An Engame that sets us up nicely for the future

Just under a year ago, reviewing Avengers: Infinity War, I described it as “over-hyped and flawed, but still an enjoyable romp”.

Having seen it again on TV, there’s no mind-changing going on here.

But 11 months on and Marvel/Disney have given us part two: Avengers: Endgame. And it’s fair to say that, while the hype has been even greater, the reality is streets ahead of its predecessor.

Rolling in at another whopping three hours, this picks up where Infinity War left off, with the remaining Avengers searching for a way to undo what Thanos had unleashed.

It’s giving away little to say that time travel is involved but, as the film explains, not like in any other movie you’ve seen – basically, even "Back to the Future’s a bunch of bullshit"!

You can make a case that the Russo brothers engage in about 30 minutes of indulgence in the later stages of this film, but they get away with it. Why? Because it’s the end of an era and that deserves respect and care. Yet Endgame never feels as though it drags in places, as its predecessor did. This is a more emotionally engaging movie.

There’s character development – even Steve Rogers/Captain America gets to show a spot of humour – while Mark Ruffalo has an absolute ball as Bruce Banner/Hulk. It is, indeed, the first time I’ve really felt engaged by the latter – and I’ve been watching that character from TV’s Lou Ferrigno on.

In the massive – and impressive – ensemble cast, Josh Brolin gets to deliver another creepy Thanos performance. Indeed, this quiet-spoken tyrant with a god complex gets one particularly skin-crawling speech.

Karen Gillan is superb as Nebula, Rene Russo gets a great brief turn as Frigga and Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie leaves you wanting to see her get the chance to develop the character further.

Then there are characters that, for me personally, I had not really noticed before, but did here and felt that they worked well: I see you, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye and Paul Rudd as Ant Man.

All of this is without mentioning the Marvel icon that is Iron Man, in the person of Robert Downey Jnr – a character that helped get me into Marvel superhero movies in the first place, precisely because he wasn't a boring, bland fart.

Endgame has plenty of moments that provide real surprises. The fight sequences work, without dominating everything else. It has humour aplenty – more than last year’s offering. 

In other words, it’s cracking entertainment.

There are loads of potential set ups for future, post-Avengers development – and given the money these films are raking in, it’s a safe assumption that there are plenty of things already in development.

Given the Sony-Marvel set up – plus Deadpool over at Fox –one can only muse on what it would be like if any one studio pulled all these threads together. 

I kid you not: I’m salivating at the thought.

Oh. And in case you are wondering, there is one (last?) Stan Lee cameo.

Venomously underwhelming, but just perhaps ...?

Marvel Studies can do little wrong these days, but while they make it look easy to produce big, brash and fun films, Venom is a reminder of just how cleverly they do it.

Intended as the first offering in a Sony Marvel universe, Marvel Studios were not involved in the film – although Stan Lee is credited as an executive producer and, almost inevitably, has one of his Hitchcockian cameos.

In many ways, this is a mess. Apparently, Tom Hardy stormed off the set at one point, furious with his dialogue. The first half of the film lacks pace as it sets up the basic premise of how Hardy’s investigative journalist Eddie Brock become host to alien lifeform Venom, which is on Earth courtesy of the Elon Musk-like Carlton Drake, a filthy-rich, techy entrepreneur with a messiah complex.

Brock has already pissed off Drake by challenging his ethics and, as a result, lost both his career and his fiancé Anne (Michelle Williams).

If not quite yawn-inducing, this set up does nothing to set the pulse racing. However – thank goodness! – when Venom and Brock become one, everything lifts. It could almost be a sexual union in terms of the energy it injects into the film.

This is not to say that everything is suddenly fab, but apart from anything else, it does create a sense of fun in the banter between Brock and Venom (the latter voiced by Hardy), which is as effective as a celluloid snort of cocaine.

Suddenly it become clear that, with more attention to the script, Venom could be more than a very, very very, very poor man’s Deadpool.

Some of the CGI is too fast – there’s a late fight scene, for instance that leaves you wondering what is actually happening on screen – but you make it to the end and find that, ultimately, it’s been measurably closer to being fun than to simply being a snore-a-thon.

Hardy grows into the role too, seeming uncomfortable early on, but developing as he gets to unite with Venom.

Williams is feisty and (like Brock) becomes less one-dimensional as the film develops.

Riz Ahmed turns in a nice performance as Drake, catching a really good tone of barking, amoral genius with far more subtlety than one might expect from a villain in the cinematic incarnation of a comic.

Hardy has signed to make two more Venom films: there was just enough here to suggest that this could be a good move. But this is far from a A-plus: Sony has some work to do.

Over-hyped and flawed, but still an enjoyable romp

In terms of sheer hype and expectation, Avengers: Infinity War must be near the pinnacle of Hollywood frenzy. One of the most expensive films ever made, with an estimated budget of $316–400 million, it achieved massive pre-release ticket sales and, by 26 May, had pulled in $1.849 billion at the box office.

Bringing together various strands of the Marvel universe, it centres on the acquisition by Thanos of all the infinity stones, rendering him pretty much invincible.

Various superheroes try to stop the genocidal lunatic, but all fail.

This provides the core idea that many fans have hailed – that supposed superheroes are not that super and can end up doubting their own abilities etc. None of this is, however, new.

There are a lot of things here that work – and when they do work, they work very, very well: the banter between Tony Stark and Dr Strange and their relationship with Spider-Man offers much fun. After all, when you get Robert Downey Jnr and Benedict Cumberbatch firing off each other, it’s likely to be worth watching, while Tom Holland is very good as a the teen among them.

The Guardians of the Galaxy crew are just great – not least the part of the team (Rocket and Groot) that splits off with Thor. Honestly: I possibly need to buy this film on some format just to rewatch (and rewatch and rewatch) Chris Hemsworth’s Asgardian god repeatedly describing Rocket as a “rabbit” and later, Groot as “Tree”. This is comic genius and probably worth the admission price alone.

Josh Brolin’s Thanos is actually very good. He brings to the role a sense of a warped intelligence that has begun from a genuine concern at what causes poverty to one that allows himself the power to solve it by wiping out half the population of every planet that he visits – and then convincing himself that, as a result of his decision, everyone lives happily ever after.

Indeed, the character itself and the question that he addresses lends a philosophical element to the film that is welcome.

But unfortunately, the whole also suffered from being overlong and, by the end, rather repetitive: ‘how many times have we seen this fight?’

It also shows us how out of date Captain America is: more modern superheroes are much savvier and funnier. Steve Rogers is past his sell-by date and it shows. Interestingly, it also illustrates the yawning gulf between Marvel and DC, the latter of which continues to plough forward with a batch of dated characters, with only Wonder Woman really suggesting a sense of a really new life through comics and film.

There’s lots to like here, but it’s already a long way from being the best Marvel film released this tear: Black Panther and Deadpool 2 leave it standing.

But doesn’t this also all tell you the level of expectation that now awaits every Marvel release? And what will it be like by the release of the second part of this story, slated for 3 May next year?

Deadpool's back – and this sassy sequel is the tops

The 2016 Marvel smash hit, Deadpool – $783.1m at the box office for a budget of $58m – always had the feeling that it might be a one-off. Could the Merc with the Mouth really pull it off again?

But the arrival of Deadpool 2 makes it clear that this was no blip: if anything, the new film is even better than the initial outing.

It says something about Marvel that, on the one hand, it can be producing the rather more ‘serious’ superhero films such as Avengers: Infinity War at the same time as having an anti-hero like Deadpool take the proverbial out of just that. In fact, it probably says most of why DC are struggling so much in the film stakes.

Personally, I can enjoy both sort of superhero outing, but this latest instalment of a character who was initially introduced to comics as a villain has something extra and David Leitch’s film develops that brilliantly.

Two years after Wade Wilson/Deadpool has become a mercenary, he just misses killing a drug dealer, who then murders his beloved Vanessa on the night of their anniversary, just after they’ve agreed to start a family.

Deadpool is distraught and tries to kill himself, but since his super power is regeneration/healing, this isn’t very effective.

Things take a new direction, though, when a mutant teenager at an orphanage, Russell ‘Firefist’ Collins, explodes with rage. Deadpool is drawn into the situation – just as cybernetic warrior Cable arrives from the future on a mission to kill the boy.

That’s it – no further spoilers.

Perhaps one of the most surprising things about the film, though, is that for all Deadpool’s wisecracking (and there’s plenty of that), it suddenly jolts to moments that are moving, in a story that has a philosophical and emotional complexity that belies the usual ‘comic book’ stereotype.

Of course, the shattered broken fourth wall, the gags about Marvel (and DC) and the self deprecation all help to give the audience a greater sense of human connection to Wade than it would to a brooding bat-type character, for instance. And that’s without mentioning the constant flow of references to other films, comics and much, much more.

The supporting cast has become stronger – Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) and Colossus (voiced by Stefan Kapicic) return, with a chance for some character development, while Domino (Zazie Beetz) and Josh Brolin as Cable add new energy from the sidelines.

Leslie Uggams and Karan Soni are also back as Deadpool’s elderly roommate Blind Al and the taxi driver, Dopinder, while Julian Dennison does a remarkable job as a Collins.

Ultimatel though, this is Deadpool’s film and Ryan Reynolds does not disappoint.

 It was suggested two years ago that this would be a career-defining role, and that becomes ever clearer. 

Sassy, sexy, arch, violent, rude – and enormous fun, it can only be hoped that this will not be the final outing for him and his developing family.

Black Panther leaps onto screens with style and depth

Marvel’s growth as a cinema brand was always set to continue this year, with Avengers Infinity War due out in the spring, Deadpool 2 shortly after that and Ant-Man and the Wasp in mid summer, but for a whole bag of reasons, Black Panther is arguably the biggest release of them all.

Sitting in a packed cinema on opening day, with one of the most mixed audiences imaginable, it was impossible to miss the expectation, just as it’s impossible not to be aware of the film’s cultural importance.

The eighteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s based on the superhero comics series that was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966.

The film gives us a basic backstory about the creation of a fictional east African nation made up of five tribes that are united as Wakanda under the first Black Panther. Once established, Wakanda develops extraordinarily advanced technology, that – among other things – enables it to hide itself from the rest of the world by appearing to be a poor Third World country.

Fast forward to Oakland, California, in 1992, where a Wakandan prince has become convinced that isolationism is wrong and that the country should share its technology with people of African descent around the world to help them defeat their oppressors.

Fast forward once more to the present, just after King T’Chaka’s death and the accession of his son, T’Challa, to the throne. But before he’s got time to properly get his feet under the royal table, faces from the past reappear, determined to exploit the change of monarch for their own ends.

This is a cracking Marvel romp, but with enough of a philosophical edge around the issue of isolationism – and the legacies of colonialism that the film also makes clear, open references to – to illustrate (were it needed) that comics and the films based on them don’t have to be vapid.

Scripted by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, and directed by the former, the film also benefits from excellent production design by Hannah Beachler, who creates a visually convincing Wakanda that melds the advanced technology with a vivid sense of actual African cultures.

The cast too is uniformally excellent – starting with Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa (channeling Mandela a tad, but why not?). This is a character who’s dignified, brave and morally intelligent – and fortunately Boseman ensures that he’s sexy and complex too, avoiding that oh-so-serious quality some Marvel superheroes have.

Michael B Jordan as Erik ‘Killmonger’ Stevens is another who adds a pleasing level of complexity to his role, while Lupita Nyong’o as undercover Wakandan spy Nakia, Letitia Wright as Shuri, T’Challa’s teenage sister and the nation’s tech genius, Danai Gurira as Okoye, head of the country’s all-female special forces and royal bodyguard the Dora Milaje, Florence Kasumba as Dora Milaje member Ayo and Angela Bassett as Ramonda, T’Challa’s mother, give the audience more really strong impressive female characters in one film than anyone would usually expect.

And not to forget Forest Whitaker as Wakandan elder statesman Zuri, Andy Serkis – appearing almost without CGI! – as South African black-market arms dealer, smuggler and gangster Ulysses Klaus, Martin Freeman as CIA agent Everett K Ross and South African acting legend John Kani as T’Chaka and there’s not much chance things are going to slip in the acting department.

The action sequences are as good as you’d expect; the whole thing looks superb and some of the mythical/ancestral plane sequences are really beautiful. Indeed, the sense of the mythological in the film is part of why it’s so successful: it has a feeling of a story that really does go back into the mists of time.

Irrespective of the expectation, Black Panther is a top-notch entry into the Marvel film universe.

Of that expectation – no film is going to spark a revolution, but it has gone way beyond simply avoiding being ‘not disappointing’. It offers black audiences – actually, all audiences – a whole raft of positive black characters and a positive black/African world.

It’s going to be fascinating to see what might be inspired by that.

A galaxy of fun with Groot and the gang

With Marvel now apparently able to pump out successful films at will, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 landed this spring to an expectant global audience that had made the first film such a massive – and unexpected – hit.

Set just a few months after the first instalment, this one sees our disparate bunch of heroes fighting off attacks by the genetically engineered Sovereign people, after Rocket steals from them for the sheer hell of it.

Hopelessly outnumbered, they bump into a godlike being who helps them escape – but what does he want in return?

In the meantime, the leader of the Sovereigns has hired Yondu to hunt them down, Gamora and Nebula are continuing their sibling rivalry and Baby Groot is slowly growing, but is confused about buttons on nuclear bombs.

It’s been suggested that this new film doesn’t feel as fresh as the first – well, there was never going to be quite the surprise factor – but it’s a rollicking good romp, with banter, action and laughs by the bucketload.

Chris Pratt as Star Lord, Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Dave Bautista as Drax, Bradley Cooper as Rocket, Vin Diesel as Groot, Michael Rooker as Yondu and Karen Gillan as Nebula all reprise their 2014 roles, while they’re joined here most noticeably by Kurt Russell as the celestial Ego and Sly Stallone as a Ravager leader.

And of course, Stan Lee gets to have his now expected cameo (except here, it serves to ensure that Stallone is not the poorest actor in the whole shebang).

It would be easy to assume that a film like this is easy money for Diesel, who only has one line to say as Groot – “I am Groot” – but he has to say it so many different ways and say it so slowly that it won’t be lost when it’s processed that he more than earns his corn.

The underlying theme of family works well and benefits from being handled lightly and never allowed to water down the rebellious nature of a bunch of characters who are accidental heroes with attitude rather than boring, sanctimonious super saints.

The whole looks great and the latest Awesome Mix Tape helps keep things going nicely.

So, it’s huge fun – do wait until the very, very end of the titles before leaving – and more than enough to make you glad that writer and director James Gunn has made it clear that there will be a third film.

Further adventures in comic land

Atmospheric artwork from Andrew MacLean

The last part of 2016 saw plenty of action on the comic front – it’s become a serious pleasure to get regular deliveries of Forbidden Planet subscription packets through the post – and there’s been plenty to enjoy from what’s been inside.

Here’s a few notes on what I read and saw in that period.

Descender 3: Singularities by Jeff Lemire continues to be a cracking read, with this third collection playing with time to allow us to see events from different characters’ perspectives, and there’s enough meat here to keep the reader wondering what they’re not yet seeing, as the companion boy robot Tim finds himself being hunted by myriad forces – and the motives are not obvious yet.

And one of the things that Lemire achieves is to make the less sophisticated robots’ characters too, creating real pathos – light years away from the comedic approach of, say, C-3PO and R2-D2.

Panel from Descender 3

Dustin Nguyen’s art remains a real pleasure, his watercolours in a limited palette offering an unusual approach to sci-fi illustration, but one that works beautifully here, offering a soft-focus contrast to the story that nonetheless never jars.

Trees 2: Two Forests arrived a while back and takes us further into Warren Ellis’s apocalyptic tale, narrowing the field of vision to just the ‘trees’ – alien craft of some unexplained variety – in New York and the Orkney Isles, and with these, the central protagonists linked to them.

There’s a brooding darkness building here, with a sense of impending doom and even an incident in London that could be read as a pessimistic comment on the growing anti-immigrant sentiment that both contributed to Brexit and was boosted by it.

All this is helped by Jason Howard’s art, with strong images and a muted palette providing an excellent compliment to the words.

On a lighter note, I have also enjoyed a spot of Doctor Strange from Marvel – though not half as much as I enjoyed the film. Indeed, with TV watching and 2016’s cinema visits for the doctor and Deadpool, I’ve got really quite absorbed into the Marvel universe – albeit it cinematically rather than the version on paper.

"We are Groot" And the racoon's pretty cool too

Big screen trailers for spring’s Guardians of the Galaxy II looks so much fun that I caught up with the first one over Christmas – and loved it! It’s smashing entertainment.

Late as ever to such a party, I am however, now able to cry ‘We are Groot!’ with the best of them.

Then there’s the mere thought of autumn’s Thor: Ragnarok, which in promising to see Benedict Cumberbatch reprise Strange and Antony Hopkins Odin, looks set to ensure that this interest continues.

Christmas also saw me catching some Captain America for the first time – a bit straight-laced as a character, but when your support cast includes Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury and, in Winter Soldier, Robert Redford as a senior SHIELD leader, plus the currently ubiquitous Toby Jones as a creepy, dead Nazi scientist (though not as creepy as his Jimmy Savile-alike villain Culverton Smith in last weekend’s Sherlock), then a bit of straight laciness can be coped with.

If Marvel have mastered the way to create universes from myriad characters, DC is floundering in its efforts to catch up, with last year’s Batman v Superman having been panned.

The only highlight was reputedly the brief first sight of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, set for her own individual movie release this summer.

Now I’ve loved Wonder Woman since the 1970s and the days of Lynda Carter, and it was one of the first things that I started reading as I dipped my toes back into the world of comics over the last few years, but DC’s 75^th anniversary comic was a disappointing, disjointed mess.

Much – MUCH – better was volume 1 of Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One from earlier in 2016, which provided a new but coherent take on the Amazon’s origin story.

Yanick Paquette’s art worked for me – but then again, I didn’t get in a tizzy about pictures of WW in chains. Well, not that sort of a tizzy.

I really don’t know whether I’ll watch this summer’s film: setting it in WWI as opposed to Wonder Woman’s conventional entry into human affairs in WWII suggests that the filmmakers have decided that, instead of understanding that conflict as six of one and half a dozen of the others, writ large across all the main actors involved, it’s going to leap in with a howlingly simplistic Goodies v Baddies approach.

We shall see.

Normal and the head of Agatha Blue Witch

Very differently, one of my personal discoveries of the year was Andrew MacLean’s Head Lopper.

Written and drawn by MacLean – and originally self-published before being picked up by Image – this is the tale of Viking warrior Norgal, who hunts down monsters with the help (though he doesn’t actually like it) of the severed head of Agatha Blue Witch, which he carries around in a bag.

Image threw the comic convention of monthly, 22-page issues out of the window for this, instead allowing MacLean to produce bigger issues on a quarterly basis.

And while the first trade is a lot heftier a volume than you’d usually expect, it doesn’t fail on the fun quota.

Completely different to Hellboy, it would nonetheless be impossible not to see a relationship between Mike Mignola’s seminal work and this.

There’s humour, violence, great atmosphere and a wonderful sense of the folkloric – yes, all things that you’ll find in Hellboy – along with a superbly stylised visual look, all of which effectively gets the Mignola nod of approval in a contribution from the man himself in the gallery at the back of this volume.

MacLean makes storytelling look simple and his art ticks incalculable numbers of boxes. The picture I’ve used here also illustrates MacLean’s fascinating use of foreshortening and perspective, which is a contributory aspect of the work.

There is not a single thing I don’t love about this.

Black Road comes with added ravens

Not very far behind in my personal appreciation stakes comes the first trade of Black Road, which also plunges readers into Viking terrain – but the mood and look could hardly be more different.

Magnus the Black is a man placed awkwardly somewhere between paganism and Christianity, as the church militant strives to conquer the Viking lands for Christ.

Hoping to perhaps ease the trauma of this momentous change for his fellow Norse men, Black finds himself caught up in the bloody politics of religious conquest – and has to turn detective when an official in his care is brutally murdered.

Brian Wood’s story has a satisfying complexity about it, but it’s the art by Dave McCaig and Garry Brown that really lifts this, with its evocation of the bleak, vast landscape of the north.

Having enjoyed the autumn release of the first trade, I’ve hit the subscribe button for the coming issues in this Image series, rather than wait for trade two.

Actually, that’s also an indicator that I’m getting sussed enough about the comics world that I spotted it before the new arc begins.

In the meantime, Skottie Young’s I Hate Fairyland is another comic that defies easy categorisation.

A bright, bubbly tot called Gertrude wishes to live in Fairyland – and then her wish comes true.

Gertrude is not as happy as Larry. Neither is Larry, to be fair

Unfortunately, 20 years later, she’s grown mentally but is physically still a child, trapped in a bubblegum world of sugary niceness.

A crazy new take on a sort of Dorothy longing for Kansas, Gertrude has become a sweary, psychopathic monster who wants to destroy everything and everyone as she tries to find an escape back to reality, accompanied by Larry, a cynical version of Jiminy Cricket.

Life is further complicated when the queen of Fairyland decides that the only way in which to deal with the chaos and violence is to have Gertrude herself killed.

Written and illustrated by Young, volume one was fun and the second trade is out now (if you look online at Forbidden Planet, it can currently be obtained with a very nice autographed postcard too).

It’s hard to know where Young can take this story – but fluff you (as our less-than-angelic Gertude so often puts it): it’s going to be fun finding out.

And finally, the autumn also saw my own first comic strip – okay, only three pages, but my words and my illustrations. It was published in a membership magazine that went to over a million people, but I've now put up a digital version, so you can catch it here. Enjoy!

The doctor may be strange, but the fun is spot on

The world might seem to be going to hell in a handcart, but the big screen entertainment just keeps on delivering.

Having not been inside a cinema for 16 years until July last year, the first 10 months of 2016 have already seen me make 10 visits – and given what’s on offer between now and the turn of the year, there are more to come.

Last night saw the 3D glasses make another appearance – this time for Dr Strange – another piece of superhero escapism from Marvel.

Dr Stephen Strange is a brilliant, pioneering neurosurgeon. Unfortunately, his ego and arrogance are on a similar scale, and when these traits help bring about a massive car crash that cripples his hands, he descends into a self-pitying, destructive mess.

Eventually, having heard of a man who made an apparently miraculous recovery from massive injuries, he heads out to Nepal, to search for a secret place called Kamar-Taj.

But all is not what he expects and, meeting the Ancient One, he finds all his beliefs about the nature of the world and life challenged, before finding himself in the unexpected position of having choose what path to take, with huge rammifications for the whole world.

We might have seen such a plot more than once – Ironman, anyone? – but this has been done with great aplomb and in very entertaining manner.

As with the decision to cast a major actor like Robert Downey J as Tony Stark, this benefits hugely from the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as the eponymous doctor.

The wry humour that he brings to the role helps give the character roundness ­– and the same is very much true of his performance during Strange’s deepest levels of despair. Add to this that he can bring great charm to the screen even when he’s playing arrogant alpha male.

Tilda Swinton is the Ancient One ­– casting that caused controversy, since the character was originally a Tibetan man. But she’s the sort of actor who revels in being mysterious and ‘different’ ­and that’s perfect here.

Mads Mikkelsen turns in a strong performance as villain of the piece, Kaecilius – and manages to look slightly like a demented Vladimir Putin on occasion, a reminder (deliberate or not) of the of the global sabre rattling we find ourselves witnessing.

Chiwetel Ejiofor makes a good Karl Mordo – an upright master who acts as a balance to the flexible Strange.

Benedict Wong as another master, the librarian Wong, forms a fun relationship with Strange. The actors bounce off each other nicely.

And Rachel McAdams as a former medical colleague – and lover – of Strange also turns in a gutsy, rounded performance.

We’ll pass over the Stan Lee cameo – and move onto Scott Derrickson’s direction.

After opening with an action sequence that introduces the Ancient One and Kaecilius, the plot turns to creating the character of Strange. But Derrickson never let’s you feel as though as though it’s flagging and makes it feel that we’re getting some meat and not just fluff.

The special effects are stunning – and the 3D really does add to the overall experience.

The spells and the different planes of existence both benefit from a sense of almost being like gossamer, while the warping of the physical world is simply incredible – it can make you feel as though you’re nearing motion sickness!

The whole has a sumptuous, glossy look and has been set up easily for further outings.

Dr Strange is quite simply enormous fun. If you want to be entertained, catch it soon.