The Huntsman: Winter's War Review

Snow White and the Huntsman was released back in 2012 and was surprisingly decent for what it was, despite having Kristen Stewart as one of the leads. Charlize Theron as Ravenna, the evil queen, stole the show and made it exciting and interesting; I wanted to see more of this amazing actress in this interesting role. Well, a movie pegged as a prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman was released and I was psyched to see more of Charlize Theron as Ravenna. Unfortunately, The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016) is a major flop and seems to go out of its way to avoid showing us what made the previous movie decent.

Betrayed by her evil sister Ravenna (Charlize Theron), heartbroken Freya (Emily Blunt) retreats to a northern kingdom to raise an army of huntsmen as her protectors. Gifted with the ability to freeze her enemies in ice, Freya teaches her young soldiers to never fall in love. When Eric (Chris Hemsworth) and fellow warrior Sara (Jessica Chastain) defy this rule, the angry queen orders them to be killed. Eric escapes, believing Sara to be dead. Many years later after Snow White had defeated Ravenna, The Magic Mirror Ravenna used as the source of her powers is stolen before it can be destroyed. Fearing the return of the Evil Queen, Eric is ordered to seek out the Mirror and destroy it. Accompanied by dwarves Nion (Nick Frost) and Gryff (Rob Brydon), Eric sets out to find and destroy The Mirror. But Freya also seeks The Magic Mirror for its power, and she sends one of her most lethal Huntsman to retrieve it first and kill Eric along the way if necessary.

The Huntsman: Winter's War was marketed and promoted as a prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman. That's just fine, of course. However, the story is more of a prequel/sequel mash up. The first fourth of the movie is a prequel and we are introduced to Freya, Sara, and Eric, and we see Ravenna's relationship with her sister. Then we get "Seven Years Later" on the screen and from that point on, everything is supposed to have happened after Snow White and the Huntsman, effectively making it a sequel. A sequel is also fine. But doing both in one movie is both confusing from a narrative perspective and a blatant cash grab from a film making perspective. Yeah, I wanted to see Ravenna's fantastic villain in action again, but this was a convoluted way to make it happen. Yes, it's just fine to have a few years pass in a story to shorten the span of time between important related events. But it's sloppy story telling if within that elapsed time, which we gloss over, a whole other movie's worth of events occur, the likes of which have a significant impact on rest of the story. I can appreciate a movie expecting it's audience to have seen the previous movie, but there's so much that The Huntsman assumes the audience knows and doesn't bother to explain. It makes the story confusing, convoluted, and poorly presented. The dreadful quality coupled with rehashed good quality special effects and big name actors makes this seem like a cash grab; there's no heart in it. It feels like it was thrown together at the last minute just to sell tickets.

The trailers for The Huntsman were pretty exciting. We got to see some shots of Freya and Ravenna throw down against each other with flashy special effects and action. That's the kind of larger-than-life stunts I appreciated about the first movie and wanted to see more of them in this second movie. Unfortunately, nearly every scene in which that sort of action occurred was shown in the trailer. I wanted to see lots of Ravenna doing her crazy thing; using beauty as a weapon, harnessing the power of The Magic Mirror, and manipulating blood in disturbing ways. Sure, we see some of that and what we see is pretty cool, but what we see is only toward the end during the climactic fight. We see a whole lot more of Freya, but we don't really see her use her powers much either. Granted, what made Ravenna so menacing in the first movie was how powerful and manipulative she was before she even resorted to using magic. Here, she's all super powers with none of the sophisticated subtlety of the previous film. The big fight at the end is probably the best part of the movie; but, it spends too much time with uninteresting characters mucking about in the woods doing very little pertaining to their intended quest.

The Huntsman does have a pretty good cast. Chris Hemsworth has shown us some good acting in the past. Charlize Theron is reprising a role I adored, and she was incredible in Mad Max: Fury Road. Emily Blunt is great actress as well. Nick Frost plays an excellent comic relief as usual. Really, the whole cast is good, they just had a horrible script to work with. The few characters returning from the previous film aren't as interesting or well developed as they were before. I actually feel sorry for the cast involved. It seems like they were present only to fulfill contractual obligations, not because they thought this would be a good movie. The best part of The Huntsman is that while Snow White is mentioned nominally a few times, Kristen Stewart does not appear in the movie.

The Huntsman: Winter's War boasts some nice special effects and a stellar cast, but neither one is enough to make up for the sloppy storytelling, lousy script, and convoluted nature of this entirely unnecessary sequel. This movie is disappointing no matter how you look at it. The returning characters aren't as interesting or fleshed out as they previously were, new characters were weak and bland, and important points of the story are left out under the assumption you've seen the previous movie. It seems like the producers thought that Elsa in Disney's Frozen was popular and tried to shoehorn a rip off of that character into a half-baked sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman. This movie lacks the heart and epic quality of its predecessor, and even that movie wasn't all that good to start with. I cannot recommend seeing The Huntsman: Winter's War even if you did like Snow White and the Huntsman. It's a blatant cash grab which I can't imagine anyone involved in it enjoyed making.

Mad Max: Fury Road Review

A couple of weeks ago a group of my guy friends got together with the express purpose of watching an over the top action movie. We ended up watching Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) which was in theaters in the spring earlier this year. I have never seen a Mad Max movie before and only had marginal interest in seeing them ever. Fury Road was insane, over the top, and completely amazing! Not only that, but it's possibly the cleanest R-rated move I've ever seen.

Years after the collapse of civilization, the tyrannical Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) enslaves apocalypse survivors inside the desert fortress, the Citadel. When the warrior Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) leads the dictator's five wives in a daring escape, she forges an alliance with a loner and former captive of Immortan Joe, Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), and one of Joe's religious zealot "War Boys," Nux (Nicholas Hoult) . Fortified in the massive armored truck, the War Rig, they try to outrun the ruthless warlord and his henchmen in a deadly high-speed chase through the Wasteland.

There are three Mad Max movies out there already, all of which star a young Mel Gibson. Originally, Gibson was intended to reprise the titular role. Fury Road's director, George Miller, ended up recasting the role because of controversies surrounding Gibson and because he really wanted Max to remain at a younger age. Tom Hardy took on the role and he was great. Granted, I don't know how his portrayal of the character compares to Mel Gibson's; I haven't seen the old Mad Max movies. Hardy was fantastic in The Dark Knight Rises and Inception, and he is still a dramatic force to be reckoned with here. Fury Road harkens back to the original films, usually in the form of Max's hallucinating about people he was unable to save. It is also a complete story on its own that doesn't rely on the assumption that you've seen the previous movies that were originally released over a quarter of a century ago. That's good, because a lot of people have been born in the last 30 years and not all movie attendees have seen the Mad Max movie. This introduces the world setting and character to a new audience. Fury Road wasn't an attempt to rekindle interest in the original films, but I certainly want to see them now!

This is a Mad Max movie; it features the titular character and the iconic post-apocalyptic world setting he inhabits. But oddly, Max himself isn't what the story revolves around. I'd argue that even though Max is the first character we're introduced to, Furiosa is the main character. It's her story, it's her adventure, it's her quest. Max is picked up and kind of tags along in the interest of their mutual survival and as a means of Furiosa achieving her quest to free Immortan Joe's wives from abuse and to find a safe place to call home. Max is mostly present only because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fury Road doesn't hint at a sequel, though there is probably enough material to make a couple. If that were to be done, I could see Furiosa eventually taking the helm of the stories set in the Mad Max universe because she is so remarkably interesting and such a highly compelling character. Max was great and all, but I'd be up for seeing more of Furiosa.

Surely you have seen Indiana Jones. Remember that crazy car chase where Indy falls down the front of a moving car, slides underneath said car to the back, climbs into the back and takes out the driver? It's a fantastic scene and highly enjoyable. Mad Max: Fury Road is basically two hours of that kind of scene. There is tons of over the top crazy action and it is relentless! Scene after scene of high stakes action, with just barely enough downtime to catch your breath before the next one starts. The stunts are nothing shy of incredible. People are constantly jumping from vehicle to vehicle, firing guns, things are exploding, enemies are defeated, allies are wounded or lost, vehicles spew fire and smoke as they accelerate, storms encroach upon the chaos, and it is absolutely fun! There's even some guy strapped to the top of a vehicle who inexplicably plays an electric guitar that also inexplicably shoots flames. Why? Who cares!? It's awesome! The stunts were unlike anything I'd ever seen before, and 90% of the special effects and stunts were practical; no CGI used for most of the whole movie. Due to the intensity of the stunts used in the movie, 150 stunt performers were used which included Cirque du Soleil performers and Olympic athletes. There are insane vehicles and cars used in the movie which defy reason, all of which were fully functional, again no CGI here.  This truly is a cinema spectacle to behold.

Fury Road was lauded as a pro-feminist film, though I'm not sure I agree with that entirely. Yes, it was fantastic to see a "women taking the reins" sort of movie. It features some women who choose to live without men, eventually fighting those men they chose to live away from. It highlights most men as villains complicit in the manufacturing of women designed to be breeders (none of this is depicted; only spoken about, or rather shouted about over the sound of cars and trucks racing at 90 mph). To be perfectly honest, the women (other than Furiosa) were not a big part of the movie and neither were their acting chops. The wives were a plot device that got some bits of dialogue. The wives' characters hardly had enough material to incorporate deeper issues. I still loved Furiosa, but I can't imagine women anywhere feeling empowered as feminists watching this movie. It's entertaining, absolutely, and it has a surprising amount of narrative heft, but Fury Road is basically a two-hour car chase and doesn't really tackle issues of feminism.

Fury Road might be the cleanest R-rated movies I've ever seen. It's "rated R for intense sequences of violence throughout, and for disturbing images." There is no sex scenes and little nudity (I'm sure I've seen worse in PG-13 movies). The action is very intense, but the violence is not gory nor visually explicit; anything notably gruesome takes place off camera, or in a few cases shows us just enough to get the gist of what has happened without dwelling on how grotesque it probably was. Furthermore, while this seems the perfect situation for it, I don't recall hearing a single word of profanity. There is talk of things that of a mature nature, but it's never shown. For example, the wives are basically sex slaves, treated as objects, abused, and intended for breeding purposes, but none of that is ever shown. It is more or less deserving of an R-rating, but Fury Road lies in the gray area between R and PG-13.

Mad Max: Fury Road was positively amazing. It's like a relentless two-hour assault on both the eardrums and the eyeballs. The structure is solid and even, at no point does it feel repetitive or drawn out. The supporting cast lacks refinement and depth, but Max and Furiosa are great characters that you can't help but be drawn to. The story is simple, but it's the action that is the backbone of this movie; it's simply fascinating. I'd love to see Tom Hardy continue in the Mad Max franchise, but more than that, I'd like to see Charlize Theron as Furiosa move it forward. I love good, strong, female protagonists, and Furiosa is great! All of the insane, over the top action sequences are positively incredible. This has got to earn awards for stunt work, and if none exists one should be made for the express purpose of giving it to this film. This is like action as art. I highly recommend seeing Mad Max: Fury Road. It's also worth owning if you enjoy action films at all.

Are you a fan of the old Mad Max films? What did you think of Mel Gibson being replaced by Tom Hardy? Comment below and let me know!

Pan Review

I do enjoy the concept of Peter Pan, though I've found the book and most of the movies it inspired to be subpar. Then along comes an unnecessary prequel movie that no one was asking for; Pan (2015). It certainly takes some creative liberties; Pan raises some questions no one thought to ask, introduces more of Neverland which we'd never thought to wonder about, and shows us events which don't make a lot of sense considering its source material. But on the other hand, it shows us some genuinely good scenes and some fantastic special effects.

Peter (Levi Miller) is a tiresome golden-child orphan in second-World-War London. But the nuns who run this orphanage are selling off their charges to Pirates who drop from the ceiling on bungee cords and pluck them from their beds before stowing them aboard an airborne galleon to Neverland. Head of the Pirate's exploits is Captain Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman), who imprisons Peter and the other boys as slave labor to mine for Pixum; a rejuvenating substance with magical properties. Peter meets a fellow minor named James Hook (Garrett Hedlund) and his accomplice, Mr. Smee  (Adeel Akhtar). The three steal one of Blackbeard's flying ships and escape into the forest where they are found and nearly executed by the natives before the Chief's daughter, Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara), notices Peter's pan flute pendant, left to Peter by his mother (Amanda Seyfried). The natives decide that Peter is their people's greatest hero, the legendary Pan. As part of his heritage, Peter should have the ability to fly, but lacks the ability to do so. Peter, Hook, and Tiger Lily race to reach the hidden Fairy Kingdom to enlist the help of the fairies to defeat Blackbeard before Blackbeard, himself, launches an attack to destroy all the fairies.

The story here has little rhyme or reason to it. It's a prequel for the sake of a prequel, and prequels notoriously anger fans and bore audiences. Sure there are images that herald back to the original Peter Pan, but it's all mashed up, weird, and inaccurate. It's like an origin-myth reboot of the Peter Pan story from studio executives who don't care how it got booted in the first place. And then for good measure, they shoehorn some steampunk where it has no business being, not unlike 2011's The Three Musketeers. Sure, there's some neat scenes, but the story raises questions no one was thinking to ask and then doesn't even bother answering them all. The story is very bland, by-the-book re-imagining of a classic story that was simply not called for.

On the other hand, there are some really neat scenes in Pan that probably couldn't have occurred without this particular twisted take on the classic story. One of the earliest action scenes involves Peter and a few other boys being abducted by a flying pirate ship in the middle of World War II London. Naturally, this draws the attention of the British air force and an exciting aerial battle between a cannon firing galleon and World War II fighter planes ensues. This scene was incredible! Later when making their escape from Blackbeard's clutches, Peter, Hook, and Smee rotate their flying ship upside down and have to cling on the ships rigging to avoid falling hundreds of feet to their deaths. That was another truly fun scene that probably couldn't have been done in the original setting.

The camera work was above average. Granted, a large portion of this movie had to be filmed in front of a green screen. So many of the impressive wide shots of detailed scenery were mostly impressive thanks to a large number of busy CGI artists. I think that in order to emphasize Peter's lack of ability to fly, there are a number of scenes that showcase some dizzying heights. The shots in those scenes were probably more impressive in 3-D. There were a number of scenes that made me stop and simply appreciate how well organized the shot looked, despite how bland the story is and how CGI intensive it is.

Ignoring the fact that nuns are in cahoots with pirates from another world, Pan does some weird things with its characters. James Hook is a miner in Blackbeard's mines, he's got an awkwardly fake cowboy accent, and seems to be a dreadful amalgamation of Indiana Jones and Slim Pickens from Dr. Strangelove. How this Stetson-wearing steampunk cowboy eventually becomes the infamous dreaded Captain Hook, I'll never understand. In what looks like it could have been a deleted scene from Mad Max: Fury Road, thousands of grubby slave-worker youths mine for Pixum while singing along to the rock band Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from their album "Nevermind." (Get it?) This is just as bizarre and out of place as watching some medieval peasants sing Queen's "We Will Rock You" in A Knight's Tale. Sure creative liberties were taken, but golly, some of them are just so weird it makes the movie hard to swallow. To be fair, though, it was a pretty good cover of Nirvana's song.

Of the many things I can rant about the Pan movie, the one that bothers me the most is how "The Natives" were handled. The orignal book has a tribe of wigwam-dwelling Native Americans who live in Neverland and are referred to by the author as "Redskins" or the Piccaninny Tribe. In what is possibly the best known rendition of Peter Pan, Disney's 1953 animated movie has these characters depicted in the most embarrassing of racial stereotyping and political incorrectness. To avoid risking such racial profiling, "The Natives" in Pan were a cluster of multiple racial backgrounds, and instead of living in wigwams, their culture seems to be inspired by Polynesians and the tree dwelling Ewoks of Star Wars. There are Asians, blacks, whites, pacific islanders, Hispanic, and middle-eastern people making up The Natives. Of course, the one Native that we're meant to be concerned with (Tiger Lily) is white, which ends up being another example of whitewashing in the film industry in spite of obvious attempts to appear multi-racial and politically correct. Pan seems to be trying to show us how open minded it is with the natives and falling flat on its face.

Pan does have some good scenes here and there, but overall it's a weak attempt to start a franchise specifically made in hopes to make sequels. The movie raises questions no one thought to ask about a solid, well-established piece of literature, and then doesn't bother answering them. This was probably in hopes of tackling them in a sequel. Pan has done so poorly in the box office and with critics that I doubt there will be one. Sure, the movie takes a generous number of creative liberties, but it retains the adventurous spirit of the classic tale and finds a few bursts of magic in its treatment of classic characters, though not enough to offset the rushed plot and GCI-fueled action. Some scenes I think are worth seeing on the big screen, but not at full ticket price; get a matinee ticket if you can. If you don't really value the big screen experience as much, wait for it on home video.

What is your favorite Peter Pan-inspired movie? Comment below and tell me why!