Iron Man 3

Can you name a third film in a franchise that was better than the previous two films? You’d probably have to go deep — A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, perhaps? — but Iron Man 3, despite my misgivings as someone who yawned through Tony Stark’s first two adventures, turns out to be deft summer entertainment, cheerfully amoral (I’ll get to that) and lightly coated with terrific little bits of comedic business. The difference here, it’s clear, is director/cowriter Shane Black, whose scripts for Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout still hold up as winking macho fantasies. Black doesn’t take much seriously unless it involves a hero trying to rescue or avenge his loved one. Everything else is fair game, all in fun, the clatter and concussion of action tropes as syncopated as the dialogue.

Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is up against some heavy hitters this time: exploding, supercharged assassins — juiced up with some form of nanotech called Extremis — who do the bidding of a shadowy, preening terrorist known as the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). The Mandarin, probably the most durable of the rather forgettable rogues’ gallery in Marvel’s Iron Man comics, is sort of tossed aside in this movie, in a wittily cynical fashion that almost reads as subversion. Black doesn’t take mustache-twirling supervillains seriously either. Mostly, the movie is a matter of Stark up against amputee war vets whose exposure to the putatively healing Extremis has made them aggressive and vicious. Someone in a bad mood might find Iron Man 3 unforgivably callous and thoughtless, especially after the events in Boston, where we saw real terrorism, real explosions, real amputees.

But the combination of Shane Black and Robert Downey Jr., which worked a treat in 2005’s little-seen but well-loved Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, wants only to put you in a good mood — especially if you were there for the ’80s and ’90s action bonanzas from which Black emerged. Right down to its holiday setting — every scene is sprinkled with festive (and patriotic) Christmas lights — Iron Man 3 is a slick late-’80s throwback, with a bad guy (Guy Pearce) whose mullet and glib smile recall Val Kilmer’s Chris Knight in Real Genius, except this real genius is bent on domination via manipulating the terrorist market. (Kilmer, of course, was also Downey’s co-star in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.) Black expands his boys’ club a bit, though — one of the more fearsome Extremis brutes is a woman (Stephanie Szostak), and even the unfortunately named Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), Stark’s loved one, gets to administer some beatdowns. Iron Woman!

If the thought of William Sadler and Miguel Ferrer — two character-actor favorites of the action era this movie fondly references — as President and Vice-President puts a spring in your step, welcome to Iron Man 3. (I wish Black had time to throw in Michael Ironside or Tom Atkins, just for me.) The rapport between Stark and fellow armor-wearer James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) likewise calls back to Riggs and Murtaugh. The action, framed by legendary cinematographer John Toll, is clear and crisp and satisfying, harking back to the days when directors felt it was important for us to see what was happening to whom, and where. (I’d advise skipping the 3D on this one — it works just fine in plain old 2D, and the colors most likely pop better.)

Downey is as blithely smug as he usually is in these hefty franchise events, but with Stark suffering Post-Avengers Stress Disorder, Downey has something new and likable to play: the current reality of gods and monsters has tweaked Stark’s head a little — he’s no longer the biggest kid on the block, and he’s a bit more humble. Technology, too, smacks him down to size, and at the end, after a symbolic fireworks show casting off tech support he no longer needs, we feel that Stark has grown up, left his toys behind. While we wait for the loud climax we have diversions in the form of witty banter between Stark and various admirers (including a fatherless kid who’s around just long enough not to wear out his welcome), and Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley making meals of their sinister dialogue, and Rebecca Hall, looking like an odd amalgam of Liv Tyler and Scarlett Johansson (Betty Ross! Black Widow!), as a botanist and former Stark one-night stand. The theme of the movie seems to be that the past — whether a woman scorned or a nerd snubbed at a New Year’s Eve party — will come back to bite you, and that extends to ghastly experiments on war veterans and destructive technology that can be used against its maker. For all its snark and lighter-than-air pyrotechnics and aesthetic, the movie has a bit more going on under the hood — or helmet — than it’ll get credit for.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – Part 2

Frank Miller’s original series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was plenty violent, but it was also strangely bloodless. There was a bit of bloodshed, but mostly the wounds and gashes were sanitized, as they probably had to be back in 1986 in a medium still widely considered kiddie stuff. The second part of DC’s animated adaptation of the series, however, is decidedly not for kids. It’s rated PG-13, as was its predecessor, but it’s full of gore and pain and trauma. (It also has a streak of hope, and faith in the social contract reasserting itself in times of crisis, that the young and cynical Miller possibly couldn’t quite bring himself to emphasize too much.) The final showdown between the aged Batman and the knife-wielding Joker (who doesn’t seem to have lost a step despite having been locked away for a decade) is thick with splatter and agony in a way Miller’s linework wasn’t.

I razzed Part 1 a bit for feeling rushed and anticlimactic, but Part 2 delivers the goods. It picks up directly where Part 1 left off, so you need to have seen the previous 77 minutes before sitting down for this one (or have the Miller comics committed to memory, as I do); there’s no “Previously, in…” stuff. Batman is still a fugitive, chased by new Gotham police commissioner Ellen Yindel and shadowed by Superman, who’s been reduced to being government muscle — we see ol’ Supes fighting in a skirmish the U.S. is involved in, casually killing hundreds of Russian soldiers. This annoys the USSR, which fires a nuke and causes a nationwide blackout. Miller anticipated not only the chaos of Katrina but the community spirit in the wake of Sandy, and the adaptation leans a little more towards the latter (though I’m sure Part 2 was in the can before Sandy struck).

It all leads to the big face-off between Batman and Superman, and the adaptation expands on the battle considerably, as though the animators couldn’t resist pulling out all the stops (Batman using barrels on the ends of his arms to batter Superman, for instance). What this approach gains in kick-ass energy, it loses a little in the sad gravitas Miller brought to the fight; the original half-a-page image of Batman punching Superman (seen below) is rightly iconic, and on the page you can linger over it and feel its power, but as animation it flashes by in a second. In terms of plot, the adaptation is mostly faithful, right down to the guest appearance by a one-armed Oliver Queen (aka Green Arrow), who helps Batman at a crucial moment with kryptonite-tipped arrows. Oliver is an old-school government-hating lefty who throws in with libertarian Batman against thoughtlessly fascist Superman.

The politics are a little weird (that was a feature of a lot of ’80s escapism, as in Rambo and Red Dawn); the story yearns for manly, incorruptible authority to challenge weak, corrupt authority. On the other hand, Miller welcomed the shift of power from male to female, as witness the newly female Robin and the noble if misguided Yindel. The Joker seems to have a gay thing for Batman, though, like Javier Bardem stroking 007 in Skyfall, Joker might only be playing that up in order to bug his adversary. Then there’s Bruno, a pre-op, post-op, or possibly non-op transgendered thief working for the Joker; she packs a big gun and has swastikas tattooed on her large silicon breasts where her nipples should be. I should remind you, this is rated PG-13.

A sequence in which the Joker massacres a theater full of people (at The David Endochrine Show, with the Letterman stand-in voiced, in a witty bit of casting, by Conan O’Brien) may pull some viewers up short post-Aurora. Later, when the Joker is loose at a carnival, he doesn’t get to kill a bunch of kids in the adaptation as he did in the comics, a mercy for which post-Newtown viewers may be grateful. Miller anticipated a lot of national traumas (a plane hitting a building in the wake of the nuclear blackout chillingly prefigures 9/11), and in the DVD’s extra feature some of the adaptation’s makers correctly describe the epic story as “heavy.” This second part does pack on the darkness and grotesqueries in a way that feels more, well, Milleresque than the first part did.

In the end, taken together, you have a 153-minute version of what many consider the ultimate Batman tale. It neither improves on nor disgraces what Miller achieved; it is, I suppose, a workable supplement, and by the very nature of its source it’s probably the wildest, messiest Batman story yet to be told in the animated medium — at least until someone gets around to Miller’s All-Star Batman & Robin, which is a whole other kettle of crazy fish.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – Part 1

Ever since it debuted in 1986, some of us have been eagerly awaiting a film version of Frank Miller’s seminal comics series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Set in a hellish near-future where a 55-year-old Batman has been retired for ten years, the series redefined the character not only for its generation but for every generation thereafter. Taking Batman back to his grim, dark roots, Miller wiped away any traces of the campy ’60s TV show. Almost every Batman movie, from Tim Burton’s 1989 effort right up to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises last summer, found inspiration in Miller’s interpretation. It’s almost as if we’ve gotten a Dark Knight Returns adaptation piecemeal over the years; to cite just one example, an older and weaker Batman’s emerging from an eight-year retirement to blunder over-confidently into a fight with a physically more powerful foe in Dark Knight Rises comes right from the Miller playbook. So at this point, an actual adaptation seems redundant, and yet here we are with the first of a two-part animated take on Miller’s material (the DVD and Blu-ray hit stores next week; part 2 is promised next spring).

Director Jay Oliva and screenwriter Bob Goodman stick very close to Miller’s narrative, in which Batman comes out of retirement first to deal with a resurgent Two-Face (plastic surgery to fix his acid-scarred face hasn’t helped his psyche), then to fight the gigantic, razor-toothed leader of the large and remorseless “Mutant Gang.” Miller’s series ran for four 48-page issues — the third and fourth issues pit Batman against the Joker and Superman, respectively — so this first half is essentially throat-clearing before the operatic finale. The pacing seems abrupt and rapid (the film crosses the finish line at just 77 minutes, including end credits), so that Batman’s conflict with Two-Face — which is supposed to emphasize that Batman can no more escape the demons that drive him than Two-Face can escape his own — seems like almost a prologue.

Whenever possible, the animators have stayed true to Miller’s sometimes idiosyncratic character design, though the figures in motion have an unavoidable rushed, Saturday-morning-cartoon cheesiness at times. The opening scene, which introduces Batman’s daytime persona Bruce Wayne in the middle of a stock-car race, doesn’t inspire confidence: the animators clearly saved money on the stiff movement of the cars. Elsewhere, more money and time obviously go into Batman’s various fight scenes, particularly his final showdown with the Mutant Leader. In general, though, Miller’s linework and compositions were so cinematic that they unfolded before our eyes as a breathless yet epic action movie, something the animation here can’t hope to duplicate.

The voicework is uneven; Peter Weller makes an imposing if monotonous Batman, while Ariel Winter adds some much-needed snark as Carrie Kelley, a bored teenage girl who becomes Batman’s new Robin. The filmmakers give Robin a much more active presence in this first half than she had in the corresponding Miller issues, and there’s even an added scene in which she saves a couple from a mugger. The other major female character is Ellen Yindel, who’s taking over the job of police commissioner from the retiring James Gordon. Carrie gets the importance of Batman, Yindel doesn’t, but she’ll learn.

Since the filmmakers also include all of the debate that raged around Batman in Miller’s story, it lays bare Miller’s mildly fascist leaning (for which some members of the comics press took him to task). Everyone pro-Batman is smart and brave, everyone anti-Batman weak and hypocritical; the film even includes the guy in the man-on-the-street interview who says we must be patient with criminals, then adds that of course he would never live in the city. For Miller, city life — constant co-existing with the violent underclass — equals a sort of bitter conservative pragmatism. In the comic, this could be enjoyed on the level of satiric caricature, and the different viewpoints could be argued, but in the movie a pro-Batman commentator’s views are toned down to be less offensive (“Hope he goes after the homos next” becomes “Hope he goes after my landlord next”). Miller at least acknowledged that some people could support Batman for the wrong reasons.

The comic could be admired as one medium striving to be another — a summer-blockbuster thriller (something like Nolan’s films). The film reduces the comic to, well, a cartoon. Yet I’m interested in what they do with the second half, which is even darker and more ambiguous in its politics. Maybe they’ll stick the landing, but they’re off to a bumpy start.

The Dark Knight Rises

These days, if you want to make an epic film, it had better have some element of fantasy. The Dark Knight Rises, which weighs in at sixteen minutes shy of three hours, is the Monolith of the summer — huge and loud, massive in scope, every elegant shot bearing the aroma of very serious money. Logically it won’t hold much water; that’s the price of hitching a big movie with pensive themes to a comic-book-superhero plot — something has to give. But, if I may quote my review of The Amazing Spider-Man from a few weeks back, “we don’t look to Spider-Man for verisimilitude” — nor do we seek it at a movie about a man who dresses up as a bat and fights crime.

Director Christopher Nolan, here finishing the trilogy he started with Batman Begins and continued with The Dark Knight, has been praised for giving us a Batman grounded in “the real world.” Essentially, this means Nolan doesn’t camp it up, though the image of a billionaire orphan — Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) — climbing into a hard rubber suit with pointy ears and pounding on criminals is inherently campy, or at least pulpy. The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t hold back on the pulp. Batman’s adversary this time is a masked beast calling himself Bane (Tom Hardy), who plans to “liberate” Gotham City by triggering mass destruction, entrapping most of the police force in the sewers, and freeing all the criminals. This threat is dire enough to pull Batman, in mopey hibernation for the past eight years, out of mothballs.

I will leave to surgeons and chiropractors the question of whether a man as grievously wounded as Batman is at Bane’s hands could recover so quickly and definitively, with crude second-hand help from a kindly inmate out in the middle of nowhere. It’s all about will power, I guess. Due to recent events, The Dark Knight Rises will probably gather a patina of spooky nihilist darkness it doesn’t deserve; the hero at one point growls “No guns!,” and he clearly stands foursquare against chaos and destruction. Batman’s other adversary and sometimes ally, Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), has no such compunctions about guns, but uses one in a key moment in a way pretty much anyone could support. Hathaway, fortunately not saddled with the nickname Catwoman anywhere in the film, is the best thing about it — slinky, sardonic, bitterly pragmatic but harboring some sliver of hope.

The movie will eat up half your afternoon, but will do it so smoothly and at such a flawless pace you likely won’t notice. Nolan gives us and the studio our money’s worth, putting it all up on the screen. He and his brother/cowriter Jonathan jam enough material for three movies into one; we don’t come out hungry for more — we emerge thoroughly sated, as we do after Thanksgiving dinner, but with our senses quickened a bit. Nolan sticks the landing and hasn’t botched the trilogy, and that in itself is satisfying, though the obvious element missing is the freakily memorable Joker of The Dark Knight. Bane is sportively evil, but the masked Tom Hardy works under a terrible handicap Heath Ledger didn’t have. He can use only his eyes and his heavily processed voice, which, despite the sound editors jacking Hardy’s and everyone else’s dialogue up to 11, is comprehensible only some of the time.

Technically, The Dark Knight Rises is a thick leatherbound volume with gilded pages, though flipping through it yields a story about a big bad bald man doing eeevil things until a vigilante with pointy ears comes to the rescue. The movie is and probably always will be the ultimate expression of the comic-book fanboy’s need to have his passion vindicated, solemnized, given the gravitas of a classic. I enjoyed handling the volume and drinking in the gorgeous pictures, but I wouldn’t recommend a close read of it. As pure cinema, this is a rich banquet, and Nolan does his damnedest to make it move and sparkle and awe. The sound design rattles your ribs; it’s like being at a fireworks show where the grand finale booms so hard it takes out some nearby windows. Hundreds of people clog the streets of Gotham City, desperate to restore order or maintain chaos. Nolan paints on a vast and glittering canvas. I just wish it meant more.

The Amazing Spider-Man

Usually I don’t stump for the extra surcharge and the glasses, but The Amazing Spider-Man is probably worth seeing in 3D, on the biggest screen you can find, just for the swinging scenes. No, not Ice Storm swinging; Spider-Man swinging. The guilt-stricken hero shoots his webs, which are stronger than any cable, and slings himself all over New York City, from precipice to precipice. It’s a beautiful sight, and from time to time director Marc Webb slows down or even pauses the action so that Spider-Man hangs suspended in the night air for a pregnant moment. Computer effects have improved vastly since the first Spider-Man movie ten summers ago, so Spider-Man actually seems to have weight and mass. I didn’t care much about where he was swinging to, but it looks terrific.

As you may have heard, this is a reboot of the Spider-Man franchise, ignoring Sam Raimi’s trilogy of films and starting from scratch. Once again, we see the origin story: dorky Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) is bitten by a genetically altered spider and gains a variety of powers. He can crawl up walls and across ceilings; his strength and endurance are enhanced, and he has what the comic books refer to as “spider-sense,” enabling him to intuit danger. (This has never helped the myriad spiders I’ve squished with a newspaper, but we don’t look to Spider-Man for verisimilitude.) All told, it’s about an hour before Peter finally climbs into his red-and-blue costume; before that, he swings around (on homemade web-slingers, not organic as in the prior films) in his civvies and then in a luchador-inspired mask.

The original Stan Lee/Steve Ditko comics had an elegant simplicity. Peter never knew his parents; he was brought up by his Uncle Ben and Aunt May (played here by Martin Sheen and Sally Field). Here, much is made of Peter’s parents disappearing into the night for some reason connected to the father’s scientific research, which in turn is connected to the life’s work of Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), who hopes to merge various species’ DNA to cure human ailments. Connors, who has only one arm, injects himself with some reptile stuff and becomes the Lizard, the big villain this time out. (In the Raimi films, Dylan Baker played this role and was obviously being groomed to be the villain in a future Raimi Spider-Man film, but now his character seems to have no reason to be in those movies.)

The problem here is that the reboot forces links where there needn’t be any. The conflict between Spider-Man and the Lizard seems to be part of a larger arc that will unfold across another trilogy, probably connected to OsCorp, Connors’ employer, named for Norman Osborn, better known as the Green Goblin. In other words, the film seems to be setting up a vast conspiracy involving Peter and his parents, the endgame of which will be made clear … in a few years. I go to a Spider-Man movie to see the guy duke it out with powerful bad guys. I’m simple that way. I don’t need a welter of convolutions. It’s become a bad habit, not only among screenwriters adapting comics for movies but among comics writers, to take a basic, enjoyable origin story with an element of randomness (high-school boy is bitten by spider, becomes hero) and remove the randomness.

Meanwhile, there’s a faltering romance between Peter and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), whip-smart daughter of the same police captain (Denis Leary) who wants to arrest Spider-Man. Stone is entertaining as always, but her character doesn’t go anywhere special here; longtime fans of the comics, of course, know what befell Gwen, though the jury’s out on whether the movies will have the guts to go there. Despite Marc Webb’s fancy talk about how the film’s theme is that “we’re all missing a piece,” that just seems pasted onto what reads as a soulless ploy by Sony to retain the rights to Spider-Man. Still, I did recommend that you spend the extra dough for the 3D, so here are some other things I enjoyed: Connors’ expression when he first realizes who Peter is; Stan Lee’s obligatory cameo, probably his funniest yet; Spider-Man using his webs to detect the Lizard’s movement; Denis Leary’s horror when faced with an allegedly menstruating teenage daughter. Few of these things have much to do with the superhero I grew up with, and this movie doesn’t even have time for Peter’s and Spider-Man’s ultimate nemesis, J. Jonah Jameson. I never thought I’d miss the old coot so much.

See also:

- Spider-Man (2002)
- Spider-Man 2 (2004)
- Spider-Man 3 (2007)

The Avengers (2012)

The Avengers — or, as the onscreen title has it, Marvel’s The Avengers — is perhaps the most purely fun and frisky superhero movie since Christopher Reeve put on the red cape in 1978. (The Dark Knight was dazzlingly accomplished, but “fun” isn’t the first word I’d use to describe that brooding crime thriller.) Marvel Studios has been building towards this film for four years, starting with Iron Man in 2008 and continuing with The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), commander of the spy mega-agency S.H.I.E.L.D., has showed up portentously in all those movies, and here he assembles the aforementioned heroes, plus S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), to do battle with an alien army commanded by Thor’s evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Got all that?

Once the set-up is out of the way — and I’ve no idea how much of it will fly over the heads of viewers who missed the previous five films — The Avengers settles into a pleasantly lighthearted combat mode. The stakes are high, but writer-director Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) never met a quip he didn’t like, and his familiarity with decades of Marvel comics shakes out as a kidding, don’t-take-this-too-seriously approach to the characters, all of whom get to be tersely witty in the Whedon tradition. This is the best writing any of these heroes have enjoyed onscreen; there’s not much of what’s pejoratively called “comic-book dialogue,” and most of that is dispensed with at the start. After that, it’s regular people with superpowers or super-tech putting on their game faces and working as a team.

For comics fans, it’s an undeniable thrill to see Captain America and Iron Man in the same frame. Additionally entertaining is seeing Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. in the same frame, rubbing each other’s nerves raw and ultimately arriving at a grudging mutual respect. Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, who under duress turns into the rampaging green Hulk, is deceptively laid-back; it seems Banner has developed a bit more control over his transformations, but we still get plenty of crowd-pleasing footage of the Hulk leaping around and bashing the enemy. At its best, The Avengers is like one of those giant-sized Marvel Treasury Editions they used to issue in the ’70s, with the massive conflicts playing out in clean broad daylight. At some points the swooping camera shows you two or three epic fights going on at once; everyone gets his or her turn in the spotlight.

Whedon, whose only previous film as director was Serenity, keeps the fun coming as if nothing at all were riding on it — not millions of dollars, not the hot expectations of fanboys. Whedon understands that this stuff is outlandish and ought not to be taken with monkish sobriety. Most of these heroes — including Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk — were co-created by legendary comics artist Jack Kirby (who also had a hand in Iron Man’s design). The Avengers does full honor to Kirby’s work, even if Marvel hasn’t; last year Kirby’s heirs were denied any of the billions that Kirby’s creations have generated for the company. Some people (rightly) incensed by the raw deal Kirby got have called for a boycott of The Avengers, and I do sympathize, though denying yourself the chance to see a Kirby-esque adventure writ large (and in 3D, though, as with the other 3D Marvel films, 2D is just as good) would be self-punitive and a drop in the bucket besides.

Overall, this is as smooth and sprightly a franchise machine as we’re likely to get this summer; even at two hours and twenty-three minutes it goes like lightning. It’s brawny but punches fast, yet not so fast that we can’t see anything. Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye shoots arrows into his targets without even looking at them; Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow comes out the best under Whedon’s jurisdiction, gaining a sense of humor and a similar suave disregard of her own combat skills. The Avengers never overplays its hand (though the marketing machine sure has); everyone in it is smart, using strategy rather than brute force, though the force is certainly brutal when called for. If every superhero movie we’re about to get for the next decade were as loose-limbed yet tightly-wrought as this one, I’d have no cause for complaint; they won’t be, of course, but at least this one is.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

A Ghost Rider film directed by the lunatics who gave us the Crank movies promises grindhouse greatness. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who always bill themselves as “Neveldine/Taylor,” exploded the action genre with Crank and Crank: High Voltage, and the pair of films shake out as merrily absurdist guilty pleasures. But they were also rated R, and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance — the second film featuring Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage), who turns into a motorcycle-riding demon with a flaming skull for a head — slinks into theaters with a family-friendly PG-13. Here and there the filmmakers sneak in something prankishly daft — like a shot of Ghost Rider pissing fire, which Neveldine/Taylor apparently enjoyed so much it’s repeated. But this isn’t nearly the Ghost Rider trash masterpiece I’d expected from these guys. It’s fitfully diverting, and sort of just there.

Nicolas Cage does his bit, continuing to channel the gonzo spirit of legendary cult actor Timothy Carey. In an interrogation scene, Cage’s Johnny grabs hold of some scruffy lowlife and demands answers, assuring the scum that he’s trying real hard to hold down the demon who wants to bust out and torch the dude’s face. Cage hams it up hardcore there, but he understands that there’s really only one way you can play a guy whose head turns into a flaming skull. In another scene, we get to watch him transform, and Cage plays it as a king-hell nihilistic wa-hoooo epiphany. Johnny hates laboring under the curse that makes him Ghost Rider, but the change itself seems to unleash his id in a way that eluded both Hulk films. In these scenes, it feels as though we’re watching an actor (and noted comic-book fan, which is why Cage has done two of these) having a ball turning into a cool visual. It’d be nice if Cage could kick some of his paycheck for this film towards Gary Friedrich, who created Ghost Rider for Marvel Comics, tried to sue them for a share of the profits from the movies, and has now ended up owing the conglomerate $17,000.

Lamentably, there’s not much to Ghost Rider but the cool visual. His quest here is to rescue a boy from the devil, the same devil who cursed Johnny. This amounts to a lot of running from place to place in “Eastern Europe,” with occasional pauses so that Ghost Rider can break out his flaming chain and turn various gun-toting nobodies into cinders. The main villain, aside from the devil, is a mercenary trying to kidnap the boy; the devil turns him into a creature who can decay anything with his touch. In a reasonable joke, we see this creature going through various foods — an apple, etc. — which decay instantly in his hand, and then settling on a Twinkie, which refuses to decay. I also laughed at a quick bit involving an upside-down Idris Elba, who plays some sort of ass-kicking member of a religious order tasked to protect the boy. Every time we see him, he’s swigging some booze or another; when he shares a bottle of vintage wine with Johnny, our hero takes a pull and mutters, “That’d taste good on a salad.”

Like the earlier Ghost Rider (2007), this one would be happier with no expectations whatsoever attached — you’d probably want to land on it randomly on TV on a slow Sunday afternoon. Visually it has considerably more oomph than its bland Mark Steven Johnson-directed predecessor, but if you decide to sit out its 3D theatrical engagement you will be missing, I promise you, very little. Like many another recent 3D presentation, it was not shot in 3D but converted later, unlike Cage’s previous mean-motorscooter epic last year, Drive Angry. (Ghost Rider is, I guess, Drive Angrier.) All things being equal, I would rather have seen Crank 3D. That would have been insane and excessive and probably banned in several counties across America. What we have here — well, it’d taste good on a salad.

Captain America: The First Avenger

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” says scrawny 4F Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) in answer to whether he wants to go kill Nazis. “I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from.” And there’s the way into Captain America: The First Avenger even for long-haired lefty peaceniks like me. The movie’s politics pretty much stay that simplistic, but then it harks back to a more simplistic time, when America’s enemies were big and bad and all you had to know was where they were so you could shoot ‘em. Despite being a sickly stick figure, Steve desperately wants to join the Army so he can go fight in World War II. He rejects the notion of finding some way to serve at home; other men, including his buddy Bucky (Sebastian Stan), are charging into the lion’s mouth, and he doesn’t feel he has a right to do any less than what they’re prepared to do.

The CGI-depleted Chris Evans, by way of a “super soldier serum,” becomes normal, beefed-up Chris Evans, and he proves his mettle right away, chasing a spy through the alleys and crowded streets of 1942 Brooklyn. Here and elsewhere, the production design is impeccable, a dream of the wartime big city as seen on Life magazine covers (and probably only there), and director Joe Johnston proves his mettle, too. I can’t say he has a vision, but he has a solid sense of pace and composition that stands him in good stead when he’s got sturdy material to work with. (With Johnston’s last effort, The Wolfman, he wasn’t so lucky.) The elements, including Alan Silvestri’s bombastically retro score, come together to form a ripping good adventure yarn that succeeds where J.J. Abrams’ too-reverent Super 8 failed in paying homage to Steven Spielberg’s salad days.

Captain America is a productive mix of square fortitude and very mild tongue-in-cheek. Even the hero’s name begins as an emasculating joke: Steve, having gained some fame, is pressed into USO service wearing a laughable version of the uniform he eventually wears in combat; he stands in front of crooning showgirls, beseeching audiences to buy bonds, and the media dub him Captain America. Soon, in battle against the fearsome Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) and his army of soldiers, he will become a real captain and leader of men. The Red Skull is a Nazi so megalomaniacal he doesn’t think Hitler is evil enough; with the help of a “cosmic cube” (which ties this movie to Thor) he builds super-weapons and an army of interchangeable soldiers. I could be wrong, but I think the Red Skull is personally shown killing more Nazis (out of the usual mu-ha-ha, you-dare-to-doubt-me Evil Genius pique) than Captain America is.

Indeed, the real threat in the movie is the Hydra legions, not the Nazis, which helps Captain America neatly avoid any real-world issues. Not that I’m complaining. Nobody particularly wants to see Captain America witnessing flyblown children’s corpses in Auschwitz, or for that matter flinging his impenetrable shield at Iraqi insurgents. What saves the movie from dumb jingoism is Cap’s reliance on a group of good, ethnically-mixed men, even including a Japanese-American soldier. The Howling Commandos, they’re called in the comics, though not in the movie. The actors, particularly Evans, do what they can to invest the film with personality, but in the crunch the script sort of loses track of the people; one major character dies so abruptly, and with so little blowback aside from a brief obligatory mourning scene, that I half expected him to have survived, somehow.

Captain America sells a country’s long-dead dream of itself as an aw-shucks giant modest about its power and benevolent in exercising it. This was never true, really, even before Vietnam made it abundantly clear to anyone without blinders on; see George C. Herring’s From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 for the scoop on how we’ve treated the rest of the planet as our playpen and piggybank for centuries. But the movie, full of good humor and color and foursquare opposition to bullies, is a lacquered pop-culture valentine to the ideal of America as the good neighbor. That its symbolic hero looks more or less like an Aryan übermensch (and was created in 1940 by two Jewish comics legends, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby) is among the many pleasant ironies spinning around in this clean, unpretentious, brawnily entertaining fantasia.

Green Lantern

The Book of Revelations was made for movies like Green Lantern, specifically this passage: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” That pretty much sums up Green Lantern, and in general the works of its director Martin Campbell, which are neither cold nor hot. I would they wert — uh, were. Here’s a movie about a superhero who can use a special ring to turn energy into matter, in any shape he wants, and the script never rides on the potential absurdity of that.

The Green Lantern of the comics used to make big green boxing gloves and whatnot come out of his ring. In the one really fun sequence here, he envelops a falling helicopter inside a big green race car, then sends it tootling around a big green racetrack. Otherwise, kind of boring stuff. You’d think a Green Lantern played by snark expert Ryan Reynolds would enjoy defeating his foes with, say, a big green duck, if for no better reason than that you’d have to go through life knowing you’d gotten your ass handed to you by a big green duck. Reynolds brings a certain Gen-Y panache, though he probably needed more moments where his Hal Jordan just leans back and realizes how weird his life is now. After all, he’s mentored by various other Green Lanterns of varying colors and sizes, who in turn take their orders from blue-skinned bosses who look to have gotten the short end of the CGI-budget stick.

Superhero movies have become CGI demo reels, and we go for long stretches wherein nothing organic is on the screen at all, except for the occasional green-screened actor (though, in the case of bland love interest Blake Lively, “organic” is debatable). So we watch as things that don’t exist bash into other things that don’t exist. You really need filmmakers who can have fun with this, acknowledging the unreality of the sequences and dialing it up to 11, and if any movie were fertile soil for that sort of phantasmagoria, the tale of a man who can make anything with his ring would be it. I mean, one doesn’t look to a film called Green Lantern for seriousness, though the script blunders in that direction with its theme that will power must trump fear. Yes, it must, except in the stockholder rooms of a studio that has invested north of $200 million.

Green Lantern is Peter Sarsgaard’s movie, if it’s anybody’s. He plays Dr. Hector Hammond, a dweeby scientist whose exposure to alien DNA turns him into a creature resembling Lester Bangs on an epic bender. Sarsgaard has an amusing habit of standing with his head bowed even before the mutation that enlarges his brain, as though his skull were weighed down with knowledge and resentment (his senator dad, smarmily played by Tim Robbins, prefers the jockish pilot Hal Jordan over him). Sadly, though, Hammond isn’t quite allowed to be the scenery-gnashing villain of the piece; the Green Lantern Corps have bigger fish to fry, in the form of a vicious alien made entirely of fear. This is not the entity FDR warned us against; it appears to be, in the words of several esteemed critics, a massive and malevolent fart.

Visually, the movie may well be colorful and gorgeous. I wouldn’t know, since I saw it in 3D, which — in my theater, anyway — threw a dim blanket over everything. (This hasn’t been nearly as much of an issue with other 3D flicks I’ve caught recently, like Thor.) There’s a scene with Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively conversing at dusk that might as well be a radio play. The action scenes likewise suffer, as do the obviously expensive off-world sequences on Oa, the planet where the Green Lanterns hang out. Your 2D mileage may vary, but under such conditions this was the ugliest movie I’ve paid to see in some time. I know this can’t be the fault of the gifted cinematographer Dion Beebe, so I choose to blame it on the glasses. I can’t blame the script on them, though — the least expensive part of the movie, emerging from four credited writers who, in disregard of the comic-book lore, didn’t even have the wit to show Hal Jordan’s ring failing to work against something colored yellow. Otherwise we’d have to ask why the alien yellow fear fart thing isn’t invulnerable to Hal’s powers, and there goes the movie.

X-Men: First Class

There are two major conflicts running through X-Men: First Class. One is interesting, though we’ve seen it before, and one is near-fatal to the film. The first conflict is the ideological loggerheads between two powerful mutants — Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), a telepath, and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), who can manipulate metal with his mind. Charles is aware that normal humans hate and fear mutants, but wants to help humans anyway. Erik is likewise aware, but gradually decides that he would rather not. The second conflict is one of tone. X-Men: First Class, set during the early ’60s leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, breathes heavily about matters of major historical import — Erik as a boy survived Auschwitz — but also wants to be a poppy summer-fun blast in which mutants sprout wings or blue fur and flit around the sky like fireflies at dusk.

The result is a weird and unstable experience, and I wish I could say I gave in to the lightweight escapism. But when you present me with the Final Solution and the spectre of nuclear annihilation — which actually almost happened, with or without mutants — I have a hard time switching gears for the goofball scenes of young mutants in training, roughhousing with their budding powers. I don’t mean to be a killjoy; I just mean to say that historical high seriousness and retro pulp don’t blend well — you can see the seams. The first two X-Men films, directed by Bryan Singer, took themselves seriously — gloomily so, at times — but at least felt consistent. The stakes were high, and Singer, an openly gay director, plumbed the metaphor of mutants as persecuted homosexuals, but when the action beats came they felt rooted in something personal. Here, the historical import seems like a tacky backdrop for tackier action.

Charles and Erik (who will later triumphantly assume the dorky name “Magneto,” snarkily given to him by Jennifer Lawrence’s shape-shifting Mystique) enter into an increasingly uneasy alliance when Erik’s old foe from the Auschwitz days, Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), plans to use his own mutant powers and mutant minions to provoke nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. The resulting radiation will kill off all the humans and empower the mutants. So Charles and Erik build their own team, made up mostly of disaffected youngsters with strange powers; perhaps significantly, perhaps not, of the two mutants of color, one dies early on and one turns to evil.

Michael Fassbender emerges as a cool, 007-like presence, the only real adult in the movie; James McAvoy seems to keep himself amused. For the most part, though, the large cast gets lost in the bombast, and January Jones as Shaw’s telepathic right-hand woman Emma Frost gives yet another dead-eyed performance in which she seems to be reading her lines phonetically. The director (and one of four named writers) of X-Men: First Class is credited as Matthew Vaughn, which I find hard to believe. Can this be the same man who gave us last year’s sarcastic, taboo-breaking superhero satire Kick-Ass (not to mention the enchanting comedy Stardust)? This film is a complete regression for Vaughn, who seemed to be forging a career as one of the few iconoclasts working in big Hollywood movies. There’s more outlaw excitement in any of Hit Girl’s scenes from Kick-Ass than in all of X-Men: First Class.

Save for a few hairdos and JFK on the tube, the ’60s milieu isn’t very convincing; the movie itself, meanwhile, feels as though it were made in 1996 or even 1986. A lot of that is due to Henry Jackman’s painfully cheesy score, but part of it is down to Matthew Vaughn’s passionless, visionless direction. Vaughn was supposed to direct 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand but dropped out two weeks before filming started; did he take this movie on to prove he could’ve done better with the earlier film, or did he forget in the intervening five years why he’d wanted to make an X-Men film in the first place? X-Men: First Class has been getting something of a free ride from the fanboy press, who respect Vaughn for his past films and are grateful that someone tried to make a better movie than The Last Stand and the oafish Wolverine. But loyalty to a director and relief that a film doesn’t stink on ice aren’t enough reason to excuse mediocrity.