Rambunctious teens are the stars in Super 8

Popcorn has never tasted this good. Not real popcorn, mind you, but the popcorn-movie variety. The genre has been increasingly stale in recent summers. Not this time.

Super 8 is a perfect summer movie. It comes from the guy who invented the summer movie — Steven Spielberg — which means that Super 8 comes from a stately pedigree: Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws. It’s a mixture of all those, and also the kid-classic The Goonies, from which Super 8 mines its spontaneous energy and wonder.

We can talk comparisons all day, but really this is a wholly original movie, a fantastically nostalgic romp with some pre-teens as they discover their own voices and the alien that terrorizes their small Ohio town. Set inside the framework of Super 8 is a movie within a movie, which is where our young stars make their entrance.

The year is 1979 and Joe (Joel Courtney) is the makeup man on an 8mm movie project called The Case, a zombie film written and directed by his best friend Charles, a lovable tyrant of a director who might be a Francis Ford Coppola facsimile. Cary, with a wild smile full of braces, is the film’s special effects wiz and pyromaniac. Martin, who throws up whenever he’s nervous, is the zombie flick’s star. The boys are in high school — based on their plucky attitudes, probably freshman.

These youngsters are authentic boys in every way: they like baseball and model kits, they ride their bikes everywhere, they bicker and argue in rowdy overlapping bursts, and they swear like little pirates. The big F word is mostly off limits; just the nickel-and-dime swears — shit, hell, damn — the ones that every kid in America knows and uses because it’s rebellious and fun. Remember when Elliott said "penis breath" in E.T.? It didn't inflict any damage on my young mind, and neither will these swear words so don't be afraid to take your children.

Swearing or not, I loved these kids. They make the movie. Each has their own quirks and interests, which gives them personality and spunk. I liked the Charles kid, who lives in one of those big houses with a gaggle of brothers and sisters who terrorize their parents at every dinner table gathering — in every shot someone is getting walloped repeatedly with a plastic bat. It reminded me of Ned Beatty’s house in 1941, the one with the kids who bounce off the walls as Beatty’s ack-ack gun is driven through the living room.

While Joe and the rest of the film crew shoot a late-night scene at a train station, they witness a horrific train crash that turns loose a captured alien, a massive beast that disappears into the brush and quietly escalates a campaign of terror on the town: Electricity flickers. The local dogs flee for neighboring communities. Engines from cars at a car dealership are stolen: “How do I explain this to my insurance company?” the lot owner screeches. Joe’s dad, the town’s ranking deputy after the sheriff turns up missing or eaten, tries to piece everything together to no avail. The deputy is played by Kyle Chandler, who was in another perfect popcorn movie about a monster and a movie within a movie — Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake.

There’s only one female character, Alice, played by Elle Fanning (Somewhere), Dakota’s little sister. She’s taller and slightly more developed than the boys because that’s the way it is; girls mature faster than boys. She has several great scenes, including one where she wows the film crew with her acting. Her careful performance provides a tender contrast to the film’s other sides: the action-heavy bombast, the witty banter with the boys, and the sci-fi thrills.

With the thrills, there are many. And they aren’t just gotcha moments, where the soundtrack volume jumps to illicit cheap shocks. Super 8 works — and works hard — for its electric jolts. I liked one scene with an electrician who hears strange noises while suspended high up above a utility truck. He goes higher and higher until the bucket he’s riding in tops out at the perfect chomping height for space aliens.

Action and thrills are prominent in Super 8, but the film never panders to the lowest common denominator. It’s fun and exciting, but also incredibly intuitive about filmgoers’ tastes. There’s a generally accepted misconception that some audiences want “mindless entertainment” — that they “don’t want to think, but just enjoy a movie.” (I get emails like this every time I pan a blockbuster movie.) This idea perpetuates movies by Michael Bay and others who feel obligated to create explosion after explosion for no other reasons than just because. Or it “looks cool.” Considering the horribleness of the last Transformers movie, this film philosophy doesn’t hold much water.

Here’s a test: go on YouTube and watch videos of building demolitions. Time yourself. If you can do this for more than two hours then you’re in a rather small minority I would not admit to in public. Most people want substance, whether they realize it or not. They want the plot, and the characters within it, to make sense. Here’s a movie that combines all the popcorny elements — gunfights, explosions, aliens, chases — into a coherent plot that will impress the hell out of you with its keen eye for detail, sharp sense of humor and its irreverent journey into the life of boys.

What begins as an adventure, quickly veers into science-fiction, mystery, action and lots of human dramas, including a half-expected romance and a painful revelation about Joe's deceased mother who may have had something to do with Alice's dad and why he's such a grump. The military also makes an appearance, as does a barking colonel who turns the Ohio town into a warzone as soldiers criss-cross the streets searching for their escaped extraterrestrial. The movie excels with each new addition to the plot. Each new layer adds to the whole, and the young actors adapt with ease. I fear that some will find the finale implausible and silly, but I saw it as a natural progression to its end. (Speaking of ends, stay for the credits to watch The Case in its entirety.)

It’s no surprise that Steven Spielberg is producing this film. He was a boy himself when he began filming his own Super 8 movies. I’ve mentioned Spielberg several times before this, but he’s not the director. J.J. Abrams (Star Trek, TV’s Alias) has that job, and he does it well. I just see more of Spielberg in this than of Abrams. Super 8 feels like a splendid mixture of E.T. and Goonies, two classic Spielberg projects that understood what it meant to be young and to seek out that one great adventure before a boy became a man, uncoiled from his imagination and entered adulthood. This is one of those rare movies that makes me want to be a kid again.

New Pirates suffers from old problems

It’s widely agreed that there were vast problems with the last two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and the reason they couldn’t be fixed was because both films — each following the same storyline — were shot at the same time. Try dropping anchor on that behemoth and you’re likely to capsize the ship.

Now here we are with a new Pirates, a fresh plot and more wiggle room to make a film that doesn’t have to cater to the story demands of a sequel. With more freedom Captain Jack Sparrow will soar again, right? Wrong.

All the agonizing issues with Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End have returned. It seems that spark from the first film, Curse of the Black Pearl, is forever gone, doused by the ocean’s mist I reckon.

Not to say that Pirates 4 — officially it’s called Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — is a bad film, because it’s not terrible. It’s just mediocre. Considering its potential, and its inflated budget, it should be so much better, especially since it had the opportunity to pop out of that rut created by the last films. Not helping the whole situation is the 3-D, which should have never been applied to a film this dark. Night scenes, dungeons, candlelit bars, underwater scenes, caves, underwater caves … these scenes would be dim even without the 3-D sunglasses. Please, see this movie in 2-D; if we avoid the 3-D versions, they’ll eventually just go away.

Returning are Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), saucy as ever, and the recently peg-legged Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), who can’t decide if he’s a hero or a villain. Throughout Tides Jack and Barbossa routinely rotate allegiances with each other and with the other factions — England, Spain and the pirate Blackbeard aboard his treacherous ship Queen Anne’s Revenge — as they seek out the Fountain of Youth, a legendary mystery that Jack solves by using a magic compass. The film bypasses all the mystery and adventure of the fountain’s discovery with that stupid compass from the earlier films; too often it’s used to add more momentum to the plot by cheating. Certainly a treasure map would be a cliché, but also much more interesting.

Along the way, Jack encounters some new characters, including Angelica (Penélope Cruz), a sexy Spaniard who he had a fling with many years before. Jack still has a crush on her, though he can’t admit it — “If you had a sister and a dog, I would choose the dog,” he tells her. Angelica is the daughter of Blackbeard, a fearsome pirate who wants the Fountain of Youth to frighten off his executioner, who has been prophesied to be Barbossa. Jack’s dad, played by Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards, returns again and he still looks to be about 120 years old. Jack asks if he knows where the fountain is. Jack’s dad: “Does this face look like it’s seen the Fountain of Youth?”

Much of the dialogue is arbitrary and meaningless, but the actors seem to be having fun, especially Depp, who has found some kind of twitchy nirvana playing a boozy pirate dressed in his leathery layers and clanking accessories. Depp is a very physical comedian, and it shows in all his little gestures and tipsy nuances. I’m glad the franchise kept him aboard and made Orlando Bloom walk that plank.

As rip-roaring fun as Depp is, the plot has all the mechanical failures of the last films: too many side-quests, too many villains, too many double-crosses and side switchers, and way too many rules. The fountain requires a mermaid’s tear that requires a mermaid that requires a map that requires a compass that requires two silver chalices that requires a boat that requires a key that requires a … on and on into infinite. On Stranger Tides doesn’t feel like an adventure, it feels like a checklist at the grocery store. The film is never propelling itself forward on its own energy; it just sort of coasts on autopilot. And like every film before it, this one devotes much of the plot to Jack Sparrow as he tries to get a ship of his own. Apparently just starting the film with Sparrow on a ship is too much to ask.

The action is exciting and technically impressive. One chase sequence through London with burning coals has a wacky ending. A scene of a man being consumed by the Fountain of Youth is mighty cool; it reminded me of ol' popcorn face at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Some of the action seems to copy the earlier films with swordfights in rafters, lots of swinging off things, and Jack and Barbossa fencing in a cave, which is exactly how Black Pearl ended. Then, as if to copy Twilight’s fading fame, the film introduces vampire mermaids who can shoot Spider-Man webs from their hands (?!?!).

On Stranger Tides is probably the second best Pirates movie, which might be faint praise, but praise nonetheless. It could do better, especially with its messy plot. What’s so odd to me is why its producers don’t require better. They have all the pieces right in front of them, but they continuously bungle the delivery. They need to streamline the story, take out all the different opposing factions and just let Jack be Jack in an adventure without so many moving parts. 

From the Vault: At World's End

To celebrate the opening of the fourth Pirates movies — Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — here is my original review of the third movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. My review of the new movie will be posted Friday morning.

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And so the trilogy implodes. It’s happened to the best of many series — Spider-Man, Aliens, Shrek, The Matrix — and here it has happened to our beloved Pirates of the Caribbean, an franchise so rich in humor and adventure the first time around that it seemed invincible to even the mightiest cannons. Here, though, a single musket could sink it into the sea. And does.

I would have never thought an entire film could be sustained on hostage negotiations and Mexican standoffs alone, but, alas, here it is with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. The film — every bloated minute of it — consists of armed and unarmed negotiation, all of it with endless explanation with in-story footnotes, annotations on the footnotes, and footnotes on the annotations. For a movie about the freedom of the ocean there sure is a great number of rules to follow: nine pirates to a summit, majority vote gets to be king pirate, Flying Dutchman requires a captain, his heart the down payment, and don’t forget parlay. At World’s End creates a world that requires too many plot points to function without constant babysitting.

Meanwhile, the pirates just want to get to it, be it plundering, pillaging or the occasional skirt lifting (“ahlow, poppet”). Arrr! The life of a pirate requires much plot. Too much plot for At World’s End to really show off its creative underbelly of computer effects. In the opening scenes we’re given a beautiful ice world with icebergs and glacier flows. But then nothing happens to it; it was an expensive set decoration. As soon as the film does start to move around and gain momentum: “Whoa there, let’s negotiate this in a tedious below-deck stalemate in which we betray everyone who’s not present.” To my readers: If you can follow the plot to any degree of certainty then please write to the producers to ask for the scriptwriters’ jobs.

This third entry, At World’s End, picks up right where Dead Man’s Chest ended: Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is in the belly of a beast, Will and Elizabeth (Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley) are without a ship and tentacle-faced Davey Jones (Bill Nighy) stalks the ocean with his barnacled crew. Davey Jones and his ship, the Flying Dutchman, are being manipulated into a war by the East Indian Trading Company, which is led by one of film’s most unhappy villains, Lord Beckett. Even victory would disappoint the wig-wearing Brit, who is so glum he should cut away the excess glumness and begin exporting it to overly happy peoples around the globe.

Disney has asked me politely (“we respectfully ask …” is the exact wording) not to reveal any of plot resolutions. They are asking not because it would ruin the film, but because if I dished the details you’d be unlikely to care. Or think I was bluffing. Truth is, not much happens. I can’t even imagine what’s not worth giving away. Will and Elizabeth get married? We saw that coming. Could it be that Jack isn’t really dead? Unlikely, because Jack’s on the movie’s poster. Or what about the death of a villain? Now that should be left out of reviews, but only because describing it would require more words than the film’s script.

Like another disastrous “threequel,” the overly-theorized Matrix Revolutions, At World’s End tried to make the story as meaty as the action. In the end, though, it created too much exposition for a story already bloated on exposition. I just wanted Jack Sparrow to be a pirate; I think that’s a reasonable request. And fret not about resolution: all the loose ends are tied up at the end, but that’s only because they’re all knotted on each other 80 minutes before the credits started rolling. Seriously, did we need six different betrayals by Will? Or three from Jack? Or a dozen “look at me, I’m a pretty girl pirate” moments from Elizabeth? What we needed was a swordfight from a windmill, or treasure hunt with a blood-soaked map, the sacking of a Cajun port, a gun battle on a ship’s mast or the plundering of a Spanish fleet. What do we get? Five open-ocean ship battles, a handful of swordfights and two hours spent talking. Woo-hoo! (Now whistle and twirl your finger in the air.)

I will give At World’s End credit, though, for its boat sequences. When the characters finally stop talking and begin sailing, they look amazing in their beautiful ships. Big, clipper-type ships look breathtaking on the big screen and they’re used too infrequently (pretty please with sugar on top see Master & Commander for a far better movie). At World’s End uses a wide variety of clipper ships, pirate frigates, Chinese sampans and British war vessels. They’re crewed by vulgar pirates and super-polite British sailors, the only difference between them is their dental plans. Occasionally these characters man cannons or muskets and take to oceanic warfare. At one point Jack Sparrow swings to a ship’s mast to grapple with a character who has the face of a octopus, the hand of a lobster and the legs of a crab — more than enough for a buffet at the Red Lobster. The scene is stunning for its vast and believable computer animation that supports it. 

The writing might go off the deep end, but the whole movie looks great. As do the stars. Depp isn’t given very much to do, but he makes do with what he’s given. In one scene he hallucinates a vision that multiplies himself dozens of times, creates rock-like crabs that can move great object and sails his ship on a wave of sand. The Depp act doesn’t feel as genuine as it did the first time, but his Sparrow is still very much a lovable character, even if it’s increasingly more prone to parody. Also, Sparrow is given a history this time around: he meets his pops, a seedy pirate played by Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards, which is bound to be the cameo of the year whether he snorted his father or not.

Bloom and Knightley are given more starring roles, but they spend so much time on opposite sides it’s easy to forget that a romance is buried in all the pirate politics. They needed more screen time together to make the ending more sustainable (by the way: stay through the credits for an extra scene). The side characters are the best, though, including a one-eyed pirate and his bald buddy, two blundering British soldiers, first mate Gibbs (Kevin McNally), a salty sea dog and his parrot, a monkey, and a small person, who fires a cannon so big it throws him backward into a pit. And Geoffrey Rush, as Captain Barbossa, is terrific if also clutter on an already crowded landscape.

I’m very disappointed in this last entry of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The first film, The Curse of the Black Pearl, was brilliantly funny and endlessly clever. The second film was a sequence of missed notes, and the third film is a symphony of missed notes. And it was on the right track for fun summer flick: the sum of all the set design, makeup, costumes, computer effects and lavish settings is production overkill but it makes for splendid visuals. If only there was a plot, at least one that we could grasp onto like the handle of a cutlass. Instead, we grab and grab and grab and come up with a big stinky piece of seaweed that is apparently the story. 

From the Vault: Dead Man's Chest

To celebrate the opening of the fourth Pirates movies — Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — here is my original review of the second movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. My review of the new movie will be posted Friday morning.

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When does marketing lead to mutiny? When you sell half a movie as a whole one and then make your customers wait for the ending until May 2007. That’s how you make the summer’s most beloved sequel into something to grumble at.

I blame the marketing of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest because the commercials are selling the movie as one complete entity. That’s the wrong approach to use on the most anticipated movie of the summer, especially when it ends … well, the way it does — I’m not going to give it away. Kill Bill broke itself into volumes; Pirates needs the same treatment. Or just call it a prequel to No. 3, at least then we know we’re only seeing the beginning of a story.

Ignoring the deceptive cliffhanger lurking toward the end of Dead Man’s Chest, this new Pirates movie plays a lot like the old one: swashbuckling, yadda yadda yadda, canon fire, blah blah blah, Johnny Depp playing Captain Jack Sparrow as a cartoon. No, actually a cartoon drawing of parody of a caricature made from a mascara sketch on a napkin. Depp has taken his drunk captain to the outer limits of reason and the movie suffers for it. What was refreshing and invigorating in the first movie, is simply obnoxious overacting in this one. Luckily Jack and Johnny are given lots to do and their superegos are given breaks during all the swashbuckling.

The new movie concerns a buried pirate’s chest (of course!) which does not contain gold doubloons or Spanish gemstones, but the beating heart of a cursed man who rules the sea, or is ruled by the sea — one of them. Whoever controls the heart controls the man. And since the man has a crew of undead sailors and a giant sea serpent at his disposal he is a valuable asset to control on the high seas.

The man is Davey Jones, a cursed pirate bound by love who roams the seas attacking ships at random. Hundreds of years before we catch up with him, Jones gave himself to the sea as a normal man, but after so long underwater his head is an octopus, his arm a crab claw and barnacles and mussels grow freely on his limbs. His crew, imprisoned for 100 years by their cursed captain, have undergone other hideous transformations; their bodies have taken on so many different kinds of ocean life they are no longer men but sampler platters.

For a variety of reasons, too many to list here, Captain Jack and young Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) head out on the open ocean to retrieve the beating heart before Davey Jones gets wise to the plan and before the East Indian Trading Company can get to it first. I liked the premise, but became more agitated with the plot as the movie unfolded. The movie was a kaleidoscope of redundancy: in two separate scenes giant round things go rolling through the jungle, there are two lengthy sea monster battles that are identical to each other and the motivating factor for every action is the same for all the characters. Everyone wants something and they’re willing to trade anything to get it: Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) for Will, Will for Jack, Jack for a key, the key for Elizabeth, Elizabeth for Elizabeth. Some movies have one exchange sequence, or Mexican standoff, but Pirates is made with them.

Although there is way too much bartering and trading among the characters, not to mention plot holes big enough to sail armadas through — How does Jack become chief of a cannibal village? — Dead Man’s Chest has its high points. They may be clones of each other, but the rolling sequences are fun: one is in a cage made of bones, the other is a sword fight on top of a water wheel. Jack Sparrow’s entrance doesn’t top his entry method in The Curse of the Black Pearl, but it comes mighty close. And some slapstick gags with Jack on a roasting kabob are enjoyable.

Everyone will have their favorite parts. Mine were the character effects of Davey Jones (no mention of his locker) and his crew, one of them being Will Turner’s dead father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgård). At first glance they look like menacing zombies with their guts hanging out of their torsos, but look closer — they are made up entirely of ocean life. One sailor has a live eel protruding from his belly; whether it is a stowaway or actually his stomach is hard to determine. Another character has hermit crabs that take up residence in all the wrong places. Several sailors use swordfish and saw fish as — what else? — real weapons. And I thought the seafood at Sizzler was bad.

All this good stuff aside, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling of disappointment when the movie ended. I wanted a resolution and all I was given was a teaser for a movie next summer. That’s called a rip-off in most parts. In the Caribbean it’s called pirating.

From the Vault: The Curse of the Black Pearl

To celebrate the opening of the fourth Pirates movies — Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — here is my original review of the first movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. My review of the new movie will be posted Friday morning.

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 Shiver me timbers, Pirates is good.

With Johnny Depp as the engagingly goofy pirate lead it couldn’t possibly be bad.

Depp plays a salty sea dog with gold teeth and a drunk swagger in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Disney’s second film based on attractions at its theme parks. The first was the worthless Country Bears; the third will be the Eddie Murphy vehicle The Haunted Mansion. I can't wait until they do a movie-version of that bitchin' Monorail. 

The press kit doesn’t refer to the movie as an interpretation of the Disneyland ride of the same name, a slow-moving boat ride among Cajun and Creole pirates as they loot and plunder the Big Easy; it’s an “homage,” the material says. Well, whatever it is, it weaves a swashbuckling adventure across the high seas, where bald men with earrings, naked lady tattoos and bad teeth can set sail in a yarn as wild as they get. And when someone gets in their way: Ar, they send’em down to Davey Jones’ locker in a rain of cannonball fire, or they make’em walk da plank. And thar be a sailor’s death, ye matie.

Depp plays Captain Jack Sparrow, an unlucky pirate recruited by Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), the eager young blacksmith who must rescue his true love from cursed, more-evil pirates. Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), the meanest pirate since One-Eyed Willie or Blackbeard, kidnaps Will’s young lass after she’s discovered with a missing piece of Aztec gold.

Barbossa and his vile crew on the Black Pearl, a mythical ship with coal-colored sails and a gray mist that follows behind it, unleashed a Spaniard curse when they stole the gold coins years before. Under the moonlight, their skin rots away leaving walking skeletons unable to feel, taste or smell. The only way they can break the curse is to return all the pieces of gold and sacrifice an innocent with the last coin.

The adventures in Pirates are numerous and far-reaching — sword battles in blacksmith shops, rope-swinging trickery on cluttered docks and crowded harbors, gun fights,  cannon battles and full-on wars in which British soldiers grapple with pirate skeletons. This is the kind of fodder summer movies were made to exploit.

Depp really makes this flick enjoyable, especially since he’s been mistaken as a pirate in real life. A rogue on his own merit, Depp is introduced here as a befuddled, yet rebellious, pirate who can’t seem to find his buccaneer groove. Jack’s Sparrow’s introduction into Black Pearl is unforgettable and it utilizes Depp’s natural comedic touch. Sparrow sails into port on a sinking boat, unfazed by his ship’s buoyancy.

Pirates of the Caribbean, directed by the same guy that did the creepy horror The Ring (Gore Verbinski), is Disney’s first PG-13 movie ever, and it should be. It’s a little too violent for the little ones, especially once the skeletons start attacking folks with meat hooks and cleavers.

Don’t get the wrong idea though, this is a Disney dazzler, one tough sea cracker (on land: cookie) that never takes itself too serious. And unlike too many movies out now, there’s plenty to see. At no time during this two-hour adventure is it not delivering on all cylinders. Ahoy, this be fun.

Marvel mines its junk bins for Thor-ible film

Talk about starting the summer movie season with a bang — a bang to the side of the head. Some movies give you a good time; Thor just assaults you then gloats over your unconscious body.

Oh, it gets worse: it’s all in 3-D because two dimensions of torture just aren’t enough. Call me a contrarian stooge for not liking this beloved comic movie. Call me an elitist snob for not appreciating the dense comic mythology. Call me a jerk for blasting a movie you’ve been dying to see. Just don’t call me when Thor gives you a raging headache from its paralyzing 3-D effects.

Here is Thor, a blond bruiser with a bad attitude. The film begins on Earth but jumps to another planet, Asgard — mind the pronunciation — where Thor and his buddies, all of them wrapped in similar football padding, prance around beating up bad guys on ice planet Jotunheim. Asgard, Jotunheim, Mjolnir, Volstagg … the names will only make sense if you’re a Nordic raider, or have somehow braved ridicule by reading Thor comics when everyone else was reading X-Men and Superman. (Seriously, Thor?!? Is Marvel out of comics to adapt? What’s next Dolphin Boy?)

Thor is steeped in mythology. He ain’t no simple Spider-Man, who can be summed up in three sentences: “Spider bites boy. Boy gets super powers. Boy uses super powers to fight crime.” Thor’s origin story, which pains the entire first half of the movie, is more complicated. He’s the son of Odin, a wise and great god-king in Asgard, a land that has a railway of lightning that can traverse the cosmos, though Thor rides to the lightning machine on a horse. Odin must choose the next god-king, which comes down to Thor and his weasely little brother Loki. I knew Loki was the villain in the first shot because he had slicked-back hair — it’s almost always a dead giveaway, more so than the “No. 1 Villain” T-shirt.

A power struggle erupts and Thor is cast to earth without his powers, of which there are many: flight, lightning punches, sonic booms kicks, and the wielding of a boomerang hammer. In an earlier scene, Odin tells Thor that his hammer is a “weapon to destroy, or a tool to build.” Guess what Thor uses it for? I kept wishing that IQ-deficient Thor spoke like Hulk: “Me Thor. Me crush with hammer.” No one expects Thor to fly down to the South and start repairing tornado damage, or zip on across to Japan to rebuild from the tsunami, but that line is insulting. Marvel would rather inject Drano into its eyeballs than feature a superhero who builds something. Name me one fat comic fan that would sit through a movie about Superman repairing levees or Batman doing homeless outreach to crackheads.

Much of the film takes place on Asgard, the realm of Thor, and these scenes are horrible in nearly every way. The dialogue is laughable, the effects are weak, and all the mythology is just silly. And there are more funny hats than the royal wedding. The Earth scenes are slightly better, including the one where Thor walks into a diner and says, “This mortal form has grown weak. I require sustenance.” He orders more coffee by throwing his mug on the floor and yelling, “Another!” You’ll laugh, as I did, but only because Thor’s the dimmest of Marvel’s bulbs. Oddly enough, Thor’s staging of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men would be quite moving.

Thor is played by Chris Hemsworth, a relative newcomer. He’s a perfect Thor if only because he plays right into the title character’s oafish goofiness, which only contradicts the film’s later heroic posing. Hemsworth is surrounded by some major talent, including two Oscar winners — Natalie Portman and Anthony Hopkins — though the characters can’t seem to get a foothold on the material. They spend too much time blubbering in convoluted prose and endlessly explaining Odin’s many faults to ever recover from the film’s melodramatic undertones. When the action elements finally wrestle the plot away from the Asgardian windbags, it’s too late and Thor is mired in too much story, too many cruddy 3-D effects and all those silly outfits.

Thor’s director, Kenneth Branagh, a fine Shakespearean actor and director, was working with too many elements here. The dialogue is atrocious. The pacing is unbalanced. There are too many characters. And generally he makes some critical missteps. For instance, actor Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from The Wire) is cast in a role that requires him to wear a ridiculous costume, walk in a clunky robotic gait and speak in a chunky monotone. Why bury a fine actor in a meaningless role? The movies seems bored with its characters, which is probably why it later resorts to outright kidnapping when Thor faces off against, I kid you not, the robot Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

That doggone extra dimension of movie doesn’t help any of this. Much of the film is shot in that hyper-cut style of editing. I find that fad difficult to watch in 2-D, but here it is in 3-D painstakingly slamming itself against your frontal lobe trying to batter out a seizure or two. With action pieced together from dozens of angles and then sped up in a flurry of images, the 3-D effect is useless and counterproductive. By the time your eyes convince your brain that what you’re seeing is a three-dimensional image the shot changes and the whole process starts over again — we’re talking nanoseconds here, but they add up. And since elements within each shot are constantly shifting from foreground to background, and back again, the film constantly plays tricks with your eyes. As if to make matters worse, every camera angle, even ones as simple as basic close-ups on talking heads, are tilted, as if Branagh left his Shakespeare collection under one leg of the camera tripod. At best the 3-D won’t work; at worst you’ll get a headache or feel dizzy.

In the end, though, the joke is on the audience: Thor will get people to pay money to sit indoors and wear sunglasses.

Furiously stupid, yet oddly enjoyable

Stupid and preposterous.

Did you expect something else with Fast Five? If so then, then open your glove box and gently slam your hand in it. That pain you’re feeling is your re-entry back to Planet Earth. If that doesn't work, have someone back over your foot.

The movie, the fifth in the Fast and Furious franchise, is also a little fun — guiltily so — but only because it’s so stupid and preposterous. The things that happen in this movie don’t happen in comic-book movies, where the heroes are mutants and the villains are space aliens and the plots take place on planets with less gravity, no physics and a wanton disregard for Newton's Laws. To tolerate the film you must suspend disbelief; to enjoy it you must walk disbelief out to a firing squad and light it a cigarette.

If you've seen the other films, then you've seen this: it's more action, mayhem and crime by way of automobile. Although, this one reunites a bunch of the old actors, basically joining the two sagas of the franchise — they can be categorized as the movies with Vin Diesel and the movies without Vin Diesel — it mostly centers on the two stars. Diesel is the meathead Dominic Toretto, whose love of fast cars keeps getting him busted. Paul Walker plays his foil/buddy, ex-FBI agent Brian O'Conner, who busts him out of jail so they can perform more dangerous car stunts.

Dom and Brian head off to Brazil, where they get entangled with a kingpin who has an empire of crooked cops at his disposal. We know the film is in Rio de Janeiro because every scene is shot in a favela, or Brazilian slum, and director Justin Lin constantly reminds us of that by including the word favela in every sentence. We also know we're in Rio because Lin shows us the Christ the Redeemer statue, which deserves some kind of cameo credit. In this setting — beautiful beaches, the vibrant downtown district and sprawling shantytowns — Brian and Dom lay waste to Brazil, plowing their cars into every national treasure except that statue, which is luckily next to no roadways.

The film runs on a mixture of ethanol and cliché, and it uses every one in the book: the One Last Job trick, the lover's quarrel that ends with the outburst "I'm pregnant," the "I'll give you 24 hours before I hunt you down" clause, the Villain Joins the Hero ploy, and lots of recycled, cheap one-liners. If you've seen just five movies in your lifetime, then you've already seen nearly every trick Fast Five will dish out.

Car chases abound, as do high-octane heists and brutal shoot-outs. These, of course, are all implausible on an obscene level. In one sequence, the stars plunge into a deep gorge with nothing but water to break their fall. No one told the director that water, when entering it at Mach 3, might as well be concrete. In another scene, a bus rolls over after apparently tripping on a dime on the highway. The final sequence involves two cars pulling a massive steel vault the size of a boxcar through the entire city. It would be like a toddler pulling a John Deere tractor from a dead stop, but never mind realism.

Joining all this ludicrous bombast is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who has facial hair more intricately manicured than the gardens of Versailles. He’s so bad it’s comical. The film gives him some hokey dialogue ("We'll catch'em. Not a phone call more and not a bullet less." "Put on your thunderwear.") and he's often shown cleaning his gun, as if we would think he were a pansy if he weren't stroking gun steel, sharpening knives or lumberjacking the entire Northwest. No one really thinks he's the next Schwarzenegger anymore; no one except maybe Johnson himself.

The film builds and builds and builds right up to its ultimate destiny: the two sweaty meatheads — Diesel and Johnson — brawling in an extended fight sequence. The movie could have been called Bald Guys With No Necks Punch Each Other and it would have worked. This sequence, which is actually the false bottom on the film’s finale — oh, there's more — is the male equivalent of women mud wrestling in bikinis. And Fast Five milks every sweaty second of the fight. By the end of the mutual pummeling there's nothing really left for The Rock to do, so he inexplicably joins the team he's trying to apprehend.

Diesel, though, give the guy a hand: He's taken one performance — 2001's The Fast and the Furious — and turned it into a gearhead's magnum opus. He holds court over cars, imparts vehicular wisdom, says grace, swigs a beer, and generally seems to glow in this Zen-like state of perpetual car bliss. His acting is laughable, but his presence on the screen is unforgettable as he soaks up the film's wild cornball energy.

The women of Fast Five don't come out as lucky as the men, though. Jordana Brewster, with her sharp features and waifish shape spends much of the movie as the sympathetic shoulder to cry on for the men. Then she gets pregnant, which means she's out of action so she can shelter Baby Brian in various half-shirts and booty-riding shorts. The other woman, played by Gal Gadot, seems to be a legitimate member of the team, a team that doesn't assign duties to its members based on gender ... oh wait, she uses her ass to secure the kingpin's fingerprints.

Then there's the case of poor Elsa Pataky, who plays an honest policia in Rio. See, she's a widow; her husband, a cop, was gunned down after he refused to take a bribe. After his death, she joined the force to be a crusader to his cause. When she's not being rescued by all the big strong men, the film paints her as this delicate and passionate woman who mourns her husband while trying to undo the corruption in Brazil's wacky system. That doesn't last. I should have known something would have gone awry with this character when The Rock's rock began bulging in his pants when he saw her dossier. "I chose you because of your smile," he says. Then Fast Five asks this crusading cop to shoot at other cops, rob the police station and destroy downtown Rio — where are her principles now? By the end of the film, the widower has been hastily thrown into Dom's arms, where she ditches her modest wardrobe and noble plight so she can be — wait for it — some hoochie-mama on a beach with a bunch of criminals. This movie's understanding of women is better than, say, Sucker Punch — in which all women are rape fantasies and sperm receptacles — but still it's desperately short of understanding women on any level deeper than,"Hot women sell movie tickets."

Fast Five, of course, also fetishizes the car in a soft-core kind of way. People who adore automobiles will be thoroughly titillated as the film frames cars in all kinds of glorious angles. It doesn’t give these cars many interesting things to do, nor does it reinvent the car chase by any means, but it does try so hard. Most of the action is visually comprehensible, though it is edited into a clustery mess. And, for the life of me, I could not figure out which cars were traveling what direction and with which drivers in the last action scene.

One thing that should be unforgivable: Dodge's super-heavy product placement. I kept waiting for Morgan Spurlock to jump out of the backseat as some kind of commentary on the nature of product placement, to which Fast Five sacrifices its soul to the Dodge Charger, a car that is as much a character in this film as Superman is to his. Chargers are in chases, shoot-outs, perilous games of chicken, used as vehicular retribution, cursed at, spit upon, and unnecessarily glorified in an extended sequence where they drag that massive vault through Rio. Curse these obvious product placements.

The film is stupid and bad, but it's also precisely up to par for a summer starter. Call me a Fast/Furious apologist. Most people turned their movie brains off in December. Before quality can be appreciated again, they need a jolt to the system. And Fast Five will probably do the trick. I knew the movie was stupid, but somehow I admired it for being every kind of stupid in just the right mixture.