OH, THE HE-MANITY

Now playing in the multiplexes:

Masters of the Universe--The Mattel toy line which started this franchise was launched in 1982. I was in college at the time, so any nostalgic associations I have with it come from my nephews, both of whom were ardent enthusiasts, of the toys and of the Filmation cartoon series.

 The dolls, that is to say action figures, were sword-and-sorcery fantasy warriors from a realm called Eternia. The signature hero was the blond, brawny swordsman He-Man; his badass friend was Teela, and his stalwart sidekick and mentor was Man-at-Arms. The main villain was the diabolical usurper Skeletor, who had a skull for a face but the same chiseled physique as his enemies (one of my sisters used to say Skeletor was a "double-bagger"). Their clashes and conflicts were played out in various playsets, most notably "Castle Grayskull."

I always imagined the characters were on some higher order of existence than ours, governing the vagaries of good and bad in our Universe. If, say, He-Man and Skeletor were fighting and Skeletor landed a blow, that was a famine or a war somewhere; if He-Man landed a blow, that was a cure for a disease. Something like that.

In any case, there was a 1987 film version, with Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and Frank Langella playing it admirably straight as Skeletor. I remember having a good time at that film with some friends back then, but the new film, opening this weekend, is an improvement.

It stars Nicholas Galitzine as Adam, aka He-Man (the retro term is mocked in the film), who fled Eternia as a runty little boy when Skeletor's hordes invaded Castle Grayskull, and landed in Oklahoma City. Adam had been entrusted with the Sword of Power, which he promptly lost upon arrival in OKC.

Now a grown-up, he's good at his job in HR at some office, so he knows his way around teamwork and respecting the feelings of others. But when he tells his cosmic backstory to, say, a first date, or when he searches the computer in his cubicle for swords, the results are unfortunate.

Before long, boy and sword are reunited, and he and Teela (the appealing Camila Mendes) are back in Eternia hacking it out with Skeletor and his scurvy followers. The good guy allies include the giant greenish feline Cringer/Battle Cat, the “human periscope” Mekaneck and such walking double entendres as Fisto and Ram Man.

Director Travis Knight, working from a script by a gaggle, wisely deflates the grandiose material for laughs, and the cast is only too happy to abet him. Galitzine embraces the silliness, giving us a splendidly manic, machismo-free He-Man.

Idris Elba makes a genial, relaxed Man-at-Arms, and Alison Brie is droll as the half-heartedly wicked Evil-Lyn. Best of all is Jared Leto, lending rich, mellifluous line readings to Skeletor, constantly frustrated by his slow-on-the-take minions, who don't give him proper villainous support when he goes on a cackling jag.

As so often with American fantasy, sci-fi and superhero epics of recent years, it may be hard for many of us not to read political allegory into this goofy, glitzy mash-up of Arthurian legend, Star Wars and Sid and Marty Krofft. The troubled times we're living in seem, at most, only a little less weird and cartoonish than what we see onscreen in Masters of the Universe. And no less needful of heroism.

TRIUMPH OF THE QUILL

Opening this weekend:

Sonic the Hedgehog 2--This is the sequel to the 2020 screen treatment of the hero from the popular '90s-era video game from Sega. He's a determined-looking little goober with blue fur and quills who can run at supersonic speeds. He doesn't look all that much like a hedgehog to me, but whatever.

I never played the game and had no familiarity with the character, but I did review the first film, which I saw at a drive-in in Glendale in April of 2020; it was the last movie I actually saw at a theatre before the big shut-down began in earnest. If memory serves--the first film didn't exactly tattoo itself on my mind--this new film is better than its predecessor.

By which I mean, it's a little better. Starting with a prologue sequence set on "The Mushroom Planet" (a nod, possibly, to Eleanor Cameron's delightful "Mushroom Planet" books of the '50s and '60s?) to which the rotten Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey) has been exiled, Sonic 2 is noticeably more visually rich and imaginative than the first film. Settings range from Siberia to Hawaii to oceanic temples, and the action ranges from aerial chases to avalanches to battles with giant robots to dance-offs.

Robotnik escapes his "Portobello purgatory" and returns to Earth in cahoots with Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba), a giant extraterrestrial echidna, to pester Sonic (voiced, as before, by Ben Schwartz) about a magical green emerald. Knuckles doesn't look all that much like an echidna to me, but whatever. Our hero's principal ally, this time, is Tails (voiced by Colleen O'Shaughnessey), a fox with two bushy tails that allow him to fly, helicopter style. Tails does, at least, sort of look like a fox.

Along with James Marsden and Tika Sumpter, back from the first film as Sonic's surrogate parents, Shemar Moore, Natasha Rothwell and Adam Pally also pad out the cast. Carrey is at his snarkiest and wackiest, and seems to be having a good time, although he's reportedly announced his retirement.

On its own terms, all that's really wrong with Sonic 2 is that, at 2 hours 2 minutes, it's too long. It didn't seem to me that this was a movie that particularly needed to be three minutes longer than Citizen Kane.

Now streaming...

Lost Angel--This micro-budget indie debut feature by Simon Drake is set in a fictitious south England island community. As it opens, we see our heroine Lisa taking a ferry home. Her sister has died, apparently by suicide, but as Lisa investigates, she finds reason to doubt the official story.

As the plot progresses, it takes a low-key, matter-of-fact turn into the supernatural. After a slow start, weighed down by lachrymose music, the film gradually picks up a nice head of mystery-thriller steam. Drake uses the settings to generate atmosphere without it feeling forced, and the performances take hold, particularly that of the plaintive, quietly focused Sascha Harman as Lisa. By the end, Lost Angel is both gripping and highly touching.

SQUAD IS IN THE DETAILS

Opening this weekend...

The Suicide Squad--Sort of a Dirty Dozen for the comic book world, The Suicide Squad is a team of DC supervillains offered suicide missions in return for reduced sentences. The premise debuted in 1959 in the team-up title The Brave and the Bold, and was revived in the late '80s. It made it to the movies in 2016 as Suicide Squad; this sequel adds a "The" to the title.

James Gunn directed this darkly comedic adventure, in which the Squad, led by Bloodsport (Idris Elba) under the direction of Colonel Flag (Joel Kinnaman) and Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), invades a small South American country which harbors a sinister alien force. Wild gory violence ensues, making Deadpool look like Paw Patrol.

The film is self-consciously brutal and cynical, as well as foul-mouthed and sexually frank; as such it can at times feel a bit wearyingly like reading the nihilistic yet energetic poetry of an angry sixteen-year-old. Yeah, yeah, you may want to say, life sucks, got it.

Even so, there's a lot to like in the film. Elba, who wisely plays it very straight, is always good company, and Margot Robbie, back as The Joker's jilted, cheerfully lethal girlfriend Harley Quinn, is as endearing as ever. Peter Capaldi only has one really juicy scene as a mad scientist, but he makes it count, and Jon Cena is quite droll as gung-ho '60s-era superhero Peacemaker. My own favorite is lovely, kindly Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher, who can communicate with and command rats the way Aquaman can lead the fish.

I also loved Starro, the giant, colorful cyclopean starfish that menaces the team in the movie's nutty climax. He strongly resembles the aliens from the 1956 Japanese sci-fi flick known in the U.S. as Warning from Space, but he's a lot less benign.

TREE FOR ALL

Merry Christmas to everybody!

If you're a bit burned out on all the standard Christmas classics, I may have a new selection for you: This past Friday my film historian pal Richard hosted his annual Christmas party/movie night, and the feature selection was 1950's Trail of Robin Hood...

...a Roy Rogers western in ghastly "Trucolor" from Republic. The story concerns, I kid you not, crooked Christmas tree growers poaching tannenbaums off of Roy's pal Jack Holt's tree farm, because Holt wants to sell the trees cheap to needy families, and his competitors are afraid he'll drive down prices.

A bunch of other cowboy stars, like Rocky Lane, Kermit Maynard, William Farnum, Ray "Crash" Corrigan, Tom Tyler and Rex Allen, among others, show up as themselves to help Roy get Holt's trees to market. Needless to say, Roy is also aided by Trigger, here billed second in the credits as "The Smartest Horse in the Movies," and by his tireless dog Bullet.

It was awesome, and as Richard pointed out, it's a great illustration of how progressive the values championed by old school western programmers often tended to be: Evil businessmen or bankers versus heroes who stuck up for ordinary people.  Roy is even bilingual in this one, singing one verse of a wonderful cowboy swing song in Spanish.

One more Christmas weekend opening:

Molly's Game--Aaron Sorkin of A Few Good Men and The West Wing makes his feature directorial debut with this intriguing drama, which he also scripted in his usual fast-talking manner. It's based on a memoir by Molly Bloom, not the Joyce heroine but the hostess of insanely high-stakes celebrity poker games in L.A. and New York during the first decade of this century.

Her games were legal, until, inevitably, she crossed the line by taking a "rake," and they weren't anymore. She was busted by the feds, but refused to sing for them; against the prospect of years in prison, she clung to her personal and professional discretion.

It's a pretty engrossing story, and Sorkin's dialogue steers it briskly through its twists. The glue that holds the picture together, however, is the lead performance. Ably supported by Idris Elba as her standoffish lawyer and Kevin Costner as her standoffish Dad, Jessica Chastain has the best role so far of her young career, as a complex and flawed but ultimately brave and ethical woman who might have been referred to, in an earlier age of movies, as a "stand-up dame."

TIGERS & BEARS, OH MY!

Opening this weekend:

The Jungle Book—Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book is probably my favorite of that studio’s animated features. This is partly sentimentality—it’s the first movie to which I can remember being taken, when I was four or five years old. But it’s also looser, lighter, funnier and far richer in personality than a lot of Disney fare, with vibrant primary colors, wonderful voice acting and a couple of catchy big band numbers.

It was hard to imagine that this same charm could be captured in live action. There was a live-action attempt in the 1940s, made by the Korda Brothers and starring Sabu. Heavily narrated, it used live animal footage, but also had a much more human-oriented story.

But Disney’s new version of Kipling’s tales of Mowgli the wolf-raised “Man-Cub,” featuring a live actor as Mowgli and CGI as his animal co-stars, takes a different approach from either earlier version, and finds some unexpected grit and emotional range. Directed by Jon Favreau from a script by Justin Marks, the film uses bits of Kipling’s language and gets across some of his near-peerless storytelling panache. Bits of his icky colonialist presumption inevitably creep in here and there, too, though to my mind this film wasn’t nearly as bad on this score as The Lion King.

As before, young Mowgli (Neel Sethi) is menaced by the scarred tiger Shere Khan (voiced by Idris Elba), who bears him a grudge. It’s decided that the black panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) will return Mowgli to the “Man Village,” and episodic adventures ensue. He’s befriended by the leisure-loving bear Baloo (Bill Murray) and threatened by the python Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) and the primate King Louis (Christopher Walken), here presented much like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, before he and Shere Khan have their big confrontation.

It’s an odd hybrid, with the Brit actors declaiming high drama alongside Murray’s Chicago-accented shtick, but mostly it works. Lupita Nyong’o, voicing Mowgli’s lupine mother, brought tears to my eyes with her avowals of love for him. It should be noted that there are a few funny but retroactively wistful lines spoken by the late Garry Shandling, as the porcupine.

There are also a few missteps, the most glaring, for me, being the decision to allow Murray and Walken to perform their character’s songs from the 1967 film. Both are great performers in their own right, but musically Murray is no Phil Harris and Walken is no Louis Prima, and they seem to know it—their numbers feel halfhearted, almost sheepish.

Parents of smaller kids—and anyone sensitive to animal suffering—should be aware that the film is violent at times, especially by current kid-movie standards, and that a couple of characters are killed in the course of the story. As the saying goes, it’s a jungle out there.