists to set their "doomsday clock" to scant minutes before the midnight of annihilation.

(In a deliberate nod to Dr. Strangelove, a scene in Nixon's war cabinet shows various generals cheerfully acknowledging the necessity of insane levels of collateral American lives lost, when — not if — this war begins. One can hear the echo of the grinning George C. Scott, as he ruefully admits that we'd "get our hair mussed.")