Covid has had many impacts on me, the main of which was my reluctance to go to the movies. Second impact on the list is fear of dying. That inevitably meant that I fell behind on my watchlist, opting for Seinfeld reruns on Netflix. Now, technically, these are not called reruns because they are on Netflix and therefore on demand. But as I remember a time where reruns were the way to watch Seinfeld, I am sticking with the 'rerun' sentiment. You might be wondering why I have spent a whole paragraph on Seinfeld instead of the three movies which I recently caught up on and intended to discuss. It is simple, really; the same procrastination that has affected my viewings is featured on this post for your benefit. So you can relate. I will get to it though, I promise. But as a final note on Seinfeld, I am just wondering if it's worrying that I relate with George Costanza and Larry David as much as I do; you don't need to answer that. It is.
The three movies in question are 'Black Widow' (I have been procrastinating for a long time, baby), 'Suicide Squad' and 'Venom: Let There Be Carnage'. Oddly enough, this is also their order of interest to me, with 'Black Widow' being the movie I cannot believe it took me so long to watch. I was trying to coordinate with other MCU friends and life got in the way. And by 'life' I mean 'Hamilton'. We just watched 'Hamilton' over and over again instead. 'Black Widow' was... classic; it was a superhero movie as we know them. Not that that is a bad thing; I miss those every now and then. I maybe wanted something more though, because of this being the first female lead in the MCU (I know, I don't care), because Black Widow is such an awesome character and because Scarlett Johansson is amazing at all of it and deserved that Oscar two years ago and I am still not over it. But yeah, the movie felt like formula and the problems with these things is that, as you get older, you start to notice little nuisances more easily. Like the fact that we see Natasha right before General Ross arrives to arrest her, and then we see her free and ready for Infinity War. But did she fight all of General Ross' team and got away? Did she break out of prison? Wouldn't these be incredibly awesome stuff for us to see? Also, I had not taken a stand on this but it seems I now have to; the accents. There is an argument currently made about whether it is worth having actors fake an accent, rather than just having an unspoken agreement among us that we will pretend they are using an accent. Here is where I am at. I see the benefit of them putting on a fake accent for realism purposes, only if it is indeed realistic. But having English and American actors all fake a Russian accent whilst speaking amongst themselves is just ridiculous. If they are all Russian, why not speak Russian? If the answer is 'let's ditch the realism and go for the most popular language in the world for the audience's sake' let's ditch the realism and have them use their own accents. Those were the main nuisances for me. But I did like it so, I will say this; while a common complaint is that the villain needlessly goes through the trouble to lay out their evil plan for the main character, I think that worked wonders here. Because that is Romanoff's skillset; because when she said 'Thank you for your cooperation' I was so happy I almost pooped. But didn't. I stand by that statement. I will also admit that I quite liked the feminist allegory; I know it's a shallow superhero movie, don't hate me, but it just felt appropriate for this character's backstory. But yeah, no real stakes, no real depth to the characters and overall, it was just not one of the most special MCU releases.
'Suicide Squad 2' I was excited for, not because I have any trust in the DCEU, Warner Bros or these characters in particular. But I have a great deal of trust in James Gunn. I fucking love James Gunn's style; 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 1.2' don't get enough credit and they get plenty of credit. Here is pretty much the aftertaste I had from this movie. I thoroughly enjoyed watching it; the direction, the banter, Idris Elba's biceps, but that movie was absolutely pointless. The characters were pointless, the relationships they developed were pointless, the plot was pointless, the fight scenes were underwhelming; I should have opened a thesaurus sometime after the second use of the word pointless. I loved Starro as the main villain and loved that it was given such humanity at the very end. Yes, the psychedelic, giant, squid-like, star-shaped, alien monster had a killer final line. Only James Gunn can bring such emotionality to an otherwise seemingly unsophisticated script. Remember how we all cried when Yondu died? And because all of us were crying no one made fun of us for doing so? Good times.
You see how my paragraph length corresponds to my interest in these movies as stated above? Expect a maximum of three sentences for Venom, I guess. I had written a whole blog post for the first installation, saying that while it was by no means a good movie, it had a lot of potential. So I have lied; I was actually quite excited for this movie. I had sort of placed my bets that this sequel would take all that worked from the first Venom movie and implement it in a good storyline with an interesting villain. Imagine my disappointment when all reviews said that this was so much worse than the first movie. Imagine how I felt when I finally watched it. I felt disappointed, I felt betrayed, I felt exposed, I felt discredited and I also felt right back where I was three years ago. Sticking up for an obviously bad movie, which, however, has just so much potential! The symbiote is a joy to watch, Tom Hardy playing a loser is great fun and the buddy-cop/split-personality relationship would work so well if Sony Pictures would just give this franchise a fair chance. Come on Sony! We are already mad at you for being a potential obstacle to Spidey's Avenger membership; give us a Venom movie with some heart.
"Why did I just waste ten minutes reading this disjointed, superficial commentary on three superhero films that I probably already have a much better articulated opinion on?", you may ask. The only explanation I have is that I hadn't posted anything in over four months and you were wondering if during this break I suddenly got better at writing. Well, joke is on you, nothing's changed. But I did miss geeking out and pretending to have an audience, so feel free to keep checking :) .
