“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.

“We Live in Time” - Emotional symmetry.

I don’t know how many horror movies I will see by the end of the year (four so far), but I’m certain We Live in Time will be the scariest movie I see all year. I’m not confused - We Live in Time is not a horror movie, it’s a romantic drama. But I can’t think of anything more terrifying than my wife being diagnosed with cancer...twice.

I realize that sounds bleak and not like a fun time at the theater, but rest assured that the movie is not a depressing tearjerker. I mean, it is a tearjerker, but almost always in happy ways.

We Live in Time shows us the story of Almut’s (Florence Pugh) and Tobias’ (Andrew Garfield) relationship. For those of you that like your stories linear, this is not the film for you. The story is presented to us in three timelines, jumping back and forth between the timelines throughout the film. Like an episode of Lost, but without polar bears and smoke monsters.

When Tobias and Almut first meet, Tobias is a breakfast cereal representative about to be divorced and Almut is a chef about to open her own restaurant. Their relationship starts in typical fashion - meet-cute, a couple of dates, sex. The intent is to show they are regular people and relatable, which helps the emotional scenes to land with the audience.

Meanwhile in the second timeline, Almut is pregnant and Tobias is meticulously journaling every detail. I admit the journaling isn’t very relatable for most of us, but the pregnancy part is. My favorite scene in the movie is the montage of them trying to get pregnant, including showing their reaction to every failed pregnancy test. I remember feeling that disappointment, though we didn’t have nearly so many failures as Almut and Tobias. And we certainly didn’t have the bonus pressure of Almut rejecting a hysterectomy and beating ovarian cancer to risk having a kid. But I also shared their joy and excitement at the eventual positive test, a scene that had me shedding those tears of joy.

But it’s not all fun and games in the third timeline. Their daughter Ella is three years old and Almut and Tobias learn that Almut’s cancer is back. And not just back, but advanced to a point where surgery isn’t an option unless they can shrink the tumors with chemotherapy first. It’s important to note that this revelation comes at the beginning of the film and is followed by Almut posing a terrible choice to Tobias. Forego treatment and spend her remaining six-to-eight months in grand fashion with her family? Or do the treatment and maybe die anyway after six-to-eight agonizing months of chemo? Ponder that choice and try not to tear up.

As the three timelines steadily move forward, the film deftly jumps between them without giving the audience emotional whiplash. The film doesn’t jump from the excitement and ecstasy of those first couple of sexual encounters to Almut puking in an alley from the chemo. Instead, each jump is designed to complement the previous scene or gently shift in tone as their journey continues. The emotions won’t hit with the audience unless the audience can relate. Jerking the audience from highs to lows might exhaust the audience before the story is finished and the climax is where the real tears come.

The beauty of the writing is the two timelines depicting Tobias’ and Almut’s past mirror their present timeline. Each one starts with a choice about how to live their lives, then throws challenges at them. And each choice tells us the kinds of people Tobias and Almut are and how their characters evolve throughout the relationship. It allows the timeline jumps to be nearly seamless while engrossing the audience in all three.

It also helps that Pugh and Garfield put forth incredible performances. Pugh’s Almut is a force of nature, a competitor who will never back down from a fight and someone who seems way out of Tobias’ league. Garfield’s Tobias, on the other hand, is a quiet and unremarkable everyman and someone that life almost seems to pass by, if not roll right over. But with a softening of Almut’s eyes and Tobias setting his mouth decisively, the two characters evolve in an instant, often exchanging those personality traits with each other. This remarkable, yet subtle, transformation is best seen when Tobias confronts Almut at a baby shower in timeline number one. And again, tears were shed.

I didn’t know what to expect when I went into the film, but I left very satisfied. A lot of that has to do with how much of the film was directly relatable to me. It connected with me as a father, husband, and even the naive and excited young man I was when I first met my wife. Even if it is also scared the bejesus out of me.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back - the tears were worth it.

“Don’t Worry Darling” - Is dinner ready yet?

Don’t Worry Darling is exactly the kind of movie that drove me to writing movie reviews. It’s a movie that is a decent watch the first time, but whose story immediately crumbles to dust upon even the slightest bit of scrutiny. It continues to astound and confound me that stories with plot holes you could fly the Death Star through make it through multiple drafts, are filmed, and get through post-production without at least one semi-conscious person making the obvious change that plugs the hole.

Case in point - Signs. Really, at no point during any stage of production did anyone notice that the entire movie revolves around aliens who are lethally allergic to water invading a planet where seventy-one percent of the surface is covered in water, where the atmosphere also contains plenty of water, and those aliens didn’t bother wearing clothes?

Clearly, I’m going to go into detail on Darling’s plot and its holes, but I’ll get to that a little later. Like I said, it’s a decent watch up until the last ten minutes of the film, when the story reveals its guts to look almost identical to those of Clark Griswold’s Christmas turkey.

Prior to the last ten minutes, the film builds a very intriguing mystery. Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) and her husband Jack (Harry Styles) live in the perfect version of the idyllic version of 1950s suburban America. And not just the Leave it to Beaver version, but the version where a perfectly dressed and done-up wife opens the door for her husband when he gets home from work, hands him his favorite drink, leads him to the dining room where a freshly prepared, five-course meal sits on the table, then immediately fucks him on said table, meal and fine china be damned. Hehe - Leave it to Beaver, indeed.

Every morning, like every other wife in her cul-de-sac, Alice makes Jack breakfast, prepares his lunch, walks him to his car, kisses him goodbye, and waves, as he and the rest of the husbands drive off to work in a line of color-soaked, 50s-era cars. I agree, it just got weird.

Alice spends the day doing chores that every man of that era expected his wife to do. Clean the house, shop for groceries, gossip with the other ladies, take care of any kids (of which Alice and Jack have none), and repeat the whole dress-drink-dinner-sex thing with a permanent smile. Men are really stupid.

Except, something doesn’t seem quite right to Alice. Perhaps it’s the mundanity or inanity of such a life, but she begins to experience flashes of memories, including a certain song’s melody that she can’t stop humming. One day while riding the town trolley, she sees a plane crash and urges the driver to take her there. Confused and slightly afraid, he refuses to help, so Alice heads out of town on her own, into the California desert, to help any victims. Instead, she stumbles upon the headquarters of the Victory Corporation (the town is also called Victory), then passes out amid hallucinations of eyeballs and synchronized dancers in black and white. I agree, it just got weirder.

From here until the last ten minutes, Alice grows more and more suspicious and paranoid about the situation, including of the town’s founder and spiritual leader, Frank (Chris Pine). Eventually, she begs Jack to escape the town with her and, now, we’re at that ten-minutes-to-go mark.

By this time, the movie has done a good job of building suspense and the audience is definitely on Alice’s side. Everything we’ve seen has drawn us further and further into the mystery and we are all on the edges of our seats in anticipation of the reveal. We’ve also been treated to a stellar performance from Pugh (who absolutely carries this film on her back), exceptional cinematography, and music and sound that escalate the tension, building us toward the answers we are craving. Then, the reveal happens. Even the movie itself seems to know the reveal is bullshit, when after finally giving it to us, it quickly tries to distract us with Alice’s long overdue attempted escape, then cutting to credits before we have time to put our hands up to ask questions. About those questions...

(SPOILER ALERT - *Deep breath*)

First of all, no, Harry Styles was not good. There were moments of potential, but the vast majority of his performance proved that his reason for being in this film was purely based on putting teenage girls’ butts in seats. And it will probably work, at least enough to make the film break even, if not turn a profit. The advanced screening audience was easily ninety percent girls who are not old enough to vote, most of whom were still whooping at the screen when Styles’ named popped up in the end credits. Never mind that he came off like someone who had no idea they were actually in a movie, which only added to how bad he came off in the pre-taped cast interview we were shown prior to the film. When he was asked questions, the look on his face was a mix of confusion and a cry for help, mumbling his way through incoherent sentence fragments until a cast mate or the interviewer bailed him out. I have to believe he’s not allowed to speak at One Direction concerts, just sing.

Unfortunately, Chris Pine wasn’t much better, which was a huge letdown for me. Pine is unconvincing as Frank, lacking all of the charm and charisma that is required of sinister cult-type leaders conning everyone as the town leader and Victory company chairman. Some of this was clearly the fault of the screenplay refusing to use Frank for all but a couple of scenes, but also stems from Olivia Wilde’s direction, or lack thereof. Wilde seemed not to notice Pine delivering a wooden performance or that Frank is a woefully undeveloped character with no motivation. The movie would have been no different had Frank (and Frank’s wife, Shelley, for that matter) been cut out completely and only referred to by the townspeople. And that brings me to the big reveal.

The whole town is nothing but a computer simulation. To be specific, the simulation is specifically for men who want that fantasy version of life that has never, ever existed because the vast majority of women don’t spend every waking moment thinking about how to please men and their dicks. To fulfill the fantasy, Jack and the other men in Victory have drugged and kidnapped their significant others, forcing the women into the simulation without their consent or even their knowledge. Like I said, that in and of itself is not a bad reveal. The problem is just about everything we saw in the movie becomes nonsense in that context.

You see, in real life, Alice is a very busy surgeon and Jack is unemployed. Clearly, Jack’s penis can’t handle this situation. After sinking further and further into depression and diving deeper and deeper into the dark holes of the Internet, he stumbles upon Frank’s software and sermons, eventually buying into the bullshit as a legitimate solution and drugging and kidnapping his own wife.

The more you think about it, the more nonsensical it becomes. The women are in their own beds in their own homes, with little gadgets attached to their eye sockets holding their eyelids open while lasers continually scan their eyeballs. The men are using the gadgets as well, but are doing it willingly, so don’t require the drugs. If the women escaping or finding out the truth is such a huge risk, why isn’t there a secret facility where the women are held prisoner, with experts monitoring various feeds and administering the drugs, and smoking rooms for the men to use to congratulate each other’s testicles when they take a break from the simulation? This scenario is even hinted at when Alice is being electroshocked in attempt to erase and reset her mind, but that means they returned her to her apartment despite clearly being a security threat. And that’s just one question. Here are more of the questions that arise about stuff that defies logic after the reveal.

·         Why were there empty eggshells that one time, but not others, and why were they empty at all?

·         Where did the crashing airplane come from? It wasn’t imagined by Alice because the trolley driver saw it.

·         Was the trolley driver an actual guy in real life? What about the employees in the shopping mall? The band members at the party?

·         Why would all of the husbands need secret jobs when literally any job would make the women less suspicious?

·         Were the walls really smashing Alice? Does the software try to kill drugged users if they start to realize they are in a simulation, like some sort of failsafe? Wouldn’t that cause problems with the husbands?

·         Is Alice trying to subconsciously wake herself up by wrapping her head/face in plastic wrap or submerging her entire self in bathwater? Is that why the walls tried to smash Alice?

·         Why is it possible to die in the simulation?

·         What are the actual rules of this simulation?

·         If they don’t want the women to escape, why isn’t the road to the exit portal walled or fenced off or even guarded at all?

·         Why are all of the guys in red jumpsuits needed to catch people in a simulation?

·         Why does Shelley (Gemma Chan) suddenly kill Frank? Did she know what was going on the whole time or did she suddenly become aware of the simulation as well?

·         What is the significance of Alice’s visions and where are they coming from? They obviously aren’t real, but she also isn’t having visions from her real life.

·         In real life, Alice is an extremely busy surgeon. Are we to believe that everyone in the hospital believed Alice would just quit (assuming that’s what Jack told everyone) and cut off all contact with them? Unfortunately, the logistics of Jack’s abduction are never even hinted at, just that he did them.

There are so many more questions I have along those lines. The entire idea feels half-baked and, despite being an original screenplay, feels like it was adapted from a novel or an episode of The Twilight Zone, but by someone who didn’t bother to read or see the source material. It’s a movie that feels like at least thirty minutes of vitally important scenes were cut from the film. It’s a movie that could have been so much better had anyone just raised their hand and asked any obvious question about a clearly broken plot.

RATING: Ask for half of your money back, even if you only care that Styles is just a pretty face.