Review: AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR 
(ACTION/SCI-FI) 
★★★1/2
Directed by Anthony Russo & Joe Russo
Screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
Based on Marvel Comics, characters and stories by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, Jim Starlin & George Perez & Ron Lim, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby & Joe Simon and Jim Starlin
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Don Cheadle, Tom Holland, Chadwick Boseman, Paul Bettany, Elizabeth Olsen, Anthony Mackie, Peter Dinklage, Sebastian Stan, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Dave Bautista, Zoe Saldana, Josh Brolin, Chris Pratt, Pom Klementieff, Tom Hiddleston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Terry Notary, Karen Gillan, Bradley Cooper (voice), Carrie Coon
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action throughout, language and some crude references.
149 minutes
Verdict: The climactic chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is long, exhausting, fun, emotional and delivers where it counts.


While this review contains no significant spoilers for AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR, there will be no such courtesies regarding earlier installments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  You have been warned.
After 10 years and 18 installments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) so far, the franchise has still maintained an improbable level of quality, and yet, even as the studio has tried to branch out in some fresh directions with the zany James Gunn-styled qualities of the Guardians of the Galaxy films, the flippant coolness of THOR: RAGNAROK, and the energetic black ensemble-led BLACK PANTHER, the series hasn't been able to totally shake a feeling of fatigue, like even when there's a visible effort to be different, there's still a resolute sameness and commercial safety to it all.  It's been accused of being essentially a multi-billion dollar TV series, which isn't completely wrong.  They feel like episodes at their cores.  It's not that they're haven't still been good, but they have been same-y, even, ironically, when they're not.  AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR, however, is pitched as a culmination.  MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS, which now reaches the ripe old age of five years, memorably ended with a mid-credits stinger that revealed the secret orchestrator of the villainous Loki's attempted takeover of Earth to be Thanos, a character familiar to many Marvel Comics fans as an exceptionally powerful antagonist of the Avengers, but the scene puzzled the masses of uninitiated.  Since then, Thanos (who was merely a CGI effect with a brief grin in his first appearance but has since been portrayed by actor Josh Brolin via performance capture technology) has made underwhelming cameo appearances in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY and AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, and all this time, the series has been building to this, his big starring role.  Whatever else, I think INFINITY WAR does a pretty decent job of shaking that episodic feeling, or at least, making it work in a way that it hasn't for a while.  The devoted fans were always going to cream in their jeans over this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it made more than a few casual moviegoers at least a little bit angry.  I yearn for the days of the supersized 100-120 minute blockbusters, but while INFINITY WAR clocks in at an epic two-and-a-half hours, it's briskly paced.  The action scenes are frequent and lengthy, but juggled rapidly between many different storylines, occasionally to very fun effect, and occasionally to one of exhaustion.  Especially by the time that extra half hour was rolling along, I was feeling the length, and by the time all was said and done, I wondered just what it had added up to.  More specifically, it's a very big movie, and I wonder, is it big because it makes sense for this climactic chapter to be a big and is thus an obligation, or did it really need all that?  Suffice it to say, this isn't the final chapter in the Avengers saga.  There is a fair bit of exposition to be had in a movie that, ostensibly, would stand at least somewhat on its own but which is also the sequel to 18 different movies; although, the Infinity Stones buildup didn't really start until THOR: THE DARK WORLD, which was, by then, already the eight installment in the series.  On the one hand, it's fortunate that INFINITY WAR doesn't waste too much time resetting the pieces, but on the other hand, there's still some effort demanded to keeping up if you've seen and remember what happened in the previous 18 movies, so it's probable that people who haven't been keeping track of things could get clobbered by how much is going on.  If you don't have time to catch up on 18 movies before seeing this one, you might be fine as long as you've covered MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS, THOR: THE DARK WORLD, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, DOCTOR STRANGE and THOR: RAGNAROK, and maybe SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING and BLACK PANTHER, too.  Not a one of them is under two hours, though.

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR picks up five years after the events of CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, in which the superhero team the Avengers were driven apart by political and personal conflict, and very shortly after the final scene of THOR: RAGNAROK.  Thanos, a bulky purple humanoid from the planet Titan, is on a quest to obtain the Infinity Stones; six immensely powerful singular elements from the beginning of the universe.  The Space Stone, previously introduced in the CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER as the Tesseract; the Mind Stone, previously introduced in MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS and further revealed in AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON as Loki's scepter before it was incorporated into the character Vision (Paul Bettany); the Reality Stone, previously introduced as the Aether in THOR: THE DARK WORLD; the Power Stone, previously introduced as the contents of a powerful orb in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY; the Time Stone, previously introduced in DOCTOR STRANGE as the Eye of Agamotto; and finally, the Soul Stone, which was briefly mentioned in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY.  I had to look all of that up after the fact, because I couldn't keep track of the details on these things for the life of me.  Wielded together, the Infinity Stones make one master of the universe, a power which Thanos desires in order to bring "balance" to the cosmos by killing half the beings in the universe.  Basically, you could say he's a population control extremist.

Once again, it falls upon the Avengers, "Earth's Mightiest Heroes," to protect their planet when Thanos and his army of grotesque henchmen come knocking, but not only are the Avengers fractured between sides sympathetic to Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) after the events of CIVIL WAR, but the battle against Thanos is a battle for the entire universe, so the Guardians of the Galaxy, led by Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), and Master of the Mystic Arts Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) enlist in the fight as well.
Personally, I'm a sucker for the reintroduction of heroes in a sequel where there's been a passage of time to catch up on, and they're already in the middle of another adventure.  Fortunately, there's no shortage of such moments in INFINITY WAR, as disparate but familiar faces make their re-entries one after another; relationships have progressed, Tony Stark still has hyperactive anxiety about protecting the world and people he cares about, Cap and his allies are continuing their heroics underground, and T'Challa/Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), is opening the previously largely secret knowledge of the nation of Wakanda to the international stage.  The familiar faces in this superhero epic are an embarrassment of riches, as evidenced by not the usual one, but two rows of star billing at the top of the film's overcrowded poster.  In addition to the aforementioned, Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), James "Rhodey" Rhodes/War Machine (Don Cheadle), Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier/White Wolf (Sebastian Stan), and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) play their parts, and those are just the characters who've been in the marketing.  I'm also a big fan of movies where they have to put together a team; one of my favorite parts of the original MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS, even in the midst of all the bombastic action, was just the beginning scenes of bringing them all together.  The hows and whys of bringing characters as varied as Thor, Iron Man and Captain America finally meeting each other, the resulting friction and eventual camaraderie, and there's an abundance of those meetings in INFINITY WAR as well.  How does the irreverent group of misfits that make up the Guardians of the Galaxy react to the prince of Asgard, Thor?  What happens when you put together the similarly brilliant but inflated egos of the tech-centric Iron Man and the magical Doctor Strange in the middle of an intergalactic war?  As a kid, I had about a year or two-long phase of devoted comic book reading, mostly of the Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk series in the form of black-and-white copied collections of the characters' classic eras from the 1960s and '70s, and as weird as each character was on their own, I accepted their individual adventures as grounded within their own respective stories.  

However, they'd occasionally have crossovers with other Marvel characters, and that's when things would start to seem weird.  Sure, a teen from Queens getting bit by a radioactive spider and getting spider-themed powers was one thing, but now he's working alongside Ghost Rider, the biker demon with a flaming skull head?  That seemed weird.  INFINITY WAR is the MCU getting weird in a similar way, but I think I like that.  It mixes together a lot of different flavors, more disparate and varied than the last two Avengers movies, and things get weird, even campy at times, like an '80s fantasy film.  THOR: RAGNAROK's aesthetic seems like a bit of a primer for this style in retrospect.  Some this blending of worlds works really well, some of it seems a bit off the mark.  The design elements of the movie cater more toward the fanboy sensibilities and occasionally to the detriment of things, such as Iron Man and Spider-Man newly styled ugly suits, and I really don't know how I feel about Thanos's henchmen, most prominently represented by the evil butler-like Ebony Maw (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) and the ram-horned warrior Proxima Midnight (Carrie Coon), who feel like they might be more at home in an episode of Stargate SG1.  The designs aren't exactly top-notch.

Some audiences might be more satisfied than others in respect to the amount of time devoted specific characters in the midst of so many to juggle, although I think they did a pretty well-balanced job of it overall.  Peter Quill might have deserved a little more time in regards to some events in the latter parts of the film, and after the immense success of BLACK PANTHER not even a few months ago, I'm sure there will be clamoring over whether T'Challa and his circle of close comrades received enough screen time, but I don't have any major complaints about things in that respect.  In terms of characters, the greatest responsibility of all to fall upon the film is Thanos, a character who has already made three previous appearances in the MCU and not yet has been able to project an ounce of real menace or depth, leaving the task all up to INFINITY WAR itself.  A tall and muscular, purple-skinned Titan, Thanos is about a B+ villain, maybe an A-.  The idea that has been pitched that this is Thanos's movie isn't quite true, it's still very much an ensemble film like the other Avengers movies,  but he certainly gets his moments.  He's still a little shallow in terms of his motivations, and while the backstory might be there, the movie doesn't give it sufficient prominence.  On the other hand, he's an emotional villain with some real dimensions, on a level alongside others of Marvel best villains like Loki and Killmonger.  I don't know if he'll make you feel a lot, but he'll make you feel something at least.  He's willing to make real, meaningful sacrifices for his objectives, and it leads to some potently emotional moments, however, there's still some lingering question as to what drives him to make those sacrifices.  There are also some serious issues with the power of the Infinity Stones and Thanos's power as he obtains each one.  I don't understand why they can be used to do one thing but not some other thing, and why it requires all six to achieve Thanos's specific goals, and their specific abilities and limitations are certainly not apparent.  Because other things about the movie seem to working well enough, you try not to worry about it in the midst of things, but the Infinity Stones seem to render a lot of what's going on almost entirely meaningless.  Perhaps there's still more to be said on the matter, but as it is, they seem like all kinds of uninhibited possibilities and deus ex machina.

Most importantly though, INFINITY WAR finally delivers a real feeling of emotional stakes to the MCU.  Obviously, we've been expecting some characters to finally meet their fates and stay that way with this chapter of the saga, after so much avoidance, but just dispatching a few of our favorite heroes wouldn't be enough if not done the right way.  I'm not sure how much credit to give to the directing team of brother Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, veterans of sitcom television who have taken the Avengers reins from Joss Whedon, director of the first two Avengers films.  INFINITY WAR is their third Marvel production after CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR and the quasi-Avengers movie CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, and as with those two movies, INFINITY WAR was falls on the darker end of the Marvel spectrum, although even there, Marvel really doesn't go that dark at their darkest.  Except for this time.  Even while INFINITY WAR finally feels like its own movie within the MCU rather than another TV episode (maybe you could say it feels like the special TV movie event within the TV series), it's still clearly studio picture, continuing Marvel's uniquely producer-dominated practice under the thumb of Kevin Feige, who decides how much creative leeway to allow hired gun directors.  That said, the Russos have displayed a propensity for emotionally charged action and undisciplined storytelling that has applied to all three so far.  In any case, INFINITY WAR is a massive movie in every way and the result of the efforts of many creative talents, some more successful than others.  Within all the spectacle though, I found myself caring about some of the characters more than I realized that I did, and when it finally becomes possible for them to die, there were some deaths that I was resigned to, and others that I actively hoped might be spared.  Finally, they were worth caring about again.  There's an emotional intensity at times that I'd been missing, and when the heroes charge into a massive Lord of the Rings-stye battle in the climactic action, the big signature thrills of a great summer blockbuster were there.

                                                                                                                                                                                           Marvel

Review: RAMPAGE

RAMPAGE 
(ACTION/SCI-FI) 
★★
Directed by Brad Peyton
Screenplay by Ryan Engle and Carlton Cuse & Ryan J. Condal and Adam Sztykiel
Story by Ryan Engle
Based on Rampage by Midway Games
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Akerman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jake Lacy, Joe Manganiello, Marley Shelton, P.J. Byrne, Demetrius Grosse, Jack Quaid, Breanne Hill, Matt Gerald, Will Yun Lee, Urijah Faber
Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief language, and crude gestures.
107 minutes
Verdict: While delivering on the promise of bombastic brain-dead monster action, RAMPAGE is more dumb than fun.

I'm not a video game kind of person, but RAMPAGE is one of the rare video game-based movies that I can actually compare to the game, because I remember playing it on Nintendo 64 at a friend's house one day when I was 8 or 9 years old.  Basically, it was a very old-fashioned seeming game, even at the time, originally from 1986, where you played as either a giant gorilla ripoff of King Kong, a giant lizard ripoff of Godzilla, or as some random giant wolf-man, and then you try to smash buildings or other monsters or something.  For some reason, it stuck in my mind.

Frankly, the new movie directed by Brad Peyton, and somehow written by four different people, doesn't actually add much more to the story.  The monsters in the game were transformed people, according to Wikipedia, which they aren't in this, but other than that, for better or worse, it's still basically excuse to let a giant gorilla, a giant crocodile and a giant wolf wreak havoc and eat people.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, for whom this kind of movie is now standard, is the human, non-CGI star as Davis Okoye, a primatologist with a vaguely defined background as a mercenary/special ops/poacher-killer, who works as at a wild animal park in California and is friends with a rare albino silverback gorilla named "George."  When a space station hosting illegal genetic experiments breaks apart in orbit above Earth, capsules containing experimental gas break through the atmosphere and crash down across North America, one of  them landing in George's enclosure, and it quickly mutates him to grow at a rapid rate and become unnaturally aggressive.  Elsewhere in the States, a capsule mutates a wolf into a gigantic, flying monster and another turns an American crocodile into a warped leviathan.  Meanwhile, the unscrupulous corporation behind the experiments, personified by the evil Claire Wyden (Malin Akerman) and her dumb brother Brett (Jake Lacy), is working to cover up the evidence and turn on a radar to draw the monsters to their headquarters in the city to create chaos.
Okoye is mostly interested in helping his "friend," George, so he enlists the help of Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris), a discredited genetic engineer who had been involved with the corporation's work, and gets help whenever convenient from a government agent who seems to be everywhere, all the time, Harvey Russell, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who you could say is the only member of the cast who knows what kind of movie he's in, but he's still playing it awfully high.

Fortunately, it doesn't take long at all to get into the monster mayhem, but every time the movie takes a moment to get back to human characters and make its half-assed, weirdly broad attempts to give them any sort of background, it's hopelessly dull.  Johnson is on cruise control, giving ham-handed lines to a CGI gorilla, and the villainous siblings played by Akerman and Lacy are a less fun carbon copy of the villains from SUPERMAN III.  Morgan's drawl-heavy performance is intermittently amusing, but his character makes no sense, popping up whenever it's convenient to the plot.
Really, the whole point of the movie is the monsters, and the movie doesn't withhold.  Plenty of people are devoured gruesomely, pushing boundaries with gore in the PG-13 rating to a surprising degree, especially for a movie this cartoony, and frankly, regardless of content, feels like a kids movie much of the time.  Personally, I'm not a huge fan of people being eaten onscreen; it's a fine line between fun and sickening, but weirdly enough, the messier deaths where people get torn up don't bother me as much as people being swallowed, e.g. Katie McGrath's prolonged demise in JURASSIC WORLD.  The deaths in RAMPAGE are mostly messy, so that's fine by me.  It's a little nasty, but it's alright.  The whole thing feels really slight, however, because there's so little story, and the encounters with the monsters during the first half of the movie just feel like previews whetting the appetite for the main showcase in the third act climax.

Even in the seemingly simple objective of dumb fun, RAMPAGE still isn't the "good video game" adaptation that continues to elude Hollywood, although it seems to have a better idea of how to get there than a lot of other that have tried.  It aims for the appeal of the Transformers series with epic fights that cause absurd destruction, and JURASSIC WORLD, with brainless bloody mayhem, and the Fast & Furious series with a weirdly earnest theme about friendship.  Unfortunately, it's just more dumb than it is fun.

                                                                                                                                                          Images via Warner Brothers

Review: A QUIET PLACE

A QUIET PLACE
(THRILLER/HORROR) 
★★★1/2
Directed by John Krasinski
Screenplay by Bryan Woods & Scott Beck and John Krasinski
Story by Bryan Woods & Scott Beck
Starring: John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward, Leon Russom
Rated PG-13 for terror and some bloody images.
90 minutes
Verdict: A simple, visceral and emotional thriller that builds on its promising high concept with stellar performances.

Despite becoming widely recognizable for his role as workplace prankster Jim Halpert in the U.S. version of The Office, John Krasinski's had a rough go of it breaking into movies, consistently landing in roles in lukewarm failures like 13 HOURS: THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI and LEATHERHEADS or out and out failures like LICENSE TO WED and ALOHA.  Sometimes in movies, to get the good roles, you've got to give them to yourself (Ben Affleck knows all about that), but while John Krasinski's role in A QUIET PLACE, which he also directed, co-wrote and executive produced, is good, it's not an especially meaty role.  Nothing about A QUIET PLACE is like that.  It's simple and broad, but highly visceral and emotional.
The context of the situation is minimal.  When the film opens, a title card indicates that it's been 89 days since whatever is happening started happening.  Civilization has broken down and only a few scattered families still survive in the area where the story takes place.  Mysterious, seemingly unbeatable creatures stalk everything that still survives, and though the creatures are blind, any sound louder than a couple dozen decibels brings them running to tear apart whatever animal life is the source.  The Abbott family communicates with sign language, and the parents, Lee (John Krasinski) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt), lay down paths of flour to walk silently on barefooted wherever they go and feel the weight of responsibility as parents while they strive to prepare their children to survive.  In the film's prologue, a scavenging trip into a nearby town ends in tragedy for the Abbott family, before the story jumps forward a year.  Each member of the family is still dealing with the guilt of what happened, and Evelyn is pregnant with another child, adding to their oldest, Regan (played by deaf actress Millicent Simmonds), who deals with the added complication of being deaf with a broken Cochlear implant and feels particularly responsible, and their current youngest, Marcus (Noah Jupe).

Although I can't really explain why, A QUIET PLACE feels more like a thriller to me than a horror movie, but that line is so constantly blurred.  There are jump scares and frequent tension, as well as supernatural plot elements, but something about it feels not quite in the same realm as what I could easily identify as horror.  Watching the trailer, with images of people walking barefoot along white pathways in the woods and an unseen menace, I assumed it would be a more surreal, almost fairy tale-like story, but it's strangely more grounded than that, for the most part.  It's a slick remix of many familiar things and reminded me of movies like SIGNS, THE WITCH and 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE.  It could easily have been the next Cloverfield movie (it's a whole lot better than THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX), and maybe it wouldn't have hurt if it were, but it's great that it's not.  
It's a movie that's easy to nitpick, and if it's okay to speak next to a waterfall because the sound of the waterfall drowns them out, I'm not sure why they can't just get a bunch of noise cancelling machines like therapist offices have, but if most of the movie is working, there's no point in bringing it all crashing down over something like that.  The creature designs are fine, nothing special (I guess I connected the trails with Temple Run and was hoping they'd be more like that freaky four-armed ape thing).

Where the movie succeeds on top of its promising concept is the creation and payoff of tension and the performances, all of which are very good while, with so little dialogue, most of the acting comes through the face and body language.  Blunt (married to Krasinski in real life, so, you know, nepotism), in particular, is a standout.  The screenplay, co-written by Krasinski from a spec script by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, keeps things simple from start to finish, allowing for the bulk of substance to come from the family relationships and emotions folded into the tension-based set-pieces.  It's a movie with big emotions that work thanks to its performances, and never unnecessarily complicates things, even if it occasionally becomes a little silly.  It's produced by Michael Bay (who directed Krasinski in 13 HOURS), and while critics will blame him when TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES was bad, most of them probably won't give him any credit for A QUIET PLACE being good, but to be fair, only the last couple minutes of the movie feel anything like some Bay would do.  The visual effects are also better and more extensive than you'd expect from this kind of stripped-down horror movie (thriller, whatever), which Bay could probably be thanked for as well.
A QUIET PLACE keeps things moving efficiently throughout its refreshing 90-minute runtime, never wasting a minute as it world-builds and draws out tension ahead of each emotional climax, only to start again, in a story about family crisis in the middle of a worldwide existential crisis.

                                                                                                                                                                 Images via Paramount