Solo: I wanted to see more of everyone else

There’s a telling moment near the end of Solo, when I found myself thinking that I’d like to see what happened next. But not Han Solo. We know what happens next to Han Solo, which takes a lot of the point out of watching what happened to him beforehand.

It’s tempting to say that if Solo didn’t exist, no-one would have missed it, but Firefly and books like Retribution Falls demonstrate that we kind of did want some version of the early footloose Han Solo before he got the pointless promotion to General and all the rest of the baggage. Charming scrappy scoundrels are fun. Not essential, but fun. 

Solo is a bit like that. It’s not essential, but it’s fun. But it’s not like I’ve been wondering these last 35 years just how Han managed the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs. It turns out that he managed it by accident, and kind of ineptly, and that he’s been rounding it down ever since. I was with Chewie when Han tries out the story for the first time, and Chewie made a non-commital roar which I immediately decided meant “Nobody cares.” 

And as with all prequels, the fate of the star is foreordained, so the only interest lies in guessing the fate of all the other characters. Though you don’t need a PhD in advanced guesswork to figure that out; we’re meeting people we don’t see in the later movies; none of them need to be buying any long playing records. Rogue One wrote the playbook for that one; Solo is setting out to be a bit more lighthearted, so there isn’t quite the same commitment to sweeping all the pieces off the board. But after Thandie Newton’s Val blows herself up on a bridge, the movie’s served notice that Han’s going to be Solo in more ways than one before the movie is over.

Which is a shame. We’re getting to meet people who are more fun than Han, at least in small doses, and all we’re getting is small doses. And they’re new, so we don’t know what to expect, other than the obvious. Han and Chewie are going to make it, obviously, and so is Lando, since he’s got the heavy burden of being the only black man in the galaxy far far away to carry through two more movies later on. And no matter how charming Donald Glover makes him, we’re still watching him knowing he has nothing to worry about. Which somehow makes him less interesting that L3-37, his cantankerous droid co-pilot, who was instantly my favourite character in just the same way as K2-SO was my pick from Rogue One. Phoebe Waller-Bridge knocks it out of the park for the few minutes she’s given. Instead of making a movie about Han Solo’s origin, they should have made a whole movie out of L3-37 trying to start a robot revolution and giving sass to anyone who got in her way. Sadly, they can’t, because, character in a prequel movie. Damn.

But after the scorpion conga reaches its conclusion and everyone’s betrayed everyone else the ordained number of times (and left me wishing that Alan Tudyk had been there at some point), there’s a quiet moment as we try to figure out what Q’ira’s game is, and she phones up Darth Maul - of all unlikely people - and at that moment I thought to myself, I’d really like to see where this goes next. Emilia Clarke doesn’t really set the screen on fire as Q’ira and Darth Maul appearing out of nowhere is more confusing than shocking, but somehow, in that moment I wanted more of something I’d been thinking I didn’t really need in the first place.

Deadpool 2: Hunt for the Wilderpeople redux

When you realise that Russell in Deadpool 2 is being played by the guy who played Ricky in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, it’s a short step to wondering how much better the movie might have been if Taika Waititi had directed it. Probably quite a bit better. Taika would have insisted on spending more of the budget on writers. Instead they spent all extra money on CGI, with all the usual results.

While I was waiting for the jokes, I mapped out the ways in which Deadpool 2 and Wilderpeople matched up. Overweight orphan kid with a terrible attitude? Check. Surrogate parental figure struggling with the loss of a loving partner? Check (sorry if that’s a spoiler…). There is no way that any of this is a coincidence. Which just makes it all the more puzzling that there isn’t an open call-out. This is Deadpool we’re talking about. It’s both nerdy and breathtakingly unsubtle.

Instead, it’s a crossover of Deadpool tropes and the inevitable encroachment of Marvel values, which is to say lots of CGI getting in the way of any chance of a performance. The one saving grace is that at least they haven’t caught end-of-the-world-itis. Deadpool 2 is still committed to the idea that you can get the audience invested by ending the world for one person, if you can just get them to buy the person. 

Too bad they had to fridge Vanessa to get the ball rolling. Having done that, they leaned right into it by making the whole opening credits a piss-take of the usual fanboy screams of disbelief when the writers (sorry, The Real Villains) do something horrible just to up the stakes a bit. That’s funny enough to be getting on with, but they pitch it against a series of vignettes of Deadpool clowning up classic movie posters like Flashdance.

That’s still the real strength of these movies; they’re good at mockery and one-line asides to a knowing audience. There’s a whole end credits sequence where Deadpool gets a working time machine and instead of going back in time to save Vanessa - the OBVIOUS thing to do - he just uses it to pay off various petty scores with other superheroes, including the horrible version of Deadpool that featured in The Wolverine, and Ryan Reynolds’ feeling of joy that he’s got the role of a lifetime in the script for Green Lantern. Given that the Infinity War is probably going to get resolved with a big time machine reset, I can’t help thinking that this was all about winding up the first unit.

Whenever Deadpool 2 is in that zone, it’s great fun, but much as the backstory in the first movie got in the way of the anarchy, the front story gets in the way this time round. Deadpool is not supposed to be taking things seriously, least of all himself. Weirdly, the insouciance all winds up belonging to Domino, whose superpower is supposedly that she’s very lucky, but is really that she’s utterly unflappable. She doesn’t get much screen time, but just like Valkyrie in Thor Ragnarok she steals all the scenes they give her.

Breaking In; cheap thrills

Breaking In didn’t have enough money to set even a small fire in the house where all the action happens, and it doesn’t matter. It’s a movie which realises that it’s not the size of the problem which matters, but the impact. 

They don’t make movies like this much any more. Back in the 1980s, small scale thrillers with lunkheads menacing ordinary joes for small scores were a dime a dozen, but these days thrillers cost more than space flight, and small scale movies are all about social issues. It’s not great art, but there’s always a simple pleasure in seeing something done well and without much fuss. 

Like most of those thrillers, there’s three layers; what are the nice heroes going to do to get out of this mess, why are the bad guys doing what they’re doing, and does any of that make a lick of sense? The answer to the third question is traditionally “Don’t be stupid.” and dumb thrillers work when you don’t have to time to wonder. So Gabrielle Union and her two cute kids go to check out her hated father’s big house before putting it on the market, and wind up running into four goons who’e come to steal $4 million out of a safe in the house. How do they know it’s there? The youngest and most useless gang member overheard a secretary talking about it. Does it make any sense that Gabrielle Union’s hated dad would have a huge house and $4 million in cash hidden in it? Not much. He’s supposed to be some kind of bad guy, but not enough of a bad guy to have had police all over his house after he died after getting his head kicked in.

You don’t get a lot of time to think about this, because the whole movie is about Gabrielle Union getting locked out of the house with her kids stuck inside as hostages, and then going all Rambo on the gang to get her kids back. And at one level it’s utterly preposterous, but on another it’s low key enough that we’re never being asked to believe the impossible. She’s smart and reasonably fit, and very determined, and it’s not hard to buy any of the things she does to get her own way.

It’s not high art; it’s not even this, for example. But it’s solid stuff, especially Billy Burke’s putupon gang leader, whose henchman recruitment process may have been too rushed. He’s got one psycho, one punk and one kind-of-tech-expert who gets knocked out of the running before he can make much of an impression. At first Billy just comes across as tired middle management trying to get the job done with as little fuss as his bad help will let him away with, and then you realise that he’s worse than any of the other gang members without even the excuse of being crazy. Still great fun to watch as he gets more and more fed up with the way a perfectly straightforward murder-robbery turns into a hostage drama.

And, of course since it’s bad guys locked in a house, there’s a rolling game of Chekhov’s household utensils as random stuff pops onto the screen so that Gabrielle can use it twenty minutes later to turn the tables on the bad guys. Depending on your position on Chekhov’s gun, you may find it frustrating or realistic that half the prompts turn out to be feints ...

Avengers: Infinity War. Dudes, cut off the arm!

Another month, another Marvel movie, and because the stakes have to keep going up no matter what, everyone but Hawkeye shows up in an effort to save half the universe.

Spoilers.

It may take them a sequel and a crazy-big time machine to pull that one off. 

Still, they have two things going for them. The first is that Thanos is an idiot, and the second is that the Avengers are, collectively and individually, also idiots. So all they need is a time machine and a plan which involves even one Avenger not being an idiot. I’d say that doesn’t seem much to ask, but I’ve just watched Avengers: Infinity War and you know what they say about past performance being the best guide to the future … 

Why is Thanos an idiot? Because he’s a prisoner of habit. In the course of the movie he accumulates all the Infinity Stones, which give him more and more powers to warp reality, cut people into cubes by thinking about it, and basically anything which the special effects team thinks looks good. And the closer he gets to collecting the complete set, the more time he spends getting stuck in punchups with the Avengers. Sure, he needs all six stones to be able to wipe half the universe by clicking his fingers, but by the time he’s collected four of them he can win any fight by rigging it his way and the fifth lets him turn back time without even looking for Cher’s assistance. Why is he still getting into fistfights?

And why are the Avengers idiots? Because Thanos can’t be bothered wearing a helmet, and his power resides in a big metal glove at the end of a big unarmoured arm. So naturally no-one puts a bullet in his head, even when they’ve got a gun pointing at his eye from three inches out, and no-one even tries to cut his arm off, even though Dr Strange can cut anything off anything else (and DOES cut an arm off a bogey in the early going), the Hulk can tear the arm off most things (including his own robot suit) and and Thor has an axe which can cut through anything he throws it at. No glove, no power. There’s even a ridiculous scene where a whole bunch of Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy band together to try to pull the glove off Thanos, but somehow draw the line at doing it the easy way.

So, morons.

Then there’s Thanos’ master plan, which is based on the notion that the universe will be a better place if half the sentient creatures in it are randomly killed. Firstly, this is at best a temporary fix. People breed. Kill half of them, and in a hundred years the numbers will be right back up where they were. Secondly, you can’t kill half the people. Well, you can, and Thanos - SPOILERS - does. The problem is what happens to everyone on a bus when the bus driver is one of the random choices. Or everyone within half a mile of a nuclear power plant when you kill half the staff at random. Or everyone in a modern society when you kill half the truck drivers who get the food into town. And so on. You kill half the people, and then the lack of those guys kills a whole lot more.

Still, who the hell goes to a Marvel movie hoping it’s going to make any kind of sense? I get you, but honestly, Marvel really seem to think that this is serious business. So serious that they end the movie with Thanos winning, half the universe dead and loads of feature players turned into dust. If they were really serious, they’d be saving a fortune on all the sequels. Not to mention the number of good actors who can get back to doing something other than react to green painted tennis balls. It would be a genuinely bummer ending if we believed for one second that Marvel really meant it and wasn’t going to spend two and a half more hours next year pressing the reset button and bringing everyone bakc to life. As it is, it’s just - meh.

Mostly because the movie is stuffed with characters to the point where no-one gets more than a couple of lines. Hawkeye’s not even in the movie, and I think he gets more lines than Black Widow. Rocket barely gets anything to do. Between a roller coaster of action scenes and way too many characters, there’s almost no chance for anyone do make a connection with the audience. When you’re hardly there, it doesn’t really register when you turn into dust and blow away. Unless you’re Spiderman, I guess.

And in every cinema, you’re going to get a trailer for Deadpool 2, which shows that there is another way to go; keep it small, keep it scrappy, keep it funny. There are more funny moments in that trailer than in the whole of Infinity War, whose cleverest joke is stunt casting Peter Dinklage as a giant. The second funniest moment is Scarlet Witch showing up to sort out the final fight and basically render everyone else in it irrelevant; one of the Wakandan guard looks straight to camera and says “Why wasn’t she here from the beginning?”, on behalf of the whole audience, and then the scene cuts back to what she was supposed to guarding as the sneaky bad guys pounce on the real prize in her absence. That’s actually cleverer than the Dinklage moment, but it’s hard to out funny Tyrion.

Anyhow, roll on Deadpool. Deadpool would at least TRY to cut the arm off.