“Thunderbolts*” - Is that an asterisk in your title or are you just happy to see us?

Before I get into why Thunderbolts* is a movie you absolutely should see in theaters, the answer to your immediate question is I’m not entirely sure why the title has an asterisk. I have an idea though. Asterisks have a lot of different meanings and usages. Typically, asterisks are used to say there is a note at the bottom of the page or in the sidebar. But this is a movie - there is no bottom of the page or sidebar. In screenplays, asterisks usually denote revisions but can also signify scene changes or character actions. There is potential there, but does that mean the title is a revision? Nerds will point out an asterisk means multiplication in math and a wild card in computer programming. Thanks nerds, you’re definitely at the right movie.

Much like Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts* is an instance of the MCU telling a solid story while consolidating a bunch of threads from previous films and series. Thunderbolts* is a direct sequel to Black Widow, but also pulls in elements from Ant-Man and the Wasp, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier. If you were wondering whatever happened with Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Red Guardian (David Harbour), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Avengers Tower, you’re in luck.

Don’t worry if you haven’t seen any of those characters’ (or building’s) movies recently. Five of them are former villains or anti-heroes, de Fontaine is the director of the CIA and showed up in a bunch of mid/post-credit scenes, and Avengers Tower is still just a building in Manhattan. There, all caught up.

Now, de Fontaine employs Walker and the three women as off-the-books mercenaries...and Red Guardian runs a limo service. When de Fontaine is in danger of being impeached for running illegal operations, she sends the mercenaries to destroy any and all evidence, including people. In their final assignment, they are all sent to a mountain vault to kill each other, except none of them are aware that the others are all working for de Fontaine. After a very entertaining and humor-infused action scene, they discover a man named Bob (Lewis Pullman). Bob doesn’t know how he got there and doesn’t remember anything going back to when he volunteered for one of de Fontaine’s experiments. Once they realize de Fontaine wants them all dead, they are forced to work together to escape the vault before they are incinerated.

As it turns out, Bob was part of the Sentry program, the very program de Fontaine is under investigation for. When de Fontaine figures out who Bob is, she stops at nothing to capture him, knowing that the experiments worked. Inevitably, the cobbled together team of anti-heroes, which eventually brings in Red Guardian and newly minted Congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), will have to face Bob. But it’s different than the usual superhero showdown we’ve grown accustomed to.

Another thing Thunderbolts* has in common with Brave New World is the stakes are much smaller than the entire world or galaxy or multi-verse. Nobody is trying to get their hands on a MacGuffin that can turn back time or erase half of life or is ten rings. It’s just the ragtag team vs. Bob, but mostly just trying to stop de Fontaine from corrupting Bob. And, as one of them points out, none of them really have any superpowers. Just a lot of training, tech, and serum-induced strength.

But the real meat of this movie, like all of the really good Marvel flicks, is the characters. If it isn’t already clear, all of them are damaged individuals. That’s how they ended up working for de Fontaine in the first place. The film establishes this is as the theme from its very first scene in which Yelena rotely executes a mission while lamenting that she is lost as a person. As the movie progresses, we learn that all of them are lost to some extent, even Bucky. Keeping the stakes to a minimum allows the film to focus on the characters’ personal struggles and how they steer them in their interactions with the group.

What I had kind of forgotten is how important the casting was to earlier Marvel successes. That’s not to say there have been any particularly bad casting choices, but how many nearly perfect choices there were. While everyone in this film gives really good performances, Harbour is fantastic, and Pugh is amazing. As with all MCU movies, comedic banter is found throughout (but it’s the right amount as opposed to Thor: Love and Thunder), but Harbour injects an earnestness and sincerity that makes it seem perfectly natural. Pugh balances the humor with a palpable sense of depression and desperation to find meaning in her life. She’s so good you’ll find yourself almost in tears at times. Over an assassin. It’s the kind of thing that’s been missing from most of the post-Endgame content, that “heart” that used to permeate earlier MCU films.

If Brave New World was a reset for the MCU (and I maintain it was a very solid reset), Thunderbolts* is very good start to the next phase of the MCU. And that asterisk? Well, the movie gives a very obvious, surface level answer. But I think it’s more than that. I think it’s a wink at us saying there’s more where this movie came from. Or to put it nerdily, it’s a wild card.

Rating: Worth your entire family seeing it, no asterisk needed.

“Gran Turismo” - Nerds...in...raaAaAAaaaAaaace.

Every video gamer dreams of playing video games as a career profession. I once seriously considered applying for job as a video game tester that listed among its requirements a “deep knowledge of baseball.” My childhood dream was to become a professional baseball player and a job playing a baseball video game sure seemed like a great consolation prize. Except, the job was located in San Francisco and paid like it was in Jackson, Mississippi. Dreams dashed again. But not every dream is crushed by the harsh reality of economics and, well, reality.

Gran Turismo tells the story of Jann Mardenborough (portrayed by Archie Madekwe), a video gamer who actually realized his dream of becoming a racecar driver. To be clear, the video game itself does not tell that story, just the film. As the film makes very clear, Gran Turismo the game is a racing simulator. The prologue of the film shows the game’s creator, Kazunori Yamauchi (portrayed in the film by Takehiro Hira), creating the game with the intention of making it the most realistic racing game possible. It will not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with sports movies that this little nugget of information will be leaned on by Jann on more than one occasion.

Following the film’s prologue, we meet Jann and he is every bit the stereotypical nerdy gamer. He’s an adult man living with his parents. He works as a salesclerk at a clothing store. He splits his free time between playing Gran Turismo in his room and playing Gran Turismo in an arcade. He spends all his money on the ultimate gaming setup. He’s socially awkward and hasn’t the slightest idea how to talk to his crush. Or to most humans, for that matter. The only thing missing is a subscription to a Funyun delivery service.

And, like all gamers, Jann’s parents (Djimon Hounsou and Geri Halliwell Horner) are very frustrated and disapproving of his lifestyle. At one point, his dad tricks him into working with him at the railyards to teach him a lesson about where his life is heading. And, of course, this just makes Jann more determined to chase his racing dream.

Luckily for Jann, Nissan marketing executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) convinces Nissan to create and fund the GT Academy with the purpose of training sim drivers (a.k.a. gamers) as real-life racing drivers (no, seriously - the GT Academy was a real thing that operated from 2008 to 2016). Jann is invited to participate in a qualification race within the game where the winner earns a place in the academy.

Once at the academy, Jann meets chief engineer and former racer Jack Salter (David Harbour). Jack’s job is to train all the contest winners to be real racers and, in easily the best movie speech in years, tells them all he thinks the entire idea is stupid and dangerous. Harbour’s Jack is nearly identical to his Stranger Things Hopper character, and it works like a charm. He’s cynical and snarky, yet sympathetic and caring. He tells people what he really thinks and it takes all of Danny’s patience not to fire Jack on the spot.

Jann is one of twelve contest winners at the academy and they learn that they are competing with each other for a chance to race for Nissan in professional races. This being a sports movie, you know exactly how this act will play out. For that matter, you know how the rest of the movie will play out. One recurring element of the movie is that Jann can see “alternate lines” – driving routes that take risks and deviate from the standard lines he is supposed to follow. But the movie itself cannot see any alternate lines, and can only follow the established sports/racing movie formula. Specifically, Days of Thunder. Jann is the underdog who has to convince several people he is for real, has a grizzled old mentor, vanquish various racing foes throughout the film, overcome an incident on the track, and even gets a girl in the end. And just like Days of Thunder, the spectacular racing scenes are the best part of the film. That’s not to say that Madekwe, Harbour, and Hounsou don’t deliver some very good performances, but we watch racing movies for the racing.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp, Blomkamp injects a bit of the video game into the film in very creative ways. If you’ve ever played a PlayStation game, you will recognize several of the sound effects incorporated into the race scenes, as well as the visualized racing lines the racers are trying to follow. It also features several scenes where a hologram schematic of a car materializes around Jann, then dematerializes after a few seconds. Once he is driving real cars, the same type of effect happens, except we are taken into the inner workings of the car (usually the engine) and the effects look like real parts instead of holograms. It’s a neat way to engage the audience to make the point - Jann is in the zone, baby!

I admit that I expected this movie to be like most video-game based movies - mediocre at best and laughably bad at worst. Instead, I found myself thoroughly enjoying a film that wasn’t a video-game movie at all, but a biopic about a cool story that just happens to involve a video game. It’s a very well-constructed, albeit safe, film that immerses you in the story and the tension as if it is a new experience, even though you already saw this movie when it featured Tom Cruise.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back and keep playing those games. You never know when the next executive will start a new academy.

“Violent Night” - Stupid is as stupid does (or Hopper gets a hammer).

All the information you need to decide if Violent Night is worth your money is right there in the movie poster. It’s like Sharknado. Your initial reaction is either “hell no - that sounds stupid” or “hell yeah - that sounds STOO-pid!” Violent Night is all kinds of stupid.

(SPOILERS - Admit it. You’re curious about what I have to say about an obviously ridiculous movie.)

Before you call me an idiot and remind me that Violent Night isn’t meant to win Oscars, I promise you...I saw the movie poster also. I expected nothing more than Santa covered in the blood of his enemies and the film delivers on that front and then some. But, I also expect movies to at least give the bare minimum of effort on basic filmmaking aspects. Things like casting people who might actually win auditions for a middle school play. Or writing a story using complete sentences. Or not outright stealing parts of other movies and bragging about it in the movie. In other words, at least a shred of competence would have been nice.

David Harbour plays Jim Hopper playing Santa. The real Santa. Reindeer, sleigh, Christmas magic...Santa. This Santa is not the holly, jolly Santa of yore, but a cynical, fed-up, drunk Santa begrudgingly stuffing video games and cash into the stockings of the few children who still believe Santa is real. Eventually, this leads him to the Lightstone family compound to leave a present for young Trudy Lightstone (Leah Brady). Upon arriving, Santa helps himself to some very good scotch and a ride in a massage chair, forgetting about the horrid human race for a moment.

Meanwhile, a group of mercenaries posing as caterers kill the security and household staff guarding the compound, take the Lightstones hostage, all in service of breaking into the super-secure vault in the basement and stealing the $300 million in cash stored there the day before. Sound familiar? Don’t worry. Santa will literally name the movie for you during an upcoming fight scene.

The Lightstones consist of matriarch Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo), her son Jason (Alex Hassell), Jason’s ex-wife Linda (Alexis Louder) and daughter Trudy, Gertrude’s daughter Alva (Edi Patterson), Alva’s husband Morgan (Cam Gigandet), and their son Bertrude (Alexander Elliot). With the exception of Trudy, the rest of the Lightstones do not matter to the plot at all. Just as one example of the family’s pointlessness in the film, the mercenaries cut all of the communications lines to the compound (so no law enforcement will show up), have a computer nerd/safecracker as part of their team, and they’ve bribed Gertrude’s emergency response team, who also happen to have the key to the vault (needed after they crack the combo). So, why don’t the mercenaries just immediately kill the Lightstones? Because John Leguizamo needs to chew up scenery.

Leguizamo plays Scrooge, the leader of the thieves. When I say he is chewing up his scenes, I mean gnashing through them like a toddler with a cake. Every word out of his mouth is either snarled or spit out. Maybe he did it to distract from the fact that every other actor not named Harbour delivered performances that ranged from forgetting how to act (D’Angelo) to never having learned in the first place (everyone else). Maybe he did it because director Tommy Wirkola refused to cast him as Santa. Or maybe he did it because he also saw the movie poster and truly understood the kind of movie this is.

Unfortunately, the writers (Pat Casey and Josh Miller) didn’t get the memo. When they weren’t blatantly plagiarizing Die Hard 2 and Home Alone, they felt the need to blurt out half-baked and no-baked explanations for several things in the film.

Why would we believe Santa can fight trained mercenaries? He’s a thousand-year-old Viking warrior who swings a sledge hammer real good.

How did he become Santa then? Hey, look over there!

Are those same mercenaries really going to fall for Home Alone-style booby traps? How could they not.

Did the mercenaries forget how guns work? Well, we forgot to have them put different colored tape on the magazines, so...

How does Jason move the money from the vault in a single night with nobody noticing and who helped him? Yes.

If Santa can get hurt and dies, does the person who killed him become Santa? Whoa, heavy.

I’d be lying if I said the movie wasn’t decently entertaining from a brainless standpoint. It’s the kind of movie that is only interested in one thing - racking up a kill count for Santa. Nothing else in the film has to be coherent - and most of it isn’t - it just has to satisfy the audience’s blood lust with lots of death and some unique ways of killing people. I’ll give credit where credit is due. It was silly fun watching Hopper-Santa sledgehammer his way through a dozen inept mercs or shove a Christmas tree star through an eyeball and plug it in or shove a grenade down a guy’s pants, walk away, then matter-of-factly state he has to watch and turn around to watch the guy explode. Did I say silly? That word is stupid. Stupid fun.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back because you saw the poster too.

“Black Widow” - Back up a step.

Not even a pandemic can stop Marvel. Even with the delayed movie releases, Marvel seemed to be ready for any contingency. WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki have filled in the movie/television schedule that has otherwise been a giant void of nothing. Now, with things opening back up and more than half of Americans with at least one vaccine shot (the rest of you need to get on it), all of those delayed movies are starting to hit theaters and/or our homes. That means Black Widow.

(SPOILERS Ahead - Don’t worry, you can keep reading. It’s not like you don’t already know Widow lives at the end.)

Black Widow takes place after the events of Captain America: Civil War and before Avengers: Infinity War. We pick up with Natasha, a.k.a. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), on the run from Secretary Ross (William Hurt), Widow having violated the Sokovia Accords. She and Captain America are the only two outlaw Avengers still free and Ross would like to change that. First though, we have to step back with the film for a glimpse of Natasha’s childhood. The opening scene of the film takes us to mid-1990s Ohio where Natasha lives with her mother Melina (Rachel Weisz), father Alexei (David Harbour), and sister Yelena (played later as an adult by Florence Pugh). Alexei returns home from work one night and says they have to leave. It is not clear what happened, but what becomes clear is that they were a Russian sleeper cell. At the end of the scene, Yelena and Natasha are returned to Dreykov (Ray Winstone), the head of the Red Room where all of the Black Widows are trained, including Natasha. Now, back to the almost-present.

Natasha is on the run and Yelena is a Black Widow on a mission for Dreykov. While trying to capture a scientist, Yelena is sprayed in the face with some red stuff and suddenly cares about the well-being of the scientist. This was confusing for a while because the spray doesn’t get explained any time soon and we don’t know much about the Black Widows aside from them being deadly assassins who take ballet and have all of their reproductive organs removed.

While on the run, Natasha receives a package from Yelena, so Natasha heads to Budapest (yes, that Budapest) and meets up with Yelena. And by meets, I mean fights with. Family, am I right? Yelena tells Natasha that Dreykov is still alive and the Red Room is still in operation and we finally get an explanation to the fabled Budapest that Natasha and Hawkeye always talked about, albeit a very abbreviated explanation. Natasha and Yelena decide to take down Dreykov once and for all and you know what that means. Vodka. Not for the Red Room, don’t be silly. Only a full nuclear family, one filled with trained assassins, can take down a room full of, er...trained assassins.

What I enjoyed most about the movie is the relationship between Yelena and Natasha. They definitely have some past demons, but they also have a respect for each other that mixes professional with familial. And if you have siblings, you will recognize the dynamics. Yelena is the younger of the two and is constantly poking at Natasha. One of the cleverest things about MCU movies is the way they show the audience that they are aware of themselves, but without coming off like morons the way the characters in F9: The Fast Saga do. One example is Yelena teasing Natasha about her superhero landings and poses, literally calling Natasha a poser. Later, Yelena will perform one pose herself, then remark to herself that it felt gross. It’s brilliant and is the reason why I’m perfectly fine submitting to the Marvel (Disney) overlords.

The film is not without its flaws. One flaw is that the story itself seems a little looser than most MCU movies. The film kind of flies past a couple of elements and kind of forgets to use some of the setup. The most glaring example is the use of Red Guardian, a.k.a. Alexei, or more specifically, lack of use. While Natasha and Yelena are reuniting in Budapest, we find Alexei in prison, bragging about being Captain America’s superior. Turns out, Alexei was given the super serum as well and we see him put it to use in the flashback scene by flipping a car and in prison during an...is this right? An arm-wrestling sequence? Huh. The rest of the film he is nothing more than comic relief. No more flipping cars and no more, uh, arm-wrestling, I guess. Just joke after joke after squeezing into his old uniform after joke. To be fair, the jokes were pretty funny. I just wish we got more of him in general.

At this point in time, we know what we are going to get from Marvel, including the intro music that, during these Covid times, is literally and figuratively music to our ears. Back are the quips, the action, the easter eggs, the fanboy winks, the post-credits scenes, and actors loving that they are in a Marvel movie now too. Harbour, Pugh, and Weisz were clearly enjoying themselves, as was I, since I really like Harbour and Weisz, and Pugh has definitely moved up my list after this film. I can’t say that it was an amazing movie because we are living in a post Avengers: Endgame world where every movie seems smaller now. But that’s okay. We need all of these movies and shows to be smaller so that whatever is the next big MCU thing feels big enough. Personally, I’m just happy that big movies are back, even if they are a step back in the universe we are watching.

Rating: Worth exactly what you paid for it. Home or theater.