Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (2022) - Movie Review

Bryan Singer’s X-Men changed superhero cinema in a big way. It proved that not only could comic book characters survive and thrive on the big screen in the new millennium, but what makes them worth reading about can effectively be translated into something watchable; this is something that superhero flicks struggled with for years prior. But I’d argue that Sam Raimi did just as much, if not more, for the sub-genre than Singer did.

Where Singer bent the edges of those characters to make them fit, Raimi instead made the cinematic artform bend to the dynamic visuals of the printed page. His Spider-Man trilogy remains a touchstone for the sub-genre to this day, and in a lot of ways, it reached heights that most of the MCU hasn’t been able to yet. So… yeah, hearing that he’d be helming a new capeshit feature had me wanting to see him come back on top, after spending the last several years either directing forgettable fluff or producing some particularly egregious horror movies.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - Movie Review

I know this is far from the first time Marvel Studios has done me, but fuck me, the marketing for this film has been extremely annoying. No joke, I saw two ads that were promotional tie-ins to this movie in the pre-session of the actual movie. Because buying a ticket for it apparently wasn’t enough; they had to keep trying to sell it to me. There’s also how flat-out ridiculous the session times for this movie have been, where it assimilated between 75% and 95% of all available screenings at both of my local cinemas, with one, maybe two sessions that were taken up by the eleven other films that are supposedly showing now as well. Anyone trying to use this film’s success as a gotcha for the 'wokeness' of other MCU films, or the MCU in competition with the DCEU, or even as a sign that the industry is picking back up since COVID first broke, are leaving out that the odds were stacked substantially in the production’s favour to get those box office receipts.

To be honest, I deliberately put off watching this movie for its first week because, as much as I love superhero movies, I really didn’t want to reward this overbearing, “Scorsese might have been underselling the problem” kind of behaviour.

Anyway, now that I’ve got my initial gripes out of the way, let’s get into how fucking brilliant this movie is.

Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (2021) - Movie Review

Now this is more like it! After how underwhelming Black Widow turned out, I was fully prepared for the MCU to be stuck in another middling point re: Phase Two, but I’m happy to report that this film turned out pretty damn well. Where that assessment gets a little odd is with how there’s a weird level of similarity between Black Widow and Shang-Chi. Like Black Widow, Shang-Chi was trained at an early age to be an assassin, and he has also been spending all the time since trying to separate himself from his past. Except here, it manages to correct the lack of personality that held back Black Widow, and it’s not just in the acting where that effect takes place.

Gemini Man (2019) - Movie Review

Will Smith plays a black-ops mercenary, one of the best shots in the history of his agency. However, when he tries to retire to a non-violent life, his old employers decide that he needs to be taken out of the picture. In the process of trying to circumvent any potential feelings of regret that could lead into a want for vengeance, their actions only end up reinforcing that notion, bringing Will back into the fold on a mission to clean up house.