Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Mary Louise Wilson, John Malkovich, Karl Urban, Helen Mirren. Dir. Robert Schwentke, Summit, 2010
What is my operative philosophy of comic book/superhero movies? What's my ultimate position? The bottom line? Death of cinema or savior?
Um.
No. Yes. Maybe. I like movies. I like stories. If a movie tells a story that looks and sounds like something I'd like to see, I try to see it. If it doesn't, I only try to see it if a number of people online say, no, check it out, critics got it wrong. Over the last decade plus, comic book/superhero movies do the business, so I see those movies when I feel curious about them. I understand why Martin Scorsese doesn't regard them as movies, and why fans don't regard Martin Scorsese as human. I get why people see the end of all things in the MC & DCEUs, but I also know TV and cable and the vcr were going to put Hollywood out of business in the '50s and we're still seeing Hollywood movies. The sky does not fall because people say it's falling.
Having said that, I have to say I often struggle with MCU and DCEU movies, and with comic book-derived movies, in general. I always say I stopped buying comics because I became a music nerd and between records and X-MEN I chose records, but I wonder sometimes. What bugs me most in comic book movies is their two-dimensionality. For all their computer generated phantasmagoria comic book movies feel emotionally limited to me. Characters move from ecstasy to rage to despair to grief without much between. Characters experience outsized emotions as they take on genicidal villains in battles of cosmic proportion. Like comic books, the vocabulary of these movies is melodrama, grand gestures, everything larger-than-life, and especially in the MC&DCEU, everything simpler, morally unambiguous, and absolute.
I cannot call any of this a weakness, because it clearly speaks to millions of people who like it just fine. I have to call it a convention, perhaps the central convention, of the genre, but one I can rarely get with. For me, it feels as if characters who could be fascinating - humans with godlike powers, not uninteresting - get short shrift because their choices have been severely, deliberately limited to the most obvious and most grandiose. Comics fans don't put much stock in a critically thinking superhero, I guess.
Right about here's where a comic book movie fan yells at me to stop taking movies so seriously. It's a comic book movie, dude, you can't take it too serious. It's not supposed to be real life, it's better than real life.
So first of all, I take all movies, even escapist fun movies, seriously, in that I take it seriously as a creative project, a work with integrity not a continually-convenient storyline of amazing coincidences and lucky breaks. The filmmaker, his cast & crew, the writers, are serious people and even this comic book movie represents three years of their lives, on average. I don't really know what people mean when they say don't take it seriously. I have to, in order to respect the work.
Second, it always looks to me as if "comic book movie" gets brandished as a defensive weapon whenever any accepted convention or trope is questioned by a casual fan. Like "fun movie," "comic book movie" covers a host of sins, or story shortcomings. It's kind of a copout, to my ears, a way to deflect legitimate criticism. It's often accompanied by its corollary, "Well, this movie really isn't FOR you."
Again, I find that a puzzling statement. It isn't for me? Who's it for? The initiated? If these movies aren't truly for everyone, you have to ask if Scorsese had a point. Are they still movies when they're not FOR movie fans?
Whatever they are, the two preceding points always lead me to the same restless place, where I struggle to stay invested in the characters as the conventions and tropes charm me less each go-round, until I'm not in the picture anymore. For all the explosive action and insane stunts, I get bored. I start thinking about how to describe the movie, not the movie, so much.
Reiterating, I don't experience these issues with every comic-book movie. Some contend with the above issues and find ways to make them work. I'm a great admirer of Chris Nolan's DARK KNIGHT trilogy, and however much of a dick Joss Whedon is, his two AVENGERS movies put movie first and thrillride second. I liked Joe Johnston's CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER a lot, and so forth.
RED, unfortunately, struggles with my usual problems. On a second viewing, anyway. I saw RED with friends about nine years ago and enjoyed it. That seems to be a thing, too, with the comic book movies: they play best to a big crowd. Comics fans like to watch their movies together. It's reinforcement, perhaps, or just the camraderie of shared, common experience. Whatever it is, comic book movies fare worse with a single viewer. No matter how I try to achieve the fans' kind of acceptance of the movies' hyperstylized reality, I can never not see the problems simply saying "comic book movie" fails to address.
RED's biggest problem, apart from the above, all of which plague it, is a problem I encountered in BATMAN RETURNS and the DARK KNIGHT trilogy. It's a problem of tone. In a melodramatic story, characters' actions and reactions play at heightened, almost parodic, levels. If the heroes possess literal godlike powers, their opposites must be as extreme, and in our world extreme involves nuclear holocaust and/or genocide. Comic book movie villains tend to like both, but it's tough to make genocide just a convention in a world where three or four actual genocides are attempted daily. Supervillain-evil and real-life evil have a tendency to overlap, and comic book movies sometimes get too close to the real thing to feel comic book-light.
In BATMAN RETURNS, Danny DeVito's Penguin sends his penguin minions out armed with RPGs, asking them to die for him as they murder "hundreds of thousands of people." Asking innocent creatures to kill themselves in order to enable your act of mass murder - that's excusable with "comic book movie, dude"? In RED the like moment comes when Bruce Willis, our hero, threatens to murder a federal agent's wife and children from inside the agent's home. Willis doesn't do it, doesn't intend to, but the moment plays dead serious, and it crosses a line that, to me, felt unnecessary.
I grew bored with RED for the same reason I grow bored with many comic book movies. Its source of charm, hyperstylized and heightened, self-aware melodrama, ran dry with about 45 minutes left, which is the usual limit for me. I like Willis and Freeman and Malkovich and Mirren and Wilson very much in most movies, and RED looks tailored for them.
Their charm wore thin, though. Their choices as characters seemed the obvious, crowd pleasing ones, but not the interesting ones. Worse than this, the characters, like comics characters from the very start, don't particularly grow, change, or develop into nuanced, interesting people in whose fate I am deeply invested. They're caricatures more than characters. Caricatures are cartoons. Cartoons can be great, but they're inherently two dimensional. As are many comic book movies. Like RED.
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