The Meg

I will pretty much go to watch anything with Jason Statham in it, because the Stath is somehow awesome despite ticking all the boxes to make him a terrible actor. He pretty much has one expression and one tone of voice, and he tends to show up in action movies with no redeeming qualities other than the Stath his own bad self. IN some ways he’s like a grumpier Dwayne Johnson, carrying along movies which would be absolutely irredeemable without him. 

And on paper, you’re thinking; the Stath fights a giant shark. What can go wrong? Well, let’s establish some baselines here. The Meg is not a good movie, but it’s a less annoying movie than Skyscraper, to pick an example of a movie built around the Rock which just didn’t work. The Meg had an extra 5 million in the budget over Skyscraper, but they share a certain reverence for Chinese people and a largely Chinese setting. Skyscraper has a more consistent look; The Meg has kind of OK underwater CGI, and kind of craptastic looking live action surface work, which means that every time you get out of the water you feel like you’re going back in time to the days when action movies were made with whatever actual props were handy and we didn’t know enough to wonder why everything looked like it had been salvaged by drunk people. 

Anyhow, the Stath has to stop a huge shark from eating all the everythings. This does not go incredibly well. Several speaking parts and quite a few beachgoers get gobbled up before the Meg gets its chips, though dog lovers everywhere will be delighted to see that the dog in peril survives to the closing credits. So does Ruby Rain. I can’t figure out Ruby Rain; any time I’ve seen her in anything, I’ve wanted to see more of her, but I can’t pin down why. She just has a bit of presence and movies seem to give her less to do than she might be up to. Anyhow, she gets about ten lines and nearly eaten two or three times, and I hope she gets more work soon.

People who don’t make it; I was really annoyed that neither Masi Oka nor Olafur Olafsson made it. They were playing the only characters with more than one dimension, and they’re immensely likeable actors. So I was fed up when the both got chomped. Particularly Olafsson. By the time he gets chummed up he’s had a chance to build up a real presence, and as the pieces got moved into place for his demise I was dreading it. About half the cast gets killed, but this was the only death which made me anxious. And weirdly, he’d shown up in last week’s movie; he had a four minute cameo as a tourist in a hostel who deus ex machinas one of the bad guys.

Anyhow, it’s not a great movie, but it’s not a bad bad movie. And having played it pretty straight the whole way through, it closed out on a gag; as the credits rolled, the first word to come up was “Fin”.

The Spy Who Dumped Me

The Spy Who Dumped Me had me with the trailer, because Kate McKinnon was the best thing in the Ghostbusters remake, and I was happy to show up and see what else she could do. Having recently been described as “anarchy in a can” I feel a certain kinship for people who act first, and think so differently that it really don’t matter than much when they do the thinking.

And it’s a fun movie. The front half of it in particular, which is just more and more things going wrong without any really coherent explanation. The back half of it stumbes a bit on trying to tie all the things back together into some kind of a plot, which is a mistake. More stupidity would have been both funnier and and more true to the spirit the movie was setting up.

When the movie works, it works because the leads work. Mila Kunis has become very good at portraying reasonably smart women who can’t quite get it together, and there’s something completely believable in the way that she responds to each new bit of idiocy; Mila has a great “And this now?” face. The idiocy is coming thick and fast too. On the one hand, her best friend is the kind of person who seems like a lot of fun to watch from a safe distance, and on the other hand her ex-boyfriend was a creep with dangerous friends. And yet, you can see how Kate and Mila have stuck together despite the idiocy. I could watch them bickering good-naturedly and making things worse all day. Their friendship makes sense, even when nothing else does.

Meanwhile, the who spy side of things is joltingly crunchy. Most spy spoofs either don’t have the budget for proper stunts, or think that gritty violence would sour the mood. This one definitely had the money, and they didn’t spend it on donuts. The fights are downright nasty, and the body count is as ludicrous as a mainstream movie. Don’t get too attached to comic relief characters; they tend to end their scenes with a messy headshot. Or get crunched into a grungy hostel floor before getting their thumb cut off and put in a lipstick container so that the movie can get a Chekhov’s thumb gag later on. 

Does this pass the Bechdel test? Man I don’t even know any more. On the one hand, it’s a movie with two strong female leads, directed by a woman, talking non stop; on the other hand, a lot of the time they’re talking about things which men have been doing, and there’s a sense in which it does all wind up being about which of a couple of men to trust. On the other other hand, it’s a spoof spy movie; just how much do you want from a dumb movie anyway? At least it felt like a film where women had had some chance to kick the worst bits off the script and make the dialogue sound like the kinds of things which women might say to each other.

And in a move which suggests that she’s entering the Helen Mirren phase of her career, Gillian Anderson shows up in a cameo to class things up and generally make everyone look like they're barely keeping up with whatever game she’s playing. That’s one bit that I think worked exactly the way they planned it.

Ant-Man & the Wasp; Marvel plays the long game

I’m ashamed to say that when I yacked on about the first Ant-Man movie, I completely failed to mention how much I liked Evangeline Lilly’s Hope van Dyne. She was not given remotely enough to do, but she was a fun piece of attitude in every scene she had, and she got to punch Paul Rudd in the nose, which was more satisfying than it should have been. So it’s good news that she’s got more to do in Ant-Man and the Wasp, to the point where you could argue that it ought to be called The Wasp, featuring Ant-Man.

So, there’s that, but the other big improvement over the first movie is that the stakes are personal. Everyone is just trying to do one simple thing. They’re not trying to save the world; they’re not even paying a huge amount of attention to the world. Henry Pym and Hope van Dyne are trying to save Janet van Dyne, the original Wasp, Hank’s wife and Hope’s mother, from being stuck in the “quantum zone”. We will pass in silence over the sheer lunacy of the idea that you can be stuck in the sub atomic realm for thirty years and still be intact, let alone sane, and simply enjoy the fact that people in a Marvel movie are pursuing a simple, human-scaled objective which does not involve daddy-issues. They rope in Ant-Man, and then other people get pulled into the mess, and there’s lots of stunts and ridiculous physics, but they never ever lose sight of what they’re trying to achieve, and so the stunts feel like they’re happening in pursuit of the story, instead of the story having been hammered into shape around the stunts.

Which means that it’s a fun movie. It’s not as much fun as Deadpool, but it’s the only Marvel thing I’ve seen which even comes close. The physics of Ant-Man’s world are preposterous but if they keep the gags coming you can forgive a lot of it. Touchingly, they keep trying to salvage the unsalvageable. Hank and Hope have a secret lab which they can compact down to the size of a rolling suitcase. Naturally it get stolen and then chucked from hand to hand, which you’d think would have the same effect as an earthquake, but luckily they remembered to "switch on the gyroscopic stabilisers” before they shrank it! The other nice thing is that they don’t have some implacable villain; the Ghost is someone boxed into doing bad things to save herself, and Walton Goggins' slimy financier [1] is wonderfully small time and inept, while the government stooges are charmingly well-meaning and beleaguered. There’s no-one to root against, just lots of people to enjoy. Michael Pena’s motormouth character Luis is back and just anchors every scene he’s in. There’s something so lived in about his character that he retrospectively makes Paul Rudd’s Scott more believable as a person as well. Rounding out the cast and proving that eventually everyone who has ever lived will be in a Marvel movie, Michelle Pfeiffer joins Michael Douglas. Neither is really acting, but they do class the place up a bit. Michael Douglas may not be acting at all; he’s just a little too good at being a grumpy old man.

So, it’s a fun light-hearted movie and makes a nice change from the last Marvel-a-thon. Right up until it doesn’t. Spoilers, I suppose. You know the way they keep putting credits sequences into the end of Marvel movies to throw in a gag or lighten the tone? What if they kept doing that until we were used to it, and then used one to switch the tone completely in a fun movie? Ant-Man, meet Thanos. It’s brilliantly done. Took them 20 movies, but it was worth it. It has more of an impact than the big dust-off at the end of Infinity War. It comes out of the blue, and it hits people that we’ve got happy to be around. That’s how you do a shock ending. Do more of that.

 

[1] As continues to be the tradition in Hollywood, Goggins is playing someone who should have been executed 24 hours ago, this time for crimes against style.