Blog Posts - Metal Lifestyle

31 Nights of Horror: Night Seven, "Raw"

10/7/2017

Where to begin with Raw? One of the most original horror movies of recent years, it plays like a season of some heady, hallucinatory TV series packed--but not cramped--into 99 minutes. Ostensibly a coming-of-age story, it’s far more than any summary or its trailer could convey, but here’s a try anyway: Justine, the youngest daughter in a family of veterinarians, who are also vegetarians, discovers that school and the larger world outside of it aren’t what she thought when she’s forced to eat raw meat as part of a school hazing ritual.

If the trailer does one thing right, it’s finding a way to reduce the movie’s sensual, decadent, and sprawling journey into a simple binary where eating meat turns you into a cannibal, so don’t trust it. Whatever Raw is supposed to mean, it’s not as easy to pin down as that; and as cliche as it may be to say, this is the rare sort of movie that makes plenty of sense on a narrative and emotional level, but whose lasting appeal is mainly in puzzling out what the hell it’s trying to say.

To say much more would undermine the experience of watching Raw unfold with the same inventive, inscrutable inspiration as Donnie Darko and May. Watch it.

-Brian L.

31 Nights of Horror: Night Six, "A Dark Song"

10/6/2017

A Dark Song is as gentle, tense, and lyrical as its title suggests, the story of Sophia (Catherine Walker), a grieving mother who doesn’t want to reflect on her loss and doesn’t want to move on: she wants her son back, a desire that puts her in a house for a month with a troubled occultist (Steve Oram) with whom she will embark on a months-long Gnostic ritual to ask a favor of her guardian angel.

Although the movie doles this plot out in doses, knowing ahead of time doesn’t spoil much, as it’s only the foundation of the movie’s gripping and clearly well-researched dive into occult magic. Thanks to nuanced performances from its two-person main cast, the movie’s clinical procession through the phases of the ritual never gets too cold or alienating--their behavior in the face of obstacles both supernatural and just plain natural is reassuringly human, keeping things grounded and believable even as the movie introduces reasons to doubt and rethink what we’re shown. It’s horror is the slow-burning kind, more of a persistent, unshakeable mood of dread and impenetrable mystique rather than a series of jump-scares and lulls; and while there’s certainly blood, it tends to trickle and drip rather than splatter and splash.

Don’t Look Now, Changeling, and The Innocents have all used the loss of a child as the basis for vastly different but equally powerful explorations of the nature of parenthood. This year, we can A Dark Song to that list.

-Brian L.

31 Nights of Horror: Night Five, "Honeymoon"

10/5/2017

The basis of all horror is simply to present the familiar in an unfamiliar way. Honeymoon, despite its brevity, takes its time introducing Bea’s (Game of Thrones' Rose Leslie) and Paul’s (Penny Dreadful's Harry Treadaway) relationship in all its fuzzy newlywed warmth, beginning with excerpts from privately-shot videos of the two gushing over one another on the eve of--you guessed it--their honeymoon. We’re guided through their affectionate interactions, the little idiosyncrasies of their relationship, and almost follow them into the bedroom, but the movie isn’t so concerned with the lascivious aspects of their marriage. The point is to illustrate that they’re very close, and seem to know each other very well.
What makes Honeymoon so engrossing is the way it patiently undermines that certainty. From the moment a bright light shines through their bedroom window in the dead of night, everything that was previously established, presented as real and true, begins to unravel. If the basis of horror is the perversion of the familiar, then it’s argument is that nothing and no one is really knowable--we know only what we’re allowed to know, or what we allow ourselves to know, about anything. Honeymoon has to rely on some genre tropes to get to its point, but it’s so tightly plotted, thematically consistent, and eminently haunting that even the familiarity of those tropes subsumes to the power of the movie’s overarching question: how well do you know the person you love?
-Brian L.

31 Nights of Horror: Night 4, "Big Bad Wolves"

10/4/2017

Death Proof is the closest Quentin Tarantino ever came to filming a straightforward horror, and for those that have seen it, it’s certainly lacking, and the furthest thing from straightforward. More an undercover remake/ode to/pastiche of his favorite car-chase movie Vanishing Point and about a thousand other, similar movies (as per usual), Death Proof kind of exemplifies all the worst qualities of a Tarantino film: it’s overlong, it’s self-indulgent, and it’s prone to meaningless tangents and winks at irrelevant films. Death Proof is not the horror film we needed from Quentin Tarantino, and I doubt it’s even the one we deserved.

Ironically enough, Tarantino named Big Bad Wolves, which is almost slavishly indebted to him, as the best movie of 2013. This Israeli-bred horror film (what an unusual thing to say!) is as much comedy as horror, and in the spirit of Death Proof, feels like a send-up of many different sorts of exploitation plots balled up and packaged together with a masterfully dry sense of humor--think more Severance than Evil Dead, and you’re almost there, but its oddball genre setups and unpredictable turnouts also betray a hint of Coen Brothers flavor, as if the script happened to float by their desks on its way to production.

Big Bad Wolves is the story of a kidnapping gone awry wrapped around a whodunit mystery, or maybe the other way around. It’s a blast to watch even when it’s clearly referencing Tarantino (you’ll be reminded of Reservoir Dogs more often than Death Proof, actually!), and it’s surprisingly funny even when things take a turn toward the grotesque; but Big Bad Wolves is depth-charge horror, the sort that disguises itself in twists and hilarious diversions, but whose presence lingers long after you’ve stopped laughing.

-Brian L.

31 Nights of Horror: Night 3 - "REC / REC 2"

10/3/2017

I’ll be the first to defend found-footage horror on the strength of a handful of movies that include The Blair Witch Project, The Bay, and the first two REC movies. The Blair Witch Project may have some cultural and historical significance behind it, but cinematically speaking, both REC movies are tighter, scarier, and eminently more watchable thanks to a plot driven by more than the improvised bickering of college students, and come with a narrative backbone that, while almost invisible, involves us in the world of the movie more than any amount of ad-libbed dialogue could.

REC is the story of a television reporter and her cameraman getting in way over their heads: initially shooting a late-night piece on the local police department, things go to hell when they follow the emergency workers to an apartment building in response to a distress call.. From the onset, these movies are first-class examples of how to harness the disarming naturalism of the found-footage style, excising virtually all of the typical dialogue and visual cues that telegraph upcoming twists or scares in more standard horror. When a corpse plummets several stories to land in the foyer moments after our protagonists arrive to the apartment building, the shock is visceral, and the lack of exposition makes it that much more disorienting. You’re never quite sure what the movie is going to throw at you, or when; and while it’s certainly possible to make educated guesses at where things will go, how we get there is frequently a mystery, and a terrifying one at that.

Put simply, REC is a 78-minute panic attack in near-darkness, and REC 2 isn’t so much a sequel as the second half of the movie, cleverly expanding the scope and scale of the first as it completes a three-hour dive into one of the most visceral, thrilling nightmares in recent horror. Watching them together is all but imperative.

31 Nights of Horror: Night 2 - The Loved Ones

10/2/2017

Night 2 - The Loved Ones

“Torture porn” horror is officially a thing of the past. We may be getting a new installment in the seemingly undying Saw franchise this month, but the nadir of horror filmmaking ushered in by the first couple of Saw and Hostel movies is behind us for good. Only the French ever seemed to get it right, with A’linterieur, Frontier(s), and especially Martyrs nearly legitimizing the style, but there have been few heirs to their thrones since--except, of course, for The Loves Ones.

Whether you love or hate torture-porn horror, Sean Byrne’s debut film is just a hell of a movie, one of those wildly auspicious works that seems to have been created in a vacuum. Like The Guest, The Loved Ones works from a familiar premise with endless possibilities: it’s the story of a girl taking vengeance on the boy who turned down her invitation to prom, and it may bear the hallmarks of torture-porn with its escalating scenes of violence and depravity, but there’s a weird pathos running parallel to the gore, and a more satirical edge of humor than you might expect. The movie’s prominent use of “Not Pretty Enough” by Kasey Chambers, an extraordinary cheesy pop ballad, had my friends and I singing it amongst ourselves for weeks after. There’s a hilarious “get laid” high school subplot like something out of Superbad that’s actually consistent with the movie’s thematic ambitions; and in Lola, the movie drops a brand new horror icon in our laps, one that could go toe-to-toe with the greats--it just can’t be overstated how sublime it is to watch Robin McLeavey’s insane, over-the-top performance, somewhere between Annie Wilkes and Freddy Krueger on the scale of awe-inspiring villainy, but solely occupying her own niche of ghoulish insanity.

The Loved Ones is quintessential 21st century horror, pulling from the same well of imagination and scrappy, low-budget energy as the original The Evil Dead: it’s brutal, unrelenting, frequently hilarious, and full of interesting, multi-dimensional characters with tangible motivations and distinct personalities. Watch it for McLeavey; watch it for director Sean Byrne, one of the most promising directors I can think of in horror, and who we’ll be seeing again before our 31 Nights of Horror are up; but most of all, watch it for that Kasey Chambers song. It’s fingah-lickin' good.

31 Night of Horror: Night 1 - The Guest

10/1/2017

Adam Wingard’s career has taken some interesting turns, somehow encompassing the excellent You’re Next, the faithful-but-underrated sequel Blair Witch, and the travesty of Death Note, but the high-water mark of his brief but eventful career is undoubtedly his third feature-length movie and the first entry in our 31 Nights of Horror, 2014’s The Guest. A throwback to peak John Carpenter in more than just its visual palette, its story is the sort of simple set-up that makes for the best thrillers: a soldier arrives one morning to the home of the Petersons, claiming to be a friend of their son Caleb, who died in action at an unspecified time before the beginning of the film. He’s a sincere guy who speaks highly of Caleb, so the family allows him to stay. Things are fine, until they’re not.

There’s a lot of talent on display, including up-and-coming horror starlet Maika Monroe (the protagonist of It Follows) as Anna Petersen and future Legion star Dan Stevens as David, the titular guest. Stevens is all charm, but he works an undercurrent of calculating remoteness to his David that finds its match in Monroe’s equally nuanced portrayal of shrewd, resilient Anna. Their standout performances pull from a sly and economical script by Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett that builds characters scene to scene and never betrays more than it needs to as the mystery around David condenses. The Guest is decidedly part of the ’80s revival, kin to Drive and Hyena in the way it gently subverts ’80s tropes even as it revels in them, but it’s a little less indulgent than these kinds of movies tend to be--somehow, that scene in the bar, that scene in the restaurant, and its finale inside a high school feel totally unironic, even earned, despite the narrative twists that put the characters in those situations.

The Guest has gone somewhat underrepresented thanks to The Babadook, It Follows, and Under the Skin drowning it out the same year, and it’s a stretch to call it a horror movie, especially on the level that those movies occupy; but for fans of thrillers looking for a perfect segue from the first days of autumn into the Halloween season, it’s hard to argue with The Guest’s politely sinister pull.

- Brian L.

Review: IT

9/17/2017

IT - Andy Muschietti
Rating: 8.8/10
Tickets

It is easily Stephen King’s most popular work out of his massive bibliography, a beloved novel from 1986 that comes in at nearly 1200 pages whose miniseries adaptation put the fear of clowns into an entire generation of children. Most fans who aren’t blinded by nostalgia realize that the 1990 adaptation was far from good and could have been much better if it wasn’t bound by the restrictions of television in the 20th century. Finally, after eight years in development hell, the cinema adaptation of the novel has hit the streets in full force. Originally supposed to be written and directed by True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga, the project was passed off to Mama director Andy Muschietti. Since release, the movie has being praised by both fans of horror and fans of King’s work all over the world. Warner Bros., wary of how fans of Tommy Lee Wallace’s miniseries would take to the new adaptation, put some serious limitations on the budget of the 2017 adaptation, one of the many reasons Fukunaga originally split. After many, many years keeping a close eye on this project and trying to keep expectations reasonable, we finally have the movie.

It begins with Bill Denbrough building his kid brother Georgie a paper boat to sail down the street in the rain, which as readers and those familiar with the miniseries know, leads to Georgie’s demise. Right off the bat, we notice the soundtrack and the inclusion of Bill’s stutter, which wasn’t present in any promotional media before release, and once Georgie loses his boat, we have our first encounter with Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise. Let me say that I was skeptical when I first saw the design. It looked cool, but it takes more than appearance to do justice to such a diverse and insane character. Fortunately, all it took was this scene alone to sell me on Skarsgard, from the subtle shift in eye color as he moves in and out of darkness to the copious amounts of drool you can see running from his mouth as he stares at Georgie from the grate. It’s a good thing that Skarsgard didn’t attempt to follow in the footsteps of Curry’s version and gave us his own twisted, frightening take on the monster, although I was mildly underwhelmed by the actual moment of Georgie’s death. I couldn’t put my finger on whether it was the CGI or the cinematography (although given that Chung-Hoon Chung is behind the camera, that’s not likely), but I felt as if the scene simply wasn’t graphic enough to drive home the horror. However, the way Pennywise’s eyes swivel in two separate directions is damn freaky, showing us that we’re dealing with something truly inhuman.

Soon after, we’re introduced to all of our main cast in almost a series of vignettes, first on their way out of school on the last day of classes before summer, and then into their individual encounters with “It.” I felt as if these 30-40 minutes are rushed, but I’m willing to cut it slack as it’s trying to fit about half of a 1200-page novel into two hours and fifteen minutes. We don’t get a lot of character backstory during these segments, but the movie picks back up after assembling the Losers’ Club with a push from the somewhat toned-down versions of the novel’s bullies. While all of them are terrible people, and Henry Bowers is graphically shown carving an “H” on Ben’s stomach, the movie does ask us to feel a little sympathy for Patrick Hockstetter before he’s killed in the ensuing chase scene. Once the kids are brought together by Ben, fleeing from a vicious attack by the Bowers gang, you start to see the cast’s chemistry unfold.

If there’s one consistent draw throughout the movie, it’s Finn Wolfhard’s portrayal of Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, or “the man of a million voices,” whose filthy mouth and “voices” are showcased wonderfully in the film and much better than they were in the miniseries. I don’t think ten minutes pass where Richie isn’t dishing out spot-on teenager-style jokes, a far cry from the character Wolfhard plays on Netflix’s Stranger Things that he nails. Sophia Lillis’s take on Beverly Marsh is also much more accurate to her character in the book compared to the damsel-in-distress that Tommy Lee Wallace forced into the miniseries. This Beverly, a thirteen-year-old rebel who smokes cigarettes in the school bathroom, is so close to the source material it will make smile from ear to ear, and the Loser boys’ attraction to her is apparent, too, without crossing over into “creepy.” There’s a great scene in the movie where, after a swim in the quarry, the guys are dumbstruck by Bev as she dries off in the sun, dressed in nothing but her bra and underwear. All in all, from this point on, there isn’t a stale moment in the Losers’ Club, either in the kids’ performances or their character interactions.

I’m not quite sure where to start with Bill Skarsgard’s take on Pennywise the Dancing Clown. He’s amazing from a physical standpoint, moving sometimes diabolically slow to insanely fast to give him the inhuman aura of Stephen King’s monster, and his range of facial expressions underneath all that makeup and prosthetic work is just incredible. The moment that really made me go “Damn, this is fucking awesome” is in the confrontation in the house on Neibolt Street, which fans of the novel know well as one of the most terrifying scenes never filmed for the miniseries: Bill and Richie run in, Pennywise turns around to look Bill dead in the eye, and says, in response to Bill’s insistence that everything they’ve seen Pennywise do isn’t real: “This isn’t real enough for you Billy?” The way he contorts his face and raises his voice an octave in mock sincerity is pure acting. There are a few moments of CGI that I felt detracted from Bill’s performance, particularly in the scene after Eddie encounters the leper on Neibolt Street, where it looks as if Pennywise’s head isn’t attached to his body. There are scenes where he’s clearly been digitally manipulated to move faster, especially in shots of him running at the camera, and some of his transformation are a bit on the rough side--especially his manifestation of Stan’s fear. But the CGI also helps Pennywise shine toward the end, helping him switch seamlessly between the losers’ fears, making for one hell of a climactic battle.

For those familiar with the source material, you’ll be happy to know that there are many, many easter eggs in store for you. Starting from the top, you can see the first two nods to the Turtle Maturin. When Georgie leaves to sail his boat, the walkie talkies are “Turtle” brand. He passes a construction cover that looks oddly like a turtle shell, although that may just be coincidence. There are small nods in the Losers’ wardrobe to other King novels, like the Christine shirt you catch Eddie wearing, but the best easter eggs are references to past It feedings like the Kitcher Ironworks, when It awoke and massacred a group of children, and the Black Spot, which is the club that a racist cult burns down the last time It woke up. The rest I’ll leave to you to find, but last but not least, watch how the movie makes the movie’s tagline very literal.

It is a damn near perfect adaptation of my favorite Stephen King novel. If you go into this movie looking for something to scare the shit out of you non-stop, don’t--people seem to forget that Stephen King himself has said the story is more about Losers’ connection than the horror they suffer, just as all his novels are about the characters more than the plot. Andy Muschietti understands that better than any director that’s tried to adapt his work, and really hits the nail on the head with It. I can safely say that I will be impatiently waiting for the next two years on It: Chapter Two, which is nothing in comparison to the eight years Chapter One spent in development hell. I’ve seen IT twice in theaters since it’s release, and I plan on at least seeing it twice more--because we all float.

- Dakota G.

Curtains: "Atomic Blonde"

8/4/2017

Atomic Blonde - David Leitch
Rating: 6.5/10

From the director of both John Wick movies, Atomic Blonde comes pre-loaded with a certain familiarity: before the move has even begun, you can expect top-tier action sequences amid sumptuous set design against a killer soundtrack, which the movie delivers in spades. Every frame is awash in neon or chilly grey, and the action is handled with expertise by a seasoned team of action movie alumni, delivering thrills intermittently throughout the movie’s unexciting noir/espionage-thriller narrative.

Nowhere in its long and rambunctious marketing campaign did I see mention of the fact that Atomic Blonde is an adaptation, but it’s based on a graphic novel called The Coldest City, so now you know. The movie (and its source material, I presume) is the story of a botched rescue mission that occurs within the political pressure-cooker of 1989 Berlin, Germany, on the cusp of the Berlin Wall’s destruction. It’s told in flashback by Charlize Theron’s British spy/hitwoman Lorraine to Toby Jones and John Goodman, British and American government representatives, respectively. Outside of the narrative, this is the third hyper-stylized action film from David Leitch after reviving Keanu Reeves’s career, and is the next full-blooded action movie in Theron's career following Mad Max: Fury Road, suggesting that these kinds of movies may become a trend for the star. That wouldn’t be a bad thing.

The film opens with a quick summary of the historic significance of the Wall, graffitied out and replaced with “This is not that story” so there’s no confusion: Atomic Blonde is exactly what its trailer suggests, an exercise in style more concerned with staging action than investing it with meaning. The narrative isn’t entirely superficial, and we get time to see Lorraine’s humanity and absorb some zeitgeisty detail about the period setting, but that stuff is all in snatches and glimpses--the film’s eye, and so the audience’s eye, is on how much ass Lorraine kicks, and how many times she can get her own ass kicked before kicking back even harder. The most interesting aspects of Atomic Blonde’s world are those moments we get in the streets of Germany, bustling through crowded back alleys and neon-lit clubs. Breakdancing, mohawks, weird outfits, and tokens of skater culture all make appearances alongside your usual earmarks of brutal police regimes--dour expressions, matching uniforms, bad-cop/worse-cop tactics--but the world-building is an overall step down from the deftness of the John Wick franchise. We can always blame the source material, but you’d think this would be the one aspect to get a boost from some pre-existing lore.

No matter. Atomic Blonde plays fair by being so unapologetic about its intentions early on, because its shortcoming only really begin to show after the movie ends. While it’s on, it’s hard not to admire it as another round of near-perfect action choreography in scenes like the opening car chase, and the movie’s indisputable guitar solo: a hand-to-hand, no-holds-barred murderthon in a hotel stairwell that pits Lorraine against four armed Soviets. Its inventiveness is sublime and is probably the most visceral thing I’ve seen in a theater this year (barring the emotional carnage of It Comes At Night), the rare sort of fight that earns the right to be described as utilizing “everything but the kitchen sink,” and only because there isn’t a kitchen in the vicinity. A lesser movie would have you glancing around the frame at various makeshift weapons and tsk-tsking missed opportunities, but not this one. On top of that, it’s shot in one take, or at least edited to appear so, but it’s such a seamless composition that any camera trickery hardly matters. If it wasn’t clear by now, this is why and where you’ll get your money’s worth.

It’s almost enough to want to gloss over the movie’s problems. Entertaining as he is, James McAvoy has played this scumbag role a few times now in exactly the same manner. He’s had too varied a career to be typecast at this point, but his array of facial tics and fixed staring is grating when you’re seeing them for the umpteenth time, and when the script offers no openings for ambiguity or development. Intriguing as it initially seems, the whodunit mystery, and even the double-crosses, are rote and unengaging thanks to a lack of investment in these characters or their motivations. The effort at a more complex narrative is commendable; we don’t need to repeat the simplicity of John Wick, nor do good stories always need rootable characters, but it would be nice if the movie interrupted its own channeling of the emotional frostiness of the James Bond movies to give at least one character, other than Lorraine, a heartbeat to go with their poker faces. Her ostensible love interest Delphine (Sofia Boutella), a French operative Lorraine gets the drop on early and recruits for sex seemingly for titillation’s sake, is especially flat. We can predict her dialogue, the “twists” their relationship will take, and how she will serve the plot as accurately as we can predict McAvoy’s. It’s boring, and drains a lot of the film’s two-hour runtime of the guesswork that’s usually the draw for these kinds of films.

Atomic Blonde is a well-mounted, well-staged, and attractive film with a few excellent action setpieces mired in a lot of passable spy drama and good lighting. Excising half an hour would have done the movie a lot of good, maximizing the impact of its action sequences, which are admittedly worth the price of admission on their own. It could do without the flashback structure--unreliable narration is a cool device when used appropriately, but it’s such a straightforward story that the twist seems gratuitous, adding little more than an artificial “gotcha” to drum up excitement--but it’s an acceptable, if disposable, two-hour diversion. Catch it when it hits your preferred streaming service.

-Brian L.

Curtains: "Spider-Man: Homecoming"

7/24/2017

Spider-Man: Homecoming - Jon Watts
Rating: 7.5/10

   Spider-Man has been kicked around by Marvel and Sony’s cinema teams nearly to death, but right off the bat, Spider-Man: Homecoming had the potential to be the best adaptation to ever bless the live-action comic universe. The fact is, Andrew Garfield should never have been Spider-Man, and Sony’s Amazing Spider-Man movies should never have happened, if only because the second is such a horrible mess it retroactively improves the first Garfield outing and softened my feelings for Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. That, especially, should never have happened. Garfield is too cool-guy to play dorky Peter Parker, and his Spider-Man too smarmy to take seriously as a hero. Tobey Maguire plays to both of the character’s strengths: he’s convincingly awkward out of the suit and charmingly witty in it, and was incontestably the best version of the character we had on-screen until Tom Holland hopped aboard the unprecedented Sony-Marvel partnership, surpassing both to claim the title as The Best Movie Spider-Man.

   He’s funny, slick, endearing, and vulnerable over the course of Spider-Man: Homecoming, and the nuances of the subtitle are inescapable: watching Holland’s Peter do almost nothing but swing and flip above the city and bumble around as a high schooler at street level for the first forty-odd minutes of the film, you get the sense that the character is truly home under Marvel’s care, and you can almost forgive these forty minutes for kind of meandering. After three movies of alternately rigid and sloppy plotting, the chance to just watch Spider-Man be Spider-Man shouldn’t be taken for granted, and is really a joy to see; but we also can’t ignore the fact that the movie feels aimless for a long time, until the ferry scene glimpsed in the trailer. Here, finally, we come as close to the “with great power” stuff as the movie dares, nicely set against an echo of Spider-Man 2’s train sequence. Having just deus ex machina’d Peter from a failing attempt to rescue a rupturing ferryboat, Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) tells Peter that if he’s no one without the custom-made suit Stark lent him, then he shouldn’t have it. You know: if he can’t be responsible, he doesn’t deserve its power. This, finally, provides conflict a little greater than “how can I get my crush to notice me,” and sees the movie picking up the thematic threads left dangling in the film’s Vulture prologue.

   Marvel has a much tougher time setting things up with these villain-in-a-nutshell scenes than they do with their credit stingers, the nadir of the technique being the prologue to Ant-Man. To some extent, even the most serious Marvel films are tonally breezy, but they rarely feel so cartoonish. The idea to retool the Vulture’s origin so that his suit is a composite of Chitauri technology left over from The Avengers is inspired, reassuring us that the thematic baggage of Captain America: Civil War isn’t forgotten. In fact, it dovetails neatly with the power/responsibility tension that defines Spider-Man: actions have consequences, and every action is ultimately justified, so act responsibly. The problem is that, while the Vulture’s motivations check out, they do so in the blandest way possible--with Michael Keaton at his most prosaic everyman vs. the stern, unempathetic corporate representatives who won’t budge an inch to let he and his men make their living, no duh we’re going to side with the guy, ideologically. It’s cheap, and I can’t help but think that developing the character’s villainy parallel to Spider-Man’s heroism would have made it less so, sharpening up the delineation between good and evil as a series of choices in an uncondescending, but suitably comic-booky way. The Vulture never gets more time to develop beyond that opening scene, coasting on the “doing the wrong thing for the right reasons”/”For my family” rationale we’ve seen before, placing him well below Doc Ock, and even Green Goblin, on the scale of interesting Spider-Man villains. Still, it’s a refreshing change from Electro’s jealousy issues and The Lizard’s de facto evil, and his costume is easily one of the best designs in the MCU.

   Let me be clear: Spider-Man: Homecoming is a good movie! As disconnected as the first half feels, it’s a lot of fun in isolation. Every joke lands, even if Peter doesn’t always; but seeing him fall flat on a rooftop after attempting a bigger swing than he’s used to making, or sprinting through a park in the middle of the night when he finds himself without buildings to swing from, grounds Spider-Man in a way the previous two entries never did. Ditto for the scene where Spider-Man does a backflip for a delighted pedestrian. He’s a kid with extraordinary powers, but he’s a kid first, and the movie makes that clear in an unforced way. He builds Lego Deathstars (Marvel’s going to make use of their Disney ties, so just accept it) with his best friend; can’t speak to his crush without stuttering; has a place of honor on the school debate team; and finds thirty minutes of waiting to be an eternity. Outside of Peter, the supporting cast is uniformly great, featuring an unusually diverse cast: Peter’s crush Liz Allan (Laura Harrier) is black; his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) is Filipino; Flash Thompson the bully (Tony Revolori) is Italian, and Peter’s not-very-secret-admirer Michelle is acted by Zendaya, which is some inspired casting. The film toys with audience expectation in this regard for a reveal that adds some appreciable punch to one of the movie’s tensest scenes, ramping up to the also-titular homecoming dance. Although the character is rather static, Michael Keaton is second to none at projecting working-class malice, and the Vulture’s better-than-average standing in Marvel’s stable of disposable antagonists rests solely on his professionalism. He can’t not act the hell out of anything.

   And what’s a superhero movie without big set pieces? Apart from the ferry and its overtones of Spider-Man 2, the Washington Monument and the climactic battle around a Stark-owned “moving plane,” transporting classified tech, are the movie’s other pivotal action pieces, and they’re handled pretty well by Marvel’s standards. The monument gives Peter a chance to demonstrate a lot of time-crunched improvisation: the debate team is trapped in an broken elevator on the top floor, and he isn’t quite strong enough to break through the thick glass on the ventilation windows at the top of the monument without help. None of these movies are going to win awards for cinematography, but there is effort put into highlighting the peril of the situation, with dizzying shots from the top of the monument and some swoopy camerawork following Peter through the air and into the elevator shaft. In another callback scene, this time to Amazing Spider-Man 2’s clock tower sequence, Peter saves Liz from a lethal fall down the shaft. This, more than any other, feels like the point at which Sony officially passes the Spider-Man torch to Marvel. The plane scene, in which Peter does his best to thwart the Vulture’s hijacking attempt, is nicely handled and ends in a fiery, albeit brief, showdown between the two that may not take advantage of the Vulture’s potential for cool aerial battles, but proves serviceably climactic nonetheless.

   If there’s a real complaint to lob at the movie, it’s exactly that: Homecoming is serviceable, and sometimes great, but it pushes no envelopes. At this point, asking for Marvel to shake things up is futile (at least until Avengers: Infinity War), but the fact that this movie is not an origin story, and that the name “Ben” crosses no one’s lips at any time, is incremental progress from a studio that could sit back on its haunches and see no change in its revenue stream. It’s not that far off from the origin-story mechanisms Marvel has fine-tuned to a science, and it’s tempting to be cynical and say that every movie under their banner is just a slightly tweaked configuration of the same elements, because there’s some truth to that statement. Homecoming is essentially Ant-Man with better jokes and better villains. But then there’s that scene, just prior to the Vulture taking off on his nefarious plot, when he appears to crush Peter under tons of rubble (accomplished by his independently mobile Vulture suit while Peter and the Vulture verbally duke it out, a la Spider-Man’s climactic battle. Callbacks everywhere!) Since the movie’s not called Vulture, we know Peter isn’t dead, and we see him a few minutes later, alive but certainly not well. He’s pinned beneath an iron bar and slabs of concrete, and there is nothing cute or quippy about any of it: he’s a terrified kid afraid of dying, like any sensible person. But he’s also a New Yorker, and he talks himself through it, until he lands on the right words--“Come on, Spider-Man! Come on, Spider-Man!”--and with a visibly tremendous effort, climbs out of the rubble.

   It’s not a flashy scene; there’s no orchestral swell or cut-happy editing to dramatize the moment, but it’s just as impactful as Raimi’s train sequence because it beautifully frames the simple courage it takes to be not only Spider-Man, but a hero at all. Ant-Man doesn’t have that. Even Doctor Strange lacks a defining moment of this caliber. Here’s everything that drives Peter Parker in a single sequence: his belief in his own ability to overcome. It’s cliche, but it doesn’t feel it, because it’s not told to us. He doesn’t verbalize it later to the Vulture before landing a knockout punch, and he doesn’t confide it to Ned before strutting off into the ending credits. If the next Spider-Man outing can pick up on this sort of nuance and stay true to the authentic personality they’ve brought to this Peter Parker, the best Spider-Man adaptation may still be just over the horizon. For now, however, Spider-Man: Homecoming is officially the third-best live-action Spider-Man film. It’s good to have him back.

-Brian L.