(Full Text after the jump)

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when Marvel makes a bad movie. I don’t mean as in “Hey, this isn’t as good as the first one!” or “This feels tonally at odds with the others and/or of lower stakes;” I mean an entry that actually outright kind of sucks – and I’m not counting the third season of AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. even though, yeah, Season 3 does kind of suck overall. I mean at some point, just by the law of averages, one of these things is going to outright bad… and at this point I’m curious to know what that means, because my suspicion is that the answer is “not much.”

By now the Marvel machinery works so well that comparisons to Swiss watches are no longer adequate: The studio’s output is more like the water-cycle at this point, turning hype into engagement into narrative and back into hype so efficiently that it feels fully capable of processing a failure and moving on: If DOCTOR STRANGE turns out to not be good in November whatever new slivers of worldbuilding detail it contributes to the bigger picture will still be poured over in forgiveness-generating detail until GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 2 wins everyone back in May with SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING batting cleanup in July. Whenever the subject of “superhero fatigue” comes up, I continue to maintain that the I’m-tired-of-this/lets-take-a-break/oh-hey-a-new-one-I’m-reminded-why-I-like-this cycle that used to be a years-long process for genre movies now takes mere months and happened for Marvel in the brief interlude between AGE OF ULTRON and ANT-MAN.

I bring this up because among the surprises to be found in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR is just how leisurely and self-assured it feels about its own existence. Despite the sensationalism of its basic setup (Friends becomes enemies! Superhero civics debate! The End of The Avengers!?) and the frenetic pace of its narrative, in terms of tone and self-regard it’s the most “lived-in” feeling blockbuster in recent memory – capable of thrilling and confidently carrying a two or three of the most satisfying setpieces the genre has ever managed to deliver up its sleeve like an emergency mood-booster, but secure to an almost zen-like state that A.) it has the goods and B.) even if it doesn’t have quite the goods it thinks it does, we’re not going to “turn” on the MCU now.

The result is that, while it could well be (on balance) the best Marvel movie since THE AVENGERS (and a more fitting thematic follow-up to that feature than its own sequel by a substantial measure) it’s also among the most deliberately-plotted and “comfy” installments in whole Marvel mega-franchise – the action movie equivalent of a hit TV show wheeling out the big guns for sweeps week secure (along with the audience) in the awareness that there’s still plenty of episodes to go before the finale.

That should be bizarre, given that the entire plot of the film is about (literally) blowing the status quo of the MCU’s central narrative hub to smithereens, but it makes sense given the degree of investment expected of the audience for all that “blowing up” to matter: We care because we love these characters and their world, we love these characters and their world because we’ve gotten to know them over more than a dozen prior films, because we love them and their world we know there will be many dozens of films to come – so, for a change, even though the action is big as ever the actual stakes are comparatively small and intimate: The world doesn’t need to be ending and it’s pointless to pretend that the MCU storyline could “finish” here, so instead lets enjoy watching our favorite characters work out some issues, develop some new dimensions and occasionally set off some new fireworks. In fact, without giving too much away, this is the first film in awhile where the mystery of what’s “really” driving an escalating series of small, personal grievances turns out to be… A smaller, even more personal grievance.

The plot you already know from the ubiquitous trailers: Something goes wrong during a routine Avengers mission that leads to collateral damage and takes the already faded bloom off the rose of having superheroes running around unchecked with enough of the global public that the U.N. steps in to force Captain America and company to become a regulated outfit. Some say yes, others say no, Cap’s “no” becomes more emphatic when a terrorist strike during the signing of the new deal is blamed on The Winter Soldier – aka Cap’s brainwashed ex-HYDRA cyborg assassin bestie Bucky Barnes – and he (after being convinced of his friend is innocent and something more sinister is afoot) goes rogue to hunt for the real culprit. Complicating matters further, one of the U.N. signatories killed in the attack was the King of the secretive African nation of Wakanda; whose son has now donned the ceremonial battle-armor of The Black Panther in order to hunt down and kill The Winter Soldier himself.

The big question mark hovering over the film from the beginning has been whether or not this was the point where the overriding commitment to a shared universe would overwhelm the individual storyline: Sure, it’s nice to see the cast hanging around and not having to wonder where all the other heroes went during a solo movie; but are we getting the “lite” version of an AVENGERS sequel at the expense of a CAPTAIN AMERICA movie?

Luckily, the answer turns out to be… it can be both: This is definitely CAPTAIN AMERICA 3 – and, more importantly, the direct continuation of the WINTER SOLDIER storyline – but since Captain America LIVES in Avengers Headquarters and the other Avengers comprise about 99% of his known social circle it really can’t help but also be an AVENGERS movie. And with that aforementioned leisurely confidence in place, CIVIL WAR wisely opts to take some of that well-earned audience goodwill and spend it on fleshing-out the character stuff that’s been driving these movies from the beginning: So Vision and Scarlet Witch get some character development, Falcon and War Machine get to voice their opinions about the way their more prominent allies conduct business, Black Widow gets to be morally-complicated on a more than superficial level… hell, Black Panther get’s an entire introductory character arc two years in advance of his own movie!

(Seriously – I’m really curious what the BLACK PANTHER movie is going to be about now that a version of the story you’d kind of expect them to tell in the first BLACK PANTHER movie has now already been told in background of this one.)

And yes – especially in the second act – it does start to feel like the proper AVENGERS sequel that AGE OF ULTRON never quite managed to be, if for no other reason than it’s as strongly a movie about a team falling apart as that first film was about a team coming together. But once the plot heads into its conclusion and the full scope and purpose of the narrative is laid bare, it becomes extremely clear that CIVIL WAR is fundamentally Captain America’s movie above all else – in as much as the thematic core is all about the push-pull of doing what you want emotionally versus doing what’s right and he’s the Avenger that embodies that inner conflict moreso than anyone else in the franchise.

The narrative arc they wring out of that, where it’s completely understandable that the other characters are more than a little skeptical that Cap’s thinking clearly when he decides to basically fight the entire rest of the world in order to clear his friend’s name, is legitimately fascinating to watch play out in such surprisingly complex terms; and instead of hogging the spotlight as many had feared Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man turns out to be a perfectly-chosen mirror-opposite to the same arc: Sure, he seems to be doing what he thinks is right; but it’s also clear that retirement not really working out and no longer having any Avenging to fall back on is letting his personal demons consume him all over again. And the dynamics at play that allow the pair to maintain their ideological “sides” while gradually trading places in terms of the attitude is a such a strange but interesting way to construct an emotional narrative I can’t help but admire it.

The strength of all that heart-on-sleeve operatic emotionality is why I’m having a hard time settling on whether or not this or WINTER SOLDIER is actually the better movie. It’d be hard to argue that SOLDIER was the more rigidly coherent and polished work in terms of structure, but CIVIL WAR is substantially more satisfying from a “pure cinema” perspective: There are some pretty hard to ignore logical leaps a play – mainly in that the entire scenario hinges on someone being able to both manipulate and predict the exact actions of dozens of individuals and entire national governments without really explaining how said someone was able to do – so but the payoff is SO strong and hits SO hard it’s genuinely hard to care… and also, yeah, because it’s a Marvel movie and by now we’ve all been trained to give that sort of thing the benefit of the doubt since three movies from now it’ll probably turn he had a magic rock or something.

But yeah – it’s a superhero movie, but it’s practically structured like the macho-melodrama version of a MARX BROS comedy: The storyline is “there” but it’s largely incidental to the true purpose of creating scenarios for the characters to literally figuratively “bounce off” of one another: So if it’ll help remind everyone just how natural it is for people in this universe trip over themselves for the chance to fight alongside Captain America and having Ant-Man show up will do that? Then you do that. And if it’ll add some necessary complexity to Tony Stark’s storyline to have him help out an underprivileged teenager and that gives you an opportunity to introduce Spider-Man to everybody? Then you do that, too. And that means you’ve got two more dynamic characters for a big show-stopping end of Act 2 blowout where everyone vents their long-simmering frustrations with one another and since they’re all varying degrees of super-powered godlings it escalates into one of the most ridiculous yet amazing action sequences ever put to film – and yes, it’s as awesome and worth the price all on its own as you’ve heard.

But however cool it all is, what sticks around and satisfies about CIVIL WAR is the emotion-driven character work that the action scenes ultimately exist to facilitate and underline – which is why it’s hard to find fault with the actual plot being kind of a superfluous shell game: By the time the big all-cards-on-the-table finale has rolled around we find – even as the mysteries have all been solved, the cause of the superhero Civil War has been identified and the narrative reasons behind the fighting have ceased – the fighting isn’t over because the dark secrets, deep-seated character flaws and furious emotional pain involved have transcended the plot-mechanics that brought them to the surface in the first place; and sometimes things like that don’t just “go away” because the inciting disaster has averted. When was the last time that was the moral of a “serious” or “grownup” movie – let alone a movie where freakin’ Ant-Man is a featured player?

And what’s most impressive of all, from a broader cultural standpoint, is that while it’s a given that the smug set will be all too happy to hand CIVIL WAR the backhanded compliment of having accomplished all this “in spite of being just another Marvel movie;” the fact is the weird, risky, offbeat, atypical stuff that makes the film work is largely only possible because Marvel has created a cultural zeitgeist for CIVIL WAR to inhabit. You simply couldn’t have a character-driven movie in this genre with this dense of an emotional narrative if so much work hadn’t already been done establishing these characters and their world in the first place: What starts as a geopolitical conflict of high-minded hypotheticals narrows down into an extended-family schism among a dozen or so ideological standard bearers and then compresses all the way down to an intensely personal brawl where it’s genuinely, viscerally difficult to root completely for (or against) either side.

That’s an impressive feat of storytelling in any genre; and while I’m not 100% convinced that CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR is itself the best film the Marvel Cinematic Universe has produced, it’s far and away the best example of why it was worth constructing in the first place – and why it’s not going anywhere any time soon.

P.S. In case you were wondering: Tom Holland is fantastic… but I feel like Tobey Maguire is still going to be the best Spider-Man. That being said, I’m increasingly of the mind that the Sam Raimi SPIDER-MAN probably needs to go on the shelf with the Richard Donner SUPERMAN i.e. “Yes, these will never be equaled and you can’t keep marking down every subsequent attempt for not living up to unattainable miracles.” The new SPIDER-MAN works and I think HOMECOMING is in good hands.

This review is made possible in part through donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you see, please consider becoming a Patron.

Hey! Did you notice I’ve been a little quiet on this website the last few weeks? Well, it’s because big things* have been in the works. Two of which can now be read up on ScreenRant:

A CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE:
Sure, you’ve probably read through the “which order to watch the Marvel Movies in” lists, and you’ve probably done your refresher-course work to get ready for CIVIL WAR (review forthcoming, incidentally) – but have you ever wanted to be able to look at a chronological breakdown of every event depicted in the MCU movies starting with the beginning of the Universe (as in The Big Bang) right up to this very week, including the events of the Netflix series and AGENTS OF S.H.I.EL.D.? Well, now you can. The (tentative) plan is to update it as new information becomes available, so bookmark it now if you want to – either way, enjoy!

15 CHARACTERS WE WANT TO SEE IN SUPERGIRL – SEASON 2:
Exactly what it says on the label. Sometimes work is hard, sometimes work is hard but you’re getting paid to explain how Comet The Superhorse works.

*Yes, the long-awaited REALLY THAT GOOD: SUPERMAN is in fact one of those big things. It’s on the way, and I thank you for your patience. As ever, both speeding me up and keeping me afloat period are functions of The MovieBob Patreon 🙂

The screencap, in case this was an early trigger-pull and they take it down:

“The Team” has been teased as “the one you’ve been waiting for,” since it’s plot supposedly involves finally giving the Secret Warriors (i.e. Daisy and the handful of good-guy Inhumans we’ve met so far this season) a full-fledged mission; in this case to rescue the rest of the cast from being held captive by Hive and Giyera. The sequence where this actually happens is pretty impressive, with the standout business being the chemistry between Yoyo and Joey, even if it does serve to highlight that giving AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D its own mini-Avengers to play with only highlights how much of an also-ran the series feels like in its lesser moments.

But whatever, it’s actually a tiny part of the episode, is over quickly and the entire Secret Warriors storyline more or less goes “That’s it, next thing!” by midpoint. Gotcha!
No, really. Once the rescue is done and the team is back at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ with a willingly-captured Mallick (he wants to team up and fight Hive now to get revenge for his daughter), “The Team” more or less tips its hand and reveals the Secret Warriors’ big debut was basically misdirection for the episode’s true intent: A low-tech redux of THE THING.

Short version: Mallick tells Coulson about Hive’s ability to mind-control Inhumans, so all the non-Inhuman Agents get paranoid and decide they have to covertly lock down the base and try to figure out if any of their allies are infected without telling them. Naturally, this doesn’t work and soon enough The Inhumans are in quarantine (Daisy betrays them to her teammates) and now nobody trusts eachother – especially since, in all the confusion, someone killed Mallick. For a moment, it even feels like they’ve found the infectee… but it turns out they figured wrong, and the episode concludes on the now evil former good guy poised to potentially destroy HQ with everyone inside.

So who’s the baddie? Daisy, duh – who else was it going to be?

In truth, this is a pretty damn good episode up to that point. The quandry makes sense, the two Spanish-speaking Secret Warriors are great characters whose actors have a killer rapport, everyone’s actions make complete sense and there’s a palpable sense of loss to the idea of these people ceasing to trust one another even though there wasn’t any other choice to be had. Hell, on paper Daisy being Hive’s unwitting sleeper even makes total dramatic sense in as much as it leaves the team in the worst possible situation: The Agents and The Inhumans will have to put their mutual distrust aside to stop this, and the only teammate who truly lives in both worlds has been removed from the equation.

And yet, frustratingly, that also means AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D once again going back to the two wells that have become the most tiresome: The tendency of every damn storyline to lead back to Daisy and “Skye/Ward,” a pairing that wasn’t interesting when they where both human and is unlikely to be interesting now.

I don’t know. I’m trying to work out how this wraps up interestingly short of “death of a main character” or “unlikely actual reprecussions from CIVIL WAR” and the options feel pretty limited at this point. Daisy being “evil” for awhile, the turning out Hive because Coulson/May/Lincoln/whoever somehow gets through to her just feels like a retread of places we already went at the climax of Season 2 but not as good. Supposedly the “Fallen Agent” storyline is going to be stretched out over a 4 episode arc (“The Singularity,” “Failed Experiments,” “Emancipation” and “Forgiven”) with CIVIL WAR happening in the middle, with the season finale “Ascension” hitting one episode later.

I guess we’ll see, especially considering Season 4 is already greenlit.

This recap made possible through donations to The MovieBob Patreon.

In the wake of some much needed diversion from formula in last week’s offbeat future-seeing episode, “Paradise Lost” gets us back to AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. Classic Recipe: a lot of low-tech-playing-high-tech diversions with the promise of later payoffs, capped off by a last-minute swerve and (for good measure) someone slamming their fist on the big red button marked Major Plot Point with enough flourish to almost make it feel like an earned moment as opposed to “Hey! The writers have just been informed of how CIVIL WAR shakes out.”

Spoilers after the jump…

To recap: Everyone is finally on the same page re: Hive, the ancient Inhuman HYDRA apparently worships as a god is on Earth wearing a Grant Ward skinsuit and building an ill-defined evil scheme involving his fellow Inhumans, but now things are complicated further by good guy Daisy and bad guy Gideon Malick both having experienced flash-forwards involving death last episode.

For a change, the main story this time is mainly about developing the villains; as we learn Hive’s back story (short version: he was the Mark I Inhumans’ General Zod, a genetically-engineered military mastermind who led the Inhuman rebellion against the Kree but then went mad with power and got himself exiled offworld) and get some background on Malick and HYDRA – though fans hoping that it might make AGENTS’ conception of the secret supervillain society make more sense are out of luck. But, then again, if “make more sense” is really high on your list of priorities for AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D., chances are you checked out of Season 3 awhile ago.

We here learn (courtesy flashbacks to a college age Gideon and his brother uneasily taking the reigns of the family business after the death of their father) that while all of HYDRA is aware of their Hive-worshipper origins, not everyone is still fully onboard. The Mallicks belong to the old school “draw lots to see who gets sacrificed to Hive” sect, while Red Skull and Daniel Whitehall’s Nazi-aligned faction were less devout about it and who knows what the S.H.I.E.L.D-infiltrating cats were on about. With a little extra push, this would all be a brilliant satire of how monumentally stupid the entire Illuminati/Bilderberger/Rothschild/Trilateral/”Bankster” globalist-conspiracy theory bullshit is when you lay it all out; but sadly AGENTS’ usually admirable resistance to self-parody won’t quite let it.

In any case: We glean this as Mallick, while waiting for HYDRA bigwigs to arrive for a fancy dinner in Hive’s honor at his estate (while also scheming to avoid a prophecized death he believes will occur at his god’s hands) recalls how Whitehall tempted he and his brother being tempted to the dark(er?) side by Whitehall, who reveals that Papa Mallick rose to power by gaming his participation in the lot-drawing ceremonies with a marked stone. The brothers resolved to reclaim the family honor by holding a fair-and-square drawing, and if you’re noticing that this is the first time we’ve ever heard that Mallick had a brother you know where that’s going.

Fortunately, most of that predictability pays off decently in terms of what however much of the other Mallick remains in Hive thinks of as karmic payback, and the whole thing has an appropriately lurid “70s pulp-Satanism” vibe; but there’s no avoiding that AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. has fallen too much in love with its own penchant for misdirection: We can see it coming by now.

Elsewhere, the B-story is all about Coulson and the non-Inhuman Agents breaking into a factory acquired by Mallick in order to set up either the cause or solution to whatever Hive’s big plan is. Finally getting to see Coulson start to lose it at the revelation that not only was murdering Ward against his own code but the direct cause of Hive being able to reach Earth is nice; but otherwise it’s a bit of a snooze. Even the promised one-on-one fight between May and Giyera  (Mark Dacascos) feels obligatory – c’mom guys! Dacascos and Ming-Na Wen are both legit icons of B-movie action, this is (literally!) Chun-Li vs Billy Lee… have some fun with it!

But whatever. The whole thing is really only happening so Giyera can be captured, taken back to S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ and escape, leaving the conveniently off-site Daisy and Lincoln to decide that *NOW* is the time to call in the Secret Warriors reserve-troops… as opposed to the several other times where the stakes have been at exactly the same height. The problem is, while Dacascos has screen-presence to burn, the show has been too indecisive about Giyera’s role for him to suddenly be an all-stops threat now; so it all feels too obvious that the only real reason for the Warriors to go into action now is because AGENTS’ needs a team of powered-pepole to show up and have their actions be misunderstood so that the plot can sort-of sync up with CIVIL WAR.

Amusingly, the C-story that serves to keep Daisy and Pikachu safe enough to push the Plot Button is actually more interesting: They go to seek out an Inhuman survivalist in Australia who once burgled information about Hive’s back story from Afterlife, but the hook is that he’s one of the Inhumans from whom Jaiying ultimately denied Terrigenisis because… he’s a douchebag, I think? It sets up a novel bit of conflict where Lincoln baits him with Terrigen in order to grab a mysterious orb-like relic he’d stolen from Jaiying, but ultimately refuses him powers because he agrees with whatever their ex-leader’s reasoning was. It’s here that we get more information about Lincoln: He caused his girlfriend’s death in a drunk driving accident shortly before The Inhumans found him.

This all feels like so much further setup for Daisy and Lincoln to be on opposite sides when AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D’s version of the CIVIL WAR schism hits; but it plays out a lot more naturally than he Giyera story and I hope Australian Guy is a recurring character – especially if he turns out to be C-list SPIDER-MAN nemesis “The Kangaroo,” whose power set includes jumping very high and being from Australia.

As for the orb? No idea. It looks like something halfway relates to the Infinity Stone vessel from GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY but covered with designs that look more than a little DOCTOR STRANGE-y; but at this point the safest bet is that they hadn’t fully committed to what it is or does when they (the show) designed it, so it looks like a lot of things to cover all bases.

NEXT WEEK: In “The Team,” The Secret Warriors get their buildup over with, at last, and someone turns out to be bad maybe. Personally, I’m hoping for Sexy Evil Simmons Who’s Been Part Hive All Along; if only to spare us the predictable arc of Fitz and Simmons being on opposite sides of CIVIL WAR LITE:

ALSO: The show loves the hell out of Hive reducing his victims to skeletons, and Mallick’s vision only shows him being partially zapped, so I’m renewing my old guess that he somehow winds up as Red Skull 2.0

This recap made possible through donations to The MovieBob Patreon.

This review is made possible by donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you see and would like to see more, please consider becoming a Patron.

HARDCORE HENRY is the sort of gleefully violent sensory-assault moviemaking that critics sometimes like to say feels “made by a madman,” but in overall execution it’s just a hair too deliberately-structured and well made for that to be a fair assessment. All told, the film is much closer to a (slightly) more polished version of a student film handed in by the class troublemaker; a show-off reel of every wicked, dangerous, inventive, perverse creative impulse they’ve got all in one go-for-broke splatter of imagination – as though they can’t believe someone finally let them play with the camera and they know it has to count because they’ll never be allowed to play with it again.

The results of such work are often tiresome, but at their best they offer a window into a unique, unrestrained vision. Like a lot of present-day art-school anarchists, director Ilya Naishuller’s vision is one thoroughly cluttered with the influence of YouTube parkour and the video-game aesthetic; but also one with an awareness (however nascent) of those influences beyond mere imitation.

MILD SPOILERS from here onward:

Set (I think?) in the near-future, its protagonist is a recently injured (dead?) man named Henry who’s just been Frankensteined back to life by his lovely super-scientist wife Estelle using technology that’s effectively made him a cyborg – complete with a titanium skeleton, onboard battery and a superhuman endurance for pain. It’s also, supposedly temporarily, left him without any memories and unable to speak, allowing the film the cheeky trick of letting its protagonist not only take the audience along for his adventure in video-game inspired First Person view but also to embody modern gaming’s favorite brand of protagonist: The mute, backstory-free, superhuman bullet-sponge cipher.

When Estelle winds up kidnapped (because video games, you see) by Akan, a telekinetic supervillain (because video games, you see) who wants her to make him a whole army of undead cyborgs (because v… you get the idea), Henry sets off to save her – aided in his quest by Sharlto Copley’s mysterious Jimmy, a living parody of NPCs who wanders in and out of the story to hand Henry his mission objectives… even as he’s repeatedly killed off, only to return with a costume change and a new personality.

There’s eventually a suitably high-concept explanation as to what’s going on with Jimmy that adds a welcome note of poignancy to all the gorehound fireworks that make up the rest of the film (in terms of creative bloodshed, HARDCORE HENRY makes DEADPOOL look like the kiddie-pool), but like most of the film’s reaches into science-fiction it feels less driven by narrative than by reverse engineering: “What sci-fi concept do we need to invent to have this bit of common video-game nonsense happen in the real world?” At one point, Henry even “powers up” by ripping a piece of combat-enhancing hardware out of a foes chest and graphically self-installing it into his own body like Mega Man as reimagined by David Cronenberg.

And make no mistake: While fans of extreme action-comedy in general will likely find plenty to enjoy in the film (the sheer number of new ways it finds for Henry to shoot, stab, slice, crush, bludgeon, bisect or even tri-sect the human body is something to behold) the places where Hardcore Henry becomes something like transcendent will land strongest with gamers. They’re the ones who’ll cue in on the specifics when Henry’s mission objective takes him on a wholly gratuitous tour of a strip club a’la Duke Nukem, or when a gaggle of oddly-unperturbed sex-workers reason out a somewhat counter-intuitive method for recharging the weary hero’s energy reserves (well, if it works for Kratos…) and will note the precise moment when the lengthy final confrontation with Akan (who already appears to have leaped, fully-formed, from a METAL GEAR SOLID sequel) switches from being the climax of a movie to a Boss Fight. If you’re looking for the gamers in your screening, they’ll be the ones already cheering when Henry kicks open a luckily-discovered first aid kit (yup!) filled with syringes conveniently-labeled “ADRENALINE” before Freddie Mercury’s vocals come sneaking in on the soundtrack.

It might be a step too far to call it “satire” of modern gaming, but it’s definitely a send-up; bursting at its (admittedly roughly-stitched) seams with the same love/hate exuberance about video games that REN & STIMPY had for classic TV cartoons – or that METALOCALYPSE had for heavy metal. It’s not necessarily a condemnation of the fantasy of inhabiting a video game (or of being a game hero in real life), but it recognizes that either option would be more comic than dramatic – even as it chooses to revel in the “fun parts” anyway: It knows enough to pause for a laugh when a pair of Jimmy’s allies showing up as leggy katana-wielding blondes in black vinyl catsuits, but you’re still getting leggy katana-wielding blondes in black vinyl catsuits.

Fortunately, it’s also got a few things on its mind about the medium beyond just hanging a lampshade on its own inherent silliness as an excuse to just keep doing it (though, yes, that’s most of it – this is a science fair volcano, not a geology thesis.) The aforementioned reveal of what, exactly, the deal is with Jimmy is the start of a string of Act 3 story turns that aren’t exactly unpredictable but arrive welcome all the same; retroactively infusing the preceding story (such as it is) with a vein of self-examination that should be familiar to gaming fans who’ve already taken their swings at the medium’s emerging canon of self-critical works like THE STANLEY PARABLE, PORTAL, BRAID and SPEC OPS: THE LINE. It’s the latter (a seemingly-conventional military shooter than gradually morphs into an apocalyptic denunciation of CALL OF DUTY-era narrative structure) with which Henry’s final denoument has the most in common – though the film is aiming less for condemnation than it is for “a swift kick in the ass” when it comes to the games medium itself.

At the beginning I referred to Henry himself as a kind of Frankenstein monsters, and so it’s appropriate that to the degree that HARDCORE HENRY wants to be “about” anything it’s about what a creation owes its creator and the very idea of identity and one’s choice in their own story. As the film races into its own climax (like any great video game there’s a castle to climb, a last wave of enemies to cut down and a Big Boss whose defeat requires every skill you’ve acquired) its central narrative question ceases to be whether or not Henry will save the princess and instead becomes who (or what) is really in charge of the hero’s destiny: Estelle, who “made” him and now requires the very services she installed? Akan, who started the story and drove the narrative? Jimmy, who set the goals and walked him through the missions? Or is Henry the one with his hand on the (figurative) joystick – and if not, shouldn’t he be?

Granted, it feels dubious to suggest that anything as enthusiastically frivolous as HARDCORE HENRY is really attempting some sort of existential statement. But a self-consciously blunt highlight reel of live-action video game homage turns out to be an amusingly insightful way to tweak narrative convention, even if a wicked final twist that lays all the self-examination bare could just as easily exist solely for Naishuller’s mischievous little boy instincts to indulge in vandalizing gaming’s most sanctified narrative device. But it can’t be avoided that video games – the type being referenced here, at least – live and die by their ability to give the player a cathartic fantasy of omnipotent power and absolute control precisely by limiting their options (“you can interact with anything so long as ‘interact’ means shoot-with-your-gun'”) and locking in their goals: Go to X, kill Y, obtain Z, do it again, the box says you’re the hero and the cutscene says this end goal is very important to you. Nor can it be avoided that applying that kind of setup to live-action humans can’t help but push all of the ever-familiar choice/fate quandaries right back up to the surface of a movie that’s already very proud of almost everything being on the surface.

And so as HARDCORE HENRY’S eponymous protagonist struggles bloodily to his feet at the midpoint of a particularly gruesome climactic battle, suddenly awash in questions about exactly what he’s done (and has been prepared to do) because this or that person handed him a task and told him what an awesome badass he was whenever executed the correct sequence of actions; it’s hard not to reflect (if just for a moment) on how much that same quietly-insidious method of incentive exists outside of video games or their action-movie tributes – whether the “goal” in question is fighting a war, going through the motions of schoolwork (or an office job) or just getting through the day in one piece. As thematic underpinnings go, “who’s pulling your strings?” may not be the most original question for a movie to ask, but it’s certainly something to think about…

…for however long until it’s time to strangle a bad guy to death with the sinews of one’s own detached eyeball, course.

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Another week, another “just fine” Season 3 episode that makes for a good watch but continues to feel like we’re running out of time to arrive somewhere more interesting by the finale, with the broader Inhumans storyline once again being waylaid for a chance at using the surprise-superpower gimmick as a way to get back into the monster of the week business that made so much of Season 1 so tiresome. Still, the idea this time is a novel one and the episode itself has some above-average direction, so call it a win.

Anyway…

The “Inhuman of The Week” this time around is a homeless guy with a variation on the DEAD ZONE power: He touches you, and you both get a premonition of witnessing someone’s death. That feels a little bit specific, sure, but trying reasoning out how Peter Parker got only those specific vague abilities of a spider sometime – spider’s don’t even have a “sense,” they know what’s coming because they’ve got lots of eyes and crazy-sensitive body hair.

But whatever. Circumstances contrive that Daisy and company show up to try and stop HYDRA from collecting the guy, only to not simply lose him to the bad guys but for Daisy to get hit with a premonition that appears to depict (among other things) Lincoln getting a beat-down, Fitz/Simmons standing inexplicably in a snowfall, Coulson shooting her – possibly to death – and May somehow not being involved in any of this.

This sets up the interesting part of the episode, wherein the Agents try to change the future by using Daisy’s vision to pre-plan their strategy (up to an including leaving the should-be participants off the mission entirely) while Fitz argues that it’s impossible by way of fourth-dimensional thinking. It’s a time-killer, as the first half of “change the future” stories often are (no prizes for guessing that May ends up not going after all because Lash business comes up) but the execution is charming in that low-tech AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. kind of way and it does set up a nifty-looking one-take fight scene for Chloe Bennett.

Also, a “of the week” stories go, the situation for the homeless Inhuman is pretty affecting: A suburban dad whose life has been completely ruined by his ability and is running away from accidentally giving his loved ones (or anyone) unwanted death-visions. For a change, it even makes sense for HYDRA to be spending resources to acquire him, since Hive/Ward finds an immediate practical use for his powers – and the fact that a final touch from Daisy gives her a slightly longer vision of the “bloody spaceship” dream from the beginning of this half of the season certainly makes things (theoretically) interesting.

The B-story, though (C-story is May and Andrew finally having it out as he prepares to transform into Lash for what he’s pretty sure will be the last time) is sort of a snooze: Hive/Ward makes Mallick buy a company that makes powered-armor, mostly so we can get fun scenes of Powers Boothe throwing people and things around wearing what sort-of looks like a 90s X-Files prop; but it very clearly all about setting things up for Mallick (who got a death-vision of his own) to have a “What have I done?” moment between now and the finale. Also, everyone is now on the same page re: “Hive is running HYDRA and looks like Ward now,” so that should speed things along.

One thing to note: The TERMINATOR exchange between Lincoln and Coulson (“I’ve actually never seen the original.” “…You’re fired.”) was cute, and it’s interesting to see two episodes in a row based on establishing rapport between these two characters. Yes, the writers seem to be in “try out new pairings” mode lately (see also: May and Simmons, sure to be exacerbated now that Lash is on ice and the “cure” might be a thing.)

NEXT WEEK: Somehow, Daniel Whitehall is back for “Paradise Lost,” which is also supposedly going to give us some backstory on Mallick presumably related to whatever he saw in his vision. It also looks like we’ll get a look at what Hive “really” looks like, so put me down for hoping for another big rubbery monster to wrestle with Lash at some point.

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Hey folks! BIG NEWS!

The MovieBob Anthology, the eBook series collecting the best of my work writing about film, video games, television and pop-culture over the last decade, is now available for purchase on your Amazon Kindle! Here’s a search-query that brings up the lot of them, hit the jump for individual links.

Okay, since this basically concludes the list of major platforms the book is now available in, I’m going to post all the links for each individual title. If it makes a difference to your purchase, I get the highest profit from ePub-format versions purchased directly from Lulu.com. However, the difference is fairly minor, so by all means please purchase based on your format of choice:

MOVIEBOB’S REEL BREAKDOWN (Movies)
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MOVIEBOB’S REEL RETRO (Classic Movies)
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MOVIEBOB’S GAME OVERTHINKER & BEYOND (Video Games)
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MOVIEBOB’S IDIOT BOX (Television)
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MOVIEBOB’S GEEK STREAK (Geek Culture)
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MOVIEBOB’S SUPERHERO CINEMA (Comics and Comic Movies)
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MOVIEBOB’S STRANGE HOLLYWOOD (Movie History/Business)
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AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D’s third season has felt the most disconnected from the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not necessarily because it’s had fewer tie-ins (it’s about even with usual, so far) but because the series has doubled-down so much on its own mythology (the Inhumans, HYDRA’s “secret origins,” Maveth/Hive) that it’s largely traded in its previously-ubiquitous references to the bigger events being depicted in the MCU films for references to bigger events that aren’t being depicted anywhere – which leaves things feeling a touch on the awkward side.

Case in point, the last two episodes have been all about the supposedly global-scale panic being caused by the continuing emergence of new Inhumans; which we’re assured is happening largely through news reports and regular cast members talking about it – some of which is cleverly staged but most of which has had the effect of making it seem like the series is rushing to establish that “No, really, it’s suddenly a really big problem” in order to hit a crossover-point with CIVIL WAR.

Anyway…
PARTING SHOT:

Not much to be said here, other than that it’s a pretty solid episode hurt a bit by its need to function as a backdoor pilot for the MOST WANTED spin-off. The basic caper stuff all works, and the one-off (I think?) Inhuman villain who can control his own shadow is a fun effect, but the big “emotional” goodbye for Hunter and Mockingbird I never quite bought.

One infrequent weakness of the series “one foot in fantasy” approach to its spy-games storytelling is that problems seem to become untenable because they need to without much real consistency: Given that Coulson has already parachuted into a portal to another planet on a whim this season, it feels contrived that, now that we need these two characters to leave for another show, he suddenly arrives at a paperwork problem (Hunter and Bobbi, framed for an attempt on the Russian Prime Minister’s life, can either end their tenure as field agents or disappear into the wind) that he doesn’t have a gadget or an owed-favor for fixing.

The “spy’s goodbye” business at the end was a good scene, a testament to how far the cast has come as performers (and, maybe, a tease at the supposedly more oldschool-espionage flavor to be expected of MOST WANTED?); but it breaks down once you remember that the two central players being payed final respects to aren’t even members of the original cast, have only been around for a season and half and for about 1/3 of that time we thought at least one of them might be a villain.

WATCHDOGS:

So, here’s the thing about me and the Mutants/X-Men thing: My favorite aspect about the whole “superpowers-as-minority” thing is the part that’s the most bullshit when you get right down to it.

For all the platitudes about how it’s an MLK/Malcom thing, adding powers basically makes it into Objectivism by proxy i.e. an inferior majority of normals trying to hold back the self-realization of their betters either out of jealousy or because they fear the upheaval that the presence of superior leaps-forward are bound to bring – and like Objectivism, it’s equal appealing (if you fancy yourself marginalized because of your not-just-different-but-better-ness) and appalling (if you’re in touch with you basic humanity.) “Watchdogs” is AGENTS’ slow-build for The Inhumans as the MCU-brand Mutants getting to part where this becomes explicit, which means I dig it but then grumble at myself during the commercial breaks.

As the title implies, it’s an intro-episode for the MCU version of The Watchdogs. In the comics, they’re an ultra-conservative right-wing militia outfit who figured prominently in the “Captain America: No More” storyline, so it makes sense they’d show up now reconfigured as the militarized arm of the growing anti-alien/superhuman movement that’s expected to drive the plot in CIVIL WAR. In an amusing bit of writing, their new origin is being “Alt-Right” (read: wannabe neo-nazi dorks who know they’d get their asses kicked by legit skinheads) internet trolls who’ve been outfitted with military-grade hardware by outside benefactors – so, GamerGaters who do their own SWATing, basically. Clever.

In the comics, the Watchdogs turned out to be unwitting pawns of The Red Skull. Here, the top-baddie at first seems to be Titus Welliver’s returning Agent Blake; who’s hacked-off about being permanently injured by Deathlok in Season 1. I like that turn, but the secondary reveal that he himself is being jerked-around by HYDRA (so bad Inhumans using Inhuman haters to kill good Inhumans) feels like twist-overkill.

Anyway, their presence in the episode-proper is mostly about laying out foundation and establishing connections (they’ve got their hands on “Nitramine,” the implosion-bomb tech from the first season of AGENT CARTER); wrapped around a story about Mack being interrupted while trying to hang out with his brother on his weekend off – and yes, they do both the “family member who has no idea I’m a spy” angle and the “family member is angry about issue I’m on the other side of professionally” angle. As checklist cliches go, they work well enough.

More interesting is the non-worldbuilding C-story about Simmons wanting to learn how to do more active Agent stuff because she’s got survivor’s guilt about how often she has to get saved. Nice bit of lampshade hanging, and it looks to be leading into a May/Simmons thread which should be interesting for a few episodes (at this point I feel like the writers are making a lot of decisions based alternately on “Who hasn’t had any extended interaction yet?” and “Who would Tumblr most like to pretend is fucking?” – not sure which this would be.

We also get to see the seeds being planted of what will, presumably, be AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D’s side-contribution to CIVIL WAR, with Daisy getting impatient about anti-Inhuman bigotry and getting big into using her powers (and S.H.I.E.L.D. backup) to knock around and threaten the Watchdogs while other Agents want to be more conciliatory and understand the other side… we’ve all seen/read an X-MEN story at least once so you get where that’s heading, especially since they’ve already got an “Inhuman cure” plot thread cooking in the background. My question: If we’re going to do “Daisy almost goes rogue because S.H.I.E.L.D won’t let her be militant enough,” do they pull the trigger on bringing Jaiying back in some way?