The Avengers

The huge crossover film which the Marvel movie continuity has been building up to, The Avengers is a Joss Whedon blockbuster about Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) teaming up to fight Thor's evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who is poised to take over Earth. However, "teaming up" is easier said that done, and Director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has to do a lot of managing to keep the team from tearing itself apart before Loki and his allies from another dimension can.

Finally, we get a movie that depicts superhero comics accurately: you need to know the central characters and premises of about half a dozen different stories to understand anything that's going on. Yay!

I was kind of wary about this film because of two things: The trailers mostly focused on a huge metropolitan battle that was cut so that it looked like it was taken right out of Transformers 3, as well as Robert Downey Jr. doing his thing, which I feel is starting to get old. Well, screw marketing, because once again it has done a great job at making a good movie look bad. Not only is that action scene they hyped way better when you don't have to butcher it to keep the invading army from appearing on screen, but they picked the worst jokes in the movie for their adverts. Not only does Downey get a lot of good lines, but everyone does. There's a surprising lot of comedy, and every character gets to crack jokes, not just the clown.

Thor and Captain America both had pacing as their biggest issue. Cap had way too little stuff happen in between his becoming a superhero and the final battle. Thor took its sweet time starting, and then had way too much build-up to a way too small climax. Avengers gets this just right. We already know these characters, there's no need to establish them any more. Let's just start off with the crisis presenting itself, then get the characters together, and then see what we can make happen with them. I'll admit I was getting worried about a quarter way in that the movie is going to suffer from having too many subplots, but thankfully most of them are resolved by the way the final action climax hits home. The movie is two hours and a third, but it accomplishes so much that you'll swear there's no way they fit all that in one hundred and forty minutes.

The performances are really good. I never saw Ed Norton's Hulk for comparison, but Mark Ruffalo is a fantastic Bruce Banner. He has the body language of a person who's trying really hard to keep themselves in check. All the returning cast keep up the high quality up, but to my surprise the standout star of the film was Tom Hiddleston. I was kind of indifferent toward Loki in Thor, because he was way too obviously evil but they tried to play him as this tragic character. Here, he's past being sympathetic, so Hiddleston gets to be a straight-up villain, and it works greatly. He does his slimy villain speeches, he addresses the people he wants to rule, he gets arrogant and he gets furious. It's just a really good basic evil villain, who is still kept fresh with expert writing.

The action is really well-done. All the characters get to shine, and their individual superpowers are used well together and never conveniently discarded to fit a scene better. The big battle scenes flow well, and you can keep track of where everyone is and what they're doing. There's this really great sweeping battle shot that I can't really describe to you all: it has to be seen to be believed. I think that Loki's evil army allies are maybe a little bit too... Stormtroopery, though at least unlike Stormtroopers, they don't get taken down by teddy bears (who would be the New York police department in this allegory, I guess).

The 3D was... okay, I guess. There was one scene early on where I had trouble telling what was happening because it was so dark, but other than that I was never bothered. There were a couple of cool 3D shots, mostly having to do with Hawkeye's crazy arrow skills, but I doubt you'll be missing much if you see it in regular 2D.

Overall, it's just a damn good film, with a tightly packed and well-crafted plot, lots of interesting and memorable characters, some good humour, great action and superhero goodness. Dark Knight Rising has to work its ass off to surpass this for the best superhero film of the summer.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

For those who missed it, 2009's Sherlock Holmes ended with a cliffhanger wherein Irene Adler's mysterious employer Professor Moriarty, who was only seen in shadow, stole a radio-trasmitter from the chemical weapon of that film's main villain. Holmes concluded that this enigmatic Moriarty must be planning something big indeed!

So, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows picks up from that by having Moriarty be a well-known scientist of many fields as well as a politician, and having him show his face every five minutes on screen. What's more, his sinister plans never use the radio-transmitter sequelbait.

I dunno, something about this weird disconnect between the setup and the film that it spawned just bothers me.

But anyways, Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law return as Holmes and Watson in A Game of Shadows, which is a very, very, very loose adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Final Problem, also known as "the story Doyle wrote to kill off Sherlock Holmes, since he was tired of writing him", or "the one with Moriarty". It mostly treads on familiar territory, though with every aspect (character quirks, comic relief, action) supercharged. It's very reminiscent of Pirates 2 at times, actually; Jack Sparrow was turned into a human shishkabob, while Sherlock Holmes dresses as a prostitute. You can get a pretty good impression of what the movie is like from its trailers, though the trailers also spoil a lot of the jokes, so I'd advice not watching them.

And speaking of the jokes, most of them missed me. I guess I must either be turning into a grump or developing actual taste, but I don't find the sort of humour most of this film went for funny. The girls one row behind me were rolling on their seats from the hilarity of it, but I'd prefer for the comedy to focus on the characters of Holmes and Watson. Watching Downey and Law play off each other is very satisfying, which just serves to make it more grating when the film goes for lowest-common-denominator humour like the above-mentioned crossdressing and other such things.

The performances on the main leads are as good as in the 2009 picture, which is the main thing that saved the sequel to me. However, I found Jared Harris as Moriarty very dull. He's kind of wicked, but not on the same caricature level of ridiculousness as the rest of the movie, and thus feels out of place. A cartoonish, hammy villain would have worked in the film's advantage, like it did with Davy Jones in Pirates. Also, Stephen Fry plays Mycroft Holmes as an exaggerated version of himself.

The action scenes are pretty good, most of the time. I really liked the use of "Sherlock-vision", though the climax of the film proves that you can take even that too far. The scene ends up being really unintentionally hilarious, and basically turns Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty into Cameron Vale and Darryl Revok. Aside from that time, though, the action is well planned and executed.

The plot... is just there. It's thin and kind of hole-y, but none of the plot holes are really glaring enough to get in the way of enjoying the film. Don't expect a detective story or mystery out of a movie about the world's greatest detective (outside of Batman, of course), though.

Overall, it's fine. It's a hypercharged version of the first one. If you're into that sort of thing, go see it.