My AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON review

The press tour for Avengers: Age of Ultron has been notable for many reasons, some relevant to the film, some not. Amid the social-media-ready tempests like actors putting their foots in their mouths and interviewers asking inappropriate questions has been the unmistakable sense in every Joss Whedon interview that the writer/director was completely broken by this film. Whedon sounds like a man who's just come back from war. If you've ever had a conversation with someone who's given off a weary, "I am so over this" vibe when discussing their job, you have a good sense of how Whedon is coming off. It feels like a combination of exhaustion from the work and exasperation from dealing with the politics of studio filmmaking.

After seeing Age of Ultron, I totally get it.

In terms of scope and complexity, this is by far the biggest Marvel movie attempted, and in many respects, the biggest tentpole movie attempted. Just to use Michael Bay's Transformers films as a contrast, as big and sprawling and exhausting as they are, as much post-production as they require, the stories are pretty straightforward and they have a much cleaner throughline. You have a human hero, his girlfriend, a wacky sidekick, good robot, bad robot, and usually two or three prestige actors in small "payday roles." And the easy part is, there's little obligation to flesh them out equally.

An Avengers film is a different beast, as it requires balancing the egos of three heroes with their own film series, a further three who've been core members of the team - all of whom generally should be given some equal weight. Add to that a main villain, two additional antagonists AND a number of cameos from other supporting heroes... and you have a character roster designed to drive any writer nuts as he crafts a story that not only gives them each some face time, but also makes them integral to the story. The worst thing would be for the audience to leave feeling like, "I don't think the Hulk really needed to be in this one."

Adding to the complexity is that with most of these characters establish - some of them WELL established - there's less freedom to bend their characterizations to serve the story. Do this sort of thing wrong and you'll be sniffed out as a fraud. Oh, and you have to do it while topping already gargantuan expectiations that this'll be more spectacular than the first film.

How does Whedon manage? For the most part, he gets his lasso around this beast.

The core story - and I'm gonna drop a lot of big spoilers ahead, so be warned - springs from a Tony Stark artificial intelligence project gone awry. Ultron was supposed to be a project to keep the world safe, but due to a combination of poor programing on Tony's part and (I think, this is a bit muddy) some interaction with the gem in Loki's staff Ultron breaks free of his programming, commanders several robot bodies after building himself an imposing new form, and sets out to end war... by ending humanity.

By his side are twins who've gone through Hydra experimentation and emerged with powers. Scarlet Witch has vaguish magical powers and the ability to mess with people's minds to draw out their biggest fears. Quicksilver is superfast, though a secondary power of his seems to be to use his superspeed in less interesting ways than his X-Men: Days of Future Past counterpart last summer.

That's the A-story. Branching out from all of this comes all the various character threads. Many of these draw from what we've seen in the intervening films, such as the collapse of SHIELD in The Winter Soldier. At times, the transition is less smooth. The end of Iron Man 3 implies that Tony has hung it up and is done. Two years later, he's fighting with the Avengers as if it's business as usual.

Tony's whole arc in this is a bit jittery. Even ignoring the end of Iron Man 3, his Ultron project is exposited in a somewhat clunky fashion. We learn about it almost literally seconds before its corrupted, which feels like a slight miscalculation in pacing. It's as if Pandora opening her box was preceded only moments earlier by "Here. Take this box. But don't open it. It's bad."

Even though Tony's mistake is the event that puts everything into motion, it feels like his character is less featured in this film. Near the end of the film's second act, the plot requires Tony to virtually repeat his earlier mistake. This sparks a brief fight with Captain America and a few of the others. It's a point where we have a very, very surface-level understanding of the motivations involved.

Then at the end of the film, Tony ends up driving off into the sunset, leaving superheroing behind. There's just enough for us to connect the dots, but it's not totally satisfying in its own way.

More than any entry so far, this feels not just like a Marvel comic but one of those big summer crossover issues that's just overstuffed with characters and incidents. This is like a House of M or Secret Invasion miniseries, where it's fair game for every character to show up. As with those sprawling storylines, there are moments where one gets the impression that the less-explained moments of the epic get fleshed out in individual tie-in issues.

A good example of this is Thor's storyline, which sends him off on a brief tangent that plays out like an under-explained vision quest. This is one subplot that was more obviously trimmed to the bare bones. When Thor shows up to suddenly move a major chunk of the story forward and bring along a great deal of exposition about the Infinity Stones, it's hard not to imagine an editor's caption "*See more about Thor's vision quest in THOR #239!"

Captain America also gets short-shrift in the drama department. It's fortunate that this is a script from someone like Whedon, who's able to get a lot of character moments wedged into idle banter within the interactions. He and Tony have some verbal sparing, some playful, some not. The main conflict between them feels like a warm-up for the next film, though. Chris Evans makes the most of what he's got, but Cap isn't driving the plot like he did last time.

The good news is that everyone gets screentime and at least one or two great moments that are uniquely theirs. An early highlight is a party in the Avengers Tower filled with cameos and these large personalities bouncing off of each other. It's here where Whedon reminds us he's the master of the set-up and payoff as more than one seemingly-extraneous bit of fun here turns out to be a seed planted for bigger moments later in the film.

(One of them - it's the moment involving Thor's hammer - had its payoff come about in a slightly unexpected way. SPOILERS. The party scene underlines that only someone worthy can lift Thor's hammer. What follows is a display of egos as Tony, Banner and eventually Cap try to pick it up. Cap gets it to budge. Slightly. I assumed this was set-up for a third-act bit where Cap would need to wield the hammer. Instead, it's paid off in a different way. Following the introduction of a new character, the team debates if they should trust this new arrival. That matter is handily settled when this person easily wields the hammer. Perfect instance of "show, not tell." "How do we know we can trust this guy?" "Well, he's able to lift the thing that only really, really good people can handle.")

It's a very full movie, but fortunately it hits more than it misses. The opening set-piece is a lot of fun despite some so-so CGI and the promised clash of Hulk versus Iron Man in his Hulkbuster armor might be my favorite action sequence in the film. It's the perfect blend of tension, comedy and violence.

That sequence also ends up introducing something that is initially refreshing - the notion of the heroes actively trying to minimize human casualties. MAN OF STEEL really got hit for this, with a vehemence that seems out of proportion considering the first AVENGERS barely raised an eyebrow without doing much more to show the heroes going out of their way. And don't even get me started on the total cop-out of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY's "We've evacuated the city" as some kind of quick-fix to make the third-act ending battle more acceptable.

(I almost literally heard Rob Lowe's character from THANK YOU FOR SMOKING in my head during that scene. "It's an easy fix. One line of dialogue...")

The Hulkbuster sequence deals with this by having Tony's armor seek out a building with no people inside. There's also a sequence involving a runaway train where shielding the civilians is a priority. But by the time we get to the final action orgy, there's something very... I hesitate to say... "corny" about the film's insistance on aggressively reassuring us the civilians are taken care of. It called to mind how Saturday morning cartoons adhered to violence restrictions by always making sure that when bad guy planes were shot down, every single one of them was shown deploying their parachutes and apparently surviving.

Don't get me wrong. The goal is laudable, but I wish Whedon had found a way to moderate it just a little bit. more. A nice touch is that we get the impression that the lives lost in that battle haunt Banner.

As the end approached, the comparisons with crossover maxi-series again came to mind, as the finale plays less like the end of a story and more like a launching pad for several new series. Tony going off on his own works, but probably had more material supporting it in longer cuts, and the showcase of who remains in the team for the next film is done pretty well.

AGAIN MORE SPOILERS

But Hulk's fate is maddeningly open-ended. The last we see of him, he's on a quinplane that's flying off into nowhere. He even apparently cuts off communication with Black Widow of his own accord and allows the jet to fly off into the unknown. It's a weird way to set up that loose thread, made even more discordant by a follow-up scene where Nick Fury says they're sure the plane crashed, but they can't find it. His almost nonchalant "He'll turn up" is a weird note to leave that scene on. It might have played better for me if Fury said it like he was trying to be blase about it, but deep down was concerned they might never find him.

Obviously he'll turn up, but the film doesn't seem to know how it wants to play the emotion of him being missing in action. On the other hand, these movies have seemingly killed so many characters who later came back fine, perhaps Whedon's muting of the character reactions is in reaction to the criticism of these fakeouts.

Hawkeye's departure makes a little more sense and I generally like how he's used in this. Fans who were pushing for a Black Widow/Hawkeye relationship are probably going to be thrown for a loop after seeing he's been married long enough to have two young kids. A neat consequence of this is it forces the viewer to revisit the supposed sexual tension between Natasha and Barton in the first film. It's kind of nice to see them showing a functional male/female relationship that doesn't necessarily end in paying off sexual tension.

Pairing her with Banner is one of the film's surprising choices. We're not shown much about this flirtation, which amounts to little more than a tease. Though has anyone noticed that when it comes to dynamics with each of the other characters, Black Widow might be the most fleshed out? Black Widow/Thor might be the only under-explored dynamic in her relationships. Tony is close behind, with only Iron Man/Hawkeye being a total tabula rosa.  Cap really hasn't been given a great deal of interaction with Banner or Thor - two characters who are mostly distant from at least half the ensemble.

It can't have been easy to craft this story in a way that allowed character to shine as much as action and plot. After one viewing, I feel like Ultron was enjoyable, but not quite as good as the first film. However, it's easily the most ambitious and even though it's not immune to the "now our moment of synergy to promote future projects" that's marred several of the films, it feels less intrusive here. The ending tag probably would have been more effective if GOTG had managed to establish Thanos beyond being "Evil Dude who sits on a throne a lot."

Still, I'd put it in the upper 25% of Marvel films. I'm a bit afraid that this movie will pull an Independence Day on me and somehow plummeted massively in enjoyment on a second viewing. For now, this has me eager for next year's Captain America: Civil War. That's being directed by the Russo Brothers, who'll follow that up with Avengers: Infinity War Parts I and II. I shudder a bit to think what a more massive Marvel movie than this will look like. If just one of these movies exhausted Whedon so much, have a few hugs ready for the Russos come 2018.

How Marvel played the game well and how the boom inevitably leads to a bust

With the release of THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON upon us, not only has summer arrived, but the big boom of superhero films is about to explode. Seriously, enjoy 2015 for its mere 3 superhero film offerings because from here on out, things are going to explode. AOU is the eleventh Marvel Studios film, and soon the studio will ramp up from two films a year to three, even as Warners finally begins utilizing the DC Comics catalog for two movies a year as well. (And that's not even getting into the Marvel characters whose rights are still controlled by Fox - such as X-Men and Fantastic Four.)

Slashfilm put together a pretty handy list of all of the comic book-related releases, which you can see here.  The short version is that these are the total number of comic book films set for release each year:

2016: 8
2017: 7
2018: 5
2019: 4

(I'm not counting the Sony Spider-Man spinoffs listed at that link because all indications are those are on ice for now.)

Obviously there's been no shortage of thinkpieces on how long this boom can sustain. Eventually, there WILL be a crash. That's just simple logic at work. It would be naive to pretend that comic book films aren't a cyclical as every other genre that's gone through its hot and cold periods. Sitcoms were dead for years until The Cosby Show brought them back. Drama went through a similar fallow period, but was reinvigorated during the late 90s and early 00s by shows like The Sopranos. Genre TV got a big boost from Lost... until the proliferation of inferior Lost imitators like The Event ended up wearing out that genre.

Honestly, I'm not interested in trying to predict where the bust will happen. Proliferation of product will be a factor, but fortunately, a lot of these WB and Marvel properties can be fairly distinct from each other. In the hands of the right auteurs, these superhero movies don't all have to feel the same. Marvel's best successes have often come from recognizing the distinct subgenres that can make a Captain America film feel distinctly different from, say an Iron Man, or a Thor film. If you're gonna lump all the comic book properties into the same category, it's about as silly as calling THE MATRIX and JOHN WICK the same film.

When Warners announced its plans to roll out 10 superhero films over five years, Marvel loyalists were quick to accuse them of trying to "rush" what Marvel "took their time" doing. It was absurd to them that JUSTICE LEAGUE would be announced before WB saw how any of the standalones would go... but that overlooks that 2012's THE AVENGERS was announced right after IRON MAN opened in 2008. Warner's plan doesn't seem quite so crazy when compared to Marvel's pace. Marvel played the feature game well, but was we go into the big boom, it might be worth revisiting the road that got them here, just to remember they stumbled along the way too.

2008: Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk - Look up Robert Downey Jr's pre-IRON MAN credits. You've got great critically acclaimed roles in Zodiac, Good Night and Good Luck, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but then there's also the completely forgotten A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a supporting parts in The Shaggy Dog and Lucky You, and then Charlie Bartlett. This is a guy who was on his second (maybe third?) comeback. He was an unlikely superhero lead with a character who was not considered a heavy hitter by any stretch of the imagination.

What I'm getting at is, in the alternate universe where Iron Man bombed, there's more than enough foundation for the "Of course this had no chance of working" post-mortem. But before the film's release, Marvel had already started developing not only Iron Man 2, but Thor, Captain America and Avengers. That was an announcement they had ready to go the weekend after Iron Man opened, which means the plans had been in the works for a while.


It sort of makes you wonder how the script would have gone if Iron Man opened to a whimper and it was The Incredible Hulk that smashed box office records. Edward Norton was about as big a star as Downey was at that point. Would we have seen the Hulk become the pivitol axis of the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

Fortunately Downey's casting turned out to be one of the most perfect instances of an actor becoming iconic as that particular character. It helps that unlike Norton's turn as the Hulk, he was the first to inhabit the role. Honestly, that might be the key to a lot of Marvel's freshness. On the DC side, we're on our seventh live-action Superman (ninth if you count the two SUPERBOY performers), our eighth live-action Batman, and our second live-action Wonder Woman. The Marvel Universe thus far really only has the Hulk as its rotating chair. (And Nick Fury, if you want to count the David Hasselhoff made-for-TV movie.)

It's Downey who carries the first Iron Man, and the first hour of that film is still one of the true high points in Marvel history. The script knows just how to introduce Tony Stark while giving Downey a chance to strut his stuff. He's a cocky asshole, but he's a charming, funny, cocky asshole and that makes it a lot easier to follow this guy. The goodwill of the film's first half makes it a lot easier to ignore that the second half of the film is a big weak, due in large part to some weak villains. It's an unfortunate Marvel tradition that their villains are generally weak sauce. On the other hand, it's nice to not be in the Burton/Schumacher mold of of the bad guys blowing the good guys completely off the screen.

In contrast to Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk is a serviceable but forgettable film. It's not bad enough to hate, but it's not really good enough to get excited about either. But then, it also came at a time when a comic book film could do all right by just getting on base rather than needing to hit a home run or else be called out for underperforming.

2010: Iron Man 2 - I think Marvel needed a failure like Iron Man 2, if you can call $623M worldwide a failure. (It earned more abroad than the first, but less at home.) Last year I called out Amazing Spider-Man 2 for feeling more like a business plan for future sequels than a story in its own right. After the ending of the first film teased "the Avenger Initiative" I was excited to see more Samuel L. Jackson in this sequel and the introduction of Black Widow looked promising too. What we got was kind of a mess of plotlines that get in each others way and a lot of material involving SHIELD that seems to be there just to keep them on the game board.

Director Favreau opening complained about the compromises he made on the film, which became his last experience with Marvel. It's probably also the weakest of the 10 films so far. Yet, we might owe it a debt of gratitude, as Marvel executives seemed to realize the folly of of this kind of story construction. Subsequent films have been much better about either integrating the larger storyline into that film's particular script, or at least minimizing the impact.

If we take MAN OF STEEL as WB's Iron Man, then Iron Man 2 needs to be the object lesson everyone involved with BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN should heed. BvS has a pretty full cast list as it tees-up JUSTICE LEAGUE, but hopefully most of the other heroes appearing in the former film are mere cameos. The titanic clash of Superman and Batman should be more than enough to fuel an entire film. Iron Man 2 fails because its part in teasing Avengers gets in the way of the presumably core story about Tony Stark. (It also doesn't help that Tony's arc - and the bad guy - are both weak on their own merits. Giving so much time over to Fury and Black Widow seems to have necessitated very surface-level scripting in the A-story.)

The second Captain America film, The Winter Soldier would prove to a be a much more successful instance of a "solo" movie playing with the SHIELD toys and utilizing other heroes well. Everything about that film feels much more organic than Iron Man 2. Let's hope Warners saw that too.

2011: Thor and Captain America - Chris Hemsworth's casting aside, Thor is one of the lesser Marvel films for me. It's another instance of SHIELD cluttering up the story needlessly and the whole enterprise feels like one of Marvel's cheaper affairs. I remember that after my first viewing, one of my strongest impressions was that I had a hard time seeing this as the same world that Tony Stark inhabits. The cheapness of the small town battle bugged me at the time (and reminded me of SUPERMAN II), but I've softened on that since subsequent summers have brought us a steady diet of city-destroying battles.

Captain America is my favorite solo film of Marvel's Phase One and it's probably the first time Marvel really succeeds at setting one of its properties in another genre. Hiring Joe Johnston, the director of cult favorite The Rocketeer, to helm this tale of Captain America's WWII origins has to go down as one of Marvel's savvier moves. Chris Evans probably doesn't get enough credit for how well-rounded he makes a Dudley Do-Right superhero, and part of why the film succeeds is because Steve Rodgers is a perfect contrast to the cockier, more ego-driven heroes Thor and Iron Man.

As much as Marvel gets flack for some formulaic elements in their films and the fact that most of the action sequences are previsualized before a director is even hired, they tend to be pretty good about nailing the characters. They're well-rounded, they're distinct from each other, and even in a weaker script, it tends to be fun to watch guys like Tony Stark and Thor play. Marvel's road to Avengers wasn't flawless at all, but the right elements were in place so that Avengers could galvanize all of them. In turn, this gave all the subsequent films a boost. Lately, superhero sequels tend to do better than their originals, but I don't think anyone would debate that a crowd-pleaser like Avengers did a lot more to draw people to The Winter Soldier and The Dark World than the original Captain America and Thor films did.

We look at Marvel as infallible now and some of that is projected backwards towards the start of their plan. I actually think that does a real disservice to the talent involved, making it seem like it was easy to reach the heights of Avengers and Phase 2 in general. It's foolish as fans - and VERY foolish as storytellers - to think any of this is easy. Marvel became the king of the mountain through trial and error in a time when they were mostly the only game in town.

As WB and Fox ramp up their own Marvel-style shared universes, there will undoubtedly be stumbles. But also, there are expectations now. Let's say that BATMAN V. SUPERMAN is the homerun it needs to be, but SUICIDE SQUAD and WONDER WOMAN do so-so business and don't impress audiences much. Does that hobble anticipation for JUSTICE LEAGUE in a way that the weak three-punch of Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2 and Thor didn't become a liability for Avengers?

Here's what Marvel did right - it put their guys on base and then Avengers hit a grand slam. Then it followed up those grand slams with another home run (Iron Man 3) a solid triple, in commercial terms if not artistic ones (Thor: The Dark World), and two more home runs (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy).

Are DC and Fox playing in a game where they can afford just to get on the base? They're going to take more lumps for doing so, to say nothing of the fact that it puts a lot more pressure on the clean-up batter.

MAN OF STEEL's worldwide take of $668M puts it above the original Iron Man ($585.2M), as well as all the other pre-Avengers releases. Avengers, ($1.5B), Iron Man 3 ($1.2B), Guardians of the Galaxy ($774M) and The Winter Soldier ($714M) are the only Marvel releases to out-gross it. If BvS can hit near a billion, WB is very much a contender.

Let's also not forget to the casual viewers, they don't draw the same Marvel/DC distinctions that most people do. If Marvel has a dud that happens to coincide with some "growing pains" bombs released by WB and Fox, it's probably not great for the comic book brand as a whole. It's one reason why the whole Marvel/DC fanboy clash has never made any sense to me. You can't be rooting for your "enemy's" failure because what's bad for WB's business is bad for Marvel's business. Marvel absolutely wants to remain number one, but I guarantee you they don't want to see WB go broke competing with them.

In the next five years we'll be seeing a lot of comic book films, but there's also a lot of diversity within that genre. Let's all hope for more hits than misses. The studios have already committed to exploiting these IPs over original ideas, so they might as well be GOOD films.

And who knows, maybe if enough of them succeed, a few savvy gamblers might take their winnings and put a few chips elsewhere on the board.

I know. That's probably a more ridiculous notion than anything ever found in a comic book.

Avengers - making introductions and re-introductions more than just exposition

It's been a while since I've discussed the importance of introducing characters in an interesting way.  I think sometimes weak openings comes as a result of the writer's inability to put themselves in the audience's shoes and recall that THIS is the moment that makes the first impression.

After all, the writer has lived with their character for weeks or months, so in their mind, this first scene just has to get the character on-screen.

I couldn't help but think of this during the opening half-hour of The Avengers, which has the task of introducing nearly a dozen major characters who have previously appeared in other Marvel films, either as headliners and supporting characters.  But the filmmakers would be wrong to assume that everyone buying a ticket to this film would have seen all or even ANY of the other movies.

And obviously, it's to the film's financial benefit that the movie appeal to audiences beyond the core Marvel fans.  So that forces the movie to introduce these characters as if it's the first time the audience has met them - without completely boring those viewers familiar with the earlier movies.

It's harder than it sounds, but I think the script did a pretty solid job of telling us everything we need to know for the sake of this movie.

First, there's a scene at a secret S.H.I.E.L.D. research center.  Here we introduce the Tesseract (previously an element in Thor and Captain America) and showcase that it's basically a mysterious and powerful form of energy.  Sure, we could trace the whole history of this thing, but it's really not that important.  In other words, screening the prior two films is unnecessary.

Loki shows up, and it's obvious that he's the villain of the piece.  He puts a few characters under his mind control spell and blows up the base, with Nick Fury and Agent Colson among those who get out in time.

So in the first few minutes we have: Villain, MacGuffin, Heroic Mastermind, Sidekick, and Brainwashed Hero.  Do we know Loki's full history or everything that Fury's got his hands in - but we know enough and they were introduced in a context that allows the audience not to feel lost.

Director Fury decides to activate the Avenger Initiative, which necessitates a series of scenes in which each member is met in turn.

- Black Widow is given a great sequence in which she appears to be a prisoner, only to turn the tables and kick ass without breaking much of a sweat.

- Then, Black Widow tracks down Dr. Banner in India, where's he's been living below the radar.  The exposition here is more dialogue-driven than visual, but the dialogue takes a turn that's either cryptic (if you're ignorant of Banner's "Hulk" alter-ego) or foreboding (if you know what they're referring to.  Either way, a couple important points are made: Banner's being recruited for his smarts, BW is very concerned about his temper, and that concern led her to bring an entire special forces team with her.

- Captain America admittedly gets one of the more mundane introductions, in addition to one of the more dialogue-laden ones.  The exposition here is more than made up for by the time we see him in action though

- And of course, Tony "Iron Man" Stark makes his debut while finishing up some technical doo-dad that we're told will turn his tower into a source of clean energy.  A lot of points are made here, including showcasing Tony's armor, reminding the audience of his relationship with Pepper Potts, and establishing both his "billionaire genius philathropist" persona.  There's also a fair amount of Tony's cocky showboating.  And of ALL the characters, I feel he's the most firmly established via just his intro scene.

Why do I say this? Because while you might argue that some dialogue given to other characters could be easily transposed to another character, there's not a single line of Tony's that could be swapped out to someone else as written.  His "voice" permeates everything he says.  If someone else would have to say something given to Tony, the rewrite would need to go further than just changing the character name above the line.

Other than Captain America, pretty much every character gets a opening scene that either conveys their function in the story, or the conflict that will define them throughout the script.  (In a few cases, we get both.)  Better still, most of those moments are entertaining scenes in their own right, either through comedy or tension.

In the wrong hands, the first half-hour could have been a bore while the viewers of previous films waited for the new audience members get caught up to speed.

The Worst Comic Book Movies Ever Made

Continuing the list I started yesterday, this post covers the Worst Comic Book Movies Ever Made. Now, for this list, I knew that I hadn't seen all of the movies that truly belonged here, so with help in whittling the field, I called in my good friend Clint, a man with unimpeachable credentials in the fields of comic books and bad movies. In addition to working together on the list, we each selected a "worst movie." Clint's reviews are noted with a special tag, everything else is by me.

10) Catwoman - There are some who would say that no list of terrible comic book movies is complete without this turkey and you know what, we'll have to take their word for it. Neither of us could stomach the task of viewing this reported abomination, so we decided the only fair thing to do was stick it at number ten and cop to going with the herd on this one. Can anyone who's seen it make a convincing case for why it wouldn't belong here?

9) The Punisher (2003) - OK, here's the problem with Punisher. In the old days, the Punisher got attention because he was a straight up killer in a time when comic heroes were still leaving the bad guys tied up outside police HQ with little birdies spinning around their heads. As comics got darker, the Punisher got darker still, and gradually became a celebration of over the top ultra-violence. Here's the problem: movies already have all that. We see it all the time. So, for The Punisher to make the same impact as a movie that it did as a comic, you're going to have to do either absurd Icchi the Killer levels of mayhem, or go for some of that real gets-in-your-brain visceral violence like The Wrestler or American History X. So it's even lamer that they trotted out this limp noodle. This movie reminded me of the generic PI movies they show on late night cable- maybe something starring Brian Bosworth. The whole point of the Punisher is that his need for vengeance has put him totally over the edge. In this movie, he's so over the edge that he commits the following heinous acts: 1) Befriending wacky neighbors. 2) Using cold steaks to scare a criminal into thinking he's going to be tortured. 3) Blowing up villain John Travolta's prized car collection. That seems about right for someone who killed your family, right? [Review by Clint]

8) Hulk - Upon viewing Se7en, producer Arnold Kopelson reportedly told director David Fincher, "You took a perfectly good genre piece and you turned it into a foreign film." That's pretty much what seems to have happened here. One can respect Ang Lee for trying something different with his comic booky transitions, but that doesn't excuse the boring script and the rather silly action scenes.

7) Blade:Trinity - What if they made a Blade movie and Blade was totally insignificant to the story? They'd end up with this horrible misfire. Wesley Snipes seems compeltly bored in his role and writer/director David S. Goyer (you know, co-writer of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight) lets Parker Posey chew the scenery (sorry... the pun was right there) like a vampire that feeds on plaster and plywood. Ryan Reynolds is the only bright spot of this film, which seems more interested in setting up a spin-off than telling a good Blade story.

6) Ghost Rider - An even better argument than the first Hulk movie for why you should not have a CGI protagonist in a live action movie. Over the course of the film, my reaction to the visuals spanned the spectrum between "shitty" and "dumb." The villain is semi-obscure comics also-ran Blackheart, the son of the devil with an inferiority complex about his dad. In the comics, he's got an arguably cool spiny demon sort of thing going on. In the movie, he's the teenage boy from American Beauty, gussied up in eyeliner. So, it basically ends up looking like an extra from DOOM versus the guy from Fallout Boy. [review by Clint]

5) X3: The Last Stand - In a word: gutless. This Brett Ratner-directed travesty kills off two major characters without fanfare in the first half, then moves to a conclusion that indiscriminately kills and depowers most of the remaining interesting characters. The only thing more infuriating than this waste of solid raw material is the fact that the two final scenes hint that all of it can be undone quickly in time for the next sequel. This prompts one to ask, why bother with this shaggy dog story then?

4) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Not just bad, but bad on many levels. As a movie, it's just painfully average. It's a by-the-numbers studio action movie that takes no chances and breaks no new ground. The addition of Tom Sawyer as a fast-talkin' Yankee secret agent reeks of the worst sort of marketing-minded executive meddling. The only thing this movie did right was the inclusion of the immortal Dorian Grey, who was notably absent from the original comics. But what really sets this movie above the rest is the vast quality gap between the source material and the film. With properties like Batman and the X-Men, there's a lot of material out there, all of varying quality, so when you introduce a clunker like X3 into the mix, you're not really diluting the pool too much. But the League had only ever been fantastic. The second volume hadn't even been completed yet when the movie came out. So, when there's only 8 or 9 issues of tight, imaginative comics to use as a point of reference, it makes this totally forgettable effort look extra-bad. Plus, the filmmaking experience was famously so painful for Sean Connery that he's sworn off acting, so it's a double shot in the gut for us geeks. It's worth noting that all these criticisms of League apply equally to another Alan Moore adaptation, From Hell, but somehow that movie failed to gall audiences in quite the same way. [review by Clint]

3) X-Men Origins: Wolverine - So bad that it makes X3 look like X2. Wolverine is one of those characters who's cooler the less we know about him. Though exploring his origins could have been interesting, he deserved better than this poorly-executed one-off that somehow boasts worst visual effects than the first X-Men movie ten years ago, at a mere three times the cost. There are far too many winks at earlier X-Men films in this prequel, and as with X3, the entire enterprise feels pointless by the end. Couldn't we just have gotten a post-X3 spinoff with Wolverine?

2) The Spirit - I said everything I needed to say about this one here.

Clint's #1 ) Captain America: Let's be honest here - the fact that any movie from the 2000's is on a list of the worst superhero movies shows how spoiled we've become. The 80's and 90's were the real golden age of awful superhero movies. Howard the Duck, Swamp-Thing, Dolph Lundgren's Punisher - these are the stuff of shlock legend. And yet, the 1990 production of Captain America manages to stand out even among this bumper crop of turkeys. This crimes this movie perpetrates against film, superheroes, and the American way are literally too many to list.

The origin sequence, where a hero explores the limits of his new-found powers, is a sure-fire hit in any superhero movie. Captain America gets it out of the way quick by getting gut-shot a couple times and spending only ONE day in the hospital. Now that's super! Cap's arch-nemesis, the Nazi mastermind Red Skull has inexplicably become Italian, and sports an accent somewhere between Chico Marx and the "You like-a da juice?" guy from SNL. Cap's slickest move is to fake motion sickness as a pretense for car theft. He does this TWICE.

And we complain about bad CGI? You don't know how good you have it, kids.

At his best, the character of Captain America simultaneously personifies everything that's good about American patriotism, and provides hope that the 90-pound weaklings of the world can aspire to greatness. This movie presents an alternate interpretation, in which he's a time-traveling fuck-up who's seeking redemption for having done absolutely nothing to combat the Nazi menace. See, back in '43, Cap got his ass handed to him as soon as he set foot on foreign soil. Now he's got to stop the bad guys before they... well... I'm sure whatever they're doing it's very bad. It involves a chip in the President's head, but they've already been running the world for 40 years, so who cares?

And that's the real problem with Captain America. Plot points are alternately delivered with the expository grace of a USA Today headline, or not delivered at all. Story details get squeezed together like the movie is playing in fast forward, only to make space for high-stakes bicycle chases in the Italian countryside. The movie becomes a parody of itself. In fact, I'm sure some enterprising grad student could make the case for Captain America as a post-modern deconstruction of the entire superhero concept. Sadly, the movie is not nearly that creative, and even if it were, it would still be extremely boring.

[Bitter Script Reader's Note: Captain America was never released to theatres, but is heavily bootlegged and notorious in comic circles. Including it on this list might skirt the criteria we used to compile this list, but I can't reject a review this excellent. The Roger Corman Fantastic Four was also very close to making this list, but in the end it was decided there was space for only one unreleased film. Fair? Probably not, but it's our list.]

[Update: as L.F. pointed out in the comments, you can see Captain America on Hulu by clicking this link.]

Bitter Script Reader's #1) Batman & Robin - I resisted putting this in the top spot because it's almost like shooting fish in a barrel to make fun of this Joel Schumacher disaster. It's so campy that it's practically a tribute to the 1960s Adam West series. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman camp it up beyond belief as Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy, while Alicia Silverstone and Chris O'Donnell given little to do beyond squeeze into their outfits. In his better moments George Clooney makes one wonder what he might have been able to do as Bruce Wayne if given a more serious script, but there's little here worth watching. The highlight of the Batman DVD boxed set was seeing Joel Schumacher sincerely apologize for this.

Now, I also promised Clint the opportunity to do a Minority Report #1 on my "Best Comic Book Movies" list, which I'm printing below:

MINORITY REPORT - Akira: If you ask people of a certain age if they've ever watched anime, a lot of them are going to say, "No, but I saw Akira." We had stuff like Speed Racer and Starblazers kicking around in America for decades, but Akira's stateside release is when we figured out that something different was going on across the Pacific. The setting is immediately interesting, the characters immediately memorable. The pace is deliberate and creepy, when it's not balls-out insane. The plot, involving a buried government experiment to weaponize the brains of children, provides fuel for some of the most imaginative action sequences ever drawn. The story seems to break down at the end, as director and original manga author Katsuhiro Otomo scrambles to pack six thick volumes worth of pseudo-metaphysical musing into 5 minutes of screen time, but I'd argue that collapse makes the movie all the more suitable for repeat viewings.