After suffering through the 4 hours it took to endure these two spandex atrocities, I can report at least two glimmer of optimism......
Glimmer #1: They bombed at the multi-plexes......sending out a message to Disney and Warners that the era of audiences panting like puppies over every new bloated superhero movie is over and done with......
Glimmer #2: The very reasons they bombed......that the superhero comic book universes of Marvel and DC are so generic, so repetitive, so connect-the-dots, so blatantly corporate greed-driven, that they've now left their audiences bored and disinterested.......with their CGI effects rendered by hundreds of animators from dozens of effects companies eliciting nothing......but yawns.
Therefore, much BQ kudos to this pair of misbegotten, megaton detonations for possibly hastening the merciful end of the superhero plague.
And now, briefly, the autopsies........
Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (2023)......at least spares us from imaging the 1000's of innocent civilians massacred by the usual city-demolishing superhero battles held in the middle of big American cities.....
All the CGI carnage here is restricted to the ultra-miniature Quantum realm....or Quantumville or QuantumLand or whatever the hell they call it. It's a completely cartoonish never-neverworld that looks like something Dr. Seuss might have designed while trippin' on hallucinogenic drugs.
The place is populated by every variety of daffy creature that George Lucas could only dream about putting into his original Star Wars Cantina scene. (This menagerie even throws in some poor shlub left over from the last ant-movie, now transformed into a metallic, weaponized Humpty Dumpty...) But they're oppressed by evil warlord Kang The Conqueror (Jonathon Majors) and his army of minions who have lightbulbs for heads.
Lucky for the Quantum-ites, the entire Ant-Gang crashed into their Seuss-ian neighborhood, including Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, and the family's Ant-Teen Kathryn Newton.
As you could already guess without ever laying eyes on a single frame of this film, endless CGI battles ensue, followed by the traditional mind numbing scene where Ant-Man Rudd and Kang Majors pound on each other for an eternity, with not even a single boo-boo to show for it.
The expected end credits teaser promises literally more and more of Kang..... but nobody should hold their breath, with Johnathon Majors fell into severe cancellation hell from his multiple sex abuse allegations and court cases.....in other words, don't wait for Kang to rejoin the gang.
The very epitome of superhero sludge, so there's only one rating BQ could ever bestow....the AFH....an ABOMINATION FROM HELL......and speaking of AFH's .....
Black Adam (2022).......arrived as a personal project of the movies' resident man-mountain Dwayne Johnson. His DC Universe hero of choice is a pissed-off, God-like ancient Middle Eastern entity named Teth-Adam, still seething from his family's slaughter at the hands of the neighborhood tyrant.
Johnson glowers a lot and with superhuman effort, sometimes affects a slight muscle twitch meant to resemble human emotion....or something close to it. With his massive sculpted bod packed into a rubberized T-shirt, he'll no doubt look great wearing that outfit to next year's Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards. Oh, did I mention he's from the Shazam-iverse? That everyone can at least get an unintentional giggle hearing someone yell "Shazam!" every so often.......
Teth-Adam, being such a cranky-puss with no scruples or moral compass, runs afoul of the Justice League.......you'll remember, that's the outfit run with an iron hand and hot temper by Viola Davis, who dispatches the League crowd to go scoop 'im up before he breaks something.
Right on schedule, come the soul-sucking, slo-mo, CGI battles between Adam and the League-ers.....Hawkman, equally pissed-off, but with wings, Dr. Fate, suave old soothsaying magician (well played, at least, by suave old Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone, tornado-turning teen girl and a boy-toy for her, Atom-Smasher, a young hunk who can turn himself the size of a Macy's Parade balloon.
Eventually, they have to knock off hammering away at Johnson (a waste of everybody's time, especially ours) and unite to face off against newly reconstituted demon Sabbac (easy to spot, the one with the horns)......but nobody can truly kick this guy's ass like the Adam-ator......and so it goes.....
And once again, all of this chaos and mass destruction reduces the fictitious, vaguely Middle East city of Looney-Toon-astan (or whatever the hell it's called) to rubble. And once again, the movie expects us to keep munchin' the popcorn and not wonder about the thousands of people killed as collateral damage. Just another 9 to 5 day for the superheroes.......
The misery finally ends with the end credits teaser, in which Viola Davis promises Johnson a spanking if he sets foot outside of Looney-Toon-astan, and threatens him with a cameo from Henry Cavill's Soopy-Doop-Man. If this ever really happens, can't wait to miss it........
Okay, that's enough of my blathering about this wretched movie, which more than earns its ABOMINATION FROM HELL rating.......time to move on to far more important things to do.....like wipe the dust off this laptop screen, re-arrange my bookmarks, and watch two cats try to murder each other over a squeaky toy.....(a far, far more entertaining sight than either of these films...)
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