Dark Side: ROGUE ONE

Rogue One takes what could’ve been trivial noodling around in Star Wars lore and turns it into a proficient sci-fi action movie building to intimations of grand space operatic tragedy. It’s the second film made after creator George Lucas sold his remarkable galaxy to Disney, who have thus far been studious, respectful, and cautious custodians. Instead of an idiosyncratic vision from one artist’s mind, it’s a committee polishing up effective fan service. (At least the emphasis is on “effective.”) For promising new narrative future, this latest film has nothing on last year’s The Force Awakens, with its immediately vibrant new personalities and their lingering unresolved promise: the simmering twisted villain Kylo Ren and fresh Force heroine Rey. But in staging Star Wars-ian action, Rogue One is the more complete experience, with a beginning, middle, and end, a style more efficiently beholden to what came before without strain, and a tone more willing to fit the enormity of the sacrifice in this conflict. It’s overly engineered to be a gleaming widget, fitting seamlessly into the larger franchise plan instead of springing from a singular revelation. But at least this is still a film that dreams a little bigger than most blockbuster product, playing in a hugely enjoyable and intricately imagined fantastical universe with some sense of the painful struggle to resisting brutal fascism.

This entry tells a big, confident tale of a dark corner of the galactic conflict we’d long known about but never seen: the process by which the Rebel Alliance discovered the existence of the super-weapon Death Star and stole plans that’ll end up given by Princess Leia to R2-D2 in the 1977 original’s opening moments. A self-contained – despite the endless references and offshoots into other areas of franchise canon – and admirably scruffy combat heist film – think The Guns of Navarone…In Space!! – it has a motley diverse crew of insurgents striking back against the forces of an evil empire. Better symbols than characters, the underwritten rebels make decent action figures. Through swooping, crashing, clamorous adventure sequences across all manner of terrain – deserts, villages, space stations, jungles, and tropical beaches – they fight. Reluctant rebel Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) joins a spy (Diego Luna), a comic-relief combat robot (Alan Tudyk), an Imperial defector (Riz Ahmed), and two monk-like warriors (legendary Chinese action stars Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang bringing fun choreography). Their mission: contact her father (Mads Mikkelsen), an unhappy Imperial scientist who knows how to take the Death Star down.

This leads to varied action beats, like an ambush in a far-flung marketplace, a mountainous recon mission in a downpour, and a dizzying dogfight above a gleaming citadel. Along the way we learn a little more about the Rebellion than the earlier films had time to explore, with different factions of the Alliance debating battle plans and how to deal with extremists (like an under-used Forest Whitaker) in their midst. This mirrors the Empire’s side, as a commander (Ben Mendelsohn) fights off the life-and-death office politics of battle-station life. The script, pieced together by four credited contributors (Chris Weitz, Tony Gilroy, Gary Whitta, and John Knoll) juggles the movie’s hard-charging tough-minded warfare with hit-and-miss cameos, fun one-liners, smart retcons, terse exposition, and shorthand emotion. That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air – and the strain sometimes shows, especially in the final product’s clearly tinkered dropped connections and foreshortened beats – but there’s fun to be had in the tactile look and crisp pace. There’s even a welcome commitment to feeling the losses, culminating in a staggering shot of good characters embracing certain doom knowing they’ve done all they could to win some small hope for their cause.

Although this is a side story, a spin-off, it’s identifiably Star Wars in its concern with family dramas writ large in galactic conflict and a sense of spirituality amidst tactics, plus gearhead love of spaceships taking off and landing and fantasy anthropologist appreciation of interesting creatures and beasties. (We get all the old familiar X-Wings and TIE Fighters and fish-heads and tentacle-haired beings, as well as slick new designs and goofy new aliens, like a massive Force-sensitive slug used as a lie-detector test.) Plus it has a key insight to style the cast like they’re actors from the 70’s – shaggy hair, groovy mustaches – playing the characters. Though cinematographer Greig Fraser shot gorgeous location photography and ILM filled it up with top-of-the-line digital fakery, it has the scuffed retro-future look of the original trilogy, like a modern re-creation of a 70’s vision. The much-ballyhooed lived-in universe aesthetic of Lucas’s original trilogy still draws visual appeal because it’s so densely designed. It proves there’s still a sense you could find a fascinating new story around every corner in every frame of this series. It also proves once more director Gareth Edwards (of 2014’s great Godzilla) is a master popcorn image-maker (despite many eye-popping shots featured in trailers ending up on the cutting room floor).

The movie works best when it has soaring spectacle clued into the enormity of its scale – a shuttle dwarfed by a planet behind it, the orbiting Death Star creating a solar eclipse, a city destroyed by laser-blast sending enormous shockwaves ripping up surrounding terrain in waves, and massive space structures colliding in the way everyone has played with the toys has dreamed about. But even in the moments when it’s merely workmanlike – or overworked franchise caretaking – it has some of the appeal the old Expanded Universe paperbacks did, varying in quality but consistently a drip, drip, drip of more, more, more for fans. It has all the bells and whistles, the immediately identifiable sound effects, music cues, and visual hallmarks of the series, even if it now has an over-polished committee’s recreation of what was once a singular personal pulp remix. The best thrills – a sensational final battle like something out of N64’s Rogue Squadron video game – feature dazzling effects and action better staged than Abrams’. It may still be imitation Lucas – or maybe imitation Kershner at this point – but it’s sturdy and entertaining nonetheless.

Animal Control: ZOOTOPIA

The most stirring, imaginative, tightly plotted, and politically engaged cop movie in years is also Disney’s newest animated film. Zootopia is among their best work: a spirited and emotional cartoon driven by charm and style, with lovely design and impressive technology put to use for an entirely satisfying story doing double duty as a winning allegory. It’s a most pleasant surprise, single-handedly recovering two tired genres: the anthropomorphic animal comedy and the police thriller. For the former it takes the snark and laziness out of a tired CG family film formula, and for the latter it retrieves the humanity from a collection of clichés. It’s everything family entertainment should be, a widely appealing all-ages crowd-pleaser, inventive and delightful, but unafraid to confront important issues and impart virtuous lessons without becoming condescending or cloying. This is a wonderful movie.

It takes place in a world exactly like ours transmogrified into a society of anthropomorphized animals living in a post-predator/prey utopia. Or so they think. Carnivores and herbivores live side-by-side in relative peace, going about their days like we do, wearing clothes, going to work, staring at smart phones, browsing shops, driving cars, eating out, listening to pop music, and so on. (I assume they’re all vegan.) We meet Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin, chipper and loveably bubbly) a brave, energetic, and optimistic young bunny who moves to the big city with dreams of becoming a police officer, despite prejudice against her meek and agrarian species. She’d be the first rabbit officer in Zootopia’s history. She’s excited to dream big and try hard no matter what, kissing her sweet farmer folks (Bonnie Hunt and Don Lake) goodbye and heading to a bustling metropolis like something out of a Richard Scarry tableau. Once there, she’s disappointed to be stuck patrolling parking meters while the bigger, scarier animals – elephants, bears, rhinos – get to do the important work. It’s a world full of bias and discrimination, and it’s allowed to hurt, and frustrate.

She gets a lucky break when her literally and figuratively bullheaded boss (Idris Elba), eager to get rid of what he sees as an annoying diversity hire, gives her 48 hours to solve a missing mammal case that’s baffled his veteran officers for weeks. Her only lead: a sly con man fox (Jason Bateman, brash sarcasm barely covering core decency) who may be able to help her navigate the city’s shadier corners. The movie becomes a terrific detective story as the reluctant mismatched partners, with a delightfully prickly rapport, attempt to unravel the mystery plaguing Zootopia. Along the way they pick up clues and informants and encounter a wide range of characters across all social groups, like a zen naturist yak (Tommy Chong), a weaselly criminal (Alan Tudyk), a rodent gangster (Maurice LaMarche), a meek sheep (Jenny Slate), and the commanding lion mayor (J.K. Simmons). The engaging mystery is full of genuine danger, suspense, and surprises. No cartoon violence here; when, say, a panther leaps in rage at our protagonists, slipping on the edge of a cliff, it’s as exciting and involving as any live action thriller.

Part of its thrill comes from the totally convincing sense of fantastical place. Zootopia is a fully developed city, so much so that watching the film hurtle through its neighborhoods feels like visiting a completely thought-through world. Disney’s animators bring it to brilliantly realized life, having figured out a way to make a metropolis convincingly populated by both giraffes and hamsters, hippos and mice. There are tiny neighborhoods for rats and massive structures for elephants, ice-cold mountains for polar bears and sweltering valleys for camels. Structures have tiny doors for teeny critters and massive entrances for lumbering beasts. It’s a vibrant, colorful, warm place dense with creative energy and detailed design, with puns and winks referencing our world without going overboard. There’s a sense you could turn a corner away from the scene at hand and stumble into another fully functioning aspect of animal society elsewhere. And the characters involved are expertly animated expressive creatures covered in dazzling textures (the fuzziest luxurious fur!) and imbued with nuanced vocal performances, humane even, with inner lives and their own points of view.

It’s not a movie that dawdles through its worldbuilding, though. It uses this bounty of imagination to bolster a genre narrative that’s zippy and appealing. It’s cute, bright, and exciting, an involving story happening to characters whose feelings are rich and vividly drawn. We follow the bunny and the fox (squint a little and it’s Thumper and Robin Hood) through chases and close calls, dramatic twists, and sweetly developing friendship. They’re adorable and relatable, quick witted and great company. And the script is nicely structured with payoffs to every setup. The movie finds great fun and emotion even as it pushes further into its implications. Lots of Disney’s best behind the scenes talent, responsible for many of their best recent efforts – directors Byron Howard (Tangled) and Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph), co-writing with Phil Johnston (also Ralph), Jennifer Lee (Frozen), and Jared Bush – find nuance in approaching the characters from compassionate angles, allowing our initial assumptions about them to be overturned in smart, natural ways.

It’s a fine allegory for identity politics, teased out in surprisingly nuanced, thoughtful scenes in which characters deal with bullying and confusion that stings. Each in the duo is given a childhood memory – an origin for confronting prejudice that’s seared with pain on their developing minds, and becomes a fulcrum deciding their future. The solution to their conflict sits with their ability to slowly recognize this and strive for a productive balance between naivety and cynicism. Of course, you can’t make species and race a 1:1 comparison. The first is classification, the second is a construct, and these evolved animals have long-buried predator/prey instincts we don’t within the human race. But as a safe funhouse mirror through which to view the impact of discrimination, it’s potent. And yet none of this design or messaging gets in the way of a whip-smart and endlessly entertaining romp. It’s light on its feet, but weighty where it matters. The movie forcefully and comfortably celebrates leaving space to allow every creature to surprise you, and has a steadfast faith in your species not determining your character.

Smart Guy, Dumb Movie: TRUMBO

Jay Roach’s Trumbo strikes me as a movie with a small target audience of people who care about Hollywood history without caring too much about movies themselves. It’s a well-intentioned recounting of the time when blathering idiots in Congress whipped up enough Americans with anti-Communist propaganda that they had to do something about it, that something being mindless persecution costing a great many people their livelihoods. (That we, too, live in a time where blathering politicians make a lot of noise about taking away civil liberties is a parallel not unnoticed.) At the center is screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (here played with gravel and scene-chewing by Bryan Cranston, late of Breaking Bad) who wrote many films (including A Guy Named Joe and Gun Crazy) before running afoul of conservative business folks who were sufficiently spooked by his Communist party affiliation to blacklist him and others like him. The movie lays out the broad strokes of the Blacklist’s rise and fall without caring too much about pesky things like nuance, context, or ambiguity.

With docudrama gloss, Roach (best known for directing Austin Powers, but who has done the reenactment thing before, with election-based HBO films Recount and Game Change) sets about recreating 1950’s Hollywood. He uses the too-bright, too-clean style of every biopic unconcerned with capturing anything but the events. He’s armed with a clear message of right and wrong (Yay, artists! Boo, bullies!), an interesting real-life hook, and a host of recognizable faces playing famous people. (There’s Michael Stuhlbarg as character actor Edward G. Robinson, Helen Mirren as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas, and so on.) The screenplay by John McNamara (NBC’s Aquarius) serves up the narrative with simple clarity and strictly expositional dramaturgy, which renders every line flat with the dust of a particularly earnest book report. People stand around explaining things to each other, talking like they’re dictating their thought processes, philosophies, and motivations for posterity. At one point, Trumbo is told to “stop talking like your words are being chiseled in granite.” Would that the film had taken its own hint.

The shame of it is that there’s a good story here. Trumbo was a first amendment hero, and the movie does the bare minimum to show it. He speechifies, he testifies, and he’s always a charismatic charmer. The scene where he refuses to name names and runs quippy circles around a Congressional committee is the highlight in this regard. But as he spends years hammering out scripts under pseudonyms for less pay and no credit, even winning Oscars for movies (like Roman Holiday) he can’t acknowledge he’s written, the film merely twinkles with the comfort of hindsight. Sure, poor Trumbo went through some tough times, didn’t he? But, ah, look who got the glory in the end, eh? After all, the Red Scare tried to drive him out of the movies and look who’s still here. Two-plus hours of uncomplicated back-patting from a movie that’s content to view the past from a know-it-all modern standpoint is hard to take. There’s not an ounce of genuine surprise or feeling in the whole thing.

Where’s the real investigation of Trumbo the character? The filmmakers have him on such a high pedestal they forgot to bring him down to our level and really dig into his thoughts and feelings. We see him interacting with his wife (Diane Lane) and kids (including Elle Fanning), but instead of illuminating his personal life, it plays like perfunctory “here’s the family” scenes.  We see him organizing support from writer pals (Alan Tudyk, Louis C.K.) and producers (Roger Bart, John Goodman), but those also play like dutifully arranged footnotes played lightly for strained seriousness. Trumbo the movie is clumsy and overfamiliar, too thin for those who know their Hollywood history, too flavorless for anyone. Trumbo the man was a good deep thinker, now immortalized in a movie of depressingly airy superficiality. The good news is that no one will remember this movie in six months, let alone last as long as his works. That’s the problem with bad movies about good filmmakers: there’s no good reason not to just go to the source.

Running on Empty: MAZE RUNNER: THE SCORCH TRIALS

The kids stuck in a maze in last year’s young adult franchise starter The Maze Runner are out of the labyrinth and in a post-apocalyptic confusion in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. There’s not a single maze to be found, but there’s still plenty of running as a group of boys and one girl find themselves in a mysterious compound where a commander (Aidan Gillen) tells them to be patient and he’ll take them to a better place. Turns out he’s lying, because of course he is. So off the kids run into a desert wasteland stretched between ruined cities. The world has ended, and they have no idea what to do, so why not keep running from the guys with guns who want to recapture them and feed their blood into blue vats pumping out potential vaccines for a zombie virus. (That doesn’t seem too bad, considering.) It really is that simple, but I don’t know why the whole thing has to be knotted up like no one has a clue, or why it takes our heroes so long to figure out their next move.

The least interesting of this cycle of teen adventure series – behind The Hunger Games, and Twilight, and even the thin derivative Divergent – the Maze Runners are without personality. It’s a dystopian sci-fi zombie conspiracy mystery with a screenplay (again by T.S. Nowlin) that works exactly like a jumble of tropes and half-formed carbon copies of better ideas used more effectively elsewhere. The characters are undifferentiated. There’s the lead (Dylan O’Brien), his buddies (Ki Hong Lee, Dexter Darden, Thomas Brodie-Sangster), and a girl (Kaya Scodelario), running through the desert called The Scorch, trying to survive. But between this movie and the last, we’ve spent nearly four hours with this group and I still couldn’t begin to tell you what their goals, hopes, dreams, and proclivities are.

They’re just the runway-ready grubby survivors, lost in scorching heat and stuck in a nightmare of zombie imagery. We know they’re the heroes because they’re young and this is YA. The bad guys are of course the grown-ups with the evil organization (the World in Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department – or Wicked, for real). It’s never entirely clear why the bad are so bad and the good are worth caring about, but never mind. Grown-ups just don’t understand. The escaped teens have nowhere to turn, and no interior lives to draw upon. Now, I could understand their spotty backstories, since their memories were wiped. But where’s the personality? They are thoroughly bland and lifeless despite the young actors’ best efforts to imbue their line readings with meaning, strain, and stress. When they run, they throw their whole bodies into it, swinging their arms side to side and twisting their torsos. It’s like they’re trying to run right off the screen and out of the theater. I knew the feeling.

As I sat through the movie’s opening stretches, I found myself wondering if the whole thing could be improved by the presence of some welcome older character actors who could at least elevate the dull, empty proceedings with their gravitas and charm. Soon enough, it started regularly introducing tiny nothing parts for the likes of Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Tudyk, Lili Taylor, and Barry Pepper. But even they can’t save scenes that require them to do nothing more than gravely intone exposition or wait for effects work to explode around them. Lifeless dreck, there’s not one moment lively or interesting in and of itself. The closest it gets are a sequence set in an abandoned zombie-infested shopping mall and, later, a woman (Rose Salazar) stuck on a rapidly cracking pane of glass over a deadly vertiginous height. In other words, even at its best it’s weakly lifted from better movies (Dawn of the Dead and The Lost World, respectively) without any creative twist or winking homage.

It’s just borrowed ingenuity heaped on a derivative structure. On a technical level it’s competently made, with convincing effects, sturdy photography, and some brisk action cutting. A moment involving a safe house rigged to self-destruct has a clever beat or two, and a moment of climactic betrayal-induced dread works well enough. But crushing boredom takes up most of its 131 long minutes as I quickly lost interest. I suspect director Wes Ball, helming the sequel to his directorial debut, could do good decent work given a better screenplay. Maybe a corporate superhero universe will call. But here a talented cast and crew have far too little to work with. It’s slick, professional, and completely uninteresting.

Earned Run: 42

We haven’t had a solid, clear, feel-good biopic in quite some time, so 42 will do nicely. It tells the story of Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman), a star baseball player in the late 1940s Negro Leagues who is given the chance to join the Brooklyn Dodgers by that team’s stubborn general manager (Harrison Ford). In the grand tradition of illustrated easy reader biographies – you know, the kind with a title like Jackie Robinson: Young Sports Trailblazer – this is a film of big broad strokes of biographical material spiced up with vivid, simple lessons about how terrible racism is and how average people with courage to do good things can sometimes make all the difference in the world. Writer-director Brian Helgeland, no stranger to sports movie formula given his anachronistic jousting movie A Knight’s Tale, brings a sense of sturdiness to the proceedings. It’s a brightly lit crowd-pleaser and a fine piece of Hollywood hero worship.

I’ll leave it to baseball historians to tell you how accurate the movie is, but as a movie, 42 works well to limit itself to Robinson’s ascent to the Dodgers and his first season playing for them. The incidents it chronicles are roughly those featured in the 1950 film The Jackie Robinson Story. Although that film starred Robinson as himself, I’ll go out on a limb and say that this new film is more truthful about the extent of the problems Robinson faced as the first African American to play in what was at the time an all-white league. There’s dissension from the public, sure, as well as from rival teams. In the film’s most effective sequence, an opposing team’s coach (Alan Tudyk) sends a relentless barrage of ugly slurs and stereotypes towards the batter’s box during every at bat. The film is also wise to avoid hiding the dissent that came from within the Dodgers organization, making it clear that Robinson’s mere presence in a previously all-white society was sometimes enough to unsettle otherwise reasonable people.

Despite the admirable details, Helgeland pulls his punches a bit. The ugliness of history is ugly here, but maybe not ugly enough. The thematic import of some scenes is underlined too forcefully, like in a cute but clunky scene of a little boy in the crowd explaining the game and, in the process, Robinson’s talent, to his mother. Still, it’s a better movie when it’s a baseball movie that’s incidentally a history lesson than when it’s the other way around. It’s my own personal prejudice that baseball is the most cinematic of sports, with naturally occurring long stretches of slow suspense and an interesting geometric playing field good for wide angles and interesting depth in framing. (That opinion may also have something to do with baseball being the only sport I find interesting to watch for any length of time.) Helgeland stages the games vividly and enjoyably, grabbing at scraps of tension related to both the game and the dynamics between the players, while never losing sight of Robinson’s presence.

As Robinson, Chadwick Boseman takes advantage of his first starring role, dripping charm and inviting sympathy with every glance. He plays the role as a simple ballplayer, aware of the pressure he’s under, but unaware of his legacy. If only all biopic performances were worn so lightly. There’s a dusting of romance care of Mrs. Robinson (Nicole Beharie, very fine) and the sweet sparkle between she and Boseman balances out the historical import that could’ve easily weighed the film down. The film has plenty of good performances from welcome character actors in sharply written historical caricatures. As the boundary-busting general manager Branch Rickey, Ford is a crusty charmer in what has to be his liveliest acting in quite a few years. Team management (Christopher Meloni, T.R. Knight), teammates (Lucas Black, Ryan Merriman, Hamish Linklater), and a radio announcer (John C. McGinley) are also given brief little moments in which to shine. It’s the well-rounded ensemble that helps fill out the background and keep the film from becoming only hagiography.

But what a wonderful sight to see such hero worship! Robinson’s a true black hero, a subject too infrequently taken up by filmmakers, at least on a massive, mainstream, studio level. (It’d make for an interesting double feature with Django Unchained in that regard.) When was the last time Hollywood deigned to roll out a major release focusing on a strong, complicated figure of African American history? I think you’d have to look back just over ten years, to 2001’s Ali, or twenty years, to 1992’s Malcolm X, to find such a picture. 42 may not have the artistry of those films, but is such a sturdy success that I’d love to see many more like it.  

Arcade Fire: WRECK-IT RALPH

Video game aesthetics have borrowed from Hollywood spectacles, which in turn borrowed right back, but Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, a bright, amusing animated comedy set in a world of game characters in an arcade, is interested in game play on a tad more than a superficial level. In this movie, the games are flexible, imaginatively malleable, and capable of shifting down to their very code. Drawing upon a Toy Story template, the characters in the games of this arcade come to life when the gamers aren’t looking. This allows for a movie of colorful creativity, creating impressive digital backdrops as characters end up zapping themselves out the back of their games, down through the power cords to a large power strip they call Game Central Station, a meeting place from which they can end up in any game they choose.

But just because the characters can jump from game to game doesn’t mean they should. Sure, some of the characters will party it up after closing time, but no one actually interferes with another’s game play. They see their fates as predetermined. At the movie’s start, we meet Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), a massive, lumbering villain in a Donkey Kong-like game. He’s spent thirty years smashing up an 8-bit high-rise only to watch day after day, level after level, the game’s namesake, Fix-It Felix, Jr. (Jack McBrayer), save the day. Felix gets all the medals, but Ralph’s left in the mud. That’s the routine and Ralph’s tired of it all. For no other reason than because he’s a bad guy, one of the only characters in any game he can really talk to is a ghost from Pac Man. For once, Ralph wants to win a medal and be loved, so he throws off society’s shackles and wanders into a couple of other games in his attempt to leave villainy behind.

He bumbles into Hero’s Duty, a first-person-shooter led by a sci-fi drill sergeant (Jane Lynch). He suffers an intense culture shock that’s hardly alleviated when he rockets over to the candy-coated kart racer Sugar Rush (think Mario Kart) and meets a spastic little girl (Sarah Silverman, in an exaggerated cutesy voice) and the goofily tyrannical King Candy (Alan Tudyk, unrecognizable with a loopy Ed Wynn voice). While Ralph is off gathering an island of misfit code, Felix sets off to find him and prevent their game from getting unplugged. The movie has a great deal of fun putting these two guys – one constantly grumpy, the other all gee-whiz innocence – into unfamiliar surroundings. When Felix first lays eyes on the shiny, dark-green-glowing scenery of Hero’s Duty he gapes and whispers “High definition” in awe. When Ralph lumbers into Sugar Rush he, through an elaborate pratfall, ends up stuck in a giant cupcake and beaten by a pair of anthropomorphized donuts (who are, of course, cops).

The plot’s rather uncomplicated, though it takes some fun twists and turns, and the premise isn’t pushed as far as I’d hoped, but that’s not so bad. As the movie settles into a nice, comfortable groove, it gathers a fine message about following your heart, being kind to others, taking pride in your job, and embracing your programming in order to transcend your programming.  That’s all well and good, but where the movie really works is in its breakneck speed and in its sharp, clever visuals, an explosion of homage and imagination, colorfully rendered. Director Rich Moore’s background with The Simpsons and Futurama might have something to do with the fine voice work and the clever animation including mile-a-minute gags and some unexpected reversals within dialogue, but the best part of the movie is the distinct environments of the three games in play. Fix-It Felix Jr. is a world of black out of which a building emerges, simple and blocky. Hero’s Duty is dark as well, but detailed and sleek. Sugar Rush is a place of overwhelming color and hyperactive silliness that lives up to its name and then some. In what has to be the work of a crew of animators who have much nostalgia for old video games, there are a great deal of cameos peppering the background between games – from Bowser to Pong and from Sonic to Q*bert – as well as strategic cutaways to renderings of the games as games.

In the end Wreck-It Ralph is an entertaining evocation of the way games work, where characters use cheat codes to gain access to secret parts of the game and where our protagonist moves through various worlds, defeating various obstacles, to try to win, that is, get a medal and get back before the arcade opens and his game’s unplugged for appearing to be out of order. (What else could you do with a game that’s missing its bad guy?) When, in the final moments, the baddest bad guy catches Ralph by surprise, the goofy slimeball gravely welcomes him to the “boss level.” With such a heavy emphasis on games and programming, the plot never really gathered suspense for me in the way it aims to and, though I liked the characters, I was more amused and interested than invested in their plight. A mention that dying in a foreign game means you won’t be regenerated seems shoehorned in as an afterthought – the stakes seem cribbed from The Matrix and Inception, to name two movies that more successfully make dangerous levels of “reality” a defining feature – and never really comes into play, but no matter. It’s lightning fast and often very funny and cute. Besides, why inject such expectations into what is intended and plays most satisfactorily as nothing more than a blast of affectionate sugary delight with surges of nostalgia for adults of a certain age?

War Between the States (And Vampires): ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER

In theory, a big summer spectacle that posits fantastical secret information about a famous American president is a great idea. As a nation, we have no shortage of myths and fictions about our leaders, stories we tell to validate our own worldviews, to view our current political climate on a smooth, uncomplicated continuum with the past. In practice, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter can’t quite live up to its title. Just the idea of our sixteenth president, tall, bearded, and with a stovepipe hat perched on his head, is enough to make me smile, but this isn’t a comedy in any way shape or form.  This is a deathly self-serious production, a lumpy fictional biopic that devotes most of its runtime to young Mr. Lincoln’s increasing hidden knowledge about vampires and their insidious plots within our nation’s nineteenth-century borders, taking time out of its sloppy chronicling of Lincoln’s real-world rise to the presidency for setpieces of vampire-hunting action. It could have used a dash of wit to help it go down easier.

In Seth Grahame-Smith’s script (based on his novel, unread by me), Lincoln’s mother dies after an encounter with a vampire. Years later, looking for revenge, Abraham (Benjamin Walker) tries to shoot his mother’s killer in the head and is surprised to find the man pop back up baring fangs. The future president is saved and confronted by Henry (Dominic Cooper), a confident vampire hunter who agrees to help the young man learn the ways of destroying these creatures that roam the land, hiding in plain sight. So Lincoln, studying to become a lawyer, marrying Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and debating Stephen Douglas (Alan Tudyk) on his way up in a promising political career, happens to moonlight as a stone-cold killer of the undead. This is a future president played as action hero, as superhero. He spins an ax and hacks off the heads of vampires, usually after acrobatic scenes of kicking, spinning, and punching that slow down into stylish slow-mo to better appreciate just how much of a smackdown Lincoln’s giving these monsters.

Director Timur Bekmambetov first made a splash in Russia with his grimy, gory modern-day vampire action movies Night Watch and Day Watch, so it’s no real surprise that his focus in Vampire Hunter is mostly on the bloody spectacle. He thinks it’s fun to have vampires clashing with Abe Lincoln and his allies – like a shopkeeper (Jimmi Simpson) and an escaped slave (Anthony Mackie) who are loyal hangers-on – in one-on-one combat and in elaborately staged action sequences of a most modern kind. And it is, for a while. Lincoln’s first hunts are well staged and his enemies are well-designed, slobbering, blue-grey things. This is an action movie first and foremost, and so it wobbles around when it reaches for slightly more ambitious elements that come into play as the march of real-world time drags Lincoln and the film’s plot into the American Civil War.

Lincoln hangs up his vampire-slaying ax and focuses on being a president, but the leader of American vampires (Rufus Sewell), who happens to be a big-time slave-owner as well, ruling over his kind from a swampy plantation, strikes a deal with Jefferson Davis (John Rothman) to allow his unstoppable supernatural soldiers to join the Confederate army. And so, Lincoln is brought back into the business of killing vampires, using his knowledge to help provide the Union with a strategy to beat back these scary creatures. Of course, none of this has anything useful or insightful (or even slightly interesting) to say about Lincoln, or war, or slavery. Essentially, all of the above are just the plot points on which to hang marginally effective CGI action and destruction, as the whole vampire-as-metaphor-for-slavery thing never really comes into clear focus and the surprisingly clever use for Harriet Tubman (Jaqueline Fleming) and her involvement in all of this straight-faced goofiness is just a nice barely-there subplot.

I went into Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter expecting nothing more than a historical figure hunting vampires, and I suppose I got that, didn’t I? Lincoln definitely hacks away at some supernatural beings during the course of his lifetime as told by this particular fiction. But it’s all contained in such a well-made bore of a movie – a stiff, intermittently stylish dullness – that it’s hard to get too excited about much of anything that happens between the opening scene and the closing credits. The actors are all convincing and the special effects are about as good as you could expect, but the movie is starved for wow moments of any kind. It’s both too much and not enough.

Eye of the Beholder: TUCKER & DALE VS. EVIL

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil has little evil at first; or rather, it sets up a situation with no good reason to expect it. Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) are two kindly small-town folk who eagerly drive deep into the woods for a much-needed vacation at a crumbling cabin that was sold cheap since its old inhabitant was allegedly some kind of crazed criminal. While out fishing one night, they’re startled by the sight of a pretty young woman (Katrina Bowden) preparing to swim. She’s just as startled as they are, so she ends up falling and hitting her head. Tucker and Dale rescue her and take her back to the cabin to nurse her back to health.

What these two nice guys don’t realize is that her friends are under the mostly false impression that she disappeared into the woods and was kidnapped by killer hillbillies or psychotic rednecks. The group of college kids she left behind plots to rescue her, but in the process creates only more and more misunderstandings. A particularly snotty frat boy classist (Jesse Moss) takes the lead and convinces one kid to sneak up to the cabin. As he does, Tucker is preparing to operate a chainsaw but instead gets attacked by a swarm of bees. So, around comes Tucker running with a chainsaw and flailing wildly, spooking the kids and reinforcing their preconceived notions. Oh, and the kid who was sneaking up ends up running in such a blind panic that he impales himself on a tree branch.

The college kids think they’re in a horror movie. After all, they’re on vacation camping in the woods and are all of a sudden in danger from the wilderness and from Those Who Are Not Like Them. It’s creepy to begin with, but scary stories around the campfire suddenly have suddenly appeared to become real. The audience, however, is in on the bloody joke. Tucker and Dale just wanted to have a nice weekend and are suddenly confronted with crazy kids running around, acting unexpectedly hostile, and getting killed in freak accidents. Tucker and Dale are the sweet innocents being terrorized. The college kids are the unwitting victimizers, the misunderstood monsters, hurting mostly themselves while making things very strange for these two nice guys.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is a 90-minute riff on its central genre flip. First time director Eli Craig, who co-wrote with Morgan Jurgenson, keeps the energy high, reveling in his neat little trick of a plot in a knowing way. Wacky bloodshed is the name of the game, held up by an endless string of sudden surprises that show up out of the inherent inevitability in its double-barreled structure of miscommunications. Neither group can clearly understand what the other is up to simply because they are viewing the world as filtered through horror films and socioeconomic assumptions. The college kids are convinced that they’ve encountered kin of Leatherface or Jason. Tucker and Dale think they’re being terrorized by a suicide cult. They’re staring at each other across an artificial social divide.

It’s not exactly a one-joke movie, but that’s not far off. It has only one approach. It sets up innocent situations with potential for either understanding or senseless violence and then twists them up through increasingly unlikely mistakes into the worst-case scenarios until it ends with inadvertent carnage. The concept is funny and startling, but it wears out its welcome ever so slightly. It grows repetitive and more than a little predictable. But because Tudyk and Labine are so very charming and inherently likable, I remained involved in the increasingly harried plight of Tucker and Dale’s ill-fated vacation. Besides, it’s hard not to care when there’s some pathos to be found in the way that Dale has internalized the way society sees him, especially when he tells the girl they rescued that the whole situation they’ve found themselves in is his fault. “I should have known if a guy like me talked to a girl like you, somebody would end up dead,” he says. He and the filmmakers are fighting for the little guy arguing, however crudely and simply, that caricatures are people too. 

Loud Noises: TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON

At the center of these Transformers movies are the perfect metaphors for describing them, huge incompressible shape shifting junk heaps that occasionally assemble into aesthetically pleasing vehicles. Aren’t these movies essential just that, occasionally pleasing junk? Directed by Michael Bay at his what was then his most excessive, the first movie, from 2007, might be his best movie. It’s a triumph of machinery, both the creatures and the Hollywood mechanisms of their birth, the kinds of gleaming metal and kinetic action that Bay has always focused on. Here they become the goofiest, most explosive expression of his style, his canted angles and saturated colors that turn every shot into a music-video/advertisement hybrid, popping each shot with the crisp vibrancy of slick commercialism. The controlled chaos fell into disproportionate anarchy with the sequel, 2009’s Revenge of the Fallen. That film, though still capable of fleeting moments that are visually striking, was tonally incoherent and offensively stereotypical on most every level.

Here we go again, with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which splits the difference between the two approaches to the same material. This time, it’s in 3D, which at least serves to slow down Bay’s typically rapid-fire editing, if only by a few blinks per shot. The spectacle has to wait, though. For a good hour, perhaps even 90 minutes, Bay spins his wheels with crude humor, offensive stereotypes, and endless, elaborate setup.

Shia LaBeouf, having saved the world twice, is out looking for a job, jealous that his glamorous girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a former Victoria’s Secret model in her first acting job) is getting so much attention from her sleazy boss (Patrick Dempsey). The job search is a bit of a stall while the robots gather up the plot points that will lead to eventual mayhem, though it gives screen time to a self-amused John Malkovich, and a small role for Ken Jeong that is both racist and homophobic at the same time. As for the elaborate romantic setup, it never really pays off, unless you’re so inclined to count the huge close-up 3D shot of Huntington-Whiteley’s rear end walking up a flight of stairs that serves as her first appearance.

Meanwhile, the Autobots (those are the good guys) are still working with the military, led by Josh Duhamel, to sniff out Decepticons (those are the bad guys) but also blow up terrorists for some reason. The movie joylessly gives us an unintentionally hilarious description of said terrorists’ hideout as “Illegal Middle Eastern Nuclear Site.” Phew. As long as it’s illegal. That’s a sequence that wouldn’t look too out-of-place in Team America: World Police.

Taking a break from working for America, the Autobots just uncovered some top-secret stuff about the true reasons behind the U.S./Russian space race of the 60’s and the nuclear meltdown of Chernobyl. I’m normally untroubled by seeing alternate history in pop sci-fi (this summer’s X-Men uses the Cuban Missile Crisis to good effect) but here it comes off sleazy and uncomfortable, especially with waxy CGI presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and even Obama) mixed in with the tweaked historical footage. Later, the movie will take visual cues from the Challenger disaster and 9/11. Ugh.

Moving on, there’s a lot to slog through. Buzz Aldrin cameos playing himself, staring up at Optimis Prime, the leader of the Autobots while admitting that, yes, there is indeed an ancient hibernating transformer (Leonard Nimoy) buried on the moon. Bill O’Reily has an interminably smug cameo needling John Turturro’s grating ex-government official. (I pause here to note that the reliably funny Alan Tudyk plays Turturro’s assistant). Frances McDormand collects a paycheck as an Intelligence chief interested in letting the ‘bots find and collect the long-dormant tech off of the moon. In a movie called Transformers: Dark of the Moon we get far too few Transformers and very little moon for all of this time. The movie is scene after scene of humans setting up what we all really want to see: stuff blowing up real good. The first film was actually a competent teen comedy that shifted effortlessly into a goofy sci-fi explosion of action, but after those giant robots have been slamming around writer Ehren Kruger has had no idea how to make just normal people interesting. To be fair he didn’t write the first movie, just the bad second two. All this human setup would be excusable in smaller, more economical doses, or if the robots’ plots made any sense whatsoever.

I won’t take this opportunity to dissect the many ways the logic of the various robot plans do not work. Instead, I will reflect on the fact that giant, largely indistinguishable robots are roaming the planet causing all kinds of ruckus and they’re still supposedly a secret. These creatures are also apparently intuitive geniuses, able to predict the plans of their enemies to an astonishingly accurate level. Take a scene wherein some rolling metal robots emerge to attack Shia on a highway, which leads to a striking 3D composition in which a car unfolds into a Transformer from around its passenger, beats back debris, then turns back into a car with the passenger returned safely to his seat. It makes not a lick of sense and I couldn’t tell you what this brief action sequence accomplishes in terms of plot or who did what to who and why, but it sure looked good for that brief moment.

For all I really disliked about the endless set-up, I was shocked to find that the pay-off almost, almost, made up for it. The action in the last hour or so moves to Chicago where Decepticons are taking over the city for some reason. Humans, after standing by powerless, and Autobots, after cowardly hiding while humans were massacred, roll into town to fight back. The resulting distended urban warfare action set piece is surprisingly effective. It’s well paced and mostly comprehensible, or at least there are clear goals that must be accomplished for the good guys to win. Chicago is thoroughly cluttered in the process. There’s a nifty Decepticon that’s like a metal Sarlacc pit on wheels. There’s good use of 3D to enhance huge drops and dips between skyscrapers. It’s dumb, loud summery sound and fury, and it works on a brute force level. One nearly great sequence with a teetering skyscraper, for example, has nice cliffhanger inventiveness. Bay may often make awkward, frighteningly tone-deaf films, but, when he’s using his eye for forcefully effective action imagery, I’d rather see a pure Michael Bay film than someone else trying to crib from his bag of tricks, like the thoroughly awful Battle: Los Angeles from earlier this year.

I didn’t end up leaving the theater completely hating Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but it’s only because the last hour distracted me from the opening 90 minutes. Upon reflection, dissatisfaction settles in along with the convoluted plot’s sheer idiocy and memory of the horrendous human plot with its endless failed attempts at humor. So, just good enough to very nearly distract from how bad it is, there’s a backhanded compliment for you.