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Amazing Amazon

The DC Universe gets the blast of fun it sorely needed with Wonder Woman, a film that gets it right on almost every front, and features a performance from Gal Gadot that makes it seem the role was her birthright.

Gadot lights up the screen and commands the camera on a level with Christopher Reeve and Robert Downey, Jr., in past films of the superhero genre. She simply is Wonder Woman to the extent that I can’t picture another actress ever even attempting to play the character again. She owns it. It’s hers. Game over.

There’s always that faction of fans who bitch about superhero genre stories, wanting these films to jump straight to the hardcore action, but I love a good superhero genre story done well, and this is one of them.

The movie starts with young Amazonian princess Diana running around in her island paradise, practicing her fight moves and yearning to be trained as a warrior. After butting heads with her sister Antiope (Robin Wright, rightfully cast as an Amazonian badass), Diana’s mother, Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen, yet another piece of great casting) relents, and allows Antiope to train Diana, as long as she doesn’t tell her about the true powers she possesses.

For those who don’t know the Wonder Woman back story—I was a little rusty on it myself—it’s a sweet little piece of mythology and mystery, and director Patty Jenkins (the Charlize Theron Oscar vehicle Monster) perfectly paces all the revelations.

Diana eventually winds up in Europe during World War I along with Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), a wartime spy who crash lands on her island. Diana is convinced that the German military leader (Danny Huston) Steve is fighting is the war god Ares, and she intends to take him out. This all leads to miraculously cool scenes of Wonder Woman leading soldiers on the battlefield against the Germans, and it’s nothing short of exhilarating every time she springs into action.

Gadot has the best superhero smile since Reeve flashed his pearly whites in the original Superman (1978). When Reeve smiled, he just drove home the fact that he was Superman for the two hours you were watching him, that being the sweetest, best darned guy running around on planet Earth. (You know, back when Superman was generally happy rather than moping about.) Gadot has that same kind of smile superpower.

It says a lot that Gadot and Jenkins make you feel good in a movie that has its share of violence and villainy in it. Huston is a super creep, very much against type, and he and his evil sidekick, Dr. Maru (Elena Anaya), comprise the film’s main bad guys. Dr. Maru likes making poisonous gas, and there are moments involving her evildoings that qualify as terrifying. Yet, no matter how dark the film gets, it remains an overall upbeat experience.

I will cite it for some occasionally terrible CGI special effects, although there are enough stellar effects to balance things out. Still, maybe this movie needed a few more months to bake in post-production because the shoddy moments are glaringly obvious. They don’t come close to spoiling the movie, but they help it fall short of excellent.

In addition to Gadot, Pine is a total charmer as the confused spy who winds up romancing a goddess, a love story handled in a way that qualifies as surprisingly convincing and adorable. Gadot and Pine make for one of the year’s winningest screen couples.

Perhaps some of the joy in this movie will make it into November’s Justice League, or future Superman movies. (Hey, Batman can mope … that’s his lot in life.) Wonder Woman gives the DC superhero crew a new lease on life, and gives the summer movie season the adrenaline boost it needed after the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie stunk up the place.

After all these years, and all of those failed attempts, Wonder Woman finally gets her chance to rule on the silver screen. Gadot takes that chance and soars with the movie gods and goddesses. May she have many more adventures as fun as this one. Ω

And yet there’s no invisible Plane in this movie ... or is there?

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3Alien: Covenant Ridley Scott’s third Alien film is an entertaining mashup of the overreaching but cool sensibilities from Prometheus and the old-school ick factor and dread that marked the original. Alien: Covenant continues the ruminations about the origins of mankind birthed in Prometheus while injecting a few more Xenomorphs into the mix. It will please those fans of the first two films of the franchise who want the shit scared out of them, while also appeasing those who enjoyed the brainy ways of Prometheus. While Scott has leaned harder on the horror elements for this one, his budget is more than $30 million less than the one he had for Prometheus. That film constituted one of cinema’s all-time great uses of 3-D technology. Covenant totally abandons 3-D and features some CGI in the opening minutes that look befitting of a low budget Syfy channel offering. The film more than makes up for it once the crew members of the Covenant, a stricken colony ship in danger of not reaching its destination, set down to scout out a new planet as a closer alternate. They encounter Prometheus survivor David (Michael Fassbender), who has basically been up to no good. Fassbender also plays a new android named Walter, and he more than capitalizes on the chance to do something weird with this acting opportunity. There’s plenty of old school scares and gore to go with the musings about Earth’s creation.

2The Fate of the Furious With The Fate of the Furious, easily the most stupidly titled installment in the Furious franchise—yes, even more stupid than the name Tokyo Drift—you get to see the single most disgusting, stomach-churning, horrifying moment in cinema so far this year. That would be when Charlize Theron plants a big, sloppy kiss on Vin Diesel, the image of which is some kind of “Woman from Monster Meets the Pillsbury Dough Boy On Steroids” nightmare. Some five years ago, I made up a list of five things I never wanted to see, and that came in at number three, right under “Donald Trump as President” and “Spiders in My Scrambled Eggs Being Served to Me By a Man with Weeping Hand Sores.” Somewhere along the way, the Furious franchise went completely bonkers and became less about cars racing around and more about dudes who think hair on the top of their heads is total bullshit and also think upper arms should be the size of a bull’s torso. It also went off on some sort of international spy team tangent, something that worked to a hilarious degree in Furious 7.

4Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 The trippy Marvel fun continues with this big, nutty, spiraling sequel that brings the fun, along with a lot of daddy issues. Star-Lord, a.k.a. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), had some major mommy issues in the first movie, and this time out his dad takes a turn at messing with his head. The dad comes in the form of Ego (Kurt Russell—yes!), who we see hanging out with Quill’s mom in the ’70s during the film’s prologue. (The CGI and practical makeup anti-aging effects on Kurt Russell ranks as one of the best examples of that particular trick.) After a killer opening credits sequence, the Guardians—including Quill, Baby Groot (voice of Vin Diesel), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (David Bautista) and Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper)—find themselves on another quest. They are quickly diverted to Ego’s planet, where Quill finds out more about his celestial origins. Russell proves to be perfectly cast as Quill’s bombastic father, with Pratt possessing many of the legendary action film star’s alluring traits. Seeing them on screen together, at one point playing catch with an energy ball Quill conjures with newfound powers, is one of the film’s great joys. But ecause writer-director James Gunn isn’t going to settle for an easy story about a wayward son reuniting with a dream dad.

1Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales In the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, a bunch of pirates run around and act like dicks while being pursued by ghosts. If my memory serves me right, that is basically the plot of all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The new one, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales rehashes the same plot, with Johnny “The Whore” Depp doing his whole drunken Keith Richards pirate routine again as Jack Sparrow. Actually, his Keith Richards routine has devolved into something more akin to Dudley Moore in Arthur 2: On the Rocks. I reference the Arthur sequel, for the original was somewhat funny, but the gag got real tired in part two. So it goes with Depp’s meandering, mumbling, tipsy performance as Jack Sparrow, the feared pirate that everybody in the world seems to have some sort of beef with. He’s laboring with a joke that stopped being funny four movies ago. This time out, a new legion of undead sailors is after Jack due to his having a compass that can lead them back to the land of the living, or some bullshit like that. The band of dead sailors is led by Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem), some dude who was trying to rid the world of pirates in his living days, but wound up a cursed ghost under the sea due to a young Sparrow’s clever trick. While Salazar’s villain has his good, creepy moments, he can’t save this dreck.

2Snatched Fifteen years after her last movie, the terrible The Banger Sisters, Goldie Hawn has been coaxed back onto the big screen opposite Amy Schumer. While it’s great to have her back, it would’ve been super great had the movie been totally worth her time. Hawn and Schumer play Linda and Emily, mother and daughter, in what amounts to some decent dirty jokes, some dumb dirty jokes, and a lot of flat jokes powered by a plot with no real sense of purpose. The comic duo work hard to make it all a bit of fun, but they are ultimately taken down by a film that aspires to mediocrity. When Emily is dumped by her rocker boyfriend (the always funny Randall Park), she has no traveling partner for her upcoming, non-refundable trip to Ecuador. In steps Linda, a crazy cat lady mom who barely ever leaves the house. Just like that, the two wind up sleeping in a king bed in a lavish resort, with Emily constantly taking selfies to impress her Facebook friends, and Linda covered up with scarves by the pool. After Emily meets a hot British guy (Tom Bateman), she ultimately winds up on a sightseeing trip with mom along for the ride. Mom and daughter wind up kidnapped and held for ransom, with nobody but their nerd son/brother (Ike Barinholtz) to save their asses. Director Jonathan Levine (50/50) isn’t afraid to take things to mighty dark places—Emily’s attempts to free her and mom from their captors has a body count—and the film earns its R-rating with raunchy humor, Schumer’s specialty.

4The Survivalist Martin McCann plays a character simply listed as Survivalist in the credits, a man living on a small piece of land in a post-apocalyptic world where food has grown scarce. It’s a lonely existence, but he has a crop to get by, and it’s all for him. That is, until a mysterious woman (Olwen Fouere) and her daughter (Mia Goth) show up looking to barter for food. After he refuses their offer of pumpkin seeds, Survivalist accepts the offer of sleeping with the daughter, and then things get a little complicated. Writer-director Stephen Fingleton has made a film that is relentlessly dark, and his film has next to nothing good to say about human beings. (Hey, the human race needs a good smackdown sometimes, am I right?) McCann is highly memorable as a nervous man who yearns for companionship but trusts no one. Fouere is the right touch of nasty as somebody who has been hardened by the apocalypse. Goth plays the film’s most sympathetic character, yet even she is a schemer with nefarious intentions. The darkness of this movie plays out until the bitter end. This is a film that aims to bum you out, and succeeds. I say this as a compliment (Available for download on iTunes and Amazon.com during limited theatrical release.)