Category: Jason Momoa

SUPERGIRL

By Marc S. Sanders

I don’t understand it.  A billion-dollar movie studio like Warner Brothers, with DC Studios, has all of the resources imaginable and nearly ninety years of source material to draw from and they opt for absolute dreck populated with three literal vomit scenes.  In the first twenty seconds of the movie, the hero’s dog urinates on the floor!  This is Supergirl, and this is the best they came up with?

Milly Alcock is a fine actress. She’s got an unusual tomboy appearance (that is unfairly and cruelly being ridiculed online) and she’s ready to offer gusto and nerve. Unfortunately, with her first big marquee picture, she is wrongly lent a disservice with a terrible script written by Ana Nogueira (The Vampire Diaries).  The story is simple and that’s not a complaint.  Basically, a villain called Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), who looks like a foreground extra from a Mad Max picture, gets his spot in the limelight when he slaughters the family of a young girl named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) and poisons the super terrier dog Krypto.  Kara Zor-El (aka Supergirl) has 72 hours to find Krem and recover the antidote or the lovable mutt will die.  Plus, she has to discourage Ruthye from slaying Krem out of a means of revenge.  While they are at it, Kara might as well try to break up a trafficking ring of young girls held in captivity. The pair hop from one seedy bar to another in their quest and encounter the ugliest alien beings imaginable.  These are all Star Wars rejects of the worst looking kind.  None of these characters would even make good action figures.

Spliced within this main plot line, Kara recalls her origin on Kryton, followed by her arrival on Earth where she meets Kal-El, aka Clark Kent/Superman (David Corenswet), for the first time. These flashbacks are the best parts of the picture. Kara struggles with staying by her dying family or leaving them to survive and prosper as a hero.  The demise of Krypton is covered again but then there are residual moments that pertain specifically to Kara that were not extensively covered in other films.

Otherwise, this gal is a miserable drunk, wanting to celebrate her twenty-third birthday by herself, because that’s entertaining and healthy. When she’s not drunk, she’s just hungover.  How is any of this fun or appealing?  Moreover, this is Supergirl. So, I want to see her dressed as Supergirl.  The imagery sells these comic book characters, right.  It’s about pictured aesthetics first.  Kara allows her oversized trench coat to drape sloppily over her hair and untucked Blondie t-shirt.  Bubble size sunglasses hide her red eye. It’s like the costumer and creators are trying as hard as they can to make her as repulsive as possible. Are we meant to enjoy this? Supergirl is not John Belushi in Animal House. He made drunkenness an art form.

Kara’s Kryptonian mother gets sick.  So, she throws up.  Kara gets poisoned.  So, she throws up.  Kara pees with the door opened.  She munches on alien poop and then realizes it tastes like shit.  Duh!  Ruthye spits on Krem. Krypto pees on a Superman newspaper article.  Every bodily fluid imaginable is presented to disgust your pallet, and if it is done for bathroom humor it’s not funny and if it is done for dramatic heights, it really was never, ever necessary.

Jason Momoa is back as Aquaman…I’m sorry Lobo, who’s basically Aquaman now, but caked in black vampire makeup and equipped with a cigar and a motorcycle.  He’s a b-character from the DC comics. An anti-hero that I think enthusiasts celebrate like they do with Deadpool.  The guy looks like a KISS rocker from outer space.  Though I don’t know what he contributes to this movie with the exception of finally bringing the ever so famous Lobo to life.  The guy never turns the tides on the narrative.  He has nothing funny to say like Deadpool might.  His motorcycle doesn’t perform any outstanding stunts.  His cigar lights up without a match, and he sits in a prison cell.  That’s it! He’s muscle but with no expressive superpowers. He observes, rather than participates. So, what’s he doing here?

After all of the Superman iterations and spinoffs, why does James Gunn, who is blessed with creative control of the entire DC franchise, stay away from the wide gallery of rogue villains offered over the last century of comic books. There’s Braniac (who I’ve read will finally arrive in the next Superman film), Metallo, and Mr. Mytxlplyk.  The Toyman too. Heck, Jerry Seinfeld introduced the backwards/opposite functioning Bizzaro Superman in his sitcom about nothing.  These are all drawn from the weird cloth that I’d think Gunn would encourage since his success with Guardians Of The Galaxy.  Instead, we are dealt an unappealing, truly ugly and uncool, one-dimensional adversary with spikes in his face, dressed in leather.  I read that Krem is a featured bad guy in recent comic iteration of Supergirl. I don’t care. This storyline adaptation is a terrible option to follow. The day after seeing this movie, I can’t even recall what accent this guy Krem uses.  He’s positively forgettable and I think as unimaginable an invention as that nuclear dude from Superman IV: The Quest For Peace.  

Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) has not assembled a good film.  I saw it on IMAX, and the enhancement did his picture no favors. Supergirl punches and kicks more than she flies.  She shoots the lasers out of her eyes and uses the x-ray vision, but where’s the super breath?  Where’s the super speed? The super hearing? Couldn’t we see her fly more?  The fight choreography is clunky and at times hard to decipher through dark CGI moving at too many frames per second.   Gillispie’s team only makes up for that by deliberately concealing Kara kicking ass and focusing on Ruthye shuddering under a table during a barroom brawl.  Not cute.  Not funny.  Just lazy craftsmanship.

There’s no wit to anything said.  Krypto is cute as a misbehaving rascal, but there’s nothing to laugh or cheer for in the rest of the film, and when Supergirl finally defeats Krem, her last act is offensively anticlimactic.  Actually, it’s obscenely hypocritical to the doctrines she tried to instill in Ruthye over the course of the film, and it crudely defies what the Superman/Supergirl mythology has always stood for.  I wanted to throw my popcorn at the screen.

Supergirl is not a total failure thanks to Milly Alcock.  She looks great in the costume and has a heroic appeal in the limited time that’s offered from the script.  Krypto is a precocious troublemaker and the Kryton footage and background look sharp, even if unoriginal. Efforts to make the alien dialogue feel authentic works nicely and enhances the fantasy/sci-fi demands.  Yet, these are just small ingredients in a stew lacking anything savory.  

Since 1984, Kal-El’s cousin has been done criminally wrong now for the third time (don’t forget The Flash from a few years ago) on the big screen. On all occasions it’s clear the filmmakers didn’t even try to research and explore what was easily at their fingertips.  Instead, they just literally vomited, shit, spit and pissed out whatever popped into their heads first – a John Wick storyline with a failed Mad Max villain, drenched in an assortment of bodily fluids.

Fly away from Supergirl. 

AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM (2023)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: James Wan
CAST: Jason Momoa, Patrick Wilson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman, Randall Park, Temuera Morrison, Dolph Lundgren
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 35%

PLOT: When Black Manta seeks revenge on Aquaman for his father’s death, Aquaman forges an uneasy alliance with his imprisoned brother to defend Atlantis and his family.


“They say everybody’s good at something.  Me?  I talk to fish.  …Some people think that makes me a joke.  But I don’t care.”

Those lines, spoken in narration by Aquaman at the beginning of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, admirably sum up just about every comic book fan’s opinion of Aquaman and his dubious powers over the course of his existence.  The genius move on the part of the DC Extended Universe was casting Jason Momoa as the King of Atlantis.  As I wrote in my review of Aquaman (2018): “Hell, I wouldn’t laugh at a guy who looks like that.  ‘You talkin’ to fish?  Ping away, Muscles!’”

So, you’ve got the right guy for the role, no worries there.  The problem now is how to use him.  Based on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, it would seem they used up all the best ideas in the first movie.  I wouldn’t call Lost Kingdom a rehash of Aquaman, necessarily, but it doesn’t exactly stake out new territory.  (Well, except for when they visit the underwater version of the Star Wars cantina, complete with a live band, seedy characters, and a pirate overlord who looks like Jabba the Hutt with fins for hands.  That was new.  I mean, sort of.)

Putting it another way, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom does not transcend, or even seem to ATTEMPT to transcend, the boundaries of the comic-book-movie genre.  The filmmakers did add some witty banter between Arthur and his imprisoned brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson), that was a nice source of comic relief.  Orm’s almost complete ignorance of life on the surface world leads to some funny scenes involving such basic concepts of what to eat and how to run.  But aside from that, a rundown of the plot seems redundant because you’ve heard and seen it all before.  “Bad guy from first movie shows up, more powerful than before, threatens life on Earth for personal vendetta against good guy.  Good guy learns to get along with semi-bad-guy brother to defeat good guy.”

With that in mind, though, knowing full well that the movie followed the comic-book-movie formula step-by-step…I must truthfully report that I had a good time.  I enjoyed it.  I could intellectualize endlessly about the bankruptcy of the story, the bloated visual effects, the overly-preachy finger-wagging to climate-change deniers (Black Manta’s plan is to raise global temperatures in order to release an army of mutant henchmen from their icy prison in Antarctica; he has a line where he says something like, “I’m only continuing what we’ve been doing for decades.”  Shaaaame on us).  But…again, I must admit, I had fun.

At some point, when it comes to comic book movies, I have to start asking myself: what more do I want from a comic book movie?  If I expected every single comic book film to be as good as Superman or The Dark Knight or The Batman or even the first Shazam!, I would be sorely disappointed.  It’s impossible to have that kind of track record, quality-wise.  To be sure, there have been disappointments (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Venom, Wonder Woman 1984, and many others).  But none of those films were even close to being as much fun as Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.  Others will no doubt disagree.  Understandable.

But I still had fun, and no amount of critical dismantling of the plot will change that.

AQUAMAN (2018)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: James Wan
Cast: Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Patrick Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Dolph Lundgren
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 63%

PLOT: Arthur Curry learns that he is the heir to the underwater kingdom of Atlantis, and must step forward to lead his people and be a hero to the world.


Take the best parts of Tron: Legacy, Tomb Raider, and Disney’s animated Atlantis, and you’ll get an idea of how much fun Aquaman is.  For some people, saying it’s one of the best of the films set in the DC Universe isn’t saying much (peep that mediocre Tomatometer score), but speaking as someone who thoroughly enjoyed Justice League and Man of Steel and Wonder Woman, I had LOADS of fun watching an aquatic Dr. Doolittle kick some serious ass.

Admittedly, some of the underwater scenes are a little tricky.  It’s hard to take some of the weighty dialogue seriously when the people doing the talking are floating instead of standing, with their hair moving around like seaweed.  It’s the kind of thing that works great in animated movies or comic books, but to see it onscreen…it takes a little getting used to.

Once you get past that initial hurdle, though, this movie really cooks.  Jason Momoa was the best possible choice to make the much-maligned Aquaman character relatable to mass audiences.  He may not have the cocky delivery of a Robert Downey Jr. or a Chris Pratt, but he throws a mean glare, and, bro, dude is CHISELED.  When THIS guy emits sonar waves to talk to whales, it’s not a joke.  Hell, I wouldn’t laugh at a guy who looks like that.  “You talkin’ to fish?  Ping away, Muscles!”

The story is as ancient as Atlantis itself.  Arthur Curry returns to the land of his lineage to reclaim his birthright, but first he must overcome several trials before he can emerge triumphant.  Ho hum, been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.  But this movie really dresses it up and dazzles us with phenomenal sights.  Atlantis itself looks like someone mashed up Pandora from Avatar with the digital cityscapes in Tron: Legacy.  The various fight and battle scenes are handled extremely well, balancing clarity with incredibly elaborate CG fireworks.

(It was also nice to see one of Aquaman’s nemeses, Black Manta, rendered in a way that was EXTREMELY faithful to the source material, big head and big eyes included.  Of the actor portraying him, let it be said he was extremely adequate to the task, without really transcending the role he was given.)

Whatever gripes people may have, I would imagine it’s with being tired of overblown superhero movies, or the relatively few story gaps in the movie. (How did they get out of the desert?  How did Black Manta contact the Atlanteans in the first place?  If this is a sequel to Justice League, why are there no appearances or mention of the other members whatsoever?)  I can understand those gripes, but for me, the spectacle and the fun cancelled them out.

It’s not a perfect superhero movie; I wouldn’t quite rank it with the best Marvel films. But I gotta be honest: I had a blast.

AQUAMAN

By Marc S. Sanders

The next installment in the DC Cinematic Universe takes place in the ocean. Too bad the ocean is just too murky. James Wan’s Aquaman is muddied in long, boring, unsurrendering exposition and CGI. It is a film based on the most famous of all the undersea super heroes who is destined to be King of Atlantis. HE’S HALF MAN! HE’S HALF FISH! HE’S AQUAMAN, AND HE MUST BE KING!!!! That’s about all we should have to know to appreciate the storytelling of this film. However, Wan left me guessing just what the hell everyone was talking about for most of the film. King Orm (boring Patrick Wilson) declares takeover of this kingdom and take over of that kingdom and I’m like what, who, how, why???? Who the hell is he talking about? Why is this a threat? What will this mean for everyone? Shut up! Stop talking! Show me something! In the immortal words of Syndrome (from a better super hero film), “Stop Monolouging!!!!”

The first problem is when we are brought from one ocean floor to another and another and another and they all have location names like Kingdom of the Starfish Curtain or Dwelling of the Stingray Horse or some such thing. So what? These locales are literally shown for no more seven seconds before it moves to another location. This isn’t Krypton or the Batcave. We get to go to “Somewhere In The Atlantic Ocean” or “Somewhere In The Indian Ocean,” but so???? And????? Wan seems too proud to uncover these geographical areas that hold no measure.

Then there is the cast of characters. We got Dolph Lungren with a red beard, Willem Dafoe with a slicked back ponytail, Amber Heard beautiful as the love interest Mera, Nicole Kidman with her alabaster skin looking angelic as a queen and mother to Arthur Curry (the Aquaman title character) and Patrick Wilson, blond, white and curiously looking like the Hanna Barbera Aquaman during the days of Super Friends. Wilson is the big bad here and he’s kind of boring, kind of not intimidating, kind of the guy who looks too innocent to ever be cast as a villain in any film.

Let’s go off subject for a moment, shall we? Jason Momoa is the best thing about Aquaman and he makes a great Aquaman. I knew that when I saw him in the role in last year’s Justice League (a much better film; yes the Joss Whedon cut). Momoa is ripped, muscled and tattooed perfectly with long flowing charcoal hair, a perfect beard and sparkling blue eyes. This guy looks great on land while downing full pints of beer with his dad, or under CGI water. As I became less and less interested as the movie went on, I found it curious that the image of Momoa’s Aquaman is destined to defeat the image of Patrick Wilson’s (supposedly) ruthless King Orm, also known as Ocean Master. It’s as if the gorgeous motorcycle dude is meant to erase the much maligned (see countless GIFs and a couple of Big Bang Theory episodes) Hanna Barbera blond boy image.

The CGI does its best. After all, how else do you film a movie that primarily takes place under the ocean? It’s colorful. The effort is there. What I took issue with was the great battles between all these kingdoms. I couldn’t tell who was fighting who, who was with who, and who lived and who died, not to mention how they fight. Was it with spears? Laser guns? Swords? Hammers? Pies? What?????? I know these are underwater battles, but why can’t any of these great kingdom of kingdoms movies learn from the best like Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films or Ridley Scott’s Gladiator? There is something more literal in those grand battles. You could always recognize who was charging at whom. In Aquaman, it’s mass hysteria, riots in the ocean streets.

The villain Black Manta is next best thing after Momoa. Played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Unfortunately, he’s not given much to do. He’s out for revenge against Aquaman. That’s been done before. What saves the character is the costume and helmet. Now this is a villain!!!!! He looks badass with red sonic blasts shooting out of his eyes and he’s agile; the filmmakers at least got the image and movements of this guy right. The best scene of the film takes place on land in what looks to be the Greek Isles. Lots of rooftop jumping, statue shattering, and wall breaking with good fisticuffs are in play here between Momoa and Abdul-Mateen. It’s a good long scene. Then, oh yeah, we gotta go back to Wilson and Dafoe talking about something somewhere that’s labeled with some “legendary” location amid some coral.

James Wan and the writers of Aquaman try too hard. There’s too much going on here that doesn’t belong. I don’t know how a pre teen kid nor an adult could sit through these boring conversations of fiction that is unfamiliar to many. Again, none of this is the stuff of legend like Lord Of The Rings, or Krypton, or Gotham City, or even Star Wars or Star Trek. If only Wan and crew didn’t elevate the importance of things that even they show are just not that important. Stick with the simplicity guys. At least, you got the Atlanteans riding Sea Horses. Nice touch, there!