Tag: Superman

THE OLD GUARD is good–and here’s what could make the sequel even better

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Yes, there will be a sequel to THE OLD GUARD, which is crushing the competition on Netflix right now. Click with your mousity mouse thing to watch the trailer.

Cool, right? Furiousa is back and she’s kicking butt.

If you haven’t watched the movie, spoilers ahead. If you have watched it, let’s talk about what worked, what didn’t, and how they could amp this thing up in the sequel.

The general feel of this movie worked well. It’s a fun time, and the acting is great for an action movie.

I like the premise–immortals who may randomly lose the ability to heal–though if you called this HIGHLANDER WITH GUNS, that feels pretty accurate, too.

The trouble with any type of immortal hero is you run into The Superman Trap, which is the fact the audience never worries about the hero being in danger because they basically can’t die. What’s good about HIGHLANDER and vampire movies is there are clear rules of how this all works. Vampires are vulnerable to sunlight, garlic, and such. Highlander and his fellow immortals die when they lose their heads, gaining the power of whoever they vanquish, except it’s not clear what power they really get. Are they faster or tougher after the light show? Can’t tell. Can they fly or do card tricks? Dunno. We’re just told they get more power, which is defined as the ability to do work, except we never see Highlander and his fellow immortal sword fetishists do anything other than swing blades at each other.

It is a nice twist for the hero, Furiosa (okay, her name in this movie is Andy, but does it really matter?) to lose her immortality toward the end. Because it raises the stakes and makes us worry.

What I didn’t like was the villain, who’s a dweeby pharma bro CEO, and yes, he’s despicable, but not scary. And certainly not a match for Furiosa and her fellow immortals.

The ending if an action movie should always have the main character, not a sidekick, take out the villain. That villain had better be just as skilled, powerful, and scary as the hero. Otherwise, snooze city. Check out the ending fight of HIGHLANDER, which featured a great bad guy, totally imposing and scary. Loved him.

There are two real villains in these Furiosa with Guns movies, which is plural on purpose because there will be more. First up is the bearded dude immortal frenemy who betrays his friends, then helps beat the bad guys only to get banished for 100 years as punishment for the original betrayal that you should have figured out ten minutes into the story. Who set up the first job that went wrong? Oh, that guy. Yeah, he’s it.

THE OLD GUARD neatly sets up the top villain in the next film, the woman who Furiosa hung out with for centuries but couldn’t save when they drowned her in an iron coffin at sea, thinking she was a witch. Then she spend hundreds of years drowning, dying, and coming back only to die again. Dreadful, right?

There’s a great stinger ending scene where the Bearded Frenemy, spending his 100 years in exile drinking all the alcohols in Europe, is surprised by the Big Bad Frenemy of Furiosa who somehow escaped the iron coffin at the bottom of the ocean. She’s certainly set up to be scary, with a totally understandable motivation for revenge and a license from the French government to do wacky psycho villain things, seeing how spending all that time drowning and coming back to life, endlessly, would warp any of our minds.

What bugged me is compared to the Big Bad Immortal Frenemy, all the little villains who died in the previous two hours feel insignificant. Especially the dweeby pharma bro.

So I hope and pray the sequel sticks with a villain who is as powerful, or more powerful, than Furiosa and her immortal friends. Because this should be the First Law of Storytelling: a movie or novel is only as strong as the villain.

Is the hero so skilled and amazing that it requires an entire division of bad guys to slow him down? Is the villain equal to that or even more skilled? You see far too many movies and novels where the villain is no match at all for the hero. And it makes it boring.

A series that completely tilts the playing field in favor of the villains, and does it incredibly well? THE BOYS on Amazon Prime (I swear this sounds like a planet in the Degobah System or whatever). The superheroes everybody worships are actually villains, and the small band of people trying to take them down are–with one exception–average people with zero powers. They’re total underdogs and it makes every victory they have so worth it.

VERDICT

Yes, it’s accurate to say THE OLD GUARD is sorta HIGHLANDER with guns, but it’s a fun time, and well worth watching.

On a related note: EQUILIBRIUM is pretty much THE MATRIX crossed with FAHRENHEIT 451 and 1984, and you’d think that mix wouldn’t work, but it does. They overdo the gun-kata nonsense a bit, sure, yet there’s a lot of great action scenes in this Christian Bale movie.

 

Leaked script for JUSTICE LEAGUE

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

ACT 1, opening scene: BRUCE WAYNE drives up in a classic black car to a black tie event. He opens the passenger door for a leggy model in Little Black Dresses and Zack Snyder makes sure the sky is an appropriately grim shade of black. In the middle of the charity ball, as Bruce is giving a speech, he notices a flash in the sky and makes an excuse to leave.

BATMAN rolls up to an industrial part of Gotham where all is not right. An alien war machine nearly kills him.

Over at Arkham Asylum, LEX LUTHOR won’t tell COMMISSIONER GORDON or BATMAN what he knows about the alien war machines. He simply gloats and says they aren’t ready for the invincible army that’s coming, though he will make popcorn and watch from his prison cell. LUTHOR does reveal the invasion of alien war machines is not being sent by the Purple Man Who Does Not Like To Stand, because that villain only attacks Earths populated by Marvel superheroes.

On the rooftop, WONDER WOMAN arrives to tell BATMAN they can’t fight this war alone, and without SUPERMAN, they won’t last ten minutes, and this movie has another 105 minutes to go, so that won’t do at all. This is war. They need an army.

In a montage, a series of would-be heroes are approached by BRUCE WAYNE and reject his suicide mission.

One exception is a pebble-faced man in a hoodie, who says if they both snagged their other costume, they’d bring a total of four superheroes to this fight. BRUCE WAYNE tells the man, “This is D.C.–we don’t do irony.”

Meanwhile, the alien robot army pauses to consolidate its grip on North Dakota for some reason, instead of taking over the world already.

 

ACT 2

BRUCE WAYNE wears steampunk goggles to brave the cold of GREENLAND, which is not green at all, to get his butt kicked by AQUAMAN in a bar.

AQUAMAN refuses the call to adventure and says this isn’t the proper way of doing things. He’ll wait for his own solo movie before joining any ensemble as a sidekick.

FLASH eagerly joins up because he’s this movie’s dorky version of Peter Parker, nerding out about being allowed to hang with a billionaire playboy with a cave full of armor and technology.

The growing crew finds CYBORG fighting off a gang of alien robot warriors. CYBORG interfaces with a dying alien robot to uncover the truth: they’re scouts for DARKSEID, a villain whose superpower is that you’ve never heard of him.

Alien robot warriors grow bored in North Dakota and descend upon the village bar where AQUAMAN is scowling while he drinks his mead, which spurs him into wearing a costume that, sadly, looks better than the Batsuit we’ve been looking at for three different movies.

 

ACT 3

Wave after wave of CGI alien robots flit through the sky and swarm the ground.

AQUAMAN leaves the fight for some made-up reason so he can sulk before coming back again. CYBORG seems to get taken down by a horde of alien robots and BATMAN gets trapped in a cave, which is as close to ironic as D.C. dares.

Meanwhile, WONDER WOMAN looks amazing in slow-mo as she destroys legions of glowing alien robots, because slow-mo is her motif, if you haven’t seen the trailers for her movie yet. But it’s a losing battle. No daughter of Zeus can single-handedly win this kind of war.

It takes a son of Krypton to help out, so SUPERMAN rises from his real grave, not the fake one in D.C., to fly around in a black suit which also looks better than the weird, short-eared Batsuit we’ve been looking at for three movies.

BATMAN finally escapes the cave and CYBORG reveals that he interfaced with another alien robot to learn the location of their secret server farm, and that they’re not using https yet.

WONDER WOMAN, BATMAN, AQUAMAN, FLASH and CYBORG pile into the Batplane to do battle, but only after BATMAN finally puts on an armored Batsuit that actually looks like it was designed for, I don’t know, fighting. SUPERMAN flies solo, because he’s still getting over being dead.

Even more endless waves of alien robots fly into battle to get smashed into glowing bits until we get a glimpse of DARKSEID, a special giant clump of dark, glowing CGI with an impossibly deep, gravelly voice based on Christian Bale’s growl in THE DARK KNIGHT, and yes, this is daringly ironic for D.C.

DARKSEID throws around the heroes until he gets bored. Nothing they do hurts him.

Finally, SUPERMAN gets tired of puny punches. He picks up DARKSEID and flies him into space, past our sun, past another sun and finally into a black hole, though when he flies back CYBORG reports that this alone won’t kill the villain. DARKSEID is still communicating with his network with a 2400 baud moden. He’ll return, stronger than before.

A bloody BATMAN picks himself off the floor to say, “We’ll be ready.”

You’ll stay to watch the credits. They will be long. At the end, there will be no post-credit scene, making you remember this isn’t a Marvel movie, though the plot of AVENGERS: INFINITY CRISIS I and II will be roughly the same thing–big bad guy leads alien invastion–with the exception that IRON MAN, THOR, CAPTAIN AMERICA and the Hulk only beat the villain by sacrificing themselves and becoming trapped in another dimension or timeline at the end of the second movie, because their contracts are all up.

 

What Thor was doing during CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
thor during civil war

I like it, I love it, I want some more of it. So why does this short bit with zero special effects work so well?

Let’s take it apart.

Comedy is incredibly hard. Even the pro’s at Saturday Night Live fail more often than succeed. The tough part of a short skit like this is variety.

Saturday Night Live and other skit shows tend to find one joke that does work, then beat it to death, making a five-minute skit feel like five hours.

The other path–multiple jokes that may or may not work–is much harder to pull off.

You won’t know if it works while writing or rehearsing it, and unless you film in front of a live audience, you won’t get feedback until you put that short film out there for the world to embrace or trash.

This bit about Thor works because they don’t rely on a single, repetitive joke. They had the guts to try a ton of different jokes, big or small, and to include little details that reward multiple viewings. Continue reading “What Thor was doing during CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR” →

7 secret ingredients to cook up a Bad Superhero Blockbuster

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

We live in the Golden Age of comic book movies, with Marvel and DC pumping them out as faster than you can swipe your VISA for $14 tickets to IMAX 3D and $9 bags of popcorn.

Here’s the secret recipe for mediocre superhero movies and its two sequels, each of which will costs at least $250 bazillion to make and $150 gazillion to market, and no, those insanely high numbers are not why you have to pay so much for tickets and kernels of dried corn that have been exploded. That’s a coincidence.

Note: I strongly deny the theory that this post is suggesting movie studios spend more than 1 percent of the budget on the actual story, because diverting that amount of money would eliminate the CGI budget for the skyscraper that explodes and falls down in the middle of the seventh fight scene, the one in that city that sort of looks like Vancouver, B.C. after the villain kidnaps the love interest and has a creepy dinner with her in his lair, but not the explode-y fight scene where the villain crashes the mayor’s birthday party to announce his plans for doomsday.

Secret Ingredient #1: A hero is born, which means Mom and Dad better have life insurance

Sorry, moms and dads of the world: if your son or daughter is destined to put on a mask and cape to fight evil, there’s a price to pay. Which means you’ve got to go.

Superheroes with dead parents are incredibly common, for these good reasons.

Here are those reasons: (a) any villain with a brain in their noggin could simply kidnap mom and dad whenever they wanted something, forcing (b) every movie or comic book starring a superhero with actual parents to spend precious time explaining exactly how mom and dad are hiding and surviving, (c) dead parents are an easy way for writers to give their superhero their motivation to fight crime and evil and (d) how else would you get Superman to fight Batman except by leveraging his human step-mom?

The list of superheroes with dead parents is so long I don’t even have to start, but I will: Batman, Superman (his real parents, not Martha), Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther—you get the picture.

Secret Ingredient #2: Our hero is a total loser

This is a necessary step to the first movie, which tells the hero’s origin story.

You have to show how lame the hero is before he gets his powers. The bigger the contrast, the better the story.

Peter Parker is a nerdy little high school kid who gets bullied.

Steve Rogers is so small and scrawny, they won’t even accept him as a volunteer to fight in World War II.

Tony Stark is a billionaire playboy who invents and sells weapons when he’s not busy trying to poison his liver and catch every STD known to man.

Finally, here’s an example that shows how going halfway doesn’t work AT ALL.

Oliver Queen (Green Arrow) is a billionaire playboy who’s totally not a copy of Batman, and though Arrow’s rich father is dead, his mom is still alive, and living with him (?) and his kid sister (??) in the same mansion, even though he’s a grown man. Yeah, that’s the setup. It is as soap-opera-ish and stinky as you could imagine.

Secret Ingredient #3: Power up

A superhero needs talents and powers, whether they come from (a) a science experiment gone wrong (Spiderman, Hulk), (b) a science experiment gone right (Captain America, Ant Man), (c) years of training and (Black Widow, Falcon, Arrow) or (d) being a playboy billionaire genius who invents his own suit and arsenal of gadgets (Batman, Iron Man and a dozen other copycats not named Arrow).

Then there are weird powers that we do not, cannot and will not accept, like gills to breathe underwater combined with the ability to get whales to act like underwater taxis whenever Batman and his buddies in the Justice League don’t feel like using in the Batsub or Wonder Woman’s invisible plane.

Secret Ingredient #4: An old mentor who eventually MUST DIE

Sorry. It’s a thing.

The same clause in Sean Bean’s contract that requires him to die in every role is included for any actor playing the mentor to our superhero.

This is also necessary, because eventually (a) the screenwriters will write themselves into a corner and need the ultimate motivation for the hero to go beserk or the aging actor playing the mentor will (b) get sick of being a glorified sidekick and do other roles or (c) demand insane amounts of money to be in the sequels.

Before he dies, the mentor needs to be wise, charming, helpful and funny.

This is almost always a male role, whether we’re talking about a hero or heroine. Sorry. That’s how the Bad Superhero Blockbuster rolls.

Our old and grizzled mentor also needs to own many hats, because he’ll be wearing them all: sidekick, martial arts trainer, tech support and father figure.

But his death serves another purpose, because it opens up the way for five different sidekicks to pick up those hats, dust them off and put them on in the sequels.

Secret Ingredient #5: A dash of young love

Didn’t expect this in a movie with capes and explosions, did you? But it always happens.

Captain America had Agent Carter and now her niece.

Iron Man has Pepper Potts when they can afford Gwyneth Paltrow.

Thor has Princess Leia’s mom.

Batman has Rachel, or he did for a while, though I’ve always said it’s a lot like Harry Potter winding up with his best friend’s sister instead of Hermione: wrong, wrong, wrong. Batman should be forever linked to Catwoman, who rocks.

The new Wonder Woman will have Captain Kirk, which is pretty cool. Great actor. Good choice.

Arrow has–actually, I don’t really care about Arrow’s paramour, and don’t even make me think about what Aquaman does on Friday nights.

Back to our recipe: Preferably, this relationship should (a) start as early as possible, maybe even childhood, and (b) it should be a love triangle, with the third person also a friend from childhood.

That third person, ideally, should be our next ingredient.

Secret Ingredient #6: A delicious nemesis

Not a villain.

No, a villain is common and boring.

A nemesis last. He or she endures.

But this takes time. Like fine wine and good whiskey, a nemesis must ferment. Because they start out good before turning sour.

The hero and nemesis were once friends, if not best friends. Maybe they both wanted the same girl, the same achievements, the same powers and status.

A true nemesis is the flip side of the hero, showing what happens if you take the path less travelled.

Or you could take the easy way out and cast an aging Hollywood has-been as the villain, somebody who used to be box office gold. Give them a terrible foreign accent, a little backstory and let them chew up the scenery until the hero punches them into oblivion and locks them inside a chamber that gets flooded with radiation from the superweapon our big baddie intended to use to nuke LA.

Also: a quick, Cheaty McCheatypants way of creating your nemesis is to give him or her the same powers or power source as the hero.

This so lazy and bad, it rarely happens except for Iron Man 1, Iron Man 2, Thor, Man of Steel, Batman Begins, Arrow and fifteen other movies and TV shows I won’t look up right now.

It’s not enough for your villain or nemesis to steal every bar of gold from Fort Knox or crown himself Lord of Canada after unleashing his army of mind-controlled badgers with steel-tipped claws and industrial lasers strapped to their heads.

To be a truly clichéd superhero movie, the villain must threaten to destroy planet Earth, or at least nuke Gotham or Metropolis, which is the same thing for DC movies.

You can blow things up however you like, though nuclear warheads were only used as a plot device in every other Bond movie, spy film and TV show since 1953.

What gives you enough pop to make the third rock from the sun go bye-bye? Here are your choices: (a) an bio-engineered super virus, (b) alien invaders, (c) an army of killer robots / sharks / zombies or (d) manipulating or mind-controlling a hero so the other heroes have to fight them, especially if the hero is somebody unstoppable like Superman.

Secret ingredient #7: Clean up the kitchen and start prepping for sequels

To be a truly Bad Superhero Movie, you must follow the recipe exactly. To the letter.

That means Movie #2 has two villains, two sidekicks and two love interests.

It also costs twice as much. Batman Returns, Spiderman 2 and The Dark Knight all follow this formula.

Movie # 3 has three villains and three sidekicks. The number of love interests is your choice. Spiderman 3 and The Dark Knight Rises are good examples. We’re not even going to talk about the Batman movies starring Val Kilmer and George Clooney. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.

The budget for Movie # 3 is also triple the original.

Despite all the big name stars and big budget for explosions, the story is a mess and entire thing collapses under its own weight, with the only hope of bringing it back being a reboot with a new actor and director.

BATMAN VS SUPERMAN is 10 times better than I expected

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , 4 Comments

After hearing about all the reviews, I expected Batman vs Superman to stink up the joint, to be Gigli with capes and masks, somehow worse that George Clooney’s turn as Bruce Wayne–which would be very hard to top.

Nope.

I enjoyed it far, far more than Avengers 2: James Spader Chews Up the Scenery, But Never Makes You Care.

In fact, it’s better than the last of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, which I saw in the theater and own on Blu-Ray with the rest. Batman Begins is actually the most solid and rewatchable of the Nolan’s films.

The Dark Knight has an amazing beginning, and the first five scenes with Heath Ledger rock, but it gets weird toward the end with the random Wayne employee trying to out Batman and the two ferries that are supposed to blow each other up. Meh.

The acid test for any movie is very simple. Would you pay cash money to see it in the theater again? I’ll go see Batfleck in the theaters at least one more time, then buy it on Blu-Ray.

Gal Gadot rocks as Wonder Woman, setting up that solo movie. Batfleck reportedly wrote a script for the solo Batman film he may direct. Aquaman was, for the first time in history, not entirely lame. And I’m crazy stoked for Suicide Squad, which has the best trailer in the history of trailers that don’t feature wheels.

Batman vs Superman performs a minor miracle: though I love Bats and dislike Supes, it made me feel for Superman during their fight. Believe me, this is just about impossible, and Zack Snyder pulled that off.

So yeah, the movie worked, both as a fun time and as a setup for the whole DC Universe to compete with the Marvel Machine to see who can gather the most dollars from us before the Antarctic Ice Sheet melts.

Verdict: Go see it in the theater with popcorn and such.

Superhero movies: Golden Age or insane glut?

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

batman-v-superman-poster-ben-affleck

You can’t escape the marketing blitz. Superhero movies have targeted your local multiplex and they WILL. NOT. STOP.

Ever since Hollywood took a risk by turning Tim Burton and Michael Keaton loose on BATMAN, studio execs in Hollywood figured out yes, you can make mountains of money on superhero movies–if you do them right.

Marvel perfected the formula of interlocking movies, and now DC is trying to copy it with BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN leading up to 5.6 bazillion movies with Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Aquaman (what?) and 16 other superheroes only fanboys would know.

Here’s a look at the six comic book films I’m aware of so far. Somebody will point out strays I’ve missed. By the year 2019, every weekend there will be a new Marvel or DC movie opening up, competing with Star Wars and Pixar sequels. All other movies will be relegated to Netflix.

Continue reading “Superhero movies: Golden Age or insane glut?” →

Top 6 reasons why Batman must DIE!

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Bruce Wayne and the Batman may or may not die in BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT.

(Google that and the volume of fanboy speculation will make your head implode).

But he’ll die soon enough. It’s guaranteed.

So will Superman, Spock, Wolverine, Captain America, Sherlock Holmes and 93 other major fictional characters you know and love.

Why will Batman and other great characters die when Jar Jar Binks is apparently invincible?

Because of reasons.

Let’s get into the guts of why this works while still Bothering you, and the answers will involve dead poets, the suspension of disbelief, the quarterly earnings reports of corporations and The Three Movies = Reboot Rule of Superheroes. Continue reading “Top 6 reasons why Batman must DIE!” →

Video

What you need to know before seeing AVENGERS 2: AGE OF ULTRON

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Unless you live in an ice cave, you know that AVENGERS 2 opens on May 1.

When it does open, all your friends will go see it, then ask what you thought about it, and What This Movie Means for the next 10 Marvel movies. Those films will feature Thor, Iron Man, Loki, and 16 other characters, and they will make $18 billion dollars.

Let’s get you educated on the whole Marvel shebang, then talk about why Marvel, against all odds, has taken over movie theaters for the next century.

Before you spend $42 on Imax tickets, 5800 calories worth of popcorn with fake butter drizzled on it and 72 ounces of Diet Coke, watch this video to refresh your knowledge of all things Marvel:

And now I’ll get serious for a moment.

Why have the Marvel movies rocked the box office so hard? Continue reading →

MAN OF STEEL and the Invincible Hero Problem

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , 15 Comments
tinseltown tuesday meme morpheous

As a non-fan of the Superman, I can honestly say this: MAN OF STEEL is far, far better than expected.

It’s like Zack Snyder took the only good parts of PROMETHEUS (cool spaceships and outfits!), stuffed it into a blender with INDEPENDENCE DAY (aliens are coming to blow up the planet!) and added with a dash of Wolverine (hairy shirtless tough guy wanders planet, doing random good deeds).

Russell Crowe is surprisingly awesome in MAN OF STEEL. Who knew?
Russell Crowe is surprisingly awesome in MAN OF STEEL. Who knew?

I mean all that in a good way.

HOWEVER: The world doesn’t need another review of Soupman’s latest reboot. What the world needs is a real discussion of a real problem that Superman and other heroes can’t seem to shake.

They’re invincible. And that, friends, is crazy boring.

Iconic heroes made of flesh and blood already have a serious problem, since everybody sitting in the seats, munching on $9 popcorn, knows they’re icons. We know the producers of James Bond movies would never wake up one day and say, “I know — let’s kill off Bond and start some other kind of film, maybe with a 200-year-old sparkling vampire who’s into whiny teeangers.”

Hollywood wants franchises, and you don’t kill off the foundation of billion-dollar juggernauts. Ironman will never die. Batman, Sherlock Holmes, Spock, Kirk (new young Kirk, not Shatner, who they did kill off), Wonder Woman — hey, they’re all safe.

But they’re not invincible. They can and do suffer. They can bleed and die. We know that.

Superman is never really in trouble. Stuff happens to him on screen and you shrug, because hey, that’s Superman.

It’s not the same with Batman, who’s been stabbed, knocked out, set on fire and generally abused. One of the great things about the Dark Knight trilogy is how much Batman really does suffer, sacrifice and grow.

MAN OF STEEL does a good job, and it’s a fun movie. The problem is the character of Superman, who’s a lot like Neo after the end of THE MATRIX, when Keanu Reeves can do anything.

Where do you go from there? Turns out you wander around and get lost for two movies that got progressively worse until something perfect turned into something meh. Which is sad. THE MATRIX was brilliant … right up until Neo went all Superman on us.

Here’s an ironclad rule of storytelling that I’m inventing right now: The villain has to be more powerful than the hero. Always.

Not equally powerful. Not less powerful. The villain has to be superior.

Otherwise, we’re sitting in a dark room watching Chuck Norris swivel around on his cowboy boots as he kicks 59 random henchmen in the face. Does it look pretty? Sure. Is it dramatic and exciting and good story? No. We know Chuck — or Jason Statham, or whoever — is better, and that our hero is gonna win.

When your hero is invincible, like Superman and Neo, the villain can’t be more powerful. It’s impossible.

Think about every Boring Action Movie you’ve ever seen: the villain is less powerful and scary than the hero, which is why he needs an army of thugs to protect him from the big bad scary hero, who starts out the story as an amazing tough guy and ends the story … as an amazing tough guy. Most of the bad Bond movies are like this.

Same thing with every Failed Comic Book Movie, like the lame Hulk films. The Angry Green Thing is basically invincible. Bullets bounce off him. Tank rounds go clang off his green skin. How can you worry about the guy getting in trouble, or having a tough time with a bad guy? This is why comic book movies tend to have hordes of villains. That’s compensating for the weakness of each villain, and it doesn’t work.

Two little movies we all remember reverse this beautifully. The villains in ROCKY and THE KARATE KID seem invincible to us, don’t they? Apollo Creed is the heavyweight champion of the world. He’s crazy strong, insanely fast, in incredible shape and everybody with a functioning brain cell in their noggin would bet the farm on him, not the slow, plodding loser they lined up for a publicity stunt of a fight. Johnny also seems like a teenage nightmare, a giant bully who pummels Daniel-san relentlessly.

Rocky and Daniel-san start out as serious underdogs, and they get their butts kicked in all sorts of ways throughout the movie. It’s only at the very end that they eke out a little moral victory. But we don’t care. That little moral victory is more important to us, the audience, than all the beat-downs administered by the tough guy in your average action movie.

Bigger isn’t better. It’s the distance traveled from the beginning to the end. And when you start out cranking it up all the way to 11, and end at 11, you’re not really taking us anywhere.

Top 5 reasons Batman crushes the nancypants known as Superman

Posted in 3 Tinseltown TuesdayTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 13 Comments
tinseltown tuesday meme morpheous

Now, I’m not saying that Batman would kick Superman’s keister in a fist-fight. No.

Though there is a hilarious series of posts over on The Correctness where they have Batman, Superman, Wolverine and other super heroes fight to the death, tournament style, each time debating who would win and why. It is amazing. Go read it.

I’m saying something different: that Batman is more far more interesting, cool and entertaining than the man who wears blue and red pajamas.

On to the reasons:

5) Batman movies rule, Superman movies drool

Comic books are a separate shebang, and the comic book nerds dive so deep into the Batman and Superman policy weeds that they Confuse me, because when it comes to the comics, I am a Bear of Little Brain.

Movies are something we all know and love, and it doesn’t take a lifetime of reading back issues of Detective Comics to say that THE DARK KNIGHT is 5,982 times better than all of the various Superman movies combined — plus every Transformer, G.I. Joe and My Little Pony movie ever created. (No, there is not a My Little Pony movie yet. At least I hope not.)

Superman movies are lame. Batman movies are fun.

Yes, there is that one exception, the George Clooney version of Batman with that blonde actress who was in a bunch of Aerosmith videos. Alicia Silverstone? Something like that. I hope she’s got a sitcom or reality show now, and that she burned that Batgirl costume, because her wearing it was an abomination. Even so, I’d rather watch the Clooney movie six times in a row than any random Superman flick.

If we throw out the one semi-decent Superman movie — the first one — and the one bad Batman with Clooney, you’ve got zero great Superman flicks versus a whole pack of good Batmans, a few great ones and three brilliant ones.

No contest. Batman wins.

4) Batman is dark and dangerous while Superman is a self-righteous ninny

We know exactly what Superman will do. He’s Mr. Perfect, completely predictable, completely indestructible and completely boring.

Batman keeps on surprising us. He’s got that one rule, but other than that, hey, watch out. Think that Superman would break a thug’s leg to find out where Joker hid a bomb? No. That would be wrong, boys and girls. Superman will use his X-ray vision to find the bomb. Or he’ll fly really fast to go back in time and prevent the bomb from ever being planted in the first place. Ugh.

3) The outfits, they are not comparable

Sure, early Batman looked little different than a five-year-old in pajamas who used a towel for a cape and put on a mask. Adam West’s costume is hilarious.

Superman’s red-and-blue pajamas, though, haven’t really changed over the years. They started out kinda odd. They’re still kinda odd. There’s nothing cool about them.

Batman’s costume has only gotten better and better. Michael Keaton looked amazing, years ago, and the Christopher Nolan movies turned the Batsuit into a work of art.

2) Alter-egos

Superman’s alter-ego is a bumbling reporter who wears glasses. Otherwise, he’s also a goodie-goodie two shoes just like Superman and nothing to write home about.

Batman’s alter-ego is playboy billionaire Bruce Wayne, who is entertaining all by himself.

Who else has a playboy billionaire alter-ego that’s endlessly entertaining? Tony Stark. Does this work as a movie? Oh yes.

Batman wins again.

1) Super powers get old, while gadgets and skills are always good

Invincible powers, like being bullet-proof and invincible and able to fly so fast you go back in time — those stink, because it’s unfair to the bad guys and unfair to the audience. We know who will win, every time.

Powers are also inherently bad because the average person reading a comic book or watching a movie can’t get (a) bitten by a radioactive spider or (b) decide to be born on a different planet and sent to Earth in some kind of spaceship aimed at a cornfield in Iowa.

Batman doesn’t have super powers. He has gadgets that he designs and makes, plus skills that he earned through hard work, study and sweat.

No matter how hard you try, you couldn’t become Superman, Spiderman, the Hulk or the other 927 super-powered heroes floating around out there.

Batman is achievable, given enough money, motivation and training.

Skills beat super powers every time. Also: girls like guys with skills.

ALSO-ALSO: Batman’s gadgets are so interesting and fun, Daniel Craig is jealous. What’s an exploding pen and a Aston Martin with machine guns compared to the Batsuit and the Batmobile? He’s got the grappling gun to zoom around, the cape with memory cloth to fly around Gotham and seventeen other amazing toys that you and I would love to have.

It’s also more interesting to watch somebody solve crimes and defeat villains using skills and brains rather than super powers that you inherited through no effort of your own. How did Superman prevent that comet from destroying the Earth? Oh, he flew out there and pushed it out of the way. No big deal. Didn’t even break a sweat.

If you’re watching a movie or reading a book, even a comic book, you want to identify with the hero. I don’t identify with Superman, not being an alien from another world with invincible powers.

I can identify with Batman, and every man alive would happily trade their two-car garage for a fully equipped Batcave.

Sidenote: By the way, Batman would wipe the floor with Superman.