Movie review - DC League of Superpets

I went with some nieces and a nephew to watch another comic book movie at the weekend. This time it was animated and focused on the DC Superpets, a spin-off in the DC comics franchise. Mild spoilers follow the picture of the film poster. 

The film centres on Krypto, Superman's super-powered dog, and various other animals from a local rescue shelter who receive superpowers from a fragment of orange kryptonite. They have to work together to thwart the evil scheme of a maniacal guinea pig who had been experimented on by Lex Luthor. It has a strong voice cast, including Dwayne Johnson as Krypto and Kevin Hart as Ace, a dog from the shelter who will end up being Batdog. 

Despite the promising premise, the film suffered from the same problems as pretty much all the other DC movies that have been released. The plotting was sedate. There were scenes and battles that did not add anything to the overall plot and just slowed things down. The final resolution was the same as every other DC film I've seen - a big punch up. (In fairness, this is a problem for almost every comic book movie.)

There were some funny jokes like the dogs playing with squeaky toys of superheroes. There were humorous references to other superhero franchises, like Superman ironing a shirt with his laser vision and toying with the idea of calling himself Iron Man.  I laughed at the recording of Krypto's father that always started the same way and Krypto saying he needed a skip intro button. And I was very amused by the character of a kitten given superpowers who became a living weapon as a result.

However, some scripting choices were a bit off. Merton the sweary tortoise got bleeped on a couple of occasions instead of cutting away or substituting other words as happens in most animated movies. Maybe the studio thought it was in keeping with DC's attempt to be the 'edgy' comic book franchise. I don't think any of the kids watching with us picked up on it, but it felt clunky. 

Another misstep was the production team's assumption that the audience would know who everyone was, especially when human superheroes turned up. I got some of the references and inside jokes, and I imagine DC super-nerds would get more. However, I don't think the jokes are so good it is worth investing the time and effort to become a DC super-nerd just to get the references. 

There were also scenes that play on Batman's origin story and take the mickey out of the darkness in the Dark Knight. But that road has already been well trodden in The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie (reviewed here). The jokes at Batman's expense in Superpets felt hackneyed as a result, so even this self-deprecation by the franchise felt stale.

Overall, I enjoyed the film and don't regret going to see it. But my main impression is that even in an animated film which is supposed to be aimed at children and therefore a bit silly, the DC franchise can't escape from its own drawbacks. 

The Lego Batman Movie - a semi-critical review (with some spoilers) from someone who loves Lego

The term AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego) is becoming more prominent, and certainly there seem to be more of us around now. Gone are the days when I would wonder round the Lego Shop in town looking sheepishly at all the lovely Lego sets and hoping no one thought I was a weirdo for not having kids in tow. Lego is now a semi-respectable hobby for grown ups too.

A lot of this is down to The Lego Movie that came out a couple of years ago and catapulted Lego back into the wider public eye. I thought The Lego Movie was a great film, and it would probably make it into my top ten animated films that even people who don't like cartoons would like. But it did that off a funny script, an interesting storyline, and the right number of in-jokes - not too many to make non-Lego fans feel like outsiders, but enough to make me smile to myself. Benny's broken helmet strap, the blink and you'll miss it references to Fabuland, that sort of thing.

Batman was one of the surprise supporting characters from The Lego Movie. He was a funny version of the well-known comic book and movie character. His comment about only building using black or very dark grey and his love of his self-penned thrash metal squeezed the pips of humour out of the Batman mythos, but all in the service of The Lego Movie's story.

As a result, I was looking forward to The Lego Batman Movie. But this is a case of where a supporting character can't really carry a whole movie. Cathy has told me of a conversation she had with our friend Tom about this, where they talked about the lower quality of the film Minions in comparison to Despicable Me where they first appeared. The Minions are funny little sideshow characters in Despicable Me. They struggled when carrying a whole film. And in this case Batman suffers the same fate.

The film is funny. There are moments that really amused me. The way they trawled the DC Comics archive for all the stupidest villains for a villain ensemble was funny. Calendar Man, anyone? Kite Man? The Eraser, who looks like a pencil? These are all real and really hilarious. There was a flashback sequence with tableaux from almost all the Batman films in franchise history, which was very cool. Alfred dons an Adam West era outfit and says he misses the sixties. At one point Batman warns Robin they are going to hit the bad guys so hard that words will appear in the air, and sure enough TV Batman style 'KA-POW' explodes into life when he punches a baddie. There's a can of shark repellent. All good gags. All made me laugh.

But there was still a hollowness to it. At the end of the day this was just a mickey-take of Batman - something that has been done before many, many times. We know the story of Batman. Bruce Wayne. Dick Grayson. Barbara Gordon. These are all people we know. When Batman appeared in The Lego Movie, he was a new kind of Batman, He was Lego Batman. And we didn't know him. He was WildStyle's unreliable boyfriend and a bit of a douche. But he was a new character to learn about and relate to.

Batman in The Lego Batman Movie isn't new. He isn't even the Batman we knew from The Lego Movie. He's an amalgam of all the Batmen we have known before. Gotham City isn't new. It's just Gotham City made out of computer generated Lego. The Joker isn't new. We've seen him before and he was more interesting when he was played by Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger or Jared Leto.

There is a break with tradition in that the Joker enlists some other villains trapped in the "Phantom Zone"; all of them villains with a Warner Bros licence. It is amusing watching Sauron as the lidless eye rampaging through Gotham, or the great white shark from Amity Beach recruited to the cause of evil.(But is 'Jaws' evil? That's a conundrum worth discussing. It's just a shark doing what sharks are reputed to do.) But we have seen unlikely team-ups before, in The Lego Movie, for example, with cameos from Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian, and Gandalf and Dumbledore sitting next to each other.

Overall, what made The Lego Movie work was it was about Lego, but also about a whole lot more. The Lego Batman Movie isn't really about Lego. It's just using Lego as a medium to poke affectionate fun at a franchise that has been pastiched to death in recent years, and whose own 'serious' films are bordering on self-parody now. No amount of clever in-jokes, smartly done animation or witty lines delivered in perfect comic timing by Will Arnett could raise this film to the level of The Lego Movie.

It certainly doesn't suck, but The Lego Batman Movie needed more Lego and less Batman.

Five reasons The Lego Movie is awesome

Cool poster; cool film

This post contains spoilers

1) It’s clever
The movie is well-animated with lots of little blink and you miss them jokes. There are also deeper jokes – the inanity of prime-time TV is spoofed by the hit TV show ‘Have you seen my pants?’ which revolves around a pantless (trouserless in the UK) guy asking his wife ‘Honey, have you seen my pants?’ repeatedly. As satire on sitcoms that rely on stupid catchphrases to get laughs, it’s spot-on.

2) It’s got superheroes (and other heroes)
Forget the hype of big-screen Batman v Superman. If you want to see DC superheroes together on the big screen, The Lego Movie got there first. The film royally rips the mick out of Batman’s ‘darkness’, while Green Lantern’s is mercilessly Green Lampooned!

There are also brief bonus cameos from Han Solo, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian and C-3PO – the latter two voiced by authentic Star Wars actors Billy Dee Williams and Anthony Daniels. Plus there’s the space slug from Empire Strikes Back!

3) It’s got an interesting point to make about creativity and order
The main plot of the Movie concerns evil President Business’s plan to set the world of Lego using the magical relic the ‘Kragle’. Once set, people won’t be able to move and people won’t be able to spoil his stuff. Opposing him are the ‘master builders’ who see the potential to create new things from the Lego buildings, vehicles and street furniture around them.

There is a conflict here between the oppressive rulers who want everyone to follow the instructions and conform – the hero Emmet actually reads out the ‘Instructions on how to fit in and be like everyone else’ at the start of the movie – and the freedom of the master builders to remake the world how they see fit. It’s an interesting exploration of the age-old tussle between conservatism and innovation, and that’s a good theme for a kid’s movie.

4) It’s been flamed by Fox “News”
Personally, I think anything that attracts the ire of Fox “News” is automatically A Good Thing. In this case one Fox “News” pundit lambasted The Lego Movie for being anti-capitalist. They said the same thing about The Muppets too. Their gripe is that business tycoons are being cast as villains, even though they create jobs and wealth.

Of course, Fox “News” is going to side with the mega-rich and look out for the interests of tycoons rather than ordinary folks. What Fox “News” don’t realise is that there is a reason why tycoons make such effective villains – we have seen enough terrible anti-social behaviour from the feral rich to believe they would destroy the world (or at least knock down valuable cultural heritage like the Muppet Theatre).

And it’s telling that in The Lego Movie, President Business would rather employ an army of robots than real people, much like the downsize kings of the business world, in fact.

5) It’s full of cult Lego references
Cathy almost jumped out of her seat when there was a glimpse of Fabuland at one point. One of the best characters is Benny the blue 80s spaceman, who is obsessed with building spaceships. (At one point one character tells him to ‘Get your retro space pieces away from me.) There are numerous cool Lego characters from the mini-figures range popping up in crowd scenes.

If you love Lego, then it’s hard not to love this movie. If you don’t love Lego, I think you will like it anyway. It’s well worth a watch.

Movies of 2012

Instead of doing my round up of films I watched and saying which one was best, I've decided to try and present a few 'awards' in different categories. So, here goes...

Most surprising movie
Disney/Pixar's Brave was a big surprise. I'd been very disappointed by Cars 2 and didn't think the trailers were anything special. I thought it looked like a Scottish-set version of Mulan or something, but the story veered off in an unexpected direction. The animation was top-notch, it had some very funny scenes, and generally I thought it was excellent.

Most underwhelming movie
Prometheus promised much and delivered very little. It somehow managed to combine pretentious ambitions with weak characterisation and a plot that seemed to be mainly made up of holes. Very, very disappointing.

Movie that made me think a bit harder than I expected
I really liked Looper, although I'm pretty sure the central plot device of time travel unravelled right at the end. But it was very well acted - Joseph Gordan-Levitt was excellent, as was Bruce Willis - and the story kept me guessing right to the end. All-in-all, a sci-fi move that was well worth watching.

Enjoyable action movie of the year
I really liked Avengers Assemble. It may not be as cool as the recent Batman films, but it was fast-paced, the actors took the job seriously, but most of all it was the culmination of a series of films that all fed into a much larger picture. As such, it was a believable 'cross-over' film. The characters had back-stories, but this was a move forward for all of them. It maybe was a bit long, but that's about the only criticism I can make.

Movie that made me feel a bit 'meh' afterwards
Two movies vie for this award - The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall. I don't think either enriched my life. The Batman film had an interesting political edge to it - that without the ruling 1%, all you get is anarchy and terror, while the James Bond film was nihilistic in the extreme (as I said when I reviewed it before). Nihilism can work in a movie (for example, I thought Dredd was very well done), but Skyfall was unremitting for a movie ostensibly about a 'hero'.

Comedy of the year
I didn't see that many comedies this year. Ted was funny, but a bit rude, so I'm going to give this one to Ice Age 4: Continental Drift, mainly because it made a joke about a previous installment in the series involving dinosaurs and said that it "didn't make a lot of sense." That amused me.

Film of the year
And so to the big one - my personal favourite film of 2012 and it has to go to... (drumroll) The Muppets. As I said when I reviewed it back in February, I liked the way the film treated the original Muppet ethos with respect. Disney did a very good job at capturing what made the Muppets work a few decades ago, and it was just a great family movie, with several jokes that made me laugh out loud. On another note, the recent acquisition of the Star Wars empire by Disney hasn't really worried me - given how Disney treated the Muppets, I have high hopes they will capture the spirit of Star Wars in the right way. (And as Cathy has pointed out, they really can't mess it up as badly as George Lucas did with the prequels.)

I'm already looking forward to some of the films due out in 2013, but that was 2012.

Summer of science fiction (and superheroes)

I've seen a goodly number of science fiction films over the last few months, from the summer through to now. I've seen most of these with my cinema buddy Connor (shout out), who may yet revive his blog and give his verdict on these films.

Avengers Assemble - I liked this a lot. Lots of action. Smart script. Humour. Built well on the preceding films. Probably one of my favourite superhero films to date.

The Amazing Spider-Man - I wasn't sure about whether this film would work as it seemed too soon for a reboot. But it was pretty good. I preferred Andrew Garfield to Tobey Maguire. The pace was quick. Aunt May wasn't as annoying. It had Martin Sheen in. The only let-down was the villain as The Lizard just doesn't have the same screen presence as Green Goblin.

Prometheus - Just about everyone I've spoken to was disappointed with this. I spent most of the film thinking about how it could have been a better movie. That's a bad sign. Perhaps the pre-event hype got to me. I do think, though, that the major problem with this was the characters doing completely nonsensical things. Science fiction is usually nonsense, but its characters have to follow the internal logic of the movie for it to work. This didn't.

The Dark Knight Rises - Meh, Batman. I went right off this after The Dark Knight. I went in the hope it would be a redemptive moment for the Batman series. It wasn't particularly  and the underlying political message was ropey. Apparently if the proles ever rebel against the downtreading classes, the result will inevitably be anarchy. Batman is a protector of the privileged because without them society would slide into chaos. Seriously.

Total Recall - I enjoyed this. There were a few nods to the Arnie original. The central gist of the story was a bit confused (and physically impossible), but the tech was cool. I want a hand phone. Definitely better than expected for a remake.

Dredd - I've reviewed this on the blog. A brilliant rendering of the original comic books, but gory and nihilistic. Not a feelgood movie, but one I want to watch again.

Looper - I'm still trying to work out whether this worked or not. Time travel movies tend to fall down when you try and piece together the timeline after all the monkeying about. But it was very well made and acted and I really liked it, so would recommend it and would watch it again.

Surprisingly alright for an X Men film

I went to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine last night and I have to say I was surprisingly impressed by it. On the one hand retconning any storyline is difficult. Do you scrap it a la Batman Begins, or embrace it and risk ruining it a la the Star Wars prequels?

But this handled it well. It fits into the film storyline, explaining at the end how Logan winds up in X-Men not knowing who he was. The rest of the story is passable. The development of Weapon XI wasn't perhaps as well-thought through as it could have been. I was a bit nonplussed at how casually the film-makers killed off some quite interesting mutants, not to mention passers-by who get in the way. Gone are the days when innocent people survived in Hollywood blockbusters.

Overall, there is something slightly fragmentary about the storyline, and the scriptwriter assumes you know who the hell everyone is. And keep an eye out for a laughable 'cameo' from Professor X at the end, who looks like a jobbing actor wearing a Patrick Stewart mask, or a really bad attempt at a CGI face. Either that or Patrick Stewart needs to cut down on the botox!

Speaking of Patrick Stewart, I saw another Star Trek trailer before the main feature. I've seen three now and they seem to keep getting better. I never thougth I'd admit this on my blog, but I'm starting to feel a bit excited at the prospect of seeing the new Star Trek film. There, I've said it. I can't believe it.

My rating for X-Men Origins: Wolverine: 6.5/10 (Worth a watch, if only for the Star Trek trailer)

The (far too) Dark Knight

I didn’t like this as much as I thought I would. In fact, I’m not sure whether I liked it at all.

True, our appreciation of the movie wasn’t helped by the half hour queue for tickets, or the queue inside to get into the auditorium. Or by the sozzled older couple behind us who kept trying to tell us how they hadn’t had to queue for the cinema since they were kids, during the War. But this was a film I was eagerly anticipating, and had been for weeks. Why did I feel so let down?

Well, first off, it’s unrelentingly dark. Batman Begins had plenty of humour to balance the darkness of the storyline. There were a couple of comic moments in this one, but really not enough.

Much had been made about Heath Leger’s performance as the Joker. It was very high grade acting - enough to make you forget it was Heath Ledger you were watching. But this Joker was truly horrible, using a knife as his principle weapon because it was "slower" and therefore more satisfying.

The Joker’s obsession with knives was a focal point of the film, and a disturbing one. (At one point he empties his pockets in custody, and places a row of knives onto the table.) Given the current climate of fear surrounding stabbings and knife crime, I’m surprised this film got such a low age certificate. On top of the discussion about how stabbing a person is a much more satisfactory way to kill them, there are three occasions where the Joker holds a knife in someone’s mouth as he threatens them.

It’s a bad, bad time to be talking about bad, bad crimes and those scenes should have been cut.

Batman himself, takes on the role of Dark Knight as opposed to Harvey Dent as Gotham’s White Night. But when a hero beats up an unresisting villain, as Batman does with the Joker in a police cell, we know we’ve moved somewhere else as a society. This simply isn’t right. Batman’s subsequent noble willingness to become a hate figure in order to preserve the reputation of the tragic Harvey Dent, is less of a sacrifice simply because he has already become an amoral monster.

And the use of two villains in superhero movies really has to stop. It didn’t work in Spider-Man 3. It didn’t work in any of the earlier Batmans, with the exception of Batman Returns. It’s just not good movie-making practice. You end up with a wasted storyline and an under-used character when you try and squeeze two villains into one film. When Dent becomes Two-Face, he has about ten minutes in which to be evil enough to merit Batman’s attention. That’s not long enough for the tragedy of a fall from grace to be accurately communicated to the audience.

It also lengthens the film well beyond any reasonable time. If you can’t tell the story in two hours, then you’ve failed as a story-teller. They could have left out Dent’s subsequent reinvention as Two-Face and left him on a hospital bed. They could have had Dent become a villain by killing the Joker in revenge. There were so many better ways to end this film than the way they did.

So, for all those reasons, The Dark Knight failed. I left the cinema feeling oppressed and depressed by it - partly because it didn’t live up to it’s hype; partly because it chose to be oppressive. I can’t really recommend it to anyone.

And that perhaps is the biggest shame of all.

Jongudmund’s Rating: 5/10

New Batmobile design revealed

If you can't wait to see what Batman's driving in the Dark Knight, here's a spoiler...


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Prepping for Batman

The Dark Knight is out on Friday (officially) and I know people who have tickets for previews on Thursday. I'm probably going to wait until next week (Orange Wedneasdays 241!), but in the meantime, in preparation, we've watched Batman Begins again tonight. My appetite is well and truly whetted now.