The post Batman: Caped Crusader first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Deadpool & Wolverine Review

With painfully few exceptions, Netflix’s Beverley Hills Cop: Axel F being among the most recent, legacy characters and legacy IPs, especially male or male-centric ones, have been kicked around and treated like family members that the big studios that own them are ashamed to acknowledge. So, when it was announced that The House of Mouse was going to bring back one of the most beloved comic/comic book movie characters of all time, featured in a film franchise known for its diarrhea and masturbation jokes, one could be forgiven for puckering up in some warm dark places.

Fortunately, the main duo’s affinity for the character shines through in scene after scene as Jackman’s dour Wolverine plays rage-filled ying to Reynolds’ neverending diatribe of sophomoric yang. This dynamic was attempted in Deadpool 2 with Josh Brolin’s Cable but fell flat due to a number of factors, Cable’s lack of character development chief among them. In Deadpool and Wolverine, the chemistry sings.

Whereas 2 sometimes felt relentless and chaotic, by keeping the focus tight on its two charismatic leads and infusing it with the perfect combination of heart, humor, and brutal violence, Deadpool & Wolverine effortlessly soars past the dreg that has become the MCU specifically and Disney programming in general.

Another shining star atop the film’s refrigerator art, as Wade and Logan go on a worlds-spanning adventure, good-naturedly harpooning many of the MCU’s blunders and missteps via The Merc with The Mouth’s signature meta-humor, the Deadpool & Wolverine delivers scene after scene of the best fan service ever put to film. Do not go hunting for spoilers, and hide your eyes from all of the marketing because D&W’s cameos are beyond next-level, and each one discovered before its time will rob you of much of the movie’s magic.

All of these warm and fuzzies aren’t just good but are dearly needed because the film’s plot is only slightly more undercooked than its villain. Played with aplomb enough to almost make up for being little more than a glorified plot device, Emma Corrin, best known for her role as Princess Diana in The Crown, manages to squeeze out and amplify both drops of character development written for her Cassandra. Performing real-life magic, she manufactures a three-dimensional performance virtually from thin air.

Ultimately, Deadpool & Wolverine is a savagely hilarious action-adventure comedy that relies on a lot of fun action sequences, tons of charisma, and gallons of chemistry between its leads. By the film’s end, your face will hurt from smiling.

WOKE ELEMENTS

It’s The 3rd One

• There’s a sprinkling of sacrilege that inches its way past modern cinema’s ubiquitous overuse of the Lord’s Name. This is why I didn’t endorse the film as Worth it.

It’s Only Gay If You Don’t Laugh

• The marketing campaign had some fans worried that Deadpool & Wolverine would lean hard into the bromance that Reynolds has been hinting at since the first Deadpool. However, the movie avoids this like the plague and instead dishes out a continual barrage of gay jokes that lampoon homosexuality rather than glorifying it.

The post Deadpool & Wolverine first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

The post The Boys (Season 4) first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

The post X-Men 97 first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

The post Megamind vs. The Doom Syndicate first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

UPDATE: In my rush to get this review out, as well as the others that I’m working on, I inadvertently scored some of the ratings incorrectly. They have been updated to better reflect the horror show of incompetence that is Madame Web.

Madame Web

Cassandra Webb, played by Dakota Johnson, is your everyday New York City paramedic with movie-star good looks, poor social skills, and a mysterious past. That is until a near-death experience begins to unlock her inner awesomeness, and she finds herself caught in the web of a mysterious and homicidal villain.

Cassandra will have to take a day trip and have a conversation to learn to accept how incredible she truly is if she hopes to save the three teenage girls destined to become the cosplayers… er, that is … superheroes who are the target of the villain’s murderous rage.

Madame Web is a gnarled web of narrative nonsense. While Tahar Rahim might inexpertly play the movie’s poorly developed villain, the film’s true villains are its writers, Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, and Claire Parker. With two-thirds of them to thank for the unmitigated disaster that was Morbius and the third having this empty husk as her sole screenwriting credit, it’s a miracle that Madame Web isn’t worse than mind-numbingly boring.

Whether it’s a conveniently misplaced wonder bar inexplicably tucked beneath a nearby parked car just in time to help the protagonist remove a license plate, or embarking on an elaborate rainforest expedition across distant lands only to immediately stumble upon the precise location where a knowledgeable figure awaits, no contrivance appears too big nor convenience too small to help this trio of writing stooges out of the narrative corners into which they paint themselves in virtually every scene.

Unfortunately, their ineptitude doesn’t end there. Most of their characters have all of the dimensions of a cosmic string, and those with more are given woefully little screen time, but that doesn’t really matter because no character receives any meaningful growth arcs.

Cassandra spends most of her time on a series of mundane fetch quests for groceries and clothes, somehow never being spotted by anyone in a city of millions while her face paints every TV and mobile screen in the state as she travels from one location to the next (including on an international flight – ostensibly after going through at least one security checkpoint in the airport) without taking even the simplest precautions to hide her identity, all while being wanted as a person of interest in a triple kidnapping and possible murder. When she does experience some character growth, the means of that growth are handed to her without conflict or exacting any price. Her true potential as an unstoppable girl boss is simply handed to her.

Meanwhile, the trio of teenage girls whom Cassandra has taken it upon herself to protect (except when she repeatedly abandons them) spend time eating and dancing on tables (No. seriously, that’s the moment in which they gel into a group of friends – when they dance on a table like sluts for a group of strange teenage boys).

Some of this fumbling and impotent script could have been forgiven if a single performer outside of Adam Scott’s three seconds as Ben Parker were to have exuded a mouse turd’s worth charisma or charm. Granted that the material that they were working with did them no favors, but Dakota Johnson’s performance was utterly bizarre.

With the exception of a scene in which a friend suddenly dies, Johnson’s Cassandra seems to have only two gears: uninterested and slightly less uninterested. There are scenes in which she witnesses multiple murders and can see the unstoppable monster who perpetrated them coming straight for her. Yet her panic is roughly the equivalent of having misplaced her keys when she’s already late for work.

If movies in which people behave contrary to all human experience, making decisions that no one would ever make is your thing, and you like cartoonishly and poorly acted villains barfing out 6th rate dialogue while characters you don’t care about do things you won’t remember, Madame Webb still isn’t worth watching.

WOKE ELEMENTS

UPDATE: So much of this film is forgettable. So, when writing the review, I completely forgot the origin of one of the teenage girls.  Her latino father just so happens to have been in the U.S. illegally. After he was heartlessly deported, she was left to fend for herself. This silly shoehorned-in bit o’ identity politics earns another 5pts off of the Woke-O-Meter, taking the film into “Woke-ish” territory.

As horrifically horrible as this movie is, it’s not terribly woke. It surely wants to be woke, but the filmmakers were so incompetent that they weren’t able to get that across successfully.

Modern Women

• There’s a very lame attempt to paint Celeste O’Connor’s Mattie Franklin as a skateboarding rebel that some might consider to be woke because she acts like a traditional rebel boy, but it’s there and gone in a blink and is so poorly done that it’s more laughable than lamentable.
• Cassandra is miserably uncomfortable and awkward around a group of TradWives at a baby shower. They are written as vapid bubble heads while Cassandra looks on with barely concealed disgust at their feminity.
• There’s some lip service paid to trash-talking tough women with $h!tty attitudes instead of personalities, but it lasts for less time than a taco fart, and the character isn’t portrayed as awesome for being a jerk. Instead, she eventually lets down her defenses and is rather respectful from then on out.
• Maybe it’s a nod to the comics, maybe not, but one of the girls is really good at math. That, of course, is not woke. What is, is her stupid t-shirt that says something or other about girls doing math and the screenwriters’ juvenile attempts to round peg it into several scenes just to make sure that you know that hot girls can be smart too. We get it; girls can excel at STEM.

The World Has Been Ending In 10 Years For Decades

• There’s a hacky line about plastics polluting the ocean ham-fisted into a scene.

It’s ok; the actresses aren’t actually teens.

• There’s an aforementioned scene that goes on longer than a business save a strip club would ever allow, in which the three teenage girls get up on a table and sluttily dance for a group of stranger men. While two of the girls are already wearing midriffs, they tie the third modest one’s shirt up so that she, too, can be a little sluttier.
  • This instance is used as a bonding moment, and while the actresses are not teens, their characters are. This show is specifically for young girls ages 13 and up. HOLLYWOOD, STOP SEXUALIZING CHILDREN!!
  • This said, the scene is short, and the camera never lingers on the girls. Most of the dancing happens off-camera.

The post Madame Web first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

The post Supertato first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

The post Teen Titans Go! To the Movies first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Echo

After discovering that her adopted Uncle Wilson Fisk (aka Kingpin) orchestrated her father’s murder, the deaf and one-legged mob enforcer and part-time ninja Maya Lopez returns to her small Oklahoma hometown for the first time in 20 years. However, she’s not there for a reunion. Maya has murdered Fisk and now plans on taking over his vast criminal enterprise as Queenpin.

Echo is another exquisite example of nu-Disney’s paint-by-numbers predictability. Girl boss with a bad attitude? Check.  A story that could (i.e., should) have been tightened up into an hour-and-a-half special but was unnaturally and unsuccessfully stretched out over the course of multiple episodes? Check, and check. Ruined by wokeness? Great big double-check with a cherry on top.

However, Marvel Studios’ Echo fails hardest in three ways. Its main character is an unrepentant criminal and murderer whose ultimate goal isn’t redemption or even revenge. Unlike other criminal leads in cinema Maya/Echo has no redeeming qualities and never has a “come to Jesus moment.” Every time Michael Corleone tried to get out of the Family business, they pulled him back in, but Maya voluntarily jumps in with one and a half feet.

When the story arc suddenly changes gears from conquest to survival, it’s too late to build any goodwill for the character, and the writers don’t try, anyway. They are perfectly happy with her as a selfish and meanspirited user of people, and they substitute personal growth for victimhood. Unfortunately, “she’s had a hard life” doesn’t do much to build sympathy when her next action after being given an ultimatum is to abandon everyone she’s ever known and loved to a ruthless monster whom she knows from personal experience will have no problem wiping them all out.

Secondly, and the libs are going to love this, her particular set of handicaps makes the character utterly laughably ridiculous. Daredevil works as a character because he has an extra sense that compensates for his blindness, and while the actual girl power that is randomly bestowed to Maya makes her sporadically stronger, faster, and more resilient than normal one-legged women, it does nothing to compensate for her deafness, nor does it make her bulletproof. Of course, she has double-plated plot armor to protect her.

Maya literally has girl power. That’s right, even though in her past 20 to 30 years (the show isn’t clear on her age), she’s never had an inkling of being powerful enough to single-handedly and easily dispatch a room full of practiced killers, this series introduces her to her new set of ill-defined powers that will deus ex machine her through whatever trial has befallen her, and best of all, she gets these powers from the spirits of her female ancestors because she “needs them.” She hasn’t earned them. She doesn’t deserve them. There’s no reason to believe that she will use them to benefit anyone but herself, but she is an American Indian woman, so… you know… stuff.

None of it is helped by Alaqua Cox’s single face expression, like she just found out someone drank the last of the orange juice.

Quite frankly, I could go on, but I’ve been struggling to get this review out because I couldn’t decide where to start. Echo is a series in which the lead character can and does make a machine gun out of a rollerskate in under five minutes. If you need more, the finale is so off-the-charts stupid that I laughed out loud, so much so that I had to pause it to avoid missing anything crucial.

If you’re looking for a way to waste several hours of your life for absolutely no payoff, watch Echo. It gives She-Hulk a run for its money as the worst MsheU series to date.

P.S. These series have consultants, right? Alaqua Cox doesn’t just exhibit horrendous trigger discipline; she thumbs the trigger to her second knuckle.

WOKE ELEMENTS

For The Honor of Grayskull! SHE HAS A VAGINAAAAAAA!

• Some of us might complain about Mary Sues and the proliferation of girl power in modern films and TV series, and it’s possible that some of us are even a little too sensitive to it.
  • Echo literally has girl power.
    • She gets her nebulous and ill-defined powers from her fierce female ancestors…because she needs them.
      • That’s not hyperbole. That’s canon. She gets her powers because she needs to have them.
      • In every episode, we get introduced to a new girl-boss ancestor.
  • Does anyone remember how Daredevil got the crap beat out of him in his series (which is still canon in this series)?
    • He was brutally trained by mystical warriors and has a superpower.
    • She was trained in a Tae Kwon Do belt mill and holds her own against an armed, fully armored DD before she gets superpowers.

Left Foot Green

• Maybe her character works in the comics, but a one-legged deaf person seems like they’d be relatively easy to best in both hand-to-hand combat and ambushes. There is a reason why both of those handicaps preclude people from active duty in both military and police forces. It sucks, but it makes sense.
  • They manufactured her powers in this series, so why not add a Spidey-Sense and a specially designed artificial limb with future tech? The reason is that the series exists for the sole purpose of virtue signaling.  The choices made were made for the sake of inclusivity instead of a quality narrative.

We No Like’em Pale Face

• The white villains are villains.
• The Indian villains are noble victims of circumstance just trying to make it in Whitey’s world.
• Every white person is deeply flawed.
  • A cartoon white couple without any self-awareness, asking stupid questions while shopping in an Indian store. The questions are the type that no one would ask and the purpose of the scene is purely to make fun of white people.
  • Evil criminal mastermind
  • White trash hillbilly
    • White trash hillbilly criminal without loyalty
  • Hitmen.

The post Echo (season 1) first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Since the events of the last film, Arthur Curry has settled down and started a family, and when he’s not busy changing his merbaby’s diapers, he’s managing the affairs of an underwater kingdom as the King of Atlantis. However, all is not well. Despite his efforts, his subjects continue to distrust the surface dwellers and reject Aurthur’s attempts at reconciliation.

Aquaman offers up some fun moments but is overlong and relies far too much on convenience and contrivance to move the plot along, not to mention that it’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s Monster of editing. You can almost feel the edges of the multiple reshoots haphazardly rounded off to fit square pegs into round holes.

Unfortunately, Aquaman flounders most with its main plot. Driven to vengeance by his father’s death at Arthur Curry’s hands, Black Manta aligns himself with a demonic presence that he promises to unleash from its ages-old prison in return for the power to destroy Aquaman.

Despite its best efforts, The Lost Kingdom never successfully manages to build the race-against-the-clock tension that it is going for. In part, that’s thanks to a combination of messy edits and uneven pacing, but mostly, it’s due to the plot’s stakes being regularly relayed via newscast exposition rather than in a more poignant and visceral way and its underwhelming villains.

Granted incredible strength and the means to destroy the planet, Black Manta occasionally shows up for a relatively meaningless CGI battle and then returns to his base of operations to look grumpily into a mirror. While the filmmakers sporadically pepper in some dialogue and flashbacks in an effort to build tension, it all feels perfunctory and haphazard. The result is a villain that is just sort of there waiting to be defeated.

Much the same can be said about the film’s secondary villain, who only appears as a disembodied voice and almost exclusively in a few flashbacks until the film’s conclusion. It makes his final reveal nothing more than a meaningless boss battle.

Further complicating things is the film’s copious and substandard CGI. Pro Tip: If 99% of your film is shot in front of a green screen, it is incumbent upon you to make sure that every digital moment doesn’t look pre-rendered.

With all of this said the film does offer up some moderately fun moments, usually thanks to decent chemistry between Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson, who plays Aquaman’s half-brother.

All in all, Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom might be worth a watch once it hits Max or Netflix, or Paramount+, or whatever studio owns WB by the time the movie hits streaming, but it’s not much of a sendoff for the DCEU, and we wouldn’t suggest spending money on a movie ticket.

WOKE ELEMENTS

First off, there’s a refreshing pro-family subplot, especially about the importance of fathers, that helps to smooth out the rather hamfisted Global Warming nonsense.

Greenhouse gasses stink

• The plot revolves around artificially generated global warming, but the film doesn’t get sanctimonious about it, which helps.
  • • However, it does get mentioned a lot.

DEI

• There’s a smattering of DEI casting, but it’s in the background with some meaningless characters that aren’t much more than glorified extras and, in most cases, are extras.
  • Neither Black Manta, nor Dr. Shin were race-swapped for the film.
    • Black Manta has been black since the first time he took off his helmet in 1977’s Adventure Comics #452
    • Dr. Stephen Shin was introduced in the comics in 2011’s Aquaman Vol.7 #2.

The post Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom first appeared on Worth it or Woke.