Tag: comic-book

X-Men: Dark Phoenix

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★★★
“I’m SO confused…”

I can’t believe there have been seven X-Men movies now. I think the last I saw was the second, which came out in 2003. Since then, there seems to have been a lot of mutants under the bridge, so to speak – and, it appears, some jiggery-pokery with timelines. That’s the only way to explain the death early on in this origin story, of someone I’m fairly sure was in the films I saw, which took place later in the chronology. Still, all I can do is presume it makes sense if you’ve seen the whole series, and on that basis this was fine. Indeed, by coincidence. we watched this the same day as Black Panther – and if I didn’t already know, I’d be hard-pushed to tell you which was a cultural phenomenon, and which was among the biggest bombs of the year.

It is the first Marvel feature since Elektra with a female lead, so there’s that. In this case, it’s Jean Grey (Turner), who is taken under the wing of Charles Xavier (McAvoy) after losing her parents in a car-crash triggered by Jean’s psychic talents. She joins the rest of the X-Men – though as Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) puts it, “The women are always saving the men around here. You might wanna think about changing the name to X-Women.” On a mission to rescue the crew of a crippled Space Shuttle, she absorbs a cosmic energy blast. This makes her incredibly powerful, yet also unleashes her insecurities, a situation not helped after she discovers that Xavier has been more than economical with the truth. Meanwhile, a group of extra-terrestrials led by Vuk (Chastain) arrives, seeking to use Grey and her powers. It becomes a race between them and the X-Men to find the runaway Grey.

Push comes to shove, I probably enjoyed this slightly more than Black Panther. It seemed less concerned about making statements, and more about simply providing entertainment. As mentioned, I have to take all plot-logic as read, and also that there’s an explanation for the biggest number of blue people in a film since The Smurfs Movie. I was here simply for large-scale, visually slick imagery, things blowing up and epic fight scenes, and on that level, I can’t say I was disappointed. Sure, the characterizations were often little more than obvious [for example, Grey comes from the “disgruntled orphan” school of superheroes], and Chastain is sadly under-used; that whole “not blinking” thing is sublimely creepy.

Yet it’s hardly alone among comic-book movie, in these or its other flaws, and I couldn’t find anything to justify the dire box-office fate suffered. Sure, it’s never going to be mistaken for a classic, and as a (supposed) wrap-up to the franchise, is probably unsatisfying to ardent fans. However, I am not one of those. As somebody who hasn’t seen an X-Men movie for seventeen years, this was the kind of overblown spectacle I expected – and, truth be told was wanting. Having watched rather too many over-inflated genre entries of late, that seek to be Very Important, I was fine with just seeing subway trains getting hurled around city streets.

Dir: Simon Kinberg
Star: Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Michael Fassbender

Cutie Honey: Tears

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★★★
“Battle Angel Cutie”

Or, perhaps: “What Blade Runner would have been like, if android Roy Batty was a good guy.” For this appears to be a mash-up of elements from that and Battle Angel Alita. While preceding the film version of the latter, it does seem to borrow elements of the manga, not least in its depiction of a future society where there is a strict, and basically vertical, division between the haves and the have-nots. After disease and pollution have pushed society to the brink, the rich and powerful live towards the top of a self-sufficient mega-city, under the control of ice queen Lady Jiru (Ishida) and her “Sodom” cyborg enforcers, leaving everyone else struggling for scraps down below. And leaving is a death sentence, due to the viruses infecting the outside world.

Falling from the sky, also just like Alita, is Hitomi Kisaragi (Nishiuchi), an android girl with the ability to transform, created by her scientist “father”, Professor Kisaragi. Witnessing this event is a young child, Hayami. Years later, he has become a journalist (Miura), and encounters Hitomi again as she stops a Sodom patrol from arresting an opponent to Jiru’s rule. He tracks Hitomi down, and requests her help in the resistance movement of which he is a member, telling her Jiru is actively causing the pollution which affects the lower levels. However, there are other members of their group, intent on taking more direct and violent action against the powers that be, and there’s also uncertainty over what happened to Prof. Kusaragi.

I really liked the look of this film: with the split between rich and poor, the style manages both to be sleekly neon and grimly dystopian, having its design cake and eating it too. Admittedly, the level of devotion to Blade Runner becomes almost slavish – somewhat ironic, watching this in November 2019, the month and year in which Blade Runner was originally set. However, I guess there are few if any better movies from which to lift. I also admired the maker’s willingness to go in a radically different direction to the previous Cutie Honey live-action adaptation, Gone is the cute bounciness, replaced by a dark, almost cyberpunk approach. It’s one best personified by the excellent performance of Ishida as Lady Jiru, who looks and acts every inch the part of an evil overlord.

The story-line, however, is severely underwhelming, with elements that are unconvincing when clear, and unclear when they are convincing. While we do get the expected confrontation between Hitomi and Jiru, the former has to deliver, with a straight face, lines of dialogue like “Because I’m incomplete, I never give up… Because I have defects, I will beat you.” Cue much rolling of eyes here. More generally, neither Hitomi nor Hayami provide enough to make you want to keep watching: Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford, they most definitely are not. As a result, you’re left largely to admire the production design, while waiting for the next Jiru appearance. It’s not quite sufficient.

Dir: Asai Takeshi
Star: Mariya Nishiuchi, Takahiro Miura, Nicole Ishida, Sousuke Takaoka

Wonder Woman: Bloodlines

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★★
“I wonder what they were thinking?”

Having enjoyed the previous animated Wonder Woman film, this was a significant disappointment. It doesn’t seem to fit in to any established universe and loos designed more as a quick cash-in on the success of the live-action version, than existing out of artistic desire. It begins with a broken, modern-day update of the latter’s opening, with the plane of Air Force pilot Steve Trevor (Donovan) making a crash-landing inside the bubble which has protected Themyscira  over the ages. He’s desperate to return to tell the world about the demonic entities which attacked him, and Diana (Dawson, who played Artemis in the previous animated version) rebels against her mother and the decision of the other Amazons to imprison Steve, going with him to the outside world.

Except, there’s basically no explanation as to Diana’s revolt, beyond a throwaway line about a prophecy. And in the next scene, Diana is sitting in the back of a cab on the way to house of historian Dr. Julia Kapatelis. Demonic entities? What are they? With those entirely forgotten, the film then focuses on the doctor’s daughter, Vanessa (Avgeropoulos), who turns bad, becomes Silver Swan, and eventually teams up with Doctor Poison and a slew of B-villains, of whom I’ve never heard, e.g. Giganta, Cheetah, Doctor Cyber. They plan to attack Themyscira and profit from its technology, and to that goal have revived and powered-up Medusa, who ends up becoming more of a Med-zilla.

This is all full of ridiculous and contrived circumstances. For instance, Diana “forgets” the location of Themyscira. But – what are the odds – there’s a fountain from which she can drink, which will restore her knowledge! And Julia discovered the location in her research! Or, the dispatch of Medusa will turn everyone whom she has petrified, back to being human again. Hmm, must have missed that bit in the mythology. It will certainly lead to some very confused ancient Greek warriors, who suddenly find themselves inhabiting the 21st-century… It feels as if the writers were making stuff up as they went along, and repeatedly painted themselves into corners, from which they could only fabricate escapes out of thin air.

All of which I could take, were the animation decent. When in motion, it’s okay, and some of the action scenes work moderately well. But otherwise, it’s painfully basic, with characters’ faces not moving, except for their mouths. Up until Medusa appears, there’s no indication that any of the antagonists are able to pose a genuine threat to our heroine. Their ludicrously-named group, “Villainy, Inc”, feels like something out of a superhero spoof like Mystery Men. While the initial set-up make it looks like Vanessa will become Diana’s main opponent, she just ends up just another faceless minion.  As someone familiar only with the various adaptations and not the source comic-books, this wasn’t worth my time. Heck, even the unaired TV pilot was more entertaining. 

Dir: Sam Liu, Justin Copeland
Star (voice):  Rosario Dawson, Jeffrey Donovan, Marie Avgeropoulos, Adrienne C. Moore

Birds of Prey (film)

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★★½
“For flock’s sake…”

Or, to give this its full, rather misguided name: Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn). I am not convinced that films are improved by giving them gimmick titles including made-up words. It smacks rather of desperation on the part of the makers. Though this is… alright. It did not actively annoy me in quite the same way Captain Marvel did, but it is still disappointing. Robbie’s Harley Quinn was easily the best thing about Suicide Squad. She’s also the best thing about this, but it feels at a considerably lower level. All the edges seem to have been filed off, with Robbie (who produced this and came up with the idea) apparently intent on making her much more of a heroic figure than the barely-restrained psychopath I was hoping to see.

The main problem, however, is over-stuffing of storylines, with so many threads being weaved in, that they all inevitably suffer as a result. Let’s enumerate them. There’s Harley, who breaks up with the Joker, only to discover his protection was the only thing which had been keeping her safe. Detective Renee Montoya (Perez), whose case-load includes investigating crossbow vigilante killings, mob boss Roman Sionis (McGregor) and Harley herself. Sionis’s singer-turned-driver Dinah Lance, a.k.a. Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), who… Well, I’m really not sure what purpose she serves here. The crossbow killer is Helena Bertinelli, a.k.a. Huntress (Winstead), seeking vengeance for the death of her family. And Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), a young pickpocket who steals and eats a diamond containing coded information sought by Sionis.

None of these are adequately developed, even Harley’s. Her story is adequately and brightly sketched out in an animated opening sequence, and then gets scant service as the script tries to keep all its balls, sorry, ovaries in the air. For the feminist leanings are probably the most painful aspect. As depicted here, the “emancipation” of the title seems less about building women up, than tearing men down. Virtually without exception, every male character is more or less a bastard, from the obvious ones like Sionis’s sidekick with a fondness for face-peeling through to Montoya’s former partner who stole credit for her work. Even the kindly store-owner turns out to be happy to sell Harley out. Is this emancipation? To steal from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” 

Along those lines I was initially prepared to criticize Margot for pre-release statements, like it being “hugely important to find a female director for this.” However, that snippet is a bit misleading, since the full quote in context goes on, “…if possible. But at the end of the day — male, female — the best director gets the job and Cathy was the best director.” I’m fine with that. Though it has to be said, I’m not sure what made Yan the best, given her only feature before this was Dead Pigs, a comedy-drama about an incident where 16,000 deceased porcines were found in a Chinese river. But the direction here is serviceable enough: it doesn’t get in the way of Margot Robbie, which may be what the star  wanted all along.

The action is a bit of a mixed bag. There are a couple of very good brawls for Harley, most notably one in a police evidence warehouse (even if the cops seem curiously unwilling to draw and use their firearms. What is this, the United Kingdom?) where Robbie and her stunt doubles get to showcase some stellar moves. But the final fight has much the same problem as the plot in general. In trying to make sure each of the four fighting leads get their chance to shine (Cassandra basically cowers in a corner for the duration of it), the climax basically succeeds in selling all of them short. There is quite a nice “funhouse” atmosphere there, since it takes place in an abandoned amusement park, though it feels like some of the potential wasn’t fully developed.

It does seem to draw some inspiration from Leon, in the relationship between Harley and Cassandra, which is not dissimilar to the one between Leon and Matilda. In both, the adult is forced to tap into a previously unknown nurturing side after a  young girl is dropped into their care, though they are hardly the ideal parent. But probably the most obvious nod is at the end, where Cassandra pulls a very similar “ring trick” to the one which takes care of Stansfield at the end of Leon. As soon as she said it, I figured out what Cassandra meant, before Harley did. However, this maternal element does play into the softening of Harley, one of the disappointing aspects. Given the freedom of an R-rating. I’d have expected a bit more in the way of mature content than a potty mouth and some intermittently brutal violence. At times, it feels more like Robbie is cosplaying Harley, rather than playing her.

Robbie’s avowed aim was to make a “girl gang” pic, perhaps inspired by things like Switchblade Sisters, Faster Pussycat or the pinky violence genre. But what she didn’t bring from them, is that those all had strong leadership. There was no doubt that Tura Satana or Meiko Kaji were the stars: the films accordingly orbited around them and their fabulous screen presence. Her previous movies have shown us, Robbie can deliver that, which makes it all the more of a shame that she abdicated the throne here. Sadly, this ends up closer to an episode from the last series of Doctor Who, with its “very flat team structure.” Or to borrow from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, an anarcho-syndicalist commune where Harley and her pals take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. Maybe the title, with its supposed heroine relegated to the tenth and eleventh words, was accurate after all.

Dir: Cathy Yan
Star: Margot Robbie, Ewan McGregor, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rosie Perez

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Valentine: The Dark Avenger

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★★★½
“An unexpected Valentine’s gift.”

It’s always nice when a film manages to surpass expectations. Coming in, I was thinking this was going to be nothing but a low-rent, dubbed, caped crusader flick. And, to be honest, that is exactly what it is: a low-rent dubbed, caped crusader flick. But it proved considerably more entertaining than, say, Terminator: Dark Fate, which I saw the same weekend, and which cost roughly a thousand times as much to make.

It has an interesting hook. Waitress Srimaya (Linden) is recruited by a film-maker, Bono (Settle, the only American in the cast), who wants to make a superhero movie that will be a positive role-model for the citizens of crime-riddled Batavia City. With no producer willing to back him, Bono opts to go the viral route. When he sees Srimaya’s martial arts skills in action, he brings her on board to star in videos where she goes up against and beats robbers, muggers and other street punks, clad in a fetching little mask and cape designed by stylist friend Wawan (Dagienks). But her actions bring her to the attention of crime lord, Shadow, who is carrying out a vendetta against the local police.

There’s a nice sense of progression through the film, with the heroine’s gear and costume improving from the pretty basic to the impressively nifty, as she and Wawan learn from her experiences, e.g. add more padding. It also is willing to kill off people you didn’t expect, and if the true identity of Shadow is something you might well figure out before the end, the reasons behind it are unexpected and well-considered. Even the dubbing didn’t irritate me, in the way it usually does – though this may partly have been been because I still put English subtitles on!

The main appeal is the action, however. Indonesian films have a reputation of late for being remarkably impressive, and if this isn’t quite The Raid or The Night Comes For Us, choreographer Robert Suwandi delivers the goods. Linden in particular, is better than expected, and I also liked the Suicide Squad-like trio of female henchmen used by Shadow. The directorial style does tend a little too much to the hyper in terms of movement and cutting, yet it also does a good job of meshing practical and CGI – better, indeed, than Terminator: Dark Fate. For the CGI is used to enhance, rather than replace the physical effects, in particular during a car-chase following a bank robbery.

My interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has steadily waned as it has become an unstoppable behemoth. Films like this, however, I find considerably more interesting.  Not necessarily because the stories they tell are particularly novel, just that they seem created out of a desire to tell those stories, rather than as cold, calculated commercial entities. I’d rather see a film with rough edges here and there, made with passion, than one which is clearly just a job for those involved. This movie is a good indication of why.

Dir: Ubay Fox, Agus Pestol
Star: Estelle Linden, Matthew Settle, Arie Dagienkz, Fendy Pradana

Captain Marvel

  By

★★½
“Hardly marvel-lous”

I had a couple of potential concerns going into this. Firstly, my general unfamiliarity with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This was film #21 in their Infinity Saga. I had seen seven. Would this be like trying to follow Game of Thrones‘s penultimate episode, after having missed two-thirds of what preceded it? Secondly, Brie Larson’s press complaints about movie critics being “overwhelmingly white male.” Yep, guilty as charged, m’lord. Would this questionable attitude – that your skin colour and genital configuration matter more than what you do or say – carry over into the movie?

Fortunately, neither turned out to be a significant issue. On the other hand, it’s still not a very good movie.

Oh, it’s occasionally amusing and sometimes reaches the level of moderately impressive spectacle. But the longer it went on, the less involved I was in it. By the time Vers (Larson), a.k.a. Air Force pilot Carol Danvers enters goddess mode and becomes Captain Marvel, all I could think of was, “That’s a silly-looking helmet.” To reach that point, we follow her as alien Vers gets captured by the enemies of her Kree species, the Skrulls. Their brainwashing attempts succeed in partially re-awakening repressed memories of life on Earth as Danvers. The Krulls are after a light-speed engine being developed there by Danvers’s mentor, Dr. Wendy Lawson (Bening). It’s up to Vers to stop them. Except, almost nothing is quite what it seems at first.

My biggest complaint is how the film relies entirely on dramatically convenient amnesia. I found it painfully obvious, the way Vers’s memories repeatedly dribble back in exactly the manner most appropriate for the plot. The most important elements left are until last, because story-line. The period setting of 1995 turns out to be largely pointless, beyond an excuse to throw a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt onto Larson. [I’ll admit, we did pause the Blockbuster Video scene, to try and recognize some of the VHS sleeves, such as Hook and Jumping Jack Flash] It could just as easily have been set now, considering Marvel vanishes at the end, not returning until Avengers: Endgame, as a mid-credits sequence makes clear.

The above would have been okay if the action had been top-drawer, and it isn’t. This is probably the area in which Battle Angel kicks Captain Marvel’s ass the hardest: almost nothing here has any impact, physically or emotionally. Overall, it just feels lazy: look no further than the most obvious choice of  No Doubt’s Just a Girl as the backing track for the final fight. That was about as cringey as the empowerment got; rather more annoying was the political subtext, of “What if we were the real terrorists?” I watched this literally immediately after seeing Ricky Gervais’s beautifully savage assault on Hollywood at the Golden Globes: “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.” This film would seem to prove his point.

Dir: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Star: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Annette Bening

Tiffany Jones

  By

★★½
“Immodesty Blaise.”

Fashion model Tiffany Jones (Hempel) finds herself dropped into the middle of international intrigue, after President Boris Jabal (Pohlmann), leader of the Eastern European state of Zirdana, takes a shine to her during a state visit to Britain. It’s supposed to be a trade negotiation, but is really to allow Jabal to broken an arms deal with some shady Americans. Her meeting the President brings her to the attention of two factions of Zirdanian rebels.

The nice is led by Prince Salvator (Thomas), the ruler in exile. The not-so-nice are a more aggressive faction, operating out of a restaurant kitchen. Both wonder what Tiffany is doing with Jabal, and are keen to use her to achieve their ends. Which is fine by her, since she has no love for the authoritarian regime which controls Zirdana. So Tiffany agrees to a plan where Jabal will be distracted, preventing from seeing the arms dealers, and a substitute will take the meeting in his place.

Walker is better know for his S&M horror films, with titles such as House of Whipcord, and it’s safe to say saucy comedy like this is not his strong suit. There’s no shortage of sauce, to be sure. It’s reported that Hempel (now known as Lady Weinberg, through marriage) bought up the rights to the film, as well as her work with Russ Meyer, Black Snake, for showing rather too much of her. And that’s before we get to the garden party she throws for Jabal, populated by a flock of 1970’s dolly-birds, who shed their clothes enthusiastically at the drop of a cocktail napkin. The whole thing – a plot to get sexually compromising material on a visiting foreign leader – does still have contemporary resonance…

It’s the comedy angles which are a horrible failure, with virtually every attempted joke falling flatter than Hempel’s chest [quite how she ended up in a Meyer film escapes me, given his fondness for the more-endowed end of the feminine spectrum. Then again, he said later of Hempel, “We had a stand-in for the tits and wouldn’t let her speak.”] It’s not just the passage of time, for the Carry On films of the same era have endured very well: I suspect this was simply not very funny to begin with, and appears to have tanked at the box-office. Like Modesty Blaise, it was based on a British newspaper comic-strip, which ran from 1964-77. Unusually for the era, it was created by two women, Pat Tourret and Jenny Butterworth, though I suspect the newspaper version was likely less salacious.

The main redeeming aspect here is Hempel, who has a lovely, breezy charm which manages to sail above the leaden material, almost redeeming it. She portrays Jones with an endearing mix of savviness and innocence, as she dodges the (literal) grasp of President Jabal, and the more fanatical of his opponents, while working to help the Prince regain his throne. Probably wisely, the morality of replacing an absolute, unelected leader with another absolute unelected leader, simply because the latter is younger and cuter, is never addressed. Hempel is not quite enough to rescue this, and it’s perfectly understandable why this vanished into obscurity, with or without the lead actress’s help.

Dir: Pete Walker
Star: Anouska Hempel, Eric Pohlmann, Damien Thomas, Susan Sheers

Lady Death: The Movie

  By

★★
“Death warmed up.”

My first viewing of this was on a day off from work, when I was down with some sinusy thing, and dosed up on DayQuil. So I chalked my losing interest and drifting off to the meds, and once I felt better, decided this deserved the chance of a re-view. However, the result was still the same: even as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed viewer, I found attention lapsing. For this animated version of a mature comic, might as well be a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe episode. Which is a shame. I wanted to like it, since the creator of Lady Death, Brian Pulido, is something of a local comics legend here in my adopted home state of Arizona. This should have been better.

In 15th-century Sweden, Hope (Auten) is the daughter of Matthias (Kleinhenz), a mercenary who is actually an incarnation of Satan. When this is exposed, the innocent Hope is burned at the stake by religious zealots: there, she makes a literal deal with the devil, and agrees to re-join her father in Hell, where he has also taken her fiance, medical student Niccolo. However, once she is in the underworld, she rebels against his authority. With the aid of Satan’s former swordsmith, Cremator (Mungle), she obtains ‘Darkness’, a weapon Cremator had forged after slaying Asmodeus. Hope – or Lady Death, as she is now known – begins to amass an army and plot her demonic father’s overthrow.

All of which sounds considerably more interesting than the execution here, which is blandly uninteresting in just about every level, beginning with its depiction of hell. Even by the standards of 2004, this is low-quality animation. One of the strengths of the medium is it’s limited only by imagination: you don’t need to worry about the costs of building sets or whatever, it’s just what you draw. Yet there’s no indication here of any thought having gone into the setting. Hell is, apparently, a poorly-lit and generic cave system, populated by entities that look like Jabba the Hutt or Tim Curry in Legend. Much the same vanilla complaint can be leveled at voice-acting that’s desperately in need of more energy, save perhaps McAvin as Lucifer’s “jester,” Pagan.

But it’s perhaps the script which is the weakest element here – and considering the screenplay was written by Pulido, that’s especially disappointing. I’m only somewhat familiar with the comics, yet they seem to have a rich and fully-developed mythology. Could have fooled me based on this, where the Devil is basically an idiot, who has to make every mistake in the Evil Overlord handbook, to allow his adversary to triumph. Though this version of Lady Death appears considerably more heroic than in the source material, the question of why a “good girl” would want to reign over hell is never addressed. All that’s left is in an impressive bit of central character design, because there’s no doubt she is a striking creation. She’s someone who deserves a significantly better fate than this entirely forgettable prod with a blunt stick.

Dir: Andy Orjuela
Star (voice): Christine Auten, Mike Kleinhenz, Andy McAvin, Rob Mungle

Wonder Woman (2009)

  By

★★★½
“A little short of truly Wonder-ful.”

Often forgotten in the critical acclaim for the live-action feature, is the animated film released by Warner Brothers in 2009. It wasn’t an enormous hit – plans for a sequel were scrapped due to its slow sales – but is worth a revisit in the the wake of Gal Gadot’s subsequent portrayal. There are some strong overlaps in the two films’ plots: in both, the crash-landing of pilot Steve Trevor (Fillion) kicks off the Amazons’ re-connection to mortal mankind, and Ares (Molina) is the common villain.

The most obvious difference is the time-frame; rather than the middle of World War I, this takes place in the present day. Additionally, Ares is initially in Amazon custody, escaping with the help of Persephone, an Amazon he has seduced to his side. Diana (Russell) is tasked with re-capturing the god before he can bring about  Zeus’s first goal is to remove the bracers, put on him by Zeus, which limit his powers. They can only be removed by another god, and he seeks the help of his uncle, god of the underworld Hades (Oliver Platt). That done, he raises an army, including the Amazonian dead, and attacks Washington, which causes the President to launch a nuke at Themyscira, believing it to be behind the attack. It’s up to Diana to stop Zeus, and to Steve to stop the missile.

There are chunks of this which are really good, not least the action. Those scenes had to be trimmed down to avoid an R-rating (rumblings of that version getting a release, have yet to be proven true), and what remains is beautifully animated, yet brutal at the same time. This perhaps reaches its peak with the battle through Manhattan between Diana and Ares’s warrior-son, Deimos (below), which for my money is the equal of anything in the live-action film. The relationship between Steve and Diana is another strong suit, helped by strong voice-work from both actors. I think the contemporary setting helps, too, avoiding the rather obvious gender politics angle shoehorned into the more recent film, in favour of more subtle consideration of such points [I was impressed that even the traitor Amazon is given a philosophical motive for her betrayal, and it offers pause for thought].

However, there are other aspects which seem very poorly thought-out. After defeating Deimos, who commits suicide rather than reveal anything, Diana gets a medallion off the corpse. Next scene, they’re sneaking into Ares’s lair. Uh, what? It feels almost as if there was a chunk missing, a feeling enhanced by the relatively terse 75-minute running time. Perhaps this also explained the whole “invisible jet” thing – something wisely abandoned entirely by the live-action film, since it never made much sense. Here, it shows up with no explanation, later firing invisible missiles.

The final battle also relies upon too much contrivance (oh, look: someone pulls a spell out of thin air to free the Amazonian zombies), though at least Ares here proves a worthy adversary, unlike in the live-action film, where he was close to the weakest link. Still, even if it’s perhaps aimed at a younger audience than your humble author, and was missing the sense of awe generated by Gal Gadot’s sword-swinging, this was entertaining and well-made. Worth a look.

Dir: Lauren Montgomery
Star (voice): Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Alfred Molina, Rosario Dawson

Vixen: The Movie

  By

★★★½
“For fox’s sake..”

Having dipped my toe into the animated DC World with their 2009 version of Wonder Woman, I thought I’d scope out this more recent entry. It collects together both seasons of the Vixen web series, as well as new footage. The series began in 2015, with six five-minute episodes under Tucker, and six more followed the following year, directed by Geda. It’s a cross-over from the “Arrowverse”, with appearances from the Flash, Green Arrow and Black Canary, among others – some of the voices here are done by the same actors as the live-action TV shows.

The focus, however, is on Mari McCabe (Echikunwoke), a orphan from Africa who was brought up in Detroit by a foster family. Virtually all she has linking Mari to her original roots is a necklace, and this is no ordinary trinket. The totem allows the wearer to tap into animal spirits and gives them their powers, e.g. strength of a gorilla, speed of a cheetah, etc. This comes as a bit of a shock, not only to Mari, but also to the rest of the Arrowverse, who were under the impression superpowers were only the result of exposure to intense radiation.

Regardless, several problems result for Mari from this. Firstly, she has to try and figure out how to control and harness the potential abilities. Secondly, her older sister, Kuasa (Rose), feels the totem belongs to her, and their struggle for control forms the focus of season one. In the second series, we discover it is just one of five elemental artifacts, and when the “fire” totem is discovered, former general Benatu Eshu arrives in Detroit, intent on acquiring it, for… the usual reasons power-hungry former generals want to get their hands on relics of great import, I guess.

While more or less your standard superhero origin story, there is an underlying awareness, occasionally bordering on self-mockery. This certainly helps, given I’m no real fan of the superhero genre in general, so seeing this poke fun at itself – albeit gently – basically beat me to the punch. Some of the background characters were occasionally an issue for a novice like me, who is almost entirely unaware of the Arrowverse. I imagine most viewers will not be in that boat, but I felt it worked better when concentrating directly on McCabe, and exploring her background and development.

The animation seems cut from the same cloth as Wonder Woman, which means it makes for nicely fluid action. Although in some of the more talky sequences, I was occasionally distracted by the absence of movement anywhere except the lips. They do a good job of crafting a feature out of something episodic, even if the join between the two seasons is fairly obvious. Fans of Arrow should stick around for the post-credits sequence which (I’m informed!) ties into Echikunwoke’s subsequently appearance in a guest role as Vixen in Arrow. Yet even for someone like me, outside that group, this was a character I liked, and wouldn’t mind seeing more of – whether in animation or live-action.

Dir: James Tucker + Curt Geda
Star: Megalyn Echikunwoke, Anika Noni Rose, Neil Flynn, Sean Patrick Thomas