[Film Review] Child's Play (1988)

This review contains spoilers.

There is a scene early in the original Child's Play where the boy Andy is watching an 80s cartoon show called Good Guys while making breakfast -- toast, milk, and Good Guys branded cereal.  Andy watches eagerly as a post-episode commercial airs for you to buy your own Good Guy doll, dressed in Good Guy brand overalls (the same kind Andy is wearing) and Good Guy brand T-shirt (the same kind Andy is wearing) and Good Guy brand shoes (the same kind Andy is wearing).  Campy, genre-aware horror always works best when it is being ridiculous, satirical, or both.  Child's Play flirts with the grotesque levels consumerism is marketed to kids, but doesn't quite sync all of these themes up with its fun schlock.

Chucky isn't just some doll come to life.  He's been possessed by the soul of a serial killer, Charles Lee Ray, after he was mortally wounded in a shootout.  As it turns out, he was a particularly ambitious serial killer, learning a little voodoo along the way in case his mortal coil ever gave a bother to him.  Given he was shot in a toy store, the only viable option around was a Good Guys doll in order to continue living, and thus, with a little voodoo chant and some timely lightening, Chucky was born.  The movie follows the expected moves for most of its runtime:  no one believes the boy when he tells them the doll can walk and talk, and Chucky is given only partial glimpses on screen to encourage the mounting suspense.  The first half of the film plays out really well like this, in a classic slasher fashion.  Andy takes an incredibly long time to suspect anything too peculiar when Chucky can move and chat with him, and it is in part because this is a branded product he has been incredibly attached to.  He trusts its iconography already because of its over-saturation in his daily life, so when it starts doing questionable things he gives it far more leeway than any sane adult would.  By the time the boy realizes the doll isn't good for him, he's far beyond being able to help in fighting him.

The scene in which the mother realizes Chucky is, indeed, alive is one of the highlights to the film.  After making herself feel silly trying to get the doll to talk the way her son says it can, she examines the box a bit, more perplexed than anything else.  As she tumbles the box in her hands, a pack of batteries falls out.  Even when obviously found out, Chucky waits until threatened being thrown in the fireplace before his face contorts into a snarl and he screams "You stupid bitch!"  It's a shocking transformation that is as funny as it is startling, and one of the things the film does rather well.  This scene, unfortunately, is the high point before the film starts to slide down into somewhat dull thriller territory.  Mom and the cop who shot Chucky have to hunt him down before he gets to Andy and tries to take his body from him.  It's slow and over explains Chucky when none of that really matters.

It is probably not ideal to talk about this film in a vacuum since it went on to become a cult film series (it's up to 7 films now!) with a remake recently released.  As a standalone, it's a cult film that's fun but just shy of being all that great.  It had a lot of potential toward satire but ultimately fails in the latter half where it gives in to schlock (more of the dull kind of schlock, not the fun kind of schlock).  As part of a series, you can see where some of the goofier elements the series would become known for were played with here.  The film can't quite commit to being totally a horror film or a suspense thriller, splitting the two styles down the middle of the film, and it hurts it overall.  Child's Play is what it is, and either you're in on the silliness of the whole thing or you're not.  Don't take it so seriously, and you'll enjoy it a lot more.



6.5

[Film Review] Logan

Note: This review contains spoilers.

Making a character study-type film on beloved superhero-with-a-darkside Wolverine is the kind of idea that is obviously going to be successful, especially if you shade the entire thing in R-rated violence after the character has been relatively restrained in his PG-13 outings.  The real question is whether or not the character had much to benefit from that kind of tense examination.  Logan wants to really dig in to the Wolverine character, to examine him completely and to a satisfying conclusion.  Wolverine isn't some background character, though.  He's been a major focus of just about every X-Men film he's been in, and he even has two solo films under his name preceding Logan (to those keeping count, that means he has had a major role in six of the nine films, not including this one).  The idea that this character had room for character exploration is either ambitious or ludicrous, either something meant to bring new life and complexity into a well known character or retread all that we know and play it like revelation.  Instead, Logan is a goodbye to a well known, well worn character. 

Wolverine's arch is well known, essentially reached in the first film, and fleshed out in the second: loner amnesiac with a violent temper learns to become part of a family of similar people and use his destructive behavior to protect that newfound vulnerability.  Days of Future Past allowed for some irony out of this, forcing this character to switch places with the moral center Professor X, who was now the hopeless loner and Wolverine the confident moral center, but otherwise Wolverine has pretty much been static in that familial vulnerability since the first film.  Logan knows this, and so takes everything away from him.  Wolverine's family, the X-Men, are dead, but not just dead: killed by his father figure Professor X.  Wolverine has Professor X hidden just on the other side of the Texas-Mexican border and medicated to prevent the Professor from suffering seizures that can kill those around him.  The medication, however, scrambles Professor X's brain, leaving him a dementia ridden shell of who he was.  In the current year of the film, 2029, it has reportedly been 25 years since a mutant was born, and all illusions they were the chosen evolution of man have been disintegrated.  Not only this, but Wolverine's adamantium skeleton has begun to poison him, and his healing powers are no longer up to snuff.  Wolverine isn't back to being the exact jaded man he was before, he's much worse and now suicidal, carrying around an adamantium bullet for when the time finally comes.  Logan places the character in his worst case scenario after his arch in the previous films: what if he lost it all?  The subtle genius of this concept is that he didn't lose all of it, but the one part he has left is at the same time the one at fault for his losing the rest: Professor X.  And now, old and dying and jaded, he spends his final days tending to the dying old man, the one who took everything from him and is simultaneously everything he has left.

It is a good set up, and places us in the proper position with Wolverine's character to bring as around to the arch this film actually wants to tell us:  what if Wolverine had to confront his past, the person/thing he fears being again and the person/thing he fears he cannot fully expunge himself of, while at the same time embracing his future, the way he could have been and still can be?  Wolverine's journey starts when he accidentally gets involved with transporting a mutant child to South Dakota where the last of the mutants are meeting to go to Eden, a mutant refuge in Canada.  The child, as it turns out, is Wolverine's daughter, prone to violence like he is, slicing the heads off anyone to get in her way with her adamantium claws.  Much like Wolverine, she was experimented on, this time by a secret government organization that, as it turns out, was responsible for annihilating the mutant population (while breeding them themselves to train as weapons).  They had a sample of Wolverine's DNA and where able to clone him, using the semen from this clone to create a daughter from Wolverine.  The child escaped with the help of a nurse at this agency's facility, and Wolverine accidentally (partially due to Professor X's insistence, even in his fragmented mental state) becomes involved in the transport.  Laura, Wolverine's daughter, is a second chance for Wolverine, even if he is literally the only one who can't see it.  She is borderline feral at times, mute for over an hour of the film and often quick to bloody her claws, while at other times incredibly intelligent, able to get Wolverine out of trouble and drive him to a hospital (it should be noted Laura is probably no more than 11 years old).  The central conflict of the film meets within Wolverine: he is responsible for this child even against his wishes, while struggling with his own mortality and struggling with the fantasy of the X-Men and what they stood for.  Wolverine finds out, about halfway through the film, that Eden was found through an issue of an old X-Men comic, a violent confrontation with his legacy and the faith he had in it at one point.  The misdirection here, of course, is that it was never an Eden outright in South Dakota or Canada, but that other escapees from that government facility -- and Laura's friends -- had chosen this location from a comic book to meet and make it over the border.  It wasn't about believing in a fantasy, it was about making a fantasy a reality.  Wolverine had lost that a long time ago.  Hope, as the Professor would say.  It had died in the old generation, but was ripe and angry in the youth.

The climax has Laura and Logan fight and kill the Wolverine clone, lethally wounding Logan in the process.  He literally kills his past with the help of his future, a bit on the nose but effective enough.  I sum this up in a couple sentences here because, as good as Logan is, I can't help but feel a bit underwhelmed by the whole thing.  It's a movie that would have been far more effective before the overabundance of antiheroes or dark, gritty movies.  We are ten years past The Dark Knight, a time ripe for Logan to have been released, but in the current climate of much more loose and fun blockbusters, it feels slightly out of place.  A good movie nonetheless, but it has an incline of the long running series it is a part of, the just-shy-of-over-saturation that is the Wolverine character, and the fact that, though R-rated super hero films are still somewhat of a novelty, adding some blood and fucks doesn't quite dislodge the film from the greater super hero genre, which is at peak saturation at this point.  Looking at the film solo, as the director numerous times implied was his intention, doesn't really work to the film's best interest because the film plays with Wolverine as a character (although there is enough context here to work alone), and looking at the film as part of a series is a bit exhausting, even if it does provide one of the best send offs a super hero has ever had (yes, even better than those in Endgame).  It's a good film I want to gush about, but just don't have the passion for.  It's a film that wears its legacy for the impression of weight, but that weight isn't felt dramatically outside of ambience.  It has little interaction outside of little pinpricks of character, all of which we've seen before even if it wasn't so R-rated cynical.  It's well made and deserving of the character, but it isn't someplace new.  It's someplace we've been many times before, just better done.



7.5

[Film Review] X-Men: Apocalypse

Note: This review contains spoilers.


Days of Future Past worked because it's plot flowed along the lines of character, and even when things fell apart in the logic department, the film held up because of it.  It is then beyond me why Apocalypse decided to forgo character in favor of the worst type of Thor movie meets the villain of Guardians of the Galaxy.

Apocalypse is a boring villain, and so much of the film relies on him.  Apocalypse, as far as I can tell, absorbs people's power by moving from body to body, and he wants to take control of the entire world and believes Professor X can give him the power to accomplish this. Everything between here and there is stilted lines (Jean Grey speaks only in this way) and a numbing amount of special affects.  Tired references and ironic lines, the hundredth explanation of how telepathic mutants feel, and too many characters for us to give a shit about anyone for any reason other than we recognize who they are supposed to be.  This movie made me feel tired.  It felt totally inconsequential outside of introducing the main team members we are used to like Jean Grey and Cyclops.  As though continuity matters whatsoever in these films any longer, we are now in our third decade within the reboot series and no one has aged a day somehow.  I've devolved into listing grievances because there just isn't anything to construct critically about a film this bland.  It absolutely is what it is and not an inch more. 

That isn't to say the entire film is worthless.  Magneto being a recluse with a wife and young daughter is a logical place for the character to be after being front page news in the previous film.  Their loss when the small town they live in realize who he is is well executed, even if it unfortunately lead to Magneto joining Apocalypse somewhat illogically and being partially responsible for the deaths of thousands.  Likewise, Mystique being a kind of mutant icon after saving the president in the last film takes on an interesting plot element.  The mutant youth of the 80s look up to her as a way for them to not just be freaks, but freaks with a purpose, and it plays well into the cultural outlook on the mutant issues plaguing their world.  It also plays well into Mystique's character, who previously had wanted to be accepted as she naturally looks, and when the proper context occurs and she is regarded as a hero in her true form, she constantly fights to shrug it off, feeling the untruth in the myth built around her.  Other characters are done okay, like Cyclops, who you see build leadership qualities in an organic way, or Quicksilver, who, though isn't as great as in Past, is still played wonderfully here by Evan Peters, but it never reaches even close to the character heights of even the middling X-Men entries. 

Summing up this review is incredibly difficult because it isn't much of a review at all.  It is a tired, heavy sigh from someone expecting to be disappointed, and wishing that he was more disappointed by what he got.  Be anything but boring, they say.  This is boring.



5.5

[Film Review] X-Men: Days of Future Past (The Rogue Cut)

Note: This review contains spoilers.


Continuity is extremely important in a film and a film series.  Continuity is a language of engagement between the filmmakers and the audience, where we are entrusted with details and information that are rewarded later when those details are utilized for character development and plot progression.  It allows for more complex plots with dynamic characters, rewarding engagement and improving your experience with the film (generally, if the filmmakers hold up their end well enough).  Yeah, that's the film-nerd over-explanation of things, and it's right enough, but sometimes you can get wild with it and come out with something just as fun and engaging.

Enter X-Men: Days of Future Past, the follow up to First Class that addresses that film's issues with continuity by saying loud and proud "fuck it", and we are all the better off for it.  The film opens with a post-apocalyptic future where it's eternally night and mutants are hunted down, killed, or otherwise thrown in concentration camps.  The remaining mutants -- including Wolverine, Professor X, and Magneto, all played by their original actors -- group up to try and use Kitty Pride's newfound ability to send people's consciousness back in time to change the past and prevent the horrific future.  Wolverine becomes the obvious choice because apparently doing this can seriously fuck up your brain, and Wolverine's healing abilities negate all of that nonsense.  Other than the fact that in no way did X-Men: The Last Stand, the most recent film in the original X-Men series, even hint that this future would come of it (it did the opposite, as a matter of fact), the main issue with this whole plot is that it tries its best to act as though both iterations of the X-Men franchise can coexist, when that would seem extremely unlikely.  For one, if there was someone in the 70s that was developing anti-mutant robots, and if he was able to accomplish this in the 70s, then what is the point of a part of the plot in the original X-Men, which has a senator campaigning against mutants in a much more civil manner?  Especially since, as this film suggests, Magneto was involved in the JFK assassination.  What I'm tapping into here is largely tone, a levity in the original films that these newer films would imply to be unrealistic given their place on the timeline.  (As a quick, spoilery side-note: seeing Jean Grey at the end and played by her original actress in the "current" timeline has me all sorts of confused about how the new Dark Phoenix film is going to work into all of this -- my guess is it doesn't).

The thing is, none of this matters.  It would, if they were building a compelling world around mutant-human relations, but rather this film and many of the films in this franchise have had a focus on inter-character development, their personal philosophies tumbling over one another in sometimes violent ways.  The Professor X and Magneto development I wanted in the last film is, for the most part, here in this one.  It is exciting to see Professor X seethe with anger and attempts at hate toward one of his closest friend, while Magneto plays the calmer side of things, attempting to level Professor X's new, darker disposition.  It was a smart character choice to make Professor X the hostile one and Magneto the calmer one.  Magneto has known suffering all along, has literally lived and struggled within it, and uses it as primary motivation for his campaign for the mutant master race: if its us or them who has to suffer, it will be them, because I won't suffer when I'm the evolved one.  Professor X, however, is just noticing the suffering he seemed so oblivious towards in the previous movie.  It isn't so much that he didn't know it to be there, it is that he has experienced it first hand now.  He has seen his students drafted into the Vietnam war, seen his friend involved in the murder of a standing President, and lost another friend to a similar philosophy because his empathizing with her was only half true.  He reflects the times here as he did in the 60s: he is disillusioned by the horrors the late 60s and 70s brought them, and now shoots up a brown liquid that allows his legs to work again (silly, but acceptable), but numbs his powers to the point of no longer functioning.  The irony, then, is that it is Wolverine who has to come in and make him believe again.

There is a lot of back and forth between good ideas and bad ideas.  As emotional as it was seeing James McAvoy and Patrick Stuart talk through time, it nullifies the point of having Wolverine there in the first place: the reversal of roles.  Still, we get a lot of great mileage through Wolverine, gruff and unfiltered, as he tries to convince those who would one day be his friends that he's from the future and that they will be some of the people he respects most.  It's funny and heartwarming, and works well.  Likewise, Mystique as the linchpin here seems both worthwhile and misguided.  Mystique, having ties between Professor X and Magneto, is the perfect conductor for a lot of the crackling plot to pop and sizzle on top of, but Mystique's importance to the antagonist (she can change her appearance, but the antagonist wants to use her cells to do, basically, what Rogue's power is) seems to be an oversight that may be necessary for the plot to work well, but one that feels a tad bit muddled nonetheless.

Rarely in this day and age, though, is a movie just so darn fun that a lot of these inconsistencies fall by the wayside.  Characters feel well executed and engaging (even side characters like Quicksilver -- one of the highlights of this movie -- are excellent), the plot keeps up a good pace, and its sense of continuity is far more fun than it is logical.  I was shocked how quickly the film felt despite watching the extended cut at 2 1/2 hours.  It isn't perfect, and it doesn't reach any kind of artistic heights a few other super hero films have made, but it is easily one of the best and most fun X-Men films to date, getting right what makes this franchise so great: character.



8.0

[Film Review] X-Men: First Class

Note: This review contains spoilers.


With the rise of comic book adaptations in the early 2000s, the X-Men movies were leaders of the pack.  Though not the only or even the biggest super hero movies of their time, they were one of the most successful attempts at translating the cartoonish attachment towards realism the comics had into something an audience less than willing to meet such an approach half way could understand.  The original X-Men movie ambitiously starts with antagonist Magneto being torn from his parents in a holocaust concentration camp, the character's prisoner number tattoo effectively used as metaphor for his fear those different could suffer from the majority, and pointing out the irony of his own master race philosophies in contrast to that majority.  The movie updated the comic's sense of reality in other ways, replacing the goofy yellow suits with cool black leather, or giving the queer metaphors a much more obvious and real spin, appealing to a modern audience more receptive to the themes.  The film was far from perfect, occasionally being campy or otherwise full of blockbuster shenanigans, but overall it was a success.  X2, it's sequel, topped it with a sharper script, but then the series fell apart after the dull and dumbed down X-men: The Last Stand, despite that film utilizing one of the most classic archs in comic book history.

Thus, X-Men: First Class is born, a reboot of the franchise despite literally opening with the same scene from the first film (literally cut from one and placed here, as though to assert outright that this is a prequel, even though, as we've learned with the sequels, this is not true).  Now, when this film was released in 2011and a decade after the first film, the world has warmed up quite a bit more to the super hero genre -- to put it lightly.  First Class allows for the X-Men comics' zanier pieces to exist, forgoing the dark tone of the original trilogy for something far more akin to the first Captain America film.  It's funny, the characters charismatic (well, one of them anyway), and plays with the period for fun rather than realism. 

First Class starts by introducing us to the antagonist, Sebastien Shaw, the Nazi officer responsible for Magneto tapping into his mutant powers (and all it took was for him to shoot young Magneto's mother in front of him).  In the 60s, Shaw has recruited other mutants and begun manipulating various military officers into ramping up the cold war to bring about nuclear holocaust, convinced humanity would die while mutants would thrive (although they never actually confirm mutants can survive nuclear fallout any better than the rest of us chumps, but that's on the low end of the problems here).  The yet unformed X-men have to go in with the CIA to halt this potential horror from occurring during -- you guessed it -- the Cuban Missile Crisis.  At the time this develops, Magneto is off hunting Nazi officers and slowly tracking down Shaw specifically, ready to take revenge on the man who killed his mother (although why he didn't do this as a boy when he was crumpling every metallic object in Shaw's office like scratch paper after witnessing his mother's death is honestly beyond me).  Professor X, however, is given a different story altogether than you would expect coming off the other three films in this franchise (yes, I am ignoring that Wolverine movie, and I will continue to for as long as I'm alive).  As a boy, he catches a young (and inexplicably American) Mystique rummaging around in his kitchen.  The boy virtually adopts her as a sister, and by the time the 60s have washed over them, Professor X is attempting at getting his doctorate while Mystique waits tables.  The two come into contact with a CIA agent after she stumbles across Shaw meeting with a Colonel and she witnesses mutants for the first time.  Professor X, giving his thesis on genetic mutation around this time, is the perfect person to talk to about this she surmises (and she basically wins the lottery).  They attempt to intervene with Shaw but it backfires, outside of their meeting Magneto there to do the same thing, to put it mildly.  Magneto groups up with his newfound peers and, with the CIA's help, they are able to locate several other mutants and get them to enlist in a CIA program honing mutant powers.  All goes awry when Shaw destroys the facility, taking one of the mutants and killing another.  Professor X is forced to gather everyone at his childhood home, which is virtually a castle (his being raised incredibly wealthy), where he is able to get everyone to hone their powers before their confrontation with Shaw, where naturally Magneto kills Shaw and becomes the antagonist we all know, Mystique following him. 

My biggest gripe with the plot is in how it under utilizes Magneto.  Magneto and Shaw may have different methods with which they want to attain their master race ambitions, but the core philosophy is the same -- Magneto even admits as much to Shaw during the climax.  The issue with this is in how dramatically flat it comes off in execution.  Magneto's philosophy is ironic given it was birthed in trauma born of a similar mentality as his own -- it is a major driving force for his character, and one of his most complex aspects, the tortured part of his psyche that Professor X desperately wants to help with in his dear friend but cannot, no matter what he does.  The monstrosities of man bred a monster, and humanity must live with the cycle they have created.  Here, however, it is dealt with in an almost unaware way.  Magneto acknowledges their similarity, but never the irony of his own rage filled ambitions.  What is even the point in having these two so similar if it does nothing for this character, and by extension this character's interaction with other characters? 

Likewise, though we get enough Professor X and Magneto friendship to give us a vague understanding and believability for their close friendship and mutual respect, it would have been far more effective as the main thread of the movie.  Professor X and Magneto are both intelligent and ambitious, with big ideas about the world, Magneto thinking more personally and with a vitriolic sense of the other or otherness, while Professor X has the privileged albeit morally sound perspective of the aristocracy.  Professor X is pretentious and arrogant, the intellectual whose mutation has been all gift.  He easily ignores those closest to him for what he finds the more important issues or their sound conclusions.  His relationship with Mystique is one of the best played aspects in the film, because he swears never to read her mind even though doing so would have sobered him up to how the lower class analogous mutants feel having to hide their physical deformities from the world at large.  In the end, when he reads her mind finally, he encourages her to go with Magneto, realizing Magneto spoke more to her person than he, and this scene is good but it is mishandled by a film that was thematically wasting time on 60s flavor and campy nonsense with the young mutants rather than a compelling conflict or character driven drama the story seems so well equipped to explore.  There's a copious amount of "that's fine" in this film, but so much of it seems swollen with character potential and great set up that it's hard to feel anything except disappointed by the rolling credits.

In the immortal words of Moe Sizlack, "Quit telling us what it aint, and start telling us what it am!", and what it am is a goofy yet fun new take on the X-Men franchise.  It hits all of the predictable notes down to corny lines about Professor X going bald, and "don't ask, don't tell" references in case the symbolism -- thin as it is here -- didn't land for you organically.  As far as first steps go (or, fucking hell, what do we call a reboot's potential new-ness?), X-Men: First Class hits the bare minimum to be "good", being enjoyable and setting up at least a couple of characters I'd like to see again, although only just.  It's good to see X-Men try something different with this iteration, and I hope it leads to at least one more good film as I've heard.  But I'm skeptical.



6.5