This looks pretty good. It is the standard hyper serious trailer with a joke at the end, but obviously I am going to see it. I am guessing pretty much everyone else will too.
Shmee Hangs Out With Ant-Man And The Wasp!
After the success of 2015’s Ant-Man there was never a question that there would be a sequel, and here it is, Ant-Man and the Wasp. After Avengers: Infinity War and even Black Panther, Ant-Man and the Wasp is a much smaller movie, with way smaller stakes. Which is a nice change of pace. It is a fun little comedy in the middle of the rest of the MCU’s epic goings on.
It has been two years since Captain America: Civil War, but before Infinity War, and for his part in that little skirmish Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is under house arrest. Unfortunately he didn’t tell Hope van Dyne-Pym (Evangeline Lilly) or Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) about his little trip to Germany, and since it gets them in trouble with the law as well, they are not supper happy with him, but when Scott has a dream about Hope’s mom Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) they will all be forced back together to try and save her from the Quantum-Zone (don’t ask me why Marvel hyphenated it).
Like I said in the opening, the stakes are very small. At worst a woman that everyone thought was dead, would stay probably dead. Not a great outcome sure, but compared to worlds ending or countries being taken over, it doesn’t rank very high on an average superhero’s emergency list. The plot also uses a lot of coincidences to drive itself forward. Now is the time a black market tech salesmen comes after Hank and Hope, and now is also the time that Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and her issues emerge. Not to mention none of this can wait three days for Scott’s sentence to be over? Sure. Thankfully the ride is enjoyable enough to gloss over all that stuff.
The cast is excellent. We all knew Rudd was good from the last movie, but this time Lilly gets a little more time to shine, which is nice, and I am always on board for more Michelle Pfeiffer, but I think she was too young looking for the age they wanted her to be, so they did some pretty distractingly bad aging makeup. She is Michelle Pfeiffer don’t mess with that!
After Infinity War it was nice to watch something more scaled back. To watch a little story in the MCU before things get crazy again, and if the after credits scene for Ant-Man and the Wasp is anything to go by, things are going to get nuts. If you have liked the average Marvel superhero movie, you will like Ant-Man and the Wasp. If not, this wasn’t a game changer. Just a fun little mid-summer popcorn flick to pass the time until the MCU comes unglued next year.
Deadpool 2 Delivers Exactly What You Would Expect
In 2016 Deadpool delivered something audiences had never seen, a foul mouthed jerky “superhero” that made fun of all the other superhero movies out there. It was the self satire that the genre needed. While Deadpool’s shtick is still funny, it lacks the shock and awe that it had two years ago, but if you are looking for more Deadpool, Deadpool 2 delivers.
Deadpool 2 starts soon after the end of the first Deadpool, and things are at first going great for the Merc with the Mouth (Ryan Reynolds), but then tragedy strikes. To make things even worse Cable (Josh Brolin) comes from the future causing chaos, so Deadpool has to get a team together to stop him, the X-Force. Queue zany hijinks and over the top action sequences. Maximum Effort!
They way they tried to change things up was to make this a more personal story for Wade Wilson. To give it a little more heart, but the problem is that it undercuts itself to tell more jokes. Which to be fair is why the audience is there in the first place, but it makes it feel like the writers were trying to have their cake and eat it too. By making this a standard emotional superhero movie, and then turning around and making fun of all those movies. Thankfully most of the jokes land the way they were intended.
We all know that this was the superhero role that Reynolds was meant to play, but Brolin’s Cable is spot on too, and Zazie Beetz as Domino is fantastic. Even better the rest of Deadpool’s excellent cast all return, and they continue to be hilarious, even if they are used to a lesser degree.
It is strange to be a little let down that Deadpool 2 gives us more of what made the first film so good, but I was kind of hoping they would try new things, maybe even find new genre’s to make fun of. However, the action is still explosive, and the jokes are still funny, so it is still worth watching. I just hope that they find something a little different to tackle with the upcoming X-Force movie, and don’t just use it as an excuse to turn Deadpool in to just another X-Man.
Star Wars Most Overrated Character Is Still Getting A Movie…
Rumors have it that James Mangold (Logan) is creating a Boba Fett movie. WHY?! I am sorry internet, but Boba Fett is lame. He is a man with a jetpack that got killed by being knocked off a hover cart by a blind man. The only thing he is proven to be good at is hiding his space ship in trash. That is a skill that pays the bills for sure. He looks cool, I will give him that, but he is terrible. The best thing he ever did was ride a pink dinosaur in the Star Wars Christmas Special.
From all accounts Solo is a fine movie, but Disney needs to start creating original Star Wars movies not just creating random character prequels. We don’t need an Obi-Wan movie, we don’t need this Boba Fett movie, or any other random original character movie. That being said, I will accept a Pokins movie. His origins need to be explored. What I am saying is I would love James Mangold to make a Star Wars movie, but I would like to see him explore something new, instead of dredging up the past.
Shmee Is Engulfed In The Infinity War!
It has taken ten years to get here, but Marvel’s Cinematic Universe has finally all come together to take on its biggest bad guy yet, Thanos. The fact they were able to pull something like this off on this kind of scale is incredible, and the fact it still manages to be a fairly focused movie and not some muddled mess is a minor miracle. Of course you will have to wait for Infinity War 2 (or whatever the title of May 2019’s Avengers movie is going to be) to get the closure you were hoping for.
Avengers: Infinity War is the movie where Thanos actually does something, and he does it quite well. For the most part I have never enjoyed overpowered comic book villains. They are generally just massively powerful so that the comic book has a reason to cram in every hero known to man, and honestly Thanos isn’t any different, but Josh Brolin brings him to life perfectly. He actually has a character of his own, and while his reason for wanting to kill half of all life in the universe, to stave off overpopulation, is iffy, you at least believe he believes it. Even though if he hired a population expert, they would have pointed out that Earth, for instance, was at half its current population a little less that fifty years ago, meaning if he succeeds in his dark task it doesn’t buy the universe a lot of time.
The biggest problem for Avengers: Infinity War is that it feels a little like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It has epic battles and cool villains fighting heroes we love, but then it ends before it crosses the finish line, and there are two more Marvel movies we will probably need to watch before we can cross that line a year from now, but if this movie is yet just another setup movie, at least it was a good one. It shows that Marvel has so far been the only studio capable of doing anything like this, and I am guess next year’s movie is going to be something special.