How many different ways can filmmakers batter Iron Man’s armor, fling Captain America off of rooftops and make every car, building and airplane near them either explode or get tossed around like confetti?
Not too many. They used ’em all up about four movies ago.
That won’t stop them from doing it all over again for the summer movie season of 2016, except this time our heroes are punching and shooting energy beams at each other over a disagreement about how The Avengers should—or shouldn’t—be regulated by the United Nations due to the fact that every time they fight to save the world about 500,000 bystanders die.
This isn’t a great movie, but it comes out looking like a real prize pig after the mind-meltingly bad Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, which covers some of the same subject matter, but lacks the secret ingredient that makes Marvel such a hit: Cleverness.
The best Marvel movies offer a clever stroke of some kind, whether it’s treating Ant-Man like a heist comedy or making one of the best and goofiest Star Wars rip-offs ever with Guardians of the Galaxy. The clever stroke here: Bringing in Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man and an all new Spider-Man, crassly recruited (and manipulated) by opposite sides in the main conflict to help out. It doesn’t sound like much, but everyman Rudd brings sorely needed comic relief to a series where Robert Downey Jr.’s zingers are becoming old hat. Meanwhile, Tom Holland’s Peter Parker/Spider-Man is so on-the-money that I (a massive Spider-Man fan as a kid, who religiously bought up all FOUR of Marvel’s monthly Spider-Man series), with gales of embarrassment, admit that I misted up in the eyes a little in the theater at EVERY Spider-Man moment. The movies finally got Peter Parker right. They made him a pencil-neck extraordinaire with a squeaky voice that sounds perfectly ridiculous issuing from behind that mask. Flash Thompson can’t wait to bully this dork and I look forward to the inevitable upcoming solo flick. Spider-Man makes me like this movie more than I should.
Three random thoughts I had while sitting in the theater and holding in my piss (did you know that this bitch is about two-and-a-half hours long?):
Superhero movies aren’t much different from pro wrestling. On the comic book page, it’s one thing. In live-action dramatization though, this shit ain’t far removed from Sgt. Slaughter Vs. Tito Santana. It’s all people in ridiculous outfits resolving their issues by beating the hell out of each other.
One of the lame things about recent action movies is that heroes rarely win by outsmarting their rivals or by gaining the upper hand in some clever way anymore. Instead, they tend to merely LUCK into the best shot or they summon up the energy to hit harder and faster than the other. That’s how every superhero movie works these days. We leave admiring their brawn much more than their brains. I think that’s a step back.
A major plot element here (no spoilers, as this gets revealed early) is that Captain America’s old “super-soldier” buddy Bucky is psychologically programmed to become a mindless pawn after he hears a series of random words. While I doubt that directors Joe and Anthony Russo, who took over the tippy-top of the Marvel Cinematic Universe creative hierarchy from a burned-out Joss Whedon, intended this to be a satire of the audience for superhero movies, the thought did do a playful pirouette across my little brain. All we need are a few cues in the trailer and some fluff hype pieces in the internet “news” for us to fill the theaters. I think about half of the Marvel movies are disappointing, yet I still drove my ass past fifteen other movies that I might have enjoyed more just to see this Captain America bullshit with a big crowd. We are Bucky. When Iron Man tediously pounds on him in one of the twenty-seven big action scenes here, he’s pounding on us, too. We deserve the beating.