You may wonder why I'm devoting a post on these two films, given that I stand strongly with Martin Scorsese in holding comic book movies responsible for turning today's cinema into a toxic waste dump.
The very good recent news has been about the possible death knell of these bloated CGI atrocities clogging up theaters.......that maybe the assembly line of spandex will mercifully grind to a halt.
The onslaught of comic book crap perpetrated by Disney and Warner Brothers may at long last reach its 'meteor-ends-the-dinosaurs' era.......all it took was audiences avoiding them, sick of the going-nowhere-fast trajectory of their labored storylines and the mind-numbing repetition of their overlong superhero smackdowns.
Therefore today, I'll present brief overviews of these two misbegotten monstrosities as prime examples of why these films are stumbling into oblivion faster than dinosaurs sinking into the La Brea Tarpits.......
At this point, it's been weeks since I made myself suffer through this double feature from hell , so only general impressions remain in my memory..... as for plot and characters details, I've already blotted them out of my mind.......let's begin out first Mt.Everest of manure......
Shazam - Fury Of The Gods (2023) This kicks off with Dame Helen Mirren, God help us and Lucy Liu as a couple of rogue goddesses trashing a museum (and innocent civilians) to grab some ancient knick-knack plot device. Whoopi-de-doo.......
We move on to Philly (BQ's own hometown!) where the annoying motor tmouthed Shazam (Zachary Levi) rescues motorists as the Benjamin Franklin bridge (gateway to New Jersey!) starts to go bye-bye-bye. Having spend half a lifetime driving over that bridge, the only calamity I ever encountered was clogged traffic trying to get to Jersey beach resorts (or as we natives say, 'down the shore')
Shazam's un-super alter ego Billy Batson (Asher Angel) has his own problems.....mainly from his foster brother Freddy nursing a crush on yet another rogue goddess (Rachel Ziegler) who's sort of in league with Dame Helen and Lucy.
Sweet spandex, I'm already getting a headache thinking about this, so I'll cut to the chase.....Shazam and his entire foster family end up battling the Goddess Gang (minus Ziegler, who's defected to the good guys), but not before Dame Hel unleashes hell by letting loose a buffet selection of CGI monsters to decimate my beloved Philly. And as usual for comic book movies, we're not supposed to think about the thousands of bystanders who die in the process......not to mention untold squashed cheesesteaks and soft pretzels...... Also usual amidst the interminable end credits, the teaser for yet another DC turd that nobody asked for and nobody's looking forward to......
'The Flash' (2023) I'll spend even less time with this since it contains very thing I despise most about these films with every single atom of my existence......the multiverse. This plague, this nuclear winter of superhero movies forces an audience to keep track of which versions of which characters are doing what to which versions of other characters in multiple universes.
I'd compare the experience to signing up for an advanced Physics class and discovering the classroom is a portal to hell......or listening to Donald Trump for more than 20 seconds.
What did tickle me no end was not the movie itself, but the agonies Warner Brothers went through as their titular 'Flash' actor, Ezra Miller, racked up loads of bad press from his....uh.....various unhappy encounters with law enforcement (later blamed on...uh...'mental health issues'.) I giggled at the idea of Warners and its reptilian CEO David Zaslev, spending millions to digitally erase Miller from the film and replace him....with who? Dame Helen Mirren?
But on to the film.....Miller's Flash discovers his speedy superpower can break the time barrier......so why not flash-forward himself himself fast enough to alter history and prevent his mom from being murdered? Poor dumb Flashy should've watched some previous multiverse movies so he'd familiarize himself with the golden rule.....don't f*** with the multiverse.
This all leads to a muli-timeline clash involving the original Batman (Michael Keaton) the ever scary General Zod (Michael Shannon) and a new alternate universe Supergirl (Sasha Calle). For extra lunacy (and cameos) the multiverse cracks open, or springs a leak or I dont-know-what, spilling out all sorts of actors who played Batman and Superman......which, if nothing else, provides at least 48 seconds worth staying awake for....
Nothing left to say, other than the immortal words of Marlon Brando in 'Apocalypse Now'.....
The horror.....the horror. For both films, BQ presents its rare AFH awards.....for each of these landfills with delusions of adequacy....ABOMINATIONS FROM HELL.
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