DVD: Divine Viewing Diversions
For your home-viewing pleasure, here are three entertaining titles well worth seeking out, each originally released theatrically in the spring. Two are fantasy-franchise sequels sandwiched around a comedy.
“AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR” (PG-13)
It was the Marvel Cinematic Universe – the MCU – that kicked off this year’s official summer movie season.
And why shouldn’t it have?
After all, “Avengers: Infinity Wars” is the 19th entry in the MCU, a sequel to 2012’s “The Avengers” and 2015’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron.”
And like its predecessors, it’s Marvelous escapism, an eye-popping, breezily entertaining fantasy, with kinetic action sequences and loads of in-references for devoted, paying-close-attention fans.
But for the casual moviegoer with little or no interest in the community of comic-book superheroes, “Avengers: Infinity War” will do little in the way of recruiting you.
Or, to put it another way, “A:IW” might attract and reward an already committed audience, but it’s unlikely to be a wide audience.
The screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on a six-issue comic-book series, gives directors (and brothers) Anthony and Joe Russo (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and “Captain America: Civil War”) plenty to work with.
But plenty, remember, is sometimes too much.
The large ensemble cast – including Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Don Cheadle, Karen Gillan, Elizabeth Olsen, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Holland, Chadwick Bosemen, Josh Brolin, Sebastian Stan, Tom Hiddleston, Zoe Saldana and Chris Pratt – packs the screen with familiar faces.
But there are so many characters involved, the movie seems too crowded and simply cannot give them all sufficient screen time to make their presences felt.
The film also – again, like its predecessors – keeps things humming to such a degree that there are times we wouldn’t mind if it slowed down just a bit, took a breath or two, and let more of the able performers be more than extravagant chess pieces.
In this outing, the title-character superheroes, having been torn apart two years ago, join forces with the Guardians of the Galaxy to stop villain Thanos, played by motion-captured Brolin, having arrived on Earth with the intention of obtaining and exploiting the all-powerful infinity stones, which would afford him an unlimited amount of power.
And let’s just say that he is very definitely not planning to use them for humanitarian purposes.
If that narrative description is vague, file it somewhere in the spoiler-free zone, a place where the degree of “fanticipation” and the level of production-value execution heading into a splashy summer attraction made up for any gaps in or confusion about the admittedly simple plot.
But fans and non-fans alike should know in advance that “A: IW” is and plays like the first part of a two-part offering, so it’s likely to register, even for viewers partial to its style and content, as stimulating but less than satisfying.
Know in advance that it’s 2½ hours of wall-to-wall action, that it’s well on its way to somewhere else next year, that its mood swings are severe, and that it’s one very clustered spectacle.
That said, it’s also visually and technically dazzling. So, for non-fans, “Avengers: Infinity War” will be impressive but excessive. Fans, however, will marvel.
“BLOCKERS” (R)
Three young women, high-school seniors who are lifelong friends, make a pact: to lose their virginity on prom night.
Consequently, their overprotective, disapproving parents get wind of it and make their own pact: to block them.
That’s the premise of “Blockers.”
But no matter how lurid or suggestive or raunchy this R-rated teen-sex comedy with the sanitized title sounds, it’s surprisingly sweet-natured and sincere and downright sentimental.
Blockers features Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz as parents who freak out when they discover that their soon-to-graduate daughters – played by Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon – have sworn to this outlandish agreement.
Thus the mom and two dads, worried that this will be a “life-ruining mistake,” agree to do whatever it takes to thwart these plans and head their “kids” off at the pass.
Which is why they follow them from location to location and activity to activity throughout a prolonged and eventful prom night that starts at the dance and eventually moves to a hotel.
And while the spying parents learn a bit about their progeny, we learn a secret or three about the “grownups.”
So, are the parents puritanical killjoys? Are the teens rebellious hellions? Both? Neither? You make the call.
Although the debuting director, Kay Cannon, wrote the three “Pitch Perfect” comedies, she works here from a screenplay by the scriptwriting team of brothers Brian and Jim Kehoe, with Seth Rogen serving as one of the film’s producers.
Perhaps a woman’s touch in the director’s chair helps the film to register as distinctive instead of generic, because the female point of view employed here renders the film an it’s-about-time gender bender.
Cannon certainly does well with her youthful ensemble cast, which displays effective collective comic timing and bring the characters to appealing life with sharp dialogue delivery and occasional game slapstick.
We’ve come to expect inspired comedic skill from Mann (“This Is 40”) and she doesn’t disappoint, while ex-wrestler Cena (“Trainwreck”) continues to impress with his comedy learning curve. As for Barinholtz, he stays a shade too insistent and strained, but he too has his moments.
As do the young women playing the three millennial daughters who set the plot in motion.
“Blockers” is a genuinely funny sex-pact comedy that’s packed with both witty lines and likable characters.
“SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY” (PG-13)
Hey, maybe that galaxy wasn’t so far, far away after all.
Because here we sit more than 40 years after the release of “Star Wars,” and the Force is still with us.
Two years ago, the standalone, action-oriented, science-fiction-adventure prequel, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” landed and entertained both longtime fans and new recruits.
“Solo: A Star Wars Story,” also a prequel, is a bit more directly aimed at viewers who have a sense of the franchise mythology, but it doesn’t exactly disenfranchise others.
“S:ASWS” is an origin story about Han Solo, the cynical galactic smuggler played by Harrison Ford in the first “Star Wars” trilogy to come our way.
Played now by Alden Ehrenreich, this younger version of wannabe top pilot and wisecracking swashbuckler Solo tries to join the Empire but stumbles at the Imperial Flight Academy.
Along with his partner-in-crime, Qi’ra, played by Emilia Clarke, who’s also an outlaw, he stays one step ahead of the mining-planet authorities who pursue him as he explores a dark criminal underworld that seems straight out of Charles Dickens, with or without the Oliver twists.
It’s during his attempt to assemble a team for a dangerous heist that he meets and bonds with a Wookiee named Chewbacca, played by Joonas Suotamo (inheriting the role from Peter Mayhew), who would become his trusted co-pilot, and which suggests as an alternate title for this space western, something like “When Han Met Chewbacca.”
He also encounters a fellow charismatic adventurer named Lando Calrissian, played by Donald Glover (originally by Billy Dee Williams).
And articulating one of the film’s major themes is Solo mentor Tobias Beckett, a scoundrel played by Woody Harrelson, who advises:
“Assume everyone will betray you and you will never be disappointed.”
This action-adventure fantasy spinoff ended up in the reliable hands of veteran director Ron Howard – who won two Oscars for “A Beautiful Mind” and was Oscar-nominated for “Frost/Nixon” – when he replaced “The Lego Movie” directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller several months into the shoot.
The script that old pro Howard works from – which comes from father-and-son screenwriters Lawrence (his fourth “Star Wars” screenplay) and Jonathan Kasdan – is based on George Lucas’s original characters, and mixes combat, betrayals, and double-crosses with star-crossed romance.
It’s a high-spirited, light-touch adventure thriller that zips right along, boasting impressive visual effects, as expected, and the cocky swagger that Harrison Ford introduced many moons ago.
Unfortunately for the film and its fans, leading man Ehrenreich tries to convey this quality with little more than a tiresomely arrogant smirk.
More successful and appropriate is Glover, whose scene-stealing and nearly-film-stealing turn is a highlight.
There’s not much that’s new here, but the narrative is simultaneously propulsive and engaging and nostalgic: It is, in other words, comfort food that’s not risky but frisky.
And while the film preaches trusting no one, it turns out that director Howard is an exception.
So, as “S:ASWS” attempts to enrich the ultimate “Star Wars” experience, does it make a case for its own necessity? Not quite. But it’s still welcome and pleasurable.
“Solo: A Star Wars Story,” a confident, competent intergalactic adventure, knows it’s not an epic and still wins us over by delivering the expected.
