Mackie having a rough time this week. Right after saying he's a "Proud American" too!

Disney spends the last decade ramming inappropriate socio-political rhetoric down the throats of families ("What's a 'period', daddy? Why are those two ladies kissing, mommy...?"), and we're supposed to "chill the f*ck out?"

Movie opens in four days, zero reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. Meanwhile Paddington In Peru is sitting at 93% and has already grossed over $100 million overseas.

The screams testosterone-filled action adventure scoring. Can't wait!

Not throwing good money after bad, apparently...but AFTER they've already blown a half-billion on each of these films is like closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out.

For what it's worth, I was at the small- town movie theatre tonight (on Thursdays, they only play preview screenings of the week's new releases) to see the new Paddington film, and while my party were the only attendees of the Paddington preview, there were fewer than 10 cars going to see Captain America on opening night. Bomb incoming.

These two characters must have been excised in the reshoots, because I can't recognize them from any point in the movie...

4/10



Not the worst recent CBM I've ever seen (especially in the wake of last year's troika of Sony Spidey Spin-Off Suckfests), but this was seriously lacking in (almost) every respect, and it's such an obvious Frankenstein pastiche of footage and ideas culled from the previous two or three earlier versions that Disney shot and tore to shreds in a frantic attempt to "Fix it!" that it never gels into a satisfying whole. The action and F/X are routine, there's a dearth of humor (maybe because all of the most charismatic Avengers are all dead or retired by this point), and there's an overall feeling of lethargy to the proceedings from a company who went all-in on the MCU over a decade ago and cannot pull out no matter how exhausted the "universe" has become. The one bright spot is --surprisingly -- Laura Karpman's score, which is "up-front" and malleable to an extent you rarely hear in superhero cinema these days. The arhythmic brass exclamations and skittery string patterns had a mild Danny Elfman feel, and I even heard some Goldsmith-style piano ostinatos during the end credits! There's still a lack of a strong, unifying central melody, but this is one of the few non-terrible comic book scores in recent memory, and I'll take what I can get.

I laughed outloud at the review Doomcock cited where not even the cemetery Ford was standing in at one point was real -- it looked like they cut and pasted him out of a green screen shot and you could see the halos around him. Doesnt that say everything about the time and place in the movies we're living in? So lazy.

Musically, I remember Laura Karpman's score for TAKEN, the Spielberg produced Sci-Fi mini-series of, oh, 20+ years ago. Very well done...even had an album released...but that was a long time ago.

The reviews aren't surprising, even the occasionally fanboy-centric Youtubers I subscribe to didn't like it, saying Mackie wasn't suited particularly to this kind of lead and the writing was terrible. Naturally the Doomcock video about the reshoots was spot on -- I saw someone say in a reaction to you MJ on x they cut out some character (one of the ones on that Happy Meal box) because they were "TOO comic-booky". Well isn't that the whole problem?

Going to try and see if I can't get through this school vacation week without having to see it. Maybe not mentioning it will help...

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2025 9:34 amI saw someone say in a reaction to you MJ on x they cut out some character (one of the ones on that Happy Meal box) because they were "TOO comic-booky". Well isn't that the whole problem?

The days when a comic book movie would revel in its four-color print origins are, sadly, long past. I'd give anything for a modern CBM to have the cool, stylized artifice of the Tim Burton Batman films, Dick Tracy, Sin City or Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Scott Pilgrim director Edgar Wright walked away from Ant-Man shortly before it started filming -- despite putting in over five years in development! -- precisely because he knew he would not be allowed to make an "Edgar Wright film". And this was a decade ago! It's only gotten exponentially worse, when Disney won't even reach out to experienced genre filmmakers anymore, and just get some indie movie puppet like Jon Watts or somebody to make the Spider-Man movies. Not just Disney, either...the only directorial credit Colin Trevorrow had prior to Jurassic World was...Safety Not Guaranteed (budget: $750 thousand, box-office gross, $4.4 million ). So why the hell was this guy handed the keys to the Jurassic Park franchise and $200 million? Probably because Spielberg just wanted someone who would say "No, sir" and "Yes, sir" and just follow the storyboards and animatics rigorously and try to keep the actors in focus. Meanwhile, when Spielberg made the original JP, he had eighteen years' worth of experience in F/X-intensive blockbuster cinema. It's why I'm vaguely interested in what Gareth Edwards is gonna bring to the new movie, because he has a handle on how to choreograph F/X and do wonders even with a modest-by-today's-standards $85 million with The Creator.

Getting into an argument on Twitter recently with a guy who's adamant that an eventual "X-Men vs. Avengers" movie is gonna be a $2 billion(!) smash, and...I just don't see it. Ten years ago, maybe, but we've gone through the X-Men characters twice with two different sets of actors (except Wolverine), so are people really going to be that excited about a third round ("We're gonna get the Phoenix Saga done right this time, dammit...!")? As much money as Deadpool vs. Wolverine made, that was still clinging to the established Fox-era actors in the roles. No one cares about the Fantastic Four getting recast (as there's never been a good FF movie), and will kids really give a crap about seeing these characters being "done right" by becoming a part of the MCU?

Hell, making the new Capt. America movie a direct sequel to 2008's The Incredible Hulk (a movie so old that Obama had yet to be sworn in at the time ) was an incredibly bizarre decision. Any teenager seeing it would not have been alive when the Edward Norton Hulk dropped.

4/10

We went to see this yesterday because it was Bargain Tuesday and XPlus was only $7, and it fit in with some other errands we had going on during February vacation week.

I really was just baffled by everything in this movie -- what was the point? There's no story being told that's engaging here. The INCREDIBLE HULK callbacks are baffling indeed given the age of that movie and the fact that Banner's not even here. Speaking of that, what PR expert came up with that -- let's finally reference that movie and bring it into the fold, but we don't need the lead character to be involved? Even going so far as to use its villain and lead actress -- but not the Hulk himself? Huh?

Losing William Hurt shouldn't have been a dealbreaker, but Harrison Ford's casting was just all wrong -- he's supposed to be playing a "reformed General Ross" but since we never see Ford playing the old part, and it's not a persona Ford ever puts on-screen, it just made no sense whatsoever. Never did I think he was playing the same character as Hurt, nor did it work dramatically. And clearly they must've been doing some kind of anti-Trump messaging, as Doomcock reported, in early test screenings, that was cut in the editing over the last few months, because that lurks underneath the surface also. (I think Cap gave some big politipreaching messages at the end in the early screenings).

Speaking of Cap, Anthony Mackie just doesn't have the charisma to anchor this kind of thing -- he's too low-key and/or the material is written at too low a level for him, or the part, to carry off the movie, which is undoubtedly why the film spent so long in post-production with them fiddling around, trying to up the test scores. But what a waste of money -- there clearly was nothing ever in this movie worth saving in the first place.

On the technical end, you could tell from the multiple endings of the movie how much was removed/adjusted editorially because all of it falls apart -- oh wait, THAT guy was in the movie before? Wait, this pint-sized Black Widow wannabe (talk about some bad casting, she was terrible) is "cranky"? Okay...when did that happen? The "edgy" aesthetic shows how much they were trying to give a different look to the picture from the usual Marvel formula but it didn't work, and I confess I found the music to be lousy too. It's all noise with no semblance of thematic interest at all. I'm glad Laura Karpman got a big opportunity but it's the kind of score an orchestrator would write -- someone who knows "their way around an orchestra" but isn't gifted enough to come up with notes really worth listening to. I just found it strident and unappealing.

What this movie is, is less a film than a release date placeholder. Keep the IP in the public eye, keep the brand going, plant some seeds for another Avengers (or X-Men too) -- we'll just keep treading water and try to tell some kind of story in the interim to keep Marvel alive. Five credited screenwriters (and undoubtedly many more uncredited) and reshoots and reshoots later, you have a lifeless corpse that's like a "Very Special Disney+" episode. How the mighty have fallen indeed.

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2025 11:00 amWait, this pint-sized Black Widow wannabe (talk about some bad casting, she was terrible) is "cranky"? Okay...when did that happen?

I know that geeks always gnash their teeth over petite, willowy actresses taking down burly, 250-lb. guys in action movies, but this actress was so short she made Linda Hunt look like Sigourney Weaver. And she certainly didn't have the charisma or screen presence to fake it convincingly, like Scarlett Johansson or Florence Pugh (soon to be wasted in Thunderbolts*, aka MCU's Legends Of Tomorrow). Supposedly she had a super-suit in the early versions that got taken out, as you can see by last year's Mickey D's promo I shared above.

Yeah I kept waiting for some "big reveal" there and it never came. All we were left with was her performance, and even in this kind of movie, it was completely WTF.