Logan: The Best There Is At What He Does

Even with occasionally spiraling quality of the parent X-Men movies, there just never seemed to be a way to make a good movie about its flagship character Wolverine. While this could be chalked up to Fox losing faith the series after a few self-inflicted misfires (X-3), it never helped that the first actual trip into the tattered psyche of the character (Origins) still consistently ranks as one of the worst comic book movies ever put to film. And, while they did try to fix this problem with an awesome premise (Wolverine vs. Ninjas!) in The Wolverine a few years later, even that effort came off as too ham-fisted and afraid to explore the character fully. Apparently tired of hearing these complaints over the years and with the added bonus of Deadpool totally proving their business model wrong (R rated movies CAN make money!), Fox has finally decided to give us Logan, the movie Wolverine always deserved but never seemed to get. The result is something very near perfection.

Yes, despite taking 17 years and literally another hero (Deadpool) to convince stupid people of its potential, Logan is an awesome send-off to a worthy character who deserved it a decade sooner. The action is visceral and merciless, Stephen Merchant as Caliban is both a disconcerting comic relief and a genuinely honorable character, Dafne Keen might be the best newcomer of the last few years and does so with little or no dialog and, finally freed of the hang ups of a PG-13 movie, the script is able to weave and honest and believable narrative without neutering it for consumption purposes. This world isn't a happy place for mutants and whole dream of that utopia never came to fruition. Instead, the world just found a way to “deal” with mutants and left the survivors not so much to pick up the pieces but to wallow in the ash of the perfect world Xavier (Stewart) so desperately wanted to create. The final result is a world where mutants aren't so much a vilified race anymore as a decimated and little thought-of population desperately trying to find hope where they are little more than an endangered species no one is really keen on saving. It's a superhero movie where the superheroes are the ones who need rescuing.

Unfortunately, while the movie works so well when it focuses on its own humanity, it ultimately fails on its biggest selling point: the over-the-top violence. While this worked early in the movie as an explanation for just how hard the world has become, it eventually loses its context and falls into nothing but pointless bloodletting over its 135 minute run time. While this violence is still fun to watch, by the third act, it all falls into a tired pattern of Logan (Jackman) running into an army of disposable meat heads and choosing to dice his way through them for little purpose outside of feeling like the producers purchased too much overpriced fake blood. This, compounded by the film's scattershot narrative being given too much time to fester, causes the movie to have multiple narrative problems when it should be wrapping up for the awesome finale. While it still nails the ending by giving the main characters a worthy send off, it still remains a sad footnote that they pretty much had the whole movie in the bag before someone said, “Hey! Let's add one more action scene!”

As for watching it, do you like comic book movies but hate that they seem to neuter their best characters for a more box office-friendly PG-13 rating? This isn't kid-friendly in the slightest. Would you prefer being able to take your kids with you to the theater? Go watch Disney Marvel while the big boys finally get their day in the sun over at Fox. Either way, Marvel gets your money here.

James Mangold (The Wolverine) finally gets the green light to make a proper Wolverine movie with Logan, a dark, poignant superhero movie about a man wanting to die while desperately seeking something to live for. In the far future, mutants are now on the verge of extinction and Logan (Jackman) is an old man slowly dying from sepsis due to his metal bones. When offered a job to get mutant clone Laura (Keen) to a safe haven in Canada, Logan packs up his last friend Charles (Stewart) and the three go on a road trip occasionally punctuated by Laura getting angry and bad guys dying horribly. Basically, its The Road with a slightly more hopeful message and more cyborgs. Check it out.

My score: 8/10. Showtime just released its newest promo for the Twin Peaks reboot. It's a twenty second clip of creator David Lynch eating a glazed doughnut. Never change, man...

The Great Wall: Too Tall An Order

There are a lot of things I feel when people claim they are offended by a movie. Due to the fact that I'm incapable of such an emotion (I blame G-Force), I tend to mock said people because, in my mind, they are wasting what little time they have on this Earth not so much being offended by something that targets them particularly, but because they are offended AT THE BEHEST of an entirely different demographic of people. So, to those people, I say this from the bottom of my heart: shut up! Don't hate Great Wall for casting Matt Damon (a box office draw) in a Chinese movie (not a box office draw). If you have to hate it for something, hate it for being a generic cash grab with little depth and an even less understandable story.

Sadly, Great Wall, despite its obvious ploying for a Chinese audience (98% of the cast are established Chinese stars), is a pretty terrible movie. The story is confusing, the acting is hammy at best, the pacing is glacial and most side characters tend to go off on tangents that don't really get resolved in any satisfactory manner. Throw in the fact that some of the most memorable characters' best aspect get completely lost in translation due to poor introductions and you have a movie designed solely to pander to the Chinese under the guise of normalized relations instead of any kind of attempt at entertainment.

Fortunately, if you can bear with the heavy slog of exposition dialog via subtitles, there are a few awesome things to behold. Like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the White Witch and pretty much every Chinese epic ever made, the battle scenes are colorful and exciting and never skimp on a chance to see some interesting battle choreography. And, while she kind of gets written into a corner as a forgettable soldier with too much emphasis on duty, Tian Jing is kind of fun to watch and actually displays more depth than this movie would ever require. Hey, it made me interested in one foreign actress's career for a little while. I call that a win.

Reasons for watching it come down to you preference or lack thereof for foreign movies. Do you overlook subtitles and just enjoy the experience? You'll probably find a few things here to have fun with before the inevitable White Man Meddling that comes into play in the second act kind of drags the whole thing through the mud. Do you hate all foreign movies because they require you to read? You won't be missing anything really unique and, in all honesty, Damon and his English speaking cohorts are so bland they might as well have been named Bland English Speakers in the credits. It just comes down to how you want to spend about two hours of your life this time.

Yimou Zhang (House of Flying Daggers) goes from making amazing movies about Chinese legend to a sort of okay movie about Chinese legend with The Great Wall, a hammy-at-times, mostly overbearing attempt to dumb a foreign culture down enough for American consumption. After killing a mysterious creature on their way to China to trade for black powder, Mercenaries William (Damon) and Tovar (Pedro Pascal) are drafted into a secret Chinese order dedicated to guarding the Great Wall against supernatural attacks (via lizard...things) that occur regularly every sixty years. Along the way, William will learn about honor by watching a bunch of Chinese soldier die, Tovar will randomly spout something that's hilarious about sixty percent of the time and the whole movie will feel more like D-Wars (minus that awesome second act) than anything resembling an epic adventure. Tread here at your own risk.

My score: 4/10. Seriously, has anyone ever watched D-Wars? It's one of the worst movies ever made and, near the eighty minute mark or so, becomes freaking awesome! They've got dragons fighting helicopters, giant rhino things fighting tanks, stone soldiers fighting dudes with machine guns and a Korean snake dragon hugging a building! Then they all wind up on Mars or something and the thing dips back into its original, terrible quality. Why couldn't this movie do that?

Lego Batman Movie: Everything is (Slightly Less) Awesome

While I'm aware he's been around for far more decades than myself, it's still really hard to take anything Batman-related seriously because, let's be honest, no one else seems to even when they seem to demand your respect. The character, either through federal intervention, lazy writing or just the simplest of greedy motivations, has run the gamut of everything from hilariously bad (Batman and Robin) to horribly bad (Batman vs. Superman) to goofily awesome (Batman 66) to realistically average (Dark Knight Rises). Throughout these iterations, it always feels like the creators all had one thing in common: none of them were actually Batman fans. Well, for those of you wondering about the creators of Lego Batman, yes, they are fans and, yes, they are ready and willing to call out the character for his shaky history. The good news? The result is freaking awesome.

For all intents and purposes, Lego Batman could possibly lay claim to not only the best version of the character ever (Will Arnett) but also the first Batman movie to not take itself too serious to actually be fun. The characters are interesting, the setting is fun, the jokes are funny and, underneath the kid-friendly veneer of Lego blocks and PG dialog, there's an encyclopedic knowledge of Batman and his history that seems to exist for one very special reason: to make fun of just how ridiculous he truly is. This isn't the broody Nolan movies or the wasted Snyder attempt. At its core, its an argument that, if Batman wasn't such a loner, maybe he wouldn't constantly be reinventing himself (via numerous different writers and artists). Its like a Batman movie that tells you that Batman kind of stinks if you think about it too hard. Take that, nerds!

Unfortunately, and mostly because of its obvious connection to the superior Lego Movie, not quite everything really lines up when its supposed to. While the cast, setting and story are near perfect, the movie falls into a rut near the beginning of the third act due to the poor animation of what I call “Lego Action” (i.e. what happens when you try to fluidly animate plastic bricks). And, while its predecessor went out of its way to cleverly mock crass commercialism and kid movies as a whole, Batman lacks some of the biting humor that probably would have pushed this one over than particular ledge of quality. Hey, they can't all have an annoying song that you don't mind getting stuck in your head.

As for watching it, are you a Batman fan or a small child? Go watch this. The fan in you will love the Easter Eggs of days gone by and the kid in you will love the inherent silliness (sort of like the franchise as a whole). Are you neither of these things? Go watch Fifty Shades Darker as punishment for your boring existence.

Chris McKay (Robot Chicken) takes his irreverent comedic talents to the big screen with The Lego Batman Movie, a movie meant to help Batman fans get over themselves. When Gotham City, a multicolored metropolis supported by a flimsy brick bridge over a void that “smells strangely of dirty underwear”, is attacked by The Joker (Zach Galifianakis), Batman, with the help of accidentally adopted son Robin (Michael Cera), must find a way not only to put everything right, but also help Batman work out his compatibility issues with...well, everyone. Along the way, Rosario Dawson will be the best Batgirl ever, Superman (Channing Tatum) will seem like a bigger tool than he probably is and Jerry Macguire will be openly mocked as an unintentional comedy. It's like the movie equivalent of a flame war, but you have to be a comic book fan to either laugh or be offended by it.

My score: 8/10. In the movie, the Joker does bad things because he feels neglected and unappreciated by Batman's constant indifference to him. This movie actually claims bad things happen because Batman's a jerk. I wasn't aware filmmakers had guts like that. Respect.