Why can’t you superheroes just get along? Like the recent “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” which saw the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel go head-to-head in a showdown over how best to police the world, “Captain America: Civil War” sees the Avengers go mano e’ mano e’ mano e’ mano e’ mano e’ mano (there’s a lot of them) in an effort to settle their differences.
Thankfully this isn’t a repeat of the Zack Snyder film. While the themes may be similar to “B v S” the Russo Brothers (Anthony and Joe) achieve a much different result. There’s humour, a story that more or less makes sense and lots of surprises.
As anyone who has seen the other Avengers movies knows the superhero team have caused havoc all over the world, blowing things up dropping buildings on people, all in the name of law and order. It’s been a wild ride but after a debacle in Lagos leaves eleven innocent people dead the United Nations decides it’s time to rein them in.
“While a great many people see you was heroes,” says Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt), “there are those who would use the word vigilante.”
Captain America (Chris Evans), Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark (Robert Downey Jr), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) are asked to sign a document that would limit their autonomy, requiring a U.N. okily-dokily before they can spring into action. The restrictions divide the group. Stark wants more oversight. “With no limits we’re no better than the bad guys,” he says. Captain America refuses to compromise. “If we sign this,” he says, “we lose our right to choose where and when we fight.”
Complicating matters is Cappy’s old pal Bucky Barnes a.k.a. Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan). When he’s not under the influence of HYDRA’s mind-control he’s a good guy, but when he is exposed to a series of code words he turns into a Manchurian Candidate style super-duper high tech killing machine. When Winter Soldier is accused of a terrible crime Captain’s loyalty to his friend that drives a wedge between him and Iron Man. As The Avengers self-destruct a mysterious figure (Daniel Brühl) watches from the sidelines.
In some ways “Captain America: Civil War” feels like an echo of “Batman v. Superman.” The difference is a matter of tone. The films share many of the same ideas about responsibility and culpability but whereas “B v. S” was a dark soul-searching affair, “Captain America: Civil War” opts for a cleaner, simpler approach. Minus the ponderosity of Snyder’s film, the Marvel movie manages to make its point in a more concise and interesting way. It’s not exactly a case of less is more—“Civil War” is almost two-and-a-half-hours long and is a Superhero-A-Rama with Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Antman (Paul Rudd) Spider-Man (Tom Holland) joining all the usual suspects—but there is an easy elegance to a line like, “Victory at the expense of the innocent is no victory at all,” missing from “B v. S.”
Better yet, “Civil War” finally finds a recipe for juggling its characters. “Age Of Ultron” featured more stars than there are in the heavens and I left the theatre feeling as though I had just left a kindergarten Christmas pageant where they have to give a part to everyone in class so no one feels left out. The Russo Brothers de-clutter, but still manage the sprawling cast effectively, giving each of them a moment or two in the spotlight and more importantly, a reason to be in the spotlight. Extended cameos from Spider-Man and Ant-man are woven into the fabric of the story, bringing some fun with them while Black Panther is set up to be an interesting recurring character.
Of the regulars Robert Downey Jr holds sway, although his Tony Stark is more subdued than usual. The wisecracks are still there, but there’s fewer than usual. Perhaps it has something to do with spending much of the movie fighting with Captain America. Much humour comes from the other characters. There’s something sublimely ridiculous about superheroes complaining about everyday things. “Can you move your seat up?”
“Captain America: Civil War” delivers. It provides all the high-flying action you expect from a summer superhero blockbuster but also delivers a thought provoking look at the nature of power, loyalty and yes, even the practicality of wedging three superheroes into a Volkswagen.
If you can’t make it to the Toronto International Film Festival but still want to get a flavour of the films, the Reel Guys — Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin — have some movies and some memories for you. They’ve been attending the festival for years and have seen it all, from actors’ tears to classic films to medical emergencies to stars being born. It’s a wild time, but like Dr. Hunter S. Thompson said, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
Richard: Mark, I’ve been going to TIFF for 30 years and covering it for almost 20 so I can’t even begin to imagine how many movies I’ve seen in the 10 days after the first Thursday after Labour Day. Hundreds? Thousands? Somewhere in between, I’m sure. There have been many standouts, but my mind immediately goes to Lost in Translation. Perhaps because it’s Bill Murray Day (isn’t every day?), but I remember walking out of that theatre thinking I had just seen a star being born. Bill Murray was great, but Scarlett Johansson was memorable. She had been in things before, but that movie and TIFF made her a star that day.
Mark: Great film, Richard, but I saw it on a rainy night in Vancouver. If you want to go way, way back, I saw the gala premiere of The Big Chill at University Theatre in 1983. It was the first film that channeled baby boomer angst and it hit me hard — in a good way. So many great performances, but I still remember William Hurt and Kevin Kline. Meg Tilly has the best line when she says, “I don’t know many happy people. What are they like?”
RC: One of the things that happens at TIFF is you see movies that never open anywhere for some reason. What Doesn’t Kill You, a gritty crime drama set in South Boston starring Ethan Hawke, Mark Ruffalo and Amanda Peet, was one of those. I really liked the movie and I hosted the press conference and that’s where something really memorable, for me, happened. During the conference, I looked over and Ruffalo had his head in his hands. At first I wasn’t sure what was happening. Was he tired? Taking a break from the conversation? Asleep? Turns out the conversation and questions had made him emotional and he was crying. I didn’t expect him to break down into tears and be unable to speak, but Hawke jumped in and spoke about how Ruffalo is a committed actor who completely throws himself into his roles.
MB: There’s more to that story … Just before the press conference, for no apparent reason, I shivved Ruffalo in the left kidney, and he must have been in a lot of pain. But I know what you mean by movies that don’t open. The film immediately disappeared. Then there was the recent Lebanese movie The Attack, which was a harrowing story of a Palestinian doctor who finds out his wife is a terrorist. After the film, the director did a Q&A describing death threats he got and the tribulations he endured just to get the film made. It was almost as good as the film itself.
RC: You never know what will happen at the screenings, whether it’s a wild Q&A or the audience reaction. A few years ago the amputation sequence in Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, was so intense several members of the audience required medical attention.
MB: Sometimes the volume of movies you see yields unexpected results. I remember the Saturday night I saw Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air immediately followed by the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man. My two favourite movies of 2009, back to back!
I am not a cold-hearted man. I like love stories as much as anyone and, as a fan of Say Anything, almost well up whenever I hear Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” but the sledgehammer romance of “Winter’s Tale” left me feeling bruised rather than buoyed. What is meant to be an uplifting experience about the power of love and the triumph of good over evil felt more like being strapped to a chair and force-fed all nine seasons of “Touched by an Angel.”
Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Mark Helprin and brought to the screen by Oscar winning writer-turned-director Akiva Goldsman the story begins when Peter Lake (Colin Farrell), a turn-of-the-last century burglar, comes across the love of his life while robbing a mansion he thought was empty.
Beverly Penn (Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay) the beautiful-but-doomed daughter of a wealthy newspaper tycoon, is a precocious and philosophical young woman with just months to live. He wants to save her, but first he must save himself from demonic crime lord Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe), a brutal man who wants Lake dead. Then, in a twist suggested by the Brothers Grimm, he finds himself thrust one hundred years into the future with only the faded memory of Beverly and a white guardian angel horse as company.
The opening narration let’s us know that “magic is everywhere around us.” I just wish that some of that magic had spilled into the screenplay. The movie’s mix of metaphysical romance, magic realism and demonic revenge is a strange stew that worked well in the novel but seems to have lost something in the translation to the screen. In other words, perhaps the sight of Colin Farrell flying above New York on a winged Pegasus is best left in the mind’s eye.
As silly as the movie is, and make no mistake, this is what I like to call an S.D.M.—Silly Damn Movie—Farrell and Findlay manage to bring the romantic side of the tale alive. Their first meeting, over a cup of tea, is simple, effective and bristles with sexual tension. The love story, although a bit starry-eyed, works until the magic realism takes over and the story becomes loopier and loopier. By the time the words, “Is it possible to love someone so much they can’t die?” spill from Farrell’s lips all is lost, and that’s not even an hour into the story.
Putting aside the enchanted horses and dime store spirituality for a moment, the story often requires leaps of faith that would have even terrified Evel Knievel. This is the kind of movie where mothers willingly hand over their sick children to scruffy looking strangers on the promise of a miracle. It’s the kind of movie where people accept outlandish events with a tossed off phrase like, “How’s that even possible?” It’s the kind of sloppily plotted movie that involves a level of suspension of disbelieve so off-the-charts it’s almost in outer space.
“Winter’s Tale” is a frustrating movie. It overly complicates a boy-from-the-wrong- side-of-the-tracks-meets-rich-girl story with a bunch of hocus pocus that wastes some good work from Farrell, Findlay and Russell Crowe.
Imagine if there had been eight people named Zapruder in Dallas, Texas on Friday, November 22, 1963 and you get the high concept of the new thriller Vantage Point—one catastrophic event, eight different viewpoints.
In the chaotic minutes after President Ashton (William Hurt) is shot while giving a speech at a global summit on the war terror in Spain, two secret service agents, Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) and Kent Taylor (Mathew Fox), try and piece together what happened. Thus begins the movie’s deep debt to Rashômon as the attempted assassination of the president is told from five different perspectives, including American tourist Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), who, camcorder in hand, videotaped the whole thing and television producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) who was producing a new piece on the summit.
First the good stuff. Vantage Point does a nice job of showing the awful suddenness in which violence can happen, and the terrible consequences of terrorism. Director Pete Travis stages the ferocious opening with gusto. As shots ring out and chaos reigns his camera conveys the intensity of the mass panic that follows. Jittery camera work effectively conveys how the bad guys can take advantage of the chaos they create to follow through with their plans. The first time through it’s a thriller, too bad it loses its oomph in repeated viewings.
The story, starting form the beginning rewinds and unspools from the point of view of the major characters. It’s a cool idea but one that is flawed in its execution. The horror of the assassination and the subsequent terror attack is blunted by the constant duplication until it loses all impact and simply becomes tiresome.
This kind of fractured storytelling is very difficult to pull off without boring the audience. It would have been interesting to see what more accomplished directors like Christopher Nolan, Alfonso Cuarón or even Quentin Tarantino, all of whom have experimented with nonlinear timelines, would have been able to do with this same material.
Amid the bombast, blood and bombs Vantage Point presents itself as an anti-war manifesto, including a reporter who blames US foreign policy for the amount of terrorism in the world and a president who seems to understand that the US isn’t loved all over the world and favors showing moral strength over military strength. It would be easier to accept these ideas from a movie that didn’t eventually dissolve into a violent shoot out with a body count that rivals Rambo.
Wonky politics aside Vantage Point does have some exciting moments, and enough political intrigue to keep conspiracy theorists happy, but its awkward construction drags the whole film down.
Why can’t you superheroes just get along? Like the recent “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” which saw the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel go head-to-head in a showdown over how best to police the world, “Captain America: Civil War” sees the Avengers go mano e’ mano e’ mano e’ mano e’ mano e’ mano (there’s a lot of them) in an effort to settle their differences.
