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What Can We Learn From the Batman V Superman Trailer?

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Well about eight million trailers came out over the weekend, and they were all pretty good, but I am going to discuss the Batman V Superman trailer for a little bit.  You can watch it again here to refresh your memory.  It was a pretty nuts trailer, and it was a teaser in the truest sense.  It showed a bunch of stuff without giving away any plot, or did it?

First off people have gone a little crazy for Superman.  I mean look at the picture above.  He is hanging out with The Warriors for some reason, and people keep kneeling down in front of him.  He clearly has some fans.  While they were showing people loving Superman, what people were saying about him was quite different.  People are unsure of him, and they don’t trust him.  The best line came from Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor, “Devils don’t come from Hell beneath us, they come from the sky.”

I am guessing Luthor’s little speech is for Batman.  Batman doesn’t trust people with a lot of power (though he and Superman do become best friends), so Luthor is playing on Batman’s paranoia and letting Batman do all his heavy lifting.  It is a good plan.  They didn’t show it (they did show Superman working with the military though), but I am guessing Superman is getting similar speeches from the military about Batman.  Except more along the lines of, “can we trust someone who works on their own without any oversight?”  The military is big on oversight.

Finally we get the line that had twitter all a buzz.  Batman’s quote, “Tell me, do you bleed?”  I am glad Bruce spent some of his money on a voice modulator.  That should save him quite a bit on throat lozenges.  I am guessing after that they do what superheroes do best, they fight until they become friends.  Which is the real question I have with this movie.  How long is the fighting until they are friends going to take?  Will it be like the first hour, and then they will figure out that they were duped.  Then they will team up to take down Lex and tell the military to get their own hitman?  That would leave an hour for the rest of the Justice League, or will that take two hours and the Justice League stuff will be like fifteen minutes.  It is hard to say, but it will be a long ten months to find out.

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A Daredevil Worth Watching!

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Netflix gave me a birthday present not to long ago when they launched their new comic book based TV show Daredevil.  This show has nothing to do with the unfortunate Ben Affleck movie, well besides that it features the same character.  It is still Matt Murdock beating up bad guys, but now it takes place in a believable world, and it is not pulling its punches.

It is a tale as old as time (sing it Angela).  An orphan wants to makes his home a better place, so he uses his extraordinary abilities to take down crime.  In this case that orphan is the blind Matt Murdock played by Charlie Cox who I am sure you know from Stardust.  You don’t know him from Stardust?  You are a terrible person!  Well back to the review,  Murdock, a local defense attorney, is trying to cleanup his part of New York City known as Hell’s Kitchen, but he is finding it harder than he anticipated.

What I love about this series is that it is so much more brutal than any other Marvel property as of late.  When the good guys and bad guys go at it, they really go at it.  There is blood and bone crunching, and people will die.  While it fits nicely within the Marvel Universe, you can definitely tell this corner of it was inspired by Frank Miller’s (Sin City) run with the character in the 90’s.  It has that dark washed out feel to it that is quite different than the bright and almost cheery Marvel Movie Universe.

If Daredevil is setting the tone for things to come in the Marvel TV Universe, I am very excited.  It shows that Marvel is finding more stories to tell outside the Avengers.  Not to rag on Agents of SHIELD which has now found its footing, but some separation from the movies will do wonders for these new TV shows.  With the good work they have done with Daredevil, I can’t wait to see AKA Jessica Jones!

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John Wick, Shmee’s Take!

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The Paladin already did a great review on John Wick, but since this my site I figure I would let you know what I thought about it.  I know that Keanu Reeves has been busy murdering his career lately, but he finally made the kind of movie that he was born to be in.  An old school action movie with a very green/blue tint that lets him murder a bunch of people.  It at least gives the poor career a brake.

When I say old school, I mean old school.  This movie follows every action movie trope by the letter: John Wick is an amazing assassin who gave it all up for a girl; He has to get back in the game because a mob boss’ son is an idiot who screws with him; There are cool secret assassin hangouts that have ‘rules’; Clubs are places shootouts happen, and women of course are not to be trusted.

I think it works so well because it slavishly devotes itself to those tropes.  Instead of trying to be something new, they did something old, but just really well.  The only thing they changed was that the mob boss’ son killed Wick’s dog and not his wife because … well … the wife was already dead.  She was pre-killed, died from an illness of some sort, and the dog was a posthumous gift from her.  So it was still all about her.  We just didn’t have to see her get needlessly tortured and killed.  I guess that is better?

All the tropes and story clichés would be pointless if the stunt work and action was not good, and it is pretty darn great.  I am not sure that Wick reloads his gun enough, but overall it is pretty top notch.  Solid movie-fu, and over the top gun play make this movie fun to watch.  You can tell the directors, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, are stunt workers because they framed all the action perfectly.  No shaky blurry action cam here.  You get to see everything.

The actors all play their one dimensional characters well.  That is the bonus of using clichéd writing.  We know how these characters are supposed to act, and the cast delivers on those roles.  With the likes of Keanu Reeves, Willem Dafoe, Michael Nyqvist, and Dean Winters there was never a doubt they knew what they were doing.

John Wick will not win any awards, unless it is a Taurus World Stunt Award (it is up for Best Fight and Best Stunt Coordination), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a solid movie with some great action.  If you want to see a lot of people get the crap beaten out of them this is a good film to watch.  If you want a story that moves you, not so much.