It’s interesting to see what taking some time off can do to your health.  For Marvel Studios, the post-Endgame years have been a bit of a roller coaster.  The delay in releases caused by the Covid-19 pandemic forced Marvel to reshuffle their plans, and this created a bit of a backlog for them as they were trying to move forward with their newest phases.  As a result, their yearly output nearly doubled, with as many as three or four new titles making it to theaters within a given year.  This was coupled with the studio also making their big push into streaming aboard their parent company’s newest platform, Disney+.  For a moment, audiences were happy to see the MCU back on the big screen, but as the bombardment of new titles kept coming as Marvel tried to relieve themselves of the backlog, audiences started to feel a sense of fatigue from all of the stuff Marvel had to offer.  Couple this with the inner turmoil at the Disney Corporate offices with the chaos caused in the short lived Chapek era, and people were starting to believe that Marvel had lost it’s magic touch.  The movies were not being received as warmly as the ones released in the lead up to the end of the Infinity Saga, and people cared even less about the shows that were appearing on Disney+, with some notable exceptions.  This growing super hero fatigue was also not unique to Marvel either, as DC was also experiencing the final death throws of their struggling DCEU.  It all came to a head in the year 2023, where Marvel saw it’s biggest losses as a brand.  Though Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 managed to succeed at the box office, the other films that year (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels) became the first ever money losers in MCU’s stellar history.  All of this led to Disney CEO Bob Iger making the decision to slam on the brakes with Marvel’s output and have the studio take a break in order to get things back on track.

In the whole of 2024, Marvel only had one film release in theaters; a significant reduction in their yearly output.  But, that single film would end up being the sure fire Deadpool & Wolverine (2024), a long awaited sequel to one of the bigger franchises around one of Marvel’s most popular characters.  While Marvel didn’t have the benefit of multiple mega-hits to carry them through the whole year, they still benefited from having Deadpool & Wolverine carry the spotlight all by itself.  The movie would end up grossing $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office, their biggest hit in years, and second only to Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) in the post-Endgame era.  The pause in the output also allowed the studio more time to re-organize themselves and put more work into the projects that were having trouble in production.  This year, Marvel is getting back to their regular ambitious output of 3 in one year.  Later this summer, we are getting the team up movie called Thunderbolts* (2025) and the long anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025).  But before then, we are getting the release of one of the more troubled productions Marvel has had in their whole history.  This new film is Captain America: Brave New World (2025), which is the fourth film centered around the iconic character, although this version is not the same Captain that we’ve known up to now.  At the end of Avengers: Endgame (2019), the original Captain America Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) literally aged out of the persona, and he left his iconic shield to his trusted friend Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), aka The Falcon.  In between then and now, there was a Disney+ plus series called The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which followed up the events of Endgame by having Sam Wilson make that transition even more towards accepting the role of Captain America, a position that he was reluctant to take before.  Now, having finally donned the red, white, and blue, Brave New World gives Sam Wilson’s Captain the full cinematic spotlight.  The only question is, does the new direction of Captain America as a character mark a fresh new path for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or does the film unfortunately still bear the scars of their misfortune and disorganization over the last couple of years.

The story of Brave New World begins after the events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  Sam Wilson (Mackie) has fully assumed the mantle of Captain America, fulfilling the wishes of the late Steve Rogers who bestowed him the Vibranium shield.  The next generation Captain America has been conducting missions in assistance of the United States army alongside his wingman Joaquin Torres, who has inherited the role of The Falcon from him.  After successfully retrieving a key piece of cargo necessary for the US Government to sign a peace treaty, Wilson and Torres are invited to the White House to meet with the newly elected President, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford).  Ross wants Sam to rebuild the Avengers team, which is a shocking proposition from him considering he used his influence to dismantle the Avengers with the implementation of the Sakovia Accords, which landed Sam in prison for a brief while.  Along with Sam and Joaquin is an old friend named Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), who is a super soldier serum enhanced fighter that later was abandoned by his country and thrown into prison for decades in order to hide the truth about his powers.  While President Ross is giving a presentation to world leaders at this White House Summit, Bradley suddenly stands up and attempts to assassinate him.  He is arrested and after questioning reveals that he has no memory of the incident.  Against the President’s wishes, Sam seeks answers and begins investigating further based on his assumption that Bradley had been set up.  He does some digging and finds a secluded, off the grid army base where it appears secret scientific experimentations had been taking place.  There, they find Dr. Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), who had been imprisoned there ever since he helped create the Abomination that attacked the Hulk over 16 years prior.  After being exposed to gamma radiation himself, Sterns’ brain had doubled in size and functionality, and he had been exploited for his intellect by then General Ross for all these years.  He’s now seeking revenge on Ross, and it involves manipulating world governments into fighting each other over a new element called Adamantium that was discovered in the newly emerged Celestial Island in the Indian Ocean.  Complicating matters even more, Captain America is also dealing with a rogue mercenary named Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito), head of a group named Serpent.  Captain America and the Falcon must act fast in order to unravel Sterns’ master plan and clear Bradley’s name.  But Stern’s plans run even deeper than they thought, including a stealth plan in place involving President Ross himself.

The road to the big screen was not easy for Captain America: Brave New World.  Greenlit towards the end of the Chapek era, the movie seemed to struggle from the very beginning.  It was delayed multiple times, with a major one forced upon it in the middle of shooting by the strikes of 2023.  It also faced multiple rewrites and reshoots, as it seemed like Marvel and Disney were desperately trying to salvage what had been a poorly planned out production.  But, the movie has finally arrived in theaters at a time that Marvel hopes to start off a major revival of their struggling MCU.  And after all the trouble that went into making the movie, it unfortunately results in a movie that is just okay.  It’s far from the worst thing that Marvel has made, and yet it also pales in comparison to it’s best.  Of the four Captain America movies that have been made by Marvel, this is unfortunately the weakest one, which is a sad thing to say for a movie that is meant to introduce us to the next generation of the beloved character.  The main problem with the movie is that you can  really feel the mechanics of all the re-workings this movie went through.  The different acts of the film all feel like they came from entirely different drafts by different writing teams.  The first act is an exposition heavy re-introduction of the characters, while the middle act is a taut mystery thriller, and the final act is yet another bombastic, CGI-enhanced Marvel action sequence.  There are individual moments throughout that do work on their own, but the movie struggles to hold it all together.  And you can definitely feel where the reshoots happened in contrast with the other scenes; they stick out like sore thumbs.  Giancarlo Esposito’s Sidewinder was one of those late editions to the film added in reshoots, and you can definitely tell that he was shoe-horned into the movie.  None of it though is exactly awful to watch; it’s just disappointing when all the different elements don’t lead to a cohesive whole.

One of Marvel’s major problems since Avengers: Endgame is that they have struggled to define their direction in the next phase.  The Multiverse Saga as it’s been defined has certainly had some high points, but the track record that Marvel had sustained for most of the last decade at a high point has more recently been more of a roller coaster.  The big problem is that more of their movies now feel more like a new episode of an on-going series rather than films that can stand well on their own.  That’s what made the MCU so special in the Infinity Saga years; that they were working with so many different flavors and allowing them to define themselves in addition to serving toward the ultimate goal of the Avengers films.  Now, each Marvel property is beginning to feel the same.  Some of it has still worked (Guardians, Deadpool), and I’ve been a bit more forgiving than other critics of Marvel’s recent direction, because as long as I come away entertained I will still give a movie a pass for some of it’s faults.  The problem with Brave New World is that the faults get in the way of the entertainment value of the movie.  It’s humorless for the most part, and the action scenes are showing me nothing new that I haven’t seen before from Marvel.  There is still some competency in it’s production that helps it to avoid the basement of the MCU.  I wasn’t angered by the film like I was by Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania or Iron Man 3 (2013).  But, the lack of anything special about the movie also leaves this in the bottom half of the MCU.  But, Marvel at it’s worst can still be better than most.  The best thing I can say about the movie is that I would definitely choose it over any of Sony’s Spiderverse films, but that’s a phenomenally low bar.  It’s about on par with some of the average DCEU films at worst.  Marvel definitely needs to relearn how to allow these movies to stand on their own again.  For this movie, not only is it necessary to have seen The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Disney+ series, but the film also references the previous Captain America movies, the Avengers movies, 2008’s nearly long forgotten The Incredible Hulk, and surprisingly also Eternals, which thankfully gets a long overdue resolution to one of it’s hanging plot threads.  And with the introduction of Adamantium in this film, it’s likely that this movie will be a stepping stone for the eventual introduction of the X-Men in the MCU.  There’s a lot going on in this film, but what it’s not doing is making you care for the actual plot that’s happening in the moment within the movie.

The saving grace for this movie is the very talented and entirely game cast.  Anthony Mackie is charming as ever, and brings an infectious magnetism to the role.  While the character himself seems to feel lost in his own movie, Mackie’s performance still shines through and you can’t help but like the guy through all the movie’s faults.  What is really impressive though is just how well Harrison Ford fits in playing the role of President Ross.  Ford is taking over a role that had previously been played by the late William Hurt in a span of 13 years and 5 movies.  He had some big shoes to fill in a role that so many people associated with another legendary actor, and yet Ford manages to make the part his own and successfully carry on the legacy of the character into this new chapter.  I love the sincerity of Ford’s performance here.  Though this is Ford’s first ever performance in any super hero movie, let alone a Marvel one, he actually feels right at home and you quickly get used to him in the role of Thunderbolt Ross.  The villains of the movie also stand out.  Credit to Tim Blake Nelson for patiently waiting for his chance to return to the role of Samuel Sterns after a 16 year absence.  While some of his villainous plan doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the script, Nelson still gives Sterns a menacing presence that helps him to feel like an actual threat.  And despite feeling like a last minute addition shoehorned into an already crowded film, Giancarlo Esposito does make the most of his time and steals every scene he is in as Sidewinder.  But perhaps the best performance of the film belong to Carl Lumbly as Isaiah Bradley.  He brings a subtle bit of gravitas to the character, and you really feel the weight of the history of this forgotten man.  He brings a lot of powerful emotion into the film that it otherwise lacks, and you can imagine a whole film’s worth of backstory that would be worth exploring about his character.  So while the script leaves a lot to be desired, the actors still make the film enjoyable enough to warrant at least a watch.

The visuals are a bit of a mixed bag.  In some moments, the movie feels flat like an episode of a Disney+ Marvel series.  But in other moments, it has some impressive visuals that live up to the high standards of the MCU.  The finale in particular really feels like it had the majority of the budget invested into it, as we see Captain America go into battle with a big CGI creature that you probably already can guess who it is.  The third act, which is by far the most cohesive part of the movie, feels like the section that experienced the least amount of changes during the re-working of the film, and it shows in the visuals.  The way that some scenes feel bland and lacking in style while others are inventive in their visuals is another tell tale sign of the re-shoots that occured after principle photography.  The re-shoots probably had a very different crew working on them, and that’s what leads to this feeling of inconsistency in the look of the film.  The movie definitely lacks the visual punch that the Russo Brothers brought to the other Captain America movies, or the distinct styles of Taika Waititi, James Gunn, or Ryan Coogler who left their mark on the MCU over the years.  Director Julius Onah is a competent enough director, but his approach here doesn’t deliver anything striking.  His style just falls into the same house style that Marvel movies have become increasingly more reliant upon.  The air battles in particular don’t have the visceral impact that they should.  Marvel probably should’ve taken some cues from the flight scenes in Top Gun: Maverick to help make their moments feel more exciting.  Again, it’s not terrible, but you really get the sense that it could have been better.  There’s no risk-taking involved in the making of this movie.  You can sense the makings of a great MCU movie within the ingredients on display here, but the complete product just stands as safe and predictable.  As Marvel heads towards their final phase of their Multiverse Saga, they need to do a bit better than safe and predictable.

Captain America: Brave New World has elements that work, and potential to be great; but unfortunately it just doesn’t justify it’s need to exist in the greater continuity of the MCU.  It’s a small chapter in a greater narrative, and one that most people are likely going to forget they even watched at all.  Marvel is loosing the way that their movies felt like events.  While they can still knock one out of the park occasionally, like last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine, they are more often making films that just barely cross the line into acceptability.  There are some great performances in the film, notably from Mackie, Ford and Lumbly.  But, the plot feels thin and inconsequential compared to Marvel at it’s best.  The sad thing is that it undermines Anthony Mackie’s debut as the star of the Captain America franchise, which should matter especially if he’s got a bigger future as a part of the MCU going forward.  He’s demonstrated that he can fill the part quite well; it’s just that Marvel needs to find a better story to play to his strengths as an actor much more.  I would like to see a more about his friendship with Isiah Bradley, and why it matters to Sam Wilson to be carrying that torch of Captain America, which holds a special kind of burden in itself, especially given the fact that unlike Steve Rogers and Isaiah Bradley, he has not been enhanced with super soldier serum.  My hope is that the mediocre elements of this film were more of a bi-product of the tumultuous Chapek era, where Marvel had less in-house creative control, and that the future films in the MCU are able to stand well enough on their own in addition to being part of the cinematic universe.  I’m actually really looking forward to the rest of the 2025 MCU slate; especially with the very promising Fantastic Four reboot.  Captain America: Brave New World is a shining example of the things that Marvel has been loosing their grip with in terms of quality control in their movies, but hopefully it’s also the point where their creative backslide starts to reverse itself.  It’s hard to know if the reshoots did more good than bad for this film.  We do know that they weren’t enough to reverse course completely.  Brave New World still resulted in a flawed by still watchable film.  Longtime Marvel fans may get a kick out of some of the more fan service moments in this movie, but otherwise most people will move on quickly to the greener pastures that are on Marvel’s horizon coming later this year and into the future.

Rating: 6.5/10

No other studio can claim to be the one and only home of cinema’s greatest monsters as Universal Studios has become.  Going back to their early years, it can be said that Movie Monsters made Universal what it is today.  Whether it’s Frankenstein’s Monster, Count Dracula, the Invisible Man or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, these monsters are an institution that Universal proudly claims as their own.  But, apart from the Creature from the Black Lagoon which is an original cinematic creation, none of the other movie monsters belong solely to Universal, mostly originating from literary sources well before cinema existed.  So, to keep their profile up as the kings of monster movies, Universal has had to find new ways to refresh their stable of monster characters for new generations.  One of the most ill-fated attempts to bring Universal Monsters back to the big screen was the bungled attempt at creating a Marvel style Cinematic Universe that tied all the monsters together called Dark Universe.  Universal had high hopes that they could sustain a blockbuster cinematic universe based around their monsters, and they were getting many big names on board to participate, including casting Javier Bardem for their Wolf Man and Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man.  Unfortunately, the Dark Universe flamed out fast due to the failure of The Mummy (2017), which even the star power of Tom Cruise couldn’t save.  The Wolf Man and Invisible Man films were quickly scrapped before they even started cameras rolling, and the Dark Universe was effectively deader than Dracula in less than a year.  With the future of the Universal Monsters in limbo, the studio needed to find a new path forward to help revitalize these characters again.  And they found their savior in a surprising collaborator that would turn out to be the ideal shepherds in giving new life for these monsters; a production company called Blumhouse.

Blumhouse, the company founded by producer Jason Blum, revolutionized the horror movie genre by putting an emphasis on economically made horror films that were more auteur driven.  Because their films were more experimental and cost a fraction of what other horror films were made with, Blumhouse managed to consistently turn a profit and this got the attention of Hollywood who saw their blueprint for success as a perfect way to revitalize a horror genre that had become bloated and stagnant.  Universal, who wanted to save face from the failure of the Dark Universe and bring new life to their monster properties, were eager to partner with Blumhouse, and so an exclusive pact was made by the two entities.  Blumhouse would now have the backing of a major studio, while Universal would have proven horror powerhouse managing their characters in a way that would peak audience interest again.  One of the key new horror filmmakers to emerge within the Blumhouse family was Australian actor turned director Leigh Whannell.  Whannell developed his horror resume as the writer for some of James Wan’s most notable films in the genre, namely Saw (2004) and Insidious (2010).  Starting with Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) he has been directing and writing horror films, and was given the opportunity by Blumhouse to launch their new partnership with Universal in re-imagining their stable of classic monsters.  His first feature under this experiment was a modern re-telling of The Invisible Man (2020).  Though the film had it’s box office run cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic, it still managed to land well with both critics and audiences.  People praised it’s fresh take on the classic movie monster, with it’s POV shifted to the vicitim of the Invisible Man (an unforgettable Elisabeth Moss) whose story became an effective allegory about domestic violence committed on women.  For his follow-up, Whannell is now getting the chance to take on another classic Universal Monster with his re-imagining of the Wolf Man (2025).  The only question is, can it live up to the bold new take that we saw in The Invisible Man, or does it fall short and makes the Blumhouse experiment unfortunately short-lived.

The film opens 30 years in the past, where a young boy named Blake (Zac Chandler) is taken out hunting with his father Grady (Sam Jaeger).  Grady is tough on his son, wanting him to take the idea of hunting and survival in the wild seriously.  While deep in the woods in a secluded valley in the Oregon mountains, the encounter a mysterious creature that is unlike anything else they’ve seen before; something like a wolf, but one that can stand up straight like a human.  The close encounter spooks Grady and Blake, and they quickly retreat from the forest.  Locals consider Grady crazy, but he’s determined to get proof of what he saw.  Cut forward to the present day, grown up Blake (Christopher Abbott) is now a father himself, to a young girl named Ginger (Matilda Firth).  Both Blake and Ginger have a strong bond with each other, with Blake demonstrating a more compassionate hand at parenting than his father.  Ginger’s mom, Charlotte (Julia Garner) on the other hand is too pre-occupied with work to be invested in her daughters life, and it causes some friction between them as well as with Blake.  One day, Blake receives the news that his father, who has been missing for quite some time, has now been legally declared dead by authorities in the State of Oregon, and that Blake has now inherited the farm house that they used to live in 30 years ago.  Blake convinces his wife and daughter that they should get away from the city and stay at the farm for a couple of weeks in order to reconnect as a family.  On their way there, Blake swerves off the road after seeing a scary looking creature in the middle of the road.  After their camper crashes, Blake tries to escape the vehicle, but ends up getting his arm slashed by the same beast that caused him to crash in the first place.  They safely make it to the farm house, but while inside, Blake begins to feel very sick.  Over time, his illness worsens, upsetting his family.  More and more his body becomes more twisted and beast like, and he can no longer communicate with his family.  As the night goes further on, Charlotte and Ginger have to come to terms that their protector himself may in fact attack them as he slowly turns into a Wolf Man.

One thing that the movie has to contend with is the familiarity of the Wolf Man in cinema.  Lon Chaney Jr. famously brought the character to life originally on the big screen in 1941’s The Wolf Man.  Universal would once again revisit the character with the 2010 film starring Benicio Del Toro.  Both films are notable for setting the story within a Victorian setting, which Leigh Whannell departs from in his mostly original, modern adaptation of the classic story.  Here he leaves foggy, cold England for foggy, cold Oregon, which ultimately still works thematically for this story.  In general, Leigh makes quite a few changes to the overall character that I would say mostly benefits the story as a whole.  The thing that I like the most about the movie is the way it handles the transformation of the Blake into a Wolf Man.  It still follows the mythology that we all know, where the wolf’s curse is like a contagion; once you’ve been attacked by a Wolf Man and survive, you become one yourself.  The thing that this movie does different is that it’s not an instantaneous change.  Blake gradually turns into the Wolf Man, with the movie really selling us on the fact that it is a painful process.  The middle section of this movie, where most of the transformation is happening, is the strongest part, where you slowly see Blake’s humanity slipping away with every new wolf trait he develops.  It starts with a stronger sense of smell, then acute hearing, and then ultimately seeing the world through a broader color spectrum in a stunning visual.  The movie treats the tragedy of this Wolf Man curse more seriously than most other versions of this story we’ve seen, and it’s also fairly bleak about it too.  There’s no salvation for Blake; no reversal after the light of a full moon is gone.  Once he’s been bled by the creature, he’s already doomed.

The problem that keeps the movie from being a bigger success is that after the transformation happens, the movie gets a bit repetitive.  With the focus shifted to the characters of Charlotte and Ginger, they unfortunately spend the whole rest of the movie on the run from both Blake and the other Wolf Man haunting the woods around the farm.  There’s no more development to their characters other than that.  The movie could have played more into the mother and the daughter mending their strained relationship through the shared ordeal, but the movie doesn’t make a lot of time for that.  Instead, it sort of pads the run time, with the characters making decisions to run and hide in different ways.  The go outside for a bit, than run back into the farm house, then back outside again, and then back into the house.  The repetition of the third act really begins to undermine the stronger parts of the story found in the film’s first half.  None of it is bad per say, it makes you wish that the film had just a little bit more to say other than having it’s two main heroines constantly be put into harms’ way.  It’s a downgrade from what Whannell was able to do with The Invisible Man, which really did a great job of building the tension of the movie into something fresh and unexpected.  It was a movie that took the familiar movie monster and took the story in a different direction than what you’d expect, which really enhanced the tension and the fear factor as well.  There’s beginnings of some good ideas in the early part of this movie, and some of them lead to a great re-imagining of the wolf man’s transformation, but when the movie decides it wants to go into an action movie climax, that’s where it definitely falls short.

One the things that definitely holds the movie together are the performances.  Christopher Abbott in particular really shines in what is very much a demanding role.  A lot of the success of the transformation scenes has to come from the effectiveness of the performance of the actor.  Abbott does a great job of portraying a man going through a terrifying and painful transformation.  The best part of this is that he never goes over the top with any of it.  When he is dealing with the most painful parts of his transformation, he characterizes it like a man drowning in a deep fever, balled up and trembling.  And once he goes into the final steps of his transformation, he believably portrays the physicality of a wild creature.  There’s a chilling moment early on before he makes his full transformation, where he begins gnawing at his open wound on his arm, like how a real wolf would tackle a piece of meat.  It’s a moment in the performance where an actor could get the physicality wrong, and it shows that Christopher Abbott must have studied up on how to act like a wolf in that scene.  The make-up effects are pretty convincing too, which follows in the proud tradition of the Wolf Man being a ground-breaking character in the art of prosthetic make-up, going all the way back to when Cheney played him.  Abbott completely disappears once the creature takes his final form, and it’s a testament to the make-up artists and Abbott’s committed physical acting that helps to make the transformation feel believably realistic.  Julia Garner’s character may be a tad underwritten, but she still does a fine job acting in this role.  I like the fact that she refrains from going over the top in her more frightened scenes.  The way she plays it, as someone who tries to remain in control even as she is paralyzed with fear, is just the right angle to take with the character.  Matilda Firth also works well enough as Ginger, helping her feel natural as the child in this scenario.  She’s sweet, but not saccharine or creepy, which is the binary dynamic that most children in horror movies tend to fall on either side of.  The movie overall has a very limited cast to work with, and thankfully the three main players here all have strong on screen chemistry with each other.

While Leigh Whannell’s adaptation of the Wolf Man may lack something in it’s storytelling, it makes up for some of that with it’s style.  Whannell does some really creative things with this re-telling of the familiar story, particularly in the visuals and with the sound-editing.  One of the best visual ideas is in showing shifting perspectives between the characters once Blake begins his transformation.  This really helps to sell the horrifying change that is going on with his body.  He begins to have the eyesight of a wolf, which allows him to see things through an infrared spectrum.  He’s better able to see things in the dark, and all the colors are take on a weird psychedelic look too.  There’s a really effective scene where it shifts from his family’s perspective, where Charlotte and Ginger are hiding within pitch black darkness inside of a barn and the camera moves away from them and shifts midway through the shot into the night vision of Blake’s POV before shifting back to the darkness again, all in a oner shot.  The way that they use sound in the movie is also incredible.  The films does an effective job of creating the cacophony of exaggerated sound that Blake now hears after his transformation, and how he no longer can hear his family speak to him clearly anymore.  There’s also a grotesque, crunchiness to the sounds his body makes when the bones inside of him change during the transformation.  And once he is in wolf mode, the movie makes his deep breath growling sound all the more otherworldly.  There’s a lot of great craft put to use in this movie, and Whannell succeeds in grounding his Wolf Man story in an almost realistic portrayal.  You really get the visceral feel of the horrific transformation that Blake goes through, and it does builds the fear up of what this creature ultimately becomes, with something that both feels of the natural world but also out of pure fantasy as well.

Overall, Leigh Whannell does a good job of giving the classic character of the Wolf Man a fresh new portrayal on the big screen.  It does seem like he was overly concerned with getting the transformation part right, and the rest was treated more as an afterthought.  When Blake goes through his transformation, it’s where the movie works the best, and it’s a testament to the make-up effects team, the visual and audio effects engineers, and Christopher Abbott all delivering together for making this a more engaging experience overall.  It’s only when Leigh Whannell takes the movie into the repetitive final act that you see the shortcomings of this adaptation, because it ultimately leads nowhere.  The Invisible Man ultimately stood out much better because of the unexpected turns it took with it’s story, which also gave us an interesting twist on the narrative you wouldn’t have seen in any other version.  Ultimately, this Wolf Man does go down the road you expect it to, and that is disappointing, given all the other things it gets right.  The surprising thing is that it’s a very bleak take on the story.  There’s no salvation for Blake; once he’s infected, he’s done for, and the movie is a sad march to death for him as you see his humanity slip away.  Not every horror movie needs to have a message to it, but I would’ve liked to see the film present some idea of what this arc for Blake was all about.  Was it saying something about inherited trauma, and how violence is passed down through generations?  I just wish there was a more clever edge to this story.  In the end, it’s definitely a strong presentation of style, as Whannell does a great job with setting up atmosphere and giving a visceral portrayal of the horrific Wolf Man transformation.  It makes me wonder what other fresh new takes we’ll see of Universal’s Movie Monsters from Blumhouse in the coming years.  This movie, and to a greater extant The Invisible Man, demonstrate that it was a good idea for Universal to make Blumhouse the caretakers of these characters.  Let’s hope that both studios continue to do brave new things with these classic movie monsters so that more generations can continue to appreciate these icons for years to come.  It’s not a perfect horror adaptation, but it can still work as a howling good time with some really terrifying and effective horror elements there to give us a good fright.

Rating: 7/10

The trend of Disney re-makes of their classic animated films has become a, shall we say, contentious thing within the fandom.  While some animation fans are happy to see these classics re-imagined in a live action, plenty more are not so happy.  The argument is that Disney is not adding anything new to these movies, and that their creation is purely for a cynical cash grab.  While there is merit to those arguments, I for one try to judge each of these remakes on their own.  The best remakes are the ones that can justify their existence, and make the case that a live action version of a classic animated film is there to compliment it rather than overshadow it.  Disney, for the most part has been all over the place with their re-makes.  Of the movies, I would say one is an improvement over the original (Pete’s Dragon), while quite a few are just as good (Cinderella, Jungle Book) and some that are not better but were decent in their own way (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin).  But, then we have the re-makes that absolutely fail at being anywhere near the same league as the originals (Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio, Dumbo).  But this trend of Disney “live action” remakes hit it’s pinnacle with the release of 2019’s The Lion King.  Pinnacle in terms of box office yes, with a world wide gross of $1.5 billion, but also pinnacle in it’s absolute worthlessness.  I ranked the film as the worst of the year, and that was because I thought it represented the worst of the remake trend under Disney; a pure copy and paste job that paled against the original in every way and was the most blatant cash grab that I had ever witnessed from Disney, which is saying a lot.  So, you can imagine that I had a lot of worries and resentment on my mind when I learned that Disney was preparing another film in the same world of their Lion King remake; a prequel centered around the character of Mufasa.

I get why Disney was doing this.  Shareholders were pleased with the box office results of the first Lion King remake, and they wanted Disney to do it again.  It didn’t matter that the first remake was critically panned (including from yours truly) and that it didn’t even register in awards season.  The billion dollar gross was what mattered, so Disney was looking to find a way to follow up their mega-hit.  But, what direction would they take.  There were direct-to-video sequels to the original 1994 Lion King, but those films aren’t as beloved, so doing yet another copy and paste job wasn’t seen as ideal.  They would have to go a more original route.  Unfortunately for Disney, the director behind the first Lion King remake, Jon Favreau, had already moved over to the Lucasfilm side of the company to work on The Mandalorian series on Disney+, along with a slew of many other Star Wars projects in the pipeline.  This was going to leave him unavailable for some time, so a new director was needed.  Surprisingly, Disney went far outside their stable to look for a new director, and they found the unlikeliest of filmmakers to fill that role.  Barry Jenkins was considered to be an art house filmmaker, having made a name for himself writing and directing Oscar winning films like Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018).  Going into the new decade he was deep into production of his ambitious mini-series for Amazon Prime, The Underground Railroad, when Disney approached him with the prospect of working on their follow-up to The Lion King, and he was surprisingly receptive to the offer.  After gaining a strong reputation as a prestige director, was he gambling that good will by taking on what many saw as a corporate cash grab, or was he seizing an opportunity to bring his artistic style to a bigger canvas that would have broad appeal with worldwide audiences?  It would all depend on if he could elevate this story beyond it’s predecessor and create something that both creatively satisfied himself as well as fulfilled the obligation that Disney had entrusted him with.  And so, the result is the prequel backstory of Mufasa: The Lion King.

When Simba (Donald Glover) and Nala (Beyonce) must leave Pride Rock for a day, they entrust Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen) to babysit their daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter).  A sudden storm causes the trio to seek refuge in a cave, where they also find Rafiki (John Kani) meditating.  In order to help calm the rattled lioness cub and her companions until the storm passes, Rafiki begins to tell the story of how Kiara’s grandfather, Mufasa, became king.  Young Mufasa (Braelyn Rankins) is washed away by a river and separated from his family.  He ends up many miles away in the territory of another pride of lions.  Their cub prince, Taka (Theo Somolu) helps save Mufasa from the perils of the river and brings him to the pride’s nesting grounds.  Taka’s mother Eshe (Thandiwe Newton) takes Mufasa under herwing, but the father Obasi (Lennie James) doesn’t trust Mufasa because he is an outsider.  Many years pass, and grown up Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) and Taka (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) have become as close as brothers.  The peace of Obasi’s pridelands is shattered however when a pack of white lions invade.  While protecting his adoptive mother, Mufasa kills one of the male white lions.  The dead lion turns out to be the son of the white lions’ king, Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), who now has a vendetta against Obasi’s pride as well as for Mufasa himself.  In order to secure the bloodline of the pride, Obasi sends his son and Mufasa away for their protection.  Forced to seek out a home of their own, Taka and Mufasa venture into the wilderness.  Mufasa convinces Taka that they should seek a vast green valley called Milele which he remembers his mother talking about when he was little.  On the road, they encounter other travelers, including the lioness Sarabi (Tiffany Boone) and her bird companion Zazu (Preston Nyman), as well as a young Rafiki (Kagiso Lediga).  But, their journey is not without more peril, and Kiros and his minions are following their tracks every step of the way.  Can they stay ahead, and does the presence of Sarabi drive a wedge between the Mufasa and Taka that shatters their brotherhood?

Given my distaste for the first Lion King remake, I didn’t have a lot of high hopes for this prequel.  My interest did perk up though when I learned that Barry Jenkins was tapped to direct.  Jenkin’s involvement could indeed bring some much needed depth and character to what otherwise was a soulless corporate product.  But, was Disney going to let him cook, or was he going to be another promising filmmaker swallowed up by the machine.  The expectations were already low, and my hope was that the movie wouldn’t be any worse than the first film.  And thankfully, it isn’t.  At the same time it’s also not a whole lot better either.  Mufasa: The Lion King is an improvement in many ways, but it also suffers from a lot of problems that are just inherent in the presentation itself.  Let me start with the positive, in that it is refreshing that this movie is not just another copy and paste job like the last movie.  The Lion King remake was one of the laziest big studio films that I had ever experienced, because it was a purely shot for shot remake, minus all of the soul that you get out of traditional animation.  I’ll talk more about my issues with the animation later, but at least story-wise it was refreshing watching this movie and not knowing what the story beats would be from scene to scene.  Now, the story was a still a tad bit on the predictable side, but at least they were building from scratch and not with the same exact script from another movie.  It’s a risk taking on a prequel, because you ultimately know the destination it’s heading towards.  But, the backstory of Mufasa is something that Disney has never really explored much in any media, so if there was any fertile ground to mine out of this franchise, this is where they found it, and Mufasa is a compelling enough character that the movie does manage to justify it’s own existence, merely by finally giving us something we haven’t seen yet out of this world.

Where the film falters though is in it’s inconsistent execution of the story.  The biggest flaw of the film is it’s framing device.  The film pulls away from Mufasa’s story constantly to remind the audience that they are being told the story second-hand by Rafiki.  I have a feeling that this was a studio mandated addition to the film that Barry Jenkins was forced to put in there, just to break up the seriousness of the movie’s tone in order to inject more kid friendly comedy to stay with the shot attention spans of younger audiences.  Each time these cutaways would happen in the film, it would grind the movie to a halt, and rob the movie of any dramatic heft.  And the cutaways to the present would be excruciating too, because it involved very unfunny comedy relief from Timon and Pumbaa.  Seriously, I hated this framing device so much because of what it was doing to the story proper.  Even worse, they were making meta jokes about The Lion King movie, the Broadway play, and Disney in general that felt horribly out of place in this world and just seemed like a desperate ploy by Disney creatives to make themselves look more clever than they really are.  They should have just let Barry Jenkins work with the story he was given and not feel the need to spice it up with pop culture puns.  You could cut out all of these cringey interstitials and the story would’ve flowed so much better.  It may not have been the greatest story ever told, but the tone wouldn’t feel all over the place and you would get a more cohesive experience.  It’s where the film felt like it was compromised the most.  While watching it, I found myself managing to appreciate the story when it found it’s groove, but then I’d grow frustrated again every time Timon and Pumbaa butted in.  It’s the worst instincts of studio interference sabotaging whatever kinds of improvements that this movie was attempting to make in response to the first movie’s mistakes.

Overall, Barry Jenkins does attempt to bring some improvements, but it also feels that he had his hands tied.  But there were just some things that were also impossible to fix in general.  The photorealism of the movie is still a major problem, because of how it robs the character out of the animation.  I talked about this a lot in my original “live action” Lion King review here, but this film too suffers from the lack emotive animation that the traditional style can offer.  When you use traditional, “cartoony” animation, you can give everything from humans to animals to even appliances expressive facial emotions.  This goes a long way towards helping an audience connect with these characters on an emotional level, because the animators are able to display emotion purely through expression; conveying things that dialogue along can’t deliver.  When animating with photorealistic animal characters, you lose that creative license because animals like lions don’t have a wide array of facial expressions in real life.  A lion’s face is emotionless by nature, and trying to get that kind of character model to emote in a movie like this while still maintaining that photorealism just doesn’t work.  The animators try to push expressions just a little bit more here compared to the first film, but the movie still can’t quite get there.  It doesn’t help that Jenkins is also a novice when it comes to animation, so he isn’t able to push the medium beyond it’s comfort zone.  There are some impressive shots of landscapes in this movie, and I do appreciate the diverse amount of locations that Jenkins tries to bring into this world, including a beautiful passage through snow capped mountains.  But the photorealistic presentation also just keeps things feeling impersonal when it should be awe-inspiring.  The thought that kept crossing my head throughout the movie was that all of this might have made for a better movie if it was a prequel to the original animated movie and animated in that style instead.  It may not have been as good as that 30 year old classic, but it would have had a lot more character to it than what we got here.

The film is also a mixed bag in terms of the vocal performances.  For one thing, I really was not digging the shoehorned way that the orginal film’s cast was brought into this movie.  It just reminded me about the waste of talent that the first remake was.  Donald Glover still sounds unremarkable as Simba, and I think Beyonce just gets one line total in this entire movie (and still manages to be one of the top billed stars).  Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen were especially grating this time around and really wanted them to shut up every time the movie cut back to them.  But at the same time, I thought the movie had some strong performances from the newcomers.  The best performance by far comes from Aaron Pierre, who had the unenviable task of playing Mufasa.  He had enormous shoes to fill, as he’s tasked with taking over the role from the late great James Earl Jones, an actor so iconicly tied to the role of Mufasa that he voiced him twice, both in the original and the remake.  Pierre manages to pick up that mantle in a way that is respectful to Jones’ performance, but also allows for the actor to make it his own.  I also viewed Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s performance as Taka to be a far better take on the character that one day becomes the villain Scar than Chiwetel Ejiofor’s phoned in performance in the original remake.  Of course, both still pale compared to Jeremy Iron’s original performance.  Speaking of villainous turns, Mads Mikkelsen reliably brings some appropriate menace to the character of Kiros, and helps the somewhat one-dimensional villain stand out just a bit better.  One other thing that this movie has going for it is that it features a new score of original songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda; Disney’s current in-house hit maker.  While the songs here are passable, they aren’t quite as strong as Miranda’s other recent work and certainly no where near the quality of Elton John’s work in the original animated classic.  But, at least Barry Jenkins has a voice cast here that’s capable of singing and doing the Miranda songs justice.  You don’t have to listen to Eichner and Rogen mangle “Hakuna Matata” anymore.

Whatever issues Disney still has with their production of live action remakes, none of them are going to be solved by the results of Mufasa: The Lion King.  Certainly bringing Barry Jenkins on board to direct this movie was a bold move, but even a great filmmaker like him can only do so much to lampshade the problems that are inherent in the production to begin with.  I can see the kernels of the more enriching story about destiny and finding yourself through adversity that Barry Jenkins was trying to strive for in his telling of Mufasa’s story, but I also see all of the meddling from Disney executives who seemed to get cold feet from this more mature storyline and tried to shoe horn in more stuff for the little kids.  The most redeeming thing about this film is that it has more originality to it than a straightforward remake.  Barry Jenkins doesn’t use any pre-built template here and tries his best to craft something new. In some fleeting moments, he succeeds, and the movie actually rises above it’s mediocrity.  But too often, you feel the cynicism of the studio trying to milk this franchise out of all the money they can get from it.  My hope is that Barry Jenkins is able to use this exercise to grow as a filmmaker and make something bold and ambitious for his next film.  The worst case is if it ruins his reputation and he just becomes a director for hire in the future, no longer driving his own artistic style but rather just finding the work that he can get.  He’s a very unique voice, and it’s a risk for someone like him to work within the machine like he’s doing here with Mufasa.  I give him credit for trying, and you do see flashes of creative brilliance here.  But Mufasa just has too many flaws that hold it back.  It is an improvement over the first remake, but I argue again why they don’t just take this story and apply it to the original animated style.  That’s where this story truly belongs, and I feel like The Lion King’s place is less in a real world aesthetic and more in the realm of escapist fantasy that hand drawn animation can provide.  Stop trying to strip away the color and animation out of this storyline and let this Lion King truly roar.

Rating: 6/10