Dark Phoenix: Better than average

Dark Phoenix (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for considerable sci-fi violence, disturbing images and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang

Comic book writers are notorious for adjusting, revising, reworking or even completely undoing the mythic back-stories and details of long-established characters. 

The spooky, otherworldly Vuk (Jessica Chastain, right) insists that she can help the
confused and increasingly overwhelmed Jean (Sophie Turner) control cosmic powers
that are literally off the chart. Naturally, Vuk's motivations are far less than pure...

Nothing is sacrosanct: not even death. If so-and-so perished nobly while saving the universe, s/he can be resurrected five years later via some previously undisclosed loophole. (If all else fails, rely on time travel.)

Putting up with this is difficult enough with comic books, but at least such contrived and manipulative nonsense can be “justified” during multiple issues over the course of many months.

It’s a lot more disconcerting when the newest X-Men entry — Dark Phoenix — makes absolute hash of the continuity established in previous films … or so it seems. Apoplectic fans sputtering “But … but … but!” are advised to pay closer attention to what went down in 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Which is how writer/direct Simon Kinberg gets away with the jaw-dropper that hits during this new film’s second act.

It also kinda/sorta justifies — albeit with an eyebrow lift — this film’s more-or-less replication of events already covered in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. Both are based on the iconic Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum/John Byrne “Dark Phoenix Saga,” which played out in comic book form from 1976 to ’80 (back when only one X-Men comic book hit the stands each month, and boy, those were simpler times).

At its core, this is a common superhero plot device: What happens when a good hero turns bad?

Having proven themselves heroic after events in 2016’s (thoroughly unsatisfying) X-Men: Apocalypse, Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and his mutant students happily bask in the unaccustomed glow of public acclaim. Charles has a direct line to the U.S. president; children eagerly purchase dolls and other ephemera related to their favorite X-Man … or X-Woman, as the shape-shifting Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) tartly suggests should be the team’s actual designation, given how frequently the gals save the day.

That’s no mere idle comment. Female characters are front and center in this film, and it’s darn well about time.

Logan: Beneath contempt

Logan (2017) • View trailer 
No stars (turkey). Rated R, and generously, for relentless profanity and strong, brutal violence
By Derrick Bang

Discussing the big-screen adaptation of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, back in late 2014, gave me the excuse to indict Suzanne Collins’ reprehensible source novel as a complete betrayal of her characters, and of her readers: a needlessly nasty finale that cruelly (and pointlessly) killed major supporting characters while turning resourceful Katniss Everdeen into a sniveling victim.

When their attempt to enjoy one restful night is interrupted by a squadron of gun-toting
killers, Logan (Hugh Jackman) and Laura (Dafne Keen) do their best to survive.

It was the most senseless, deliberately mean-spirited betrayal of a heroic franchise — by its original author, no less — that I’d ever encountered.

Until now. This film is even worse.

Logan doesn’t merely trash the long-beloved character of Wolverine, played here (for the ninth time!) by Hugh Jackman; director James Mangold and his gaggle of co-writers defecate all over the entire X-Men franchise and, by extension, the broader Marvel superhero universe. All this, with the apparent blessing of the parent company, given the familiar pre-credits Marvel Entertainment logo.

Shame on everybody involved.

Whereas 2014’s exciting X-Men: Days of Future Past cleverly employed backwards time travel as a means of re-booting the franchise — with smiles all around during the unexpectedly happy ending — Logan takes the opposite approach, moving the action forward to 2029. The tidings are grim: All of Logan’s X-Men comrades are dead, via some horrific event that apparently involved both Charles Xavier/Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and an evil scientific genius named Dr. Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant).

I say “apparently,” because while the film repeatedly references this ghastly occurrence, we never get details.

A despondent Logan, his once-invulnerable body being poisoned by the adamantium enhancements to his skeletal frame, is drinking his days away while earning chump change as a limo driver. His lair, across the border in Mexico, also serves as a hideout for Xavier, stricken with Alzheimer’s, senile dementia or some other brain disorder. Their sole companion is the albino mutant Caliban (Stephen Merchant), who fears that he’s doing little but watching his two friends die. Slowly.

Unlike the rival DC universe, which occasionally indulges in such canonical mischief by branding the results “imaginary stories” or “elseworlds tales,” Mangold makes no such reassurances here. This is the way things are ... and they’re about to get worse.

X-Men: Apocalypse — Thud and blunder

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and quite generously, for gratuitously fleeting profanity and distasteful, soul-crushing violence
By Derrick Bang

Enough, already.

Things were bad enough last summer, when Avengers: Age of Ultron gave us characters capable of re-shaping reality, along with a celestial scheme to return Earth to its Ice Age. Hollywood’s apparent need for superhero movies that forever increase the sense of scale — like a junkie craving ever-stronger fixes — was plain outta control.

When Charles Xavier (James McAvoy, center) is alerted to the presence of an ultra-
powerful mutant, he and his comrades — from left, Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), Moira
Mactaggert (Rose Byrne), Alex Summers (Lucas Till) and Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) —
try to determine how best to find this entity.

This newest X-Men entry is even worse, with a villain who literally can re-shape the planet according to whim: a level of power so off the chart that the very notion of this guy being stopped by anybody, let alone young and largely untested mutant heroes, is simply ludicrous.

What, I wonder, could be next? A baddie who’ll pull the Moon out of its orbit? Destroy Saturn and her rings? Extinguish our sun? Annihilate entire galaxies?

It’s impossible to care about any of this film’s sturm und drang, because its screenplay — credited to Simon Kinberg, Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris and director Bryan Singer — doesn’t spend enough time with character development. Worse yet, the little we do get is needlessly grim and mean-spirited: the same problem of tone that infected Batman V Superman a few months back.

The early X-Men films were entertaining by virtue of the wary ensemble dynamic that united such radically different characters into a team, and for the way that everybody’s strange and weird powers were blended into a cohesive fighting unit. That camaraderie is all but lost in this smash-fest, which instead revels in an arrogantly callous level of civilization-snuffing carnage that I’ve not seen since the distasteful 2012, which depicted mass death with all the gravitas of a pinball machine.

Singer’s tone is about the same here, with John Ottman’s bombastic score adding even more portentous fury. And just to seal that atmospheric deal, Ottman’s original themes are augmented, at (ahem) apocalyptic moments, by the equally dour second movement (“Allegretto”) of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.

Not much fun to be had, all told, in this 143-minute endurance test.

X-Men: Days of Future Past — One for the ages

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for nonstop action violence, considerable grim content and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.23.14

This one cooks.

The X-Men film series has earned high marks from its debut back in 2000, notwithstanding the frustrating rival studio issues that prevent these characters from operating within the larger tapestry of the “Marvel Universe” project that includes Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and the Avengers.

After learning that black-ops types plan to conduct dangerous — even lethal — medical
experiments on some helpless mutants, a furious Raven (Jennifer Lawrence, second
from right) gets quite irate with the goons responsible, while helping the others escape.

Director Bryan Singer got Marvel’s “merry mutants” off to an excellent start with the first two films, and he returns here, batteries fully charged, for a rip-snortin’ adventure that satisfies on every level.

Longtime comic book fans, who’ve followed these characters since their debut back in September 1963, can point to three periods of writer/artist genius during the series’ half-century history. Old-timers still cite the Roy Thomas/Neal Adams run, despite its brevity, as the highlight of 1969 and early ’70. The subsequent generation scoffs at that choice, pointing instead to the bravura Chris Claremont/Jim Lee run from 1989 through ’91.

In between, though, we enjoyed four years of greatness from late 1977 through early ’81, thanks to Claremont’s imaginative stories and artist/co-author John Byrne’s artwork. And that run produced a two-parter, “Days of Future Past,” which remains one of the all-time best comic book stories, anywhere ... not to mention one of the most ingenious time-travel narratives ever concocted (and cited as such in a recent issue of the British pop culture magazine SFX).

Fan reaction was guarded, when word broke that this new X-Men film would adapt that classic tale. Doing it justice would be difficult enough; carefully sliding it into the big-screen mythos already established by the first three films and 2011’s X-Men: First Class, even harder. Screenwriters Simon Kinberg, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn therefore deserve considerable credit, because they pulled it off. And then some.

Failing to give Claremont and Byrne a “story by” acknowledgment, however, is utterly indefensible. And I rather doubt that Claremont was mollified by his eyeblink cameo.

To a degree, this film also has been shaped by the wattage of its primary stars, most notably Jennifer Lawrence, who has become huge since first playing the shape-shifting Raven/Mystique in First Class. Hugh Jackman’s ultra-cool Wolverine also is front and center, as are James McAvoy’s angst-ridden Charlie Xavier and Michael Fassbender’s smoothly malevolent Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto.

But wait, I hear you cry. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen also appear in this adventure ... and aren’t they also Xavier and Magneto?

Well, yes ... and that’s the nature of time-travel stories. Done properly, we get to eat our cake, and have it, too. And this is one tasty treat.

The Wolverine: Claws for delight

The Wolverine (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for intense sci-fi action, mild sensuality and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.26.13

I’ve never understood why critics sharpened their claws so gleefully while savaging 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Few bona-fide actors have inhabited a superhero role with the panache Hugh Jackman brings to this Canadian-born berserker, and that earlier solo adventure was just fine, in my book.

Logan (Hugh Jackman) finds himself helplessly manacled, his claws unable to extend,
as the sinister Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) reveals that this imprisonment is
merely one element of her horrible plans. Still to appear: the dread Silver Samurai.

Sure, it lacked the wit and overall snap of The Avengers, but that’s true of most big-screen superhero epics. The more important observation is that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was far, far better than, say, Daredevil or either Fantastic Four bomb.

And, for the purposes of our discussion, Jackman’s newly released sequel. The Wolverine, is better still.

Writers Christopher McQuarrie, Mark Bomback and Scott Frank focus on the key element of Wolverine’s character: that he’s a modern ronin, a samurai without a lord or master to serve. This definition applies to the X-Men mythos in both comic books and big-screen adaptations, where Wolverine may or may not consider himself part of the team at any given moment, depending on recent events.

Building further on that core, McQuarrie & Co. have constructed a narrative from several of the X-Men/Wolverine comic book story arcs that found our clawed protagonist in Japan, a country that understands and practices the same warrior’s code of honor by which he lives.

Perhaps the surprise success of the big-screen adaptation of Kick-Ass had something to do with this, thanks to that saga’s flamboyant, sword-wielding character of Hit Girl; perhaps it’s mere coincidence. Whatever the reason, we finally get live-action embodiments of Mariko Yashida and Yukio — characters co-created in the Marvel Comics universe by writer Chris Claremont and artists John Byrne and Frank Miller — and brought to excellent life by Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima, respectively (although costume designer Isis Mussenden shouldn’t have based the latter’s look quite so heavily from the aforementioned Hit Girl).

Angst-ridden journeys of the soul always make good sagas, and this one’s no exception. The core plot doesn’t always hold together — the barrage of double- and triple-crosses makes it rather difficult to separate some of the good guys from the bad guys — but the destination isn’t nearly as important as the trip itself.

One other caveat: McQuarrie, Bomback and Frank assume that viewers either know the Marvel universe or have seen all previous X-Men films, which I regard as mildly presumptuous. For the benefit of newbies, then, a few key facts left unexplained:

Logan (Wolverine) is essentially immortal, thanks to a scientific process that laced his bones with the indestructible metal allow adamantium, and a “healing factor” that quickly repairs all wounds. He’s also much older than one would expect, and doesn’t show his age. Finally, he’s currently consumed with guilt and grief over having been forced to kill X-Men teammate Jean Grey, when she “went evil” as Dark Phoenix (that crisis depicted in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand).