Thor: The Dark World (2013)

I Only Ask for One Thing in Return; a Good Seat from Which to Watch Asgard Burn!

I would like to offer you some backstory to why I saw today’s movie, but it simply doesn’t exist.  It’s a sequel to a movie I’ve seen and vaguely liked.  But more importantly than that, it’s a comic book movie.  That is all that is required for me to find interest in seeing it.  And then the movie came out and I watched it.  What do you want from me?  There’s not always an interesting story leading up to these reviews!  Sometimes I just watch movies!  And this one was Thor: The Dark World, written by Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely, directed by Alan Taylor, and starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christopher Eccleston, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston, Rene Russo, Stellan Skarsgård, Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jaimie Alexander, Ray Stevenson, Zachary Levi, and Tadanobu Asano.

Eons ago, the Asgardians defeated the Dark Elves on the battlefield of Vanaheim –where Disneyland will someday be built – before they got the chance to plunge the universe into darkness with a weapon known as the Aether, but their leader Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) manages to escape with his lieutenant Algrim (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and some of their men.  In present day, the realms come close to aligning again, bringing the return of Malekith when he senses that the Aether was discovered by Dr. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) when it started to use her body as a host.  Her “boyfriend” Thor (Chris Hemsworth) returns to Midgard to take her back to Asgard with him to see if it can be removed.

I didn’t really go into this movie expecting much.  The first Thor movie was okay, but not really anything special.  This one was slightly better.  Not the greatest thing ever and not the worst, but it was an enjoyable enough watch.  The story was your basic “Bad thing’s gonna happen, hero’s gotta stop it” storyline.  And some of the subplots were a little predictable.  If you were the type that kept thinking during the Avengers, “Why did they make Coulson’s part so much bigger?  It’s like they’re trying to get us attached to him for some … Oh …,” then you may think the same thing about a returning character that had one or two lines in the first movie and was suddenly Chatty Cathy.  There’s also a fight near the end of the movie between two characters who – though they are technically enemies – are clearly faking it.  I don’t think anyone watching thought they were actually fighting instead of feigning a fight.  Though the writing can be predictable, there are some well-written funny moments to be had.  The scene where Thor and Loki are walking down and Loki was changing his appearance was pointless, but funny.  I also thought the moment where Loki and Thor are arguing over who’s a better pilot and Thor says, “Out of the two of us, which one can ACTUALLY fly,” was a funny line, but Loki really dropped the ball on that one.  Thor doesn’t fly!  He throws his hammer and gets dragged through the air by it!

Not much to say about the visuals of this movie.  It looks pretty great all the way through.  One thing that stood out to me was the singularity grenades that the enemies used.  Those were pretty awesome, and pretty brutal.

We’ve all probably seen this cast before, either in Avengers or the first Thor movie.  They do that.  But they still do it pretty well.  Chris Hemsworth is all around solid, in both performance and body.  And Natalie Portman is sexy, in both performance and body.  …I don’t think that one makes sense…  Tom Hiddleston is also very good.  I think the stand out performance in this movie for me was Kat Dennings.  She was comic relief in the first movie, but they really gave her a lot of funny to work with in this one, and she made good with it.  She’s one of the few comic relief performances I’ve enjoyed in recent memory.  I was really curious about the Warriors Three, or more specifically the Warriors Two out of Three.  Ray Stevenson came back as Volstagg, but new actors were portraying Fandral and Hogun.  They did fine jobs at it, but what the hell are the other two doing that they can’t be in an epic Marvel movie?  Once Upon a Time?  Worth it!

Thor: The Dark World was a step up from the original Thor.  The story was basic, but entertaining, and even managed a good couple of laughs.  The look was great and the action was solid, and all of the actors did fine jobs, especially Kat Dennings, who was typically hilarious.  This was an enjoyable movie and definitely worth the money to check it out in theaters.  A rental would also work if you would rather wait for it.  Thor: The Dark World gets “Look at you!  Still all muscly and everything!” out of “If we do nothing, they will destroy us.”

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The Three Musketeers (2011)

We Live in a Kingdom Controlled by Fear

Have you ever wanted to see a classic novel like The Three Musketeers designed like Wild Wild West?  Yeah, me neither.  But that didn’t stop them from making one.  In the past, I’ve found myself less than impressed with the work of Paul W.S. Anderson, but I’m usually happy about the fact that his involvement generally brings Milla Jovovich, who I am always happy to watch.  And, what’s more than that, I love a good sword fight.  So I guess what made me have any interest in potentially watching Anderson destroy a story I love was the hotness of Jovovich and the promise of sword fighting.  Let’s see what happened in my review of The Three Musketeers, loosely based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas, written by Alex Litvak and Andrew Davies, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, and starring Logan Lerman, Matthew MacFadyen, Luke Evans, Ray Stevenson, Milla Jovovich, Christoph Waltz, Freddie Fox, Orlando Bloom, Juno Temple, Mads Mikkelsen, Gabriella Wilde, James Corden, and Til Schweiger.

For no particular reason, the Three Musketeers – Athos (Matthew MacFadyen), Porthos (Ray Stevenson), and Aramis (Luke Evans) – and Athos’ lady friend, Milady de Winter (Milla Jovovich), are trying to steal plans for an airship designed by Leonardo da Vinci.  Having gotten a better offer, de Winter drugs the Musketeers and gives the plans over to the Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom).  A year later, D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman), leaves Gascony for Paris to become a Musketeer.  When he gets to Paris, a series of misunderstandings lead to him having consecutive duels with all three Musketeers, but it’s broken up by the guards of Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz), the diabolical priest-y dude that’s trying to take control of France from King Louis XIII (Freddie Fox).  The Musketeers find out that Cardinal Richelieu is trying to take over France with an elaborate plot to make it seem like Louis’ queen, Anne (Juno Temple), had been banging the bejesus out of the Duke of Buckingham.  I don’t know how that will help him take control of France, but you just go along with it.  The Musketeers have to stop the plot, D’Artagnan starts wanting a piece of the Queen’s lady-in-waiting Constance (Gabriella Wilde), and that airship comes back into the movie.

This isn’t what I would call a “good movie”, but it was decently fun for all of it’s stupidity.  I think that what I didn’t like about this actually had nothing to do with Paul W.S. Anderson.  It was mainly the story.  Yeah, it’s LOOSELY based on a fantastic novel, but it kind of fucks of what made the novel good.  The novel was a lot of fun, and the movie is as well, but they started to lose me when they brought in the giant airship, which was basically one of the boats from Pirates of the Caribbean with a balloon on the top.  My mind instantly went back to watching Wild Wild West and seeing that big, ridiculous, mechanical spider.  The airship was slightly more plausible than the spider, but still pretty ludicrous.  So ridiculous was it that, when the Musketeers were escaping from their pursuing airship by flying into some storm clouds, I half expected the response to “You’re never going to find them in there” to be them activating the medieval radar, which would essentially be them pulling a lever and dropping a whale out of the bottom of the ship and using it’s echolocation to find the other airship.  It wouldn’t have been that farfetched to me when contrasted with the flying pirate ships.  My remaining complaints on the story require ::SPOILER ALERTS::  First, one of the most memorable things about the Three Musketeers what the fate of Milady de Winter, and this movie pissed on that well and good.  In the novel, it’s a very memorable part when Athos is forced to have de Winter executed for her betrayal, even though he loves her.  It’s a very poignant scene.  They go for it in a sense here, but then put it under the glass coffee table and shit all over it’s chest.  It takes place on the airship and Athos is going to shoot her, but she dives off the airship into the water – easily ten stories above the water – in order to save Athos from the regret of killing her himself.  Naturally we assume, understanding physics as we do, that falling from that height and hitting water would be roughly the same as hitting concrete and de Winter would be pulverized, so I was okay with the way they decided to stick to the book.  At the end of the movie, the Duke of Buckingham fishes her out of the water, alive but a bit confused.  And she walked pretty well for someone whose BONES WOULD BE POWDER!  And that’s not even mentioning the unlikelihood of someone actually being able to locate someone adrift in the ocean.  Athos also was going to kill her because she betrayed France and it was his duty, not something stupid and selfish like his own hatred.  I also didn’t understand the idea of letting the Cardinal get away with his attempted betrayal, but I can’t really shit on it because I don’t remember what happened to him in the book.  ::END SPOILER::

One could argue that Paul W.S. Anderson had at least some control over the script, but since I don’t know his level of involvement, I can’t really blame the story on him.  The parts that I would expect a director to be in control of were actually pretty enjoyable, with a couple of complaints.  The main complaint comes from the answer to this question: what do you think of when you think about the Three Musketeers?  For me (and probably most people) it’s sword fights.  There isn’t an actual sword fight until about a half hour into the movie.  That’s not to say there isn’t action for the first 30 minutes, but they made the characters that I think of as iconic examples of sword fighters into people to whom swords were fairly secondary to pistols or fists.  And, in the case of Porthos, baskets he’s found laying around.  Some solid swordplay comes up later, but it bothered me that they would rather give the Musketeers some fantasy contraptions instead of having them sword fight.  And the action scenes were pretty fun, although they did use slo-mo a little much for my tastes.  I was a bit confused by Athos because he stabbed a guy in the chest and then headbutted him.  Why would you do that?  He’s already dead.  If you wanted to hurt your own head, you could’ve just face-planted after stabbing him.  Another thing that made me dislike the giant airships in this movie was that it was more time where they were doing action without the sword fighting I came to see.  It was just like Pirates of the Caribbean cannon battles in midair.  At one point, de Winter has to steal some jewelry from the Queen, and they tried really hard to fit in the overused classic of red lasers in a hallway that you can only see by blowing some powder down the hall.  To do that, they used thin, nearly invisible razor wire.  It worked well enough.

The performances were very hit and miss in this movie.  The person who could be considered the main character, Logan Lerman as D’Artagnan, did not work for me.  He reminded me of Keanu Reeves in his delivery, and that’s not really a compliment.  His delivery was quasi-surfer dude in a time period that didn’t support that.  I also didn’t like a couple of things they did with his character, like how he would defend his horse’s honor … to the death!  This also happened right before another stupidity on his part.  Moments before, his father warned him that his opponents might not be as honorable as him.  Then, the first thing he does when he gets into a fight is to turn his back on his opponent.  He gets shot for it, but sadly it was only a flesh wound.  Also, when he finally kills Rochefort, he stabs him in the chest with his heirloom sword that his father gave him and then lets him fall off of the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral with it still in his chest.  I know that you could go and take it from his corpse on the floor, but you also could have kept your fuckin’ sword by just pulling it out, dumbass.  I thought all three of the main Musketeers did very well, but did nothing particularly standout.  Milla Jovovich did a fine job, but I was mainly looking to see her be hot, so I got that.  Gabriella Wilde as Constance and Juno Temple as the Queen were also very beautiful.  Christoph Waltz did an the job you’d expect from a great actor like him, but you do begin to wonder about his choices in movies now that he’s getting to be a big name in America. Orlando Bloom seemed much more gay than usual in this movie, even though he was trying to be a badass.  Also, James Corden as Planchet, the fat comic relief, was annoying, and in the film far too often.

The Three Musketeers was exactly what I expected it to be.  They took a good story and wiped their asses with it, but had some decent action that was perhaps a bit light on the swordplay for my tastes.  Altogether it was a dumb movie, but fun enough that I don’t regret the dollar I rented it for.  I’d say it’s worth checking out from the RedBox, but you’ll also do alright if you never get around to watching it.  It’s the dumb fun for a night of shutting off your brains, or making fun of it with your friends.  I still like the Kiefer Sutherland/Charlie Sheen/Oliver Platt movie a lot better.  This version of The Three Musketeers get “Are you always this cocky?” out of “Lower the whale!”

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