ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA
Obviously, Marvel Studios is experiencing a bit of a downturn. The big screen nadir — creatively, albeit not financially — is surely Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantamania. Which is a shame, because the first two installments in the Peyton Reed-helmed trilogy were perfectly decent popcorn entertainment. Why the studio thought this was the film to tee-up their next big phase of storytelling is beyond me — the first two Ant-Man movies worked because, like their lead character, they were modest in their aspiration and scale. The script from Jeff Loveness (one of many Rick and Morty scribes Marvel has cribbed) is overly ambitious and almost as muddled as the much-denigrated CGI (the flat backgrounds, bad comping and Corey Stoll's garish cyborg M.O.D.O.K. haunt me to this day). This film's legacy will probably go down as the breaking point for the Marvel CGI team electing to unionize. They deserved more equitable working conditions, and we deserved a better movie. (JBax)ELEMENTAL
In a way, Pixar is a victim of its own success. The animation studio had one of the more unimpeachable runs of films for the first two decades of its existence, so the bar for each new film is crazy high. That said, few (if any) Pixar films feel like a complete whiff in the way that Elemental does. Creating a story around a city of anthropomorphic elements (fire, water, earth, air) seems like an amazing base on which to build, but the filmmakers don't come anywhere close to maximizing it in the way that a film like Zootopia had a blast with an animal world. Even more damning is the fact that this is a romantic comedy and the lead fire gal and water guy had zero chemistry (I had no idea one could botch animated chemistry like this!). If you find both leads annoying and you don't care if they get together, that's a problem. When you add in that Elementals' takeaway theme — racism is bad — is so blunt and ham-handed that a 7-year-old would roll their eyes at it, you've got a movie that deserves to be extinguished. (SS)
THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER
David Gordon Green's recently resurrected Halloween trilogy was uneven and divisive, a case of diminishing returns that nonetheless contained a few intriguing ideas. Green's first crack at an Exorcist reboot, meanwhile, contains no ideas — good, bad or otherwise. Of all its sins, perhaps the most damning is that it's ungodly boring. The Exorcist: Believer follows the blueprint of the 1973 original, except it gives us two possessed little girls instead of one, and the characters don't behave like they're enduring an exorcism but rather the tired machinations of an exorcism movie. Green ends Believer on a righteous, borderline idealistic tone, which simply doesn't work. And what he does to the great Ellen Burstyn, reprising her role as Chris MacNeil, would be sacrilegious were it not so dumb. The Exorcist II: The Heretic is no longer the worst Exorcist sequel. (NW)
EXPEND4BLES
The idea of a bunch of 1980s action stars teaming up for a hyper-violent supergroup is fun in theory, but these movies have always been grim, tedious slogs through the genre's worst tendencies. The belated fourth entry barely has any classic action stars left, with even franchise mastermind Sylvester Stallone offscreen most of the time. Instead, the replacement players grind their way through a haphazard, forgettable plot, filled with poorly staged action and atrocious special effects. At least Stallone and fellow series veteran Jason Statham have charisma and screen presence, whereas watching 50 Cent and Randy Couture "act" in a scene together is like whatever the opposite of a master class is. (JB)
FAST X
The inexplicable critical acclaim for certain entries in the interminable Fast and Furious franchise finally broke down with this bloated, incoherent 10th installment, which drags on for nearly two and a half hours only to end literally in the middle of a scene. The massive cast of characters has grown so unwieldy that they've all melded into one indistinguishable mush of "family," as Vin Diesel's insufferable protagonist Dom Toretto is constantly blabbering about. The chaotic action scenes no longer even remotely resemble reality, and Dom and his associates have become essentially invulnerable superhumans. Jason Momoa's addition as the latest villain with a nonsensical diabolical plan barely even registers, and he's likely to randomly switch sides by the unavoidable next movie anyway. (JB)
THE FLASH
All the worst aspects of late-stage superhero cinema — all in one place! Time travel, multiverses and dead mothers? Check. The Flash is crammed with charmless, empty, inorganic cartoonish-CGI action bombast. That's a given. But it also features the tedious paradox of constantly trying to up the ante while being ultra aware of the fact that nothing and no one is ever truly in danger. So we get things like the grotesque spectacle of a hospital nursery full of babies flying out the windows of a collapsing skyscraper... and is (disgustingly) played for laughs. Because the film knows — and we know that the film knows — that Our Hero will save them all. Oh, people can still die, but only across the multiverse — where cheap emotion can be mined by killing alternate versions of characters who live merrily on in other realities. Throw in an embarrassing return of Michael Keaton as Batman and other tired callbacks, and this is the apotheosis of everything that has gone wrong with comic book movies. (MJ)
OLD DADS
With Old Dads, the otherwise talented Bill Burr proves that not every comedian can or should direct a movie. Built around a trio of middle-aged guys trying to raise their kids and fight back against a changing world, it only gestures at self-awareness while leaning into full "old man yells at cloud" territory. To even call Old Dads a movie feels like a gross overstatement as it hardly meets the requirements to be considered one. Instead, it is like a series of recycled stand-up bits that Burr has already done better before. Here, he just bombs over and over. As it turns out, creating a film where the majority of the other characters exist only to set up the same series of punchlines over and over can get old quite fast. This may work on stage, but it doesn't in a film that is somehow below two hours while seeming to run for an eternity. As a comedian, Burr remains a dynamic stage presence and he has even given good acting performances elsewhere. One can only hope we get more of that guy and less of whatever the hell this was. (CH)
PRISCILLA
Maybe stop making movies about Elvis and his family? Baz Luhrmann's 2022 Elvis was all pizzazz and no substance. Sofia Coppola's biopic of Priscilla Presley takes the opposite tonal approach to end up at the same hollow place. While going for a more subdued, artful tone, there's none there. The titular Priscilla has no interesting characteristics, and the filmmaking isn't as artful as it seems to think it is. Pricilla lacks any message or takeaway beyond, "Having a crappy famous husband kinda sucks, right?" But even that's barely earned because (apart from once suggesting she might get a part-time job in high school) Pricsilla never expresses any real ambition for agency, she primarily just wants more attention from her man. The film — much like its protagonist — has absolutely nothing to say. (SS)RENFIELD
At some point in Renfield's decadelong gestation from concept to screen, it must have been good. It's predicated on a funny idea: Count Dracula's eternal manservant Renfield finds solace and strength in a support group for people in toxic relationships and finally decides to sever ties with his boss. And then you've got Nicolas Cage literally vamping as Drac — how could you go wrong? Unfortunately, Renfield completely misses its own point and busies itself with a lame storyline involving Awkwafina as a cop investigating the crime family that killed her father. Who cares? The movie looks and feels like it was chopped up and hastily reassembled in an attempt to appeal to the broadest possible audience. All we can do is watch as all potential for a wild, entertaining horror comedy is drained like blood from a corpse, until all that's left is a lifeless husk. (NW)
SALTBURN
For all the ways Emerald Fennell's faux thriller Saltburn is trying to trick you into thinking it has something more on its mind, this ruse is soon revealed to have nothing else behind it. Following a young college student who gets whisked away to a world of immense wealth beyond his dreams, it soon turns itself in circles before baring its ass in all the wrong ways. Living in the shadow of The Talented Mr. Ripley, it desperately reaches for sunlight but is never able to find anything illuminating of its own. Much like Fennell's previous feature, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn shoots itself directly in the foot and renders its already-empty provocations that much more inert. What it then says about class is off-key at best and regressive at worst. That its defenders will say it isn't trying to really comment on anything of substance would be one thing if it wasn't so boring. To take it at all seriously in either regard is to see how vacuous it truly is. (CH)
