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Little wonder

It looks like somebody forgot to tell Brie Larson to have fun and let loose in Captain Marvel. Her turn as the title character, a.k.a. Carol Danvers, is one laced with lethargy and bizarre line deliveries.

Samuel L. Jackson and an orange tabby seem to be in on the notion of being in escapist fare, but Larson is stiffer than Church the cat on the Creed’s front lawn after his unfortunate encounter with a speeding truck. (Say, is my excitement for the upcoming Pet Sematary reboot evident?)

A similar problem plagued Larson in Kong: Skull Island. The Academy Award-winning actress seems to be in her wheelhouse when the budget is low, but seems miscast when the title of her movie is synonymous with blockbuster. She gives off a detached vibe, like she just doesn’t want to really be in the movie. It’s odd. The movie should be called Captain Meh-I Dunno… I Got Better Things to Do.

Had the movie around her been really good, her seemingly bored disposition might’ve been forgiven, but Captain Marvel is also riddled with awful special effects and some haphazard storytelling.

I went in hoping for a badass movie about Captain Marvel but found myself more intrigued by the subplot involving an up and coming, low-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. agent named Nick Fury, played by Jackson. Honestly, the de-aged Jackson in this movie, along with a returning Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), who died in the first Avengers movie, are so good you wish they got their own film.

I’m not putting the blame for Danvers as a character solely on Larson. The character itself is a bust when it comes to superheroes. All she does is fly around and send out energy bursts from her hands. She has moments where she goes full Marvel mode, and this brings on some sort of light show where she glows, gets white eyes and a goofy looking mohawk. As for superpowers, hers just don’t register as anything all that exciting.

The Marvel light show isn’t aided by the special effects, which look rushed and cartoonish. Captain Marvel in her full glory doesn’t integrate with the worlds around her. She looks animated and out of place. It reminds me of how bad the villain Steppenwolf looked in Justice League. It takes you right out of the action.

As for the orange tabby named Goose, he’s your basic super cute cat with a few surprises under his fur. Again, the special effects are a letdown when Goose goes full Goose, another example of the visual team coming up short.

Part of the film is set on Earth in the ’90s, which lends to Jackson’s Fury having a full head of hair and both eyes. It also lends to music by Nirvana and No Doubt, both of which are used in situations that feel awkward and forced. Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck get a little carried away in their efforts to be cute with the tunes.

There’s a big supporting cast, including a strong Annette Bening as a scientist and murky memory in Carol’s dreams. Lashana Lynch does good work as Maria Rambeau (pronounced “Rambo!”), an Earthly friend of Carol’s. Jude Law gets a change of pace with an action role as an alien named Yon-Rogg, while Ben Mendelsohn plays Fury’s S.H.I.E.L.D. boss, another character with a few surprises to offer.

The film isn’t 100 percent void of fun. It’s just not on par with other Marvel Universe offerings. That’s a high bar to hit. As for Captain Marvel, the end of Avengers: Infinity War hinted at some major participation for her, so this is just the start for the character and hopefully things get better.

As always, stay all the way through the credits. There are plenty of things happening in the credits scene that you won’t want to miss, even if you’ve had your fill with the events that happened before all those words splashed across the screen. Ω

“I don’t know what’s worse, the lazers or this L.A. summer heat.”

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2Alita: Battle Angel The first time I saw the actual character of Alita in previews (played, in motion captures, by Rosa Salazar), I found her super creepy with her big eyes and ghostly smile. After seeing her in 3D IMAX, I have to say, something about adding that third dimension makes her more visually accessible. She really is an impressive special effects feat, blending in just fine with the 100 percent human actors and special effects backdrops. The movie itself is rather absorbing for a while, a decent story about a more than 300-year-old android trying to fit into a dystopian society, along with having the dullest boyfriend in cinematic history (Keean Johnson). The convoluted plot has something to do with her amnesiac-self trying to remember her battle machine origins (interesting) and trying to become a killer roller derby superstar (not so interesting). This is a project that’s been on James Cameron’s plate for what seems like forever. I can’t remember the first time I saw him attached to the project, but I know it was a long time ago. Then, the whole Avatar thing happened, and Cameron the director got lost in Pandora speaking Navi and doing strange things with horse-like creatures. He went from directing Alita to contributing to its screenplay and production only.

2Cold Pursuit Cold Pursuit sees Liam Neeson in another tired revenge formula film, this time set in the snowy Rocky Mountains. It allows for some impressive scenery. That’s about the best thing I can say for this one. It’s not a good thing when the best part of a murder mystery is shots of a snow plow cutting through large quantities of white stuff. That, oddly enough, is a beautiful thing to watch and had me wishing this was a documentary about a guy trying to keep a mountain pass clear in the winter rather than another Fargo rip-off. Neeson plays Nels Coxman and, yes, the film contains plenty of jokes about that last name. Nels has just won citizen of the year for keeping the roads clear, just in time for his son Kyle (Michael Richardson) to be killed by a criminally forced heroin overdose. Turns out Kyle interfered in some drug dealings with a major dealer nicknamed Viking (Tom Bateman) and got put in a fatal predicament made to look like an addict’s accident. Nels knows better and seeks out answers. When he starts getting them, he kills off those responsible, one by one, until the path leads to Viking. When he gets there, the plan involves Viking’s young son. (“You took my son’s life. You have a son. He’s going to be taken!”) What follows is a revenge thriller that thinks it’s funny and clever, but it’s not.

3Greta Isabelle Huppert goes gonzo bonkers in director Neil Jordan’s latest—a silly, standard psycho stalker cinematic run-through made somewhat fun by Huppert’s commitment to nuttiness and costar Chloe Grace Moretz’s excellence at playing freaked out. Moretz is Frances, a young woman living in New York City with her best friend Erica (Maika Monroe). Frances, still dealing with the loss of her mother, finds somebody’s handbag on the subway and decides to return it to its owner. The owner is Greta (Huppert), a piano playing, solitary French woman who immediately invites Frances into her life, and they develop a fast mother/daughter bond. Greta has a daughter of her own, but she lives in Paris, so Frances fills a void. Greta provides the motherly friendship Frances craves. Erica cries weird about the whole relationship, but Frances persists, even helping Greta adopt a dog, and opting to hang with Greta instead of friends her own age. This is a horror-thriller, so it’s fairly obvious going into the theater that the Greta connection isn’t going to work out for the good. The cards are flipped early in the movie, and Greta reveals herself as a real kook, and the mother/daughter bonding goes south super-fast, devolving into Greta going into full stalker mode. The plotting is similar to other stalker films like Single White Female and One Hour Photo.

2Happy Death Day 2U Christopher Landon follows up his somewhat creative original with an overly ambitious sequel that starts off fantastically but gets lost in its second half. Jessica Rothe returns as Tree, the college student who got stuck in the Groundhog Day murder loop in the original. The sequel starts with Ryan (Phi Vu), the character who walked in on Tree and Carter (Israel Broussard) stuck in a brand new murder loop with a seemingly different baby mask killer. Landon and friends go crazy, establishing a reason for the whole murder loop thing (a quantum physics experiment) and setting up some scenarios that openly acknowledge the plot of Back to the Future 2, featuring doppelgangers and everything. So far so good—but then the plot goes Tree-centric again and becomes about her fixing other elements of her life, leaning hard on emotional stuff rather than the totally clever gimmicks the film presents in the first half. In fact, the movie basically ignores the doppelganger element and drops it completely, becoming just another murder mystery that feels like a bad Scream sequel.

4How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World The tale of Toothless, the freaking adorable animated dragon, comes to a close (maybe) with How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the third chapter in what producers are calling a trilogy. Yeah, you know, the same thing they said about Toy Story 3 before green-lighting Toy Story 4. If the story continues from this chapter, you won’t get any complaints from me. I think the dragon beat could very entertainingly go on with this franchise. Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), now the chief of his Viking tribe, and dragon buddy Toothless happen upon another Night Fury dragon, this one a female, and Toothless is justifiably smitten. After a first date that involves some hilarious show off dancing, the two hit it off, and Hiccup might find himself staring down a future life without Toothless in it. The movie clocks in at 104 minutes, but it feels more like 60. Director Dean DeBlois, who directed all three Dragon films, gets credit for making the proceedings breezy—and never boring. His only other directing credits are the equally enjoyable Lilo & Stitch and a Sigur Ros documentary. Thankfully, the great Jonsi of Sigur Ros provides another terrific song for the soundtrack.

2The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part Taking some cues from Mad Max, the Book of Revelations and, yes, Radiohead, The Second Part is another healthy dose of family-friendly fun where both sides of the age spectrum should laugh heartily. One of my favorite moviegoing things is to hear an adult blast out laughing, and then their kid follow suit. Cut to five years after the end of the first movie, and our hero Emmet (Chris Pratt) is happily buying coffee in Apocalypseburg, a devastated Lego land of sullen tones and broken dreams. Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) has taken to dramatic narrating at all times, things are getting knocked down as soon as they are built up, and invading aliens called Duplos are mostly to blame—invading forces that are at once undeniably adorable and unabashedly destructive. It’s a crazed world where Batman (Will Arnett) winds up engaged to Queen Waterva Wa-Nabi (Tiffany Haddish), leader of the Duplo, and Emmet winds up running with a Kurt Russell-type antihero who is suspiciously like him. The reasons for all of the craziness will not be revealed here. Take the kids, and find out for yourself.