NOBODY 2

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

When Nobody was released in 2021, it worked perhaps better than it deserved: released in May, it was the first movie I saw in the theater since covid stay-home orders had begun 14 months before. There was something freeing about the experience, both the return to normalcy for us movie lovers, and the violent release of pent-up tension that unfolded in the plot, about a guy with a problem resisting an urge to pick fights—but always with good (sort of) on his side. It also established Bob Odenkirk as the latest in a line of unlikely older-man action heroes.

Odenkirk was 58 when Nobody was released, which makes him 61 now. That film also featured Connie Nielsen as his wife, Becca; Christopher Lloyd as his dad, David; and RZA as Harry, his brother—all of whom return for Nobody 2. Even Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath return as Hutch and Becca’s children, who are quickly established at the beginning of the film as increasingly frustrated by their dad’s absence—but not as much as Becca.

Nodody was hokey and contrived as hell, but lots of fun not just in spite of but because of that: it was a movie that made no bones about what it was, and that’s what made it work. It was kind of a blast. Nobody 2 has a bit of a problem in that it simply attempts to replicate what the first movie did, giving it the feel of a copy of a copy. Nothing is innovated here, and the film seems to serve little purpose other than to stage ultra-violent combat sequences at a rickety amusement park.

Hitch and Harry were taken there once as kids by their dad, you see, and it was the one family vacation they ever took—something Hutch is attempting to replicate by returning there with his own wife and kids. Naturally, what else is replicated is how the dad gets sucked back into old habits there, particularly when an asshole employee swats his daughter upside the back of the head. This results in violent retribution that is so wildly out of proportion, the movie quickly stopped being fun for me. Acting in self-defense is one thing, even when it’s excessive, but in response to a swat on the head? Bashing a guy’s head through an arcade game?

Nobody 2 attempts to make this behavior okay—for the sake of the audience, anyway; Becca doesn’t approve, at least not at first—by having Hutch admit to Wyatt (John Ortiz), the park owner, that “I lost my shit,” but in response to what still qualifies as assault against his daughter: “What would you do?” Wyatt, the park owner who starts off as a potential adversary after his son and Hutch’s son get into a scuffle (this is what starts it all), seems to ponder this briefly and then basically give Hutch a pass.

But there are some truly wild characters we have yet to meet. There’s the local sheriff, Abel (Colin Hanks, at 47 looking shockingly like his father in middle-age), ridiculously corrupt and acting as a sort of middle-man between Wyatt, who oversees an underground drug operation for which the amusement park is a front (seems unduly complicated), and the most bonkers character of all, Lendina, played with unselfconscious relish by Sharon Stone. She’s the boss of this entire operation, a ruthless woman about whom a character might say “She’s wiped out entire bloodlines for less.” Funny how Hutch can wipe out her henchmen like they are, you know, nothing but story props.

I won’t lie, I had kind of a good time with Nobody 2. That can happen when you just surrender to what a movie is, in this case a moderately amusing action movie with modest ambitions and zero pretense. That doesn’t make this movie good, and this is just a rehash of a previous film that barely succeeded on such flimsy merits. Nobody might still hold up, actually—but it was the kind of movie that worked precisely because it shouldn’t, but it was saved by great fight choreography and charismatic performers. The performers are mostly the same in Nobody 2, but the premise and especially the villains are so ridiculous that it sometimes took me out of the movie. Every supporting character in Nobody 2 is not only a caricature, but practically a cartoon.

But, if you just want to see a bunch of people get dismembered and blown up in an amusement park, I suppose you’ll have a great time.

Fire in the hole! In the plot hole!

Overall: C+

WEAPONS

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A+

Weapons is a tricky one, because its success relies so heavily on how little you know going in. How much can I tell you about it, then? About as much as the setup is revealed in the trailer: all but one student in a single third-grade class suddenly run out of their homes at the same time in the middle of the night, run out into the darkness, and no one has any idea where they went. The parents of these students are deeply suspicious of the class teacher, Justine (Julia Garner, perfectly cast), for little reason other than it’s the only thing they have to hold onto, the closest thing to a shred of sense. She is seemingly the only thing all these kids have in common.

I suppose you could argue that it’s strange this community is not equally suspicious of Alex (an exceedingly well-directed Cary Christopher), as he is just as much what these kids have in common as Julia is: he’s from their class, and he’s the only one that didn’t run out into the night. Of course, adults are far more likely to suspect other adults than a child, and while they might also have been suspicious of Alex’s parents, those two are . . . let’s say: incapacitated.

Such is the central mystery of Weapons, and one that remains a mystery for quite a long time in this movie: what made these children run away, and where did they go?

This is perhaps the perfect time to mention that Weapons was written and directed by Zach Creggor, the filmmaker behind the 2022 surprise hit Barbarian, which established him as a bold new voice in cinema. What Weapons proves is that he is far from a one-hit wonder. This is a movie that does everything right. It establishes a mystery, then unravels it before out eyes without ever once telegraphing what comes next. It doesn’t have the wild tonal shifts of Barbarian (one of the many things that made that movie such a delight), but it does provide a fair amount of laughs—just don’t expect them to come too soon. Creggor wants to put you through the paces of nervous tension first.

Horror has never been my favorite genre, but horror with a healthy dose of humor gets me a step closer. Weapons has been likened to a cross between Magnolia and Hereditary, which does reveal a little bit, in an abstract way: we get several chapters, each titled the name of the character being focused on, the first being the aforementioned Justine. Another is Alex, and yet another is Archer (Josh Brolin), a parent of one of the missing children. There’s also Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local cop; and James (Austin Abrams), a homeless addict who is given far more dimension than such a character is typically given in any movie, let alone a horror movie. Eventually we start to see how the narratives of all these characters intersect, which is where the Magnolia comparison comes in. The broader vibe otherwise can be inferred.

There is no allegory or metaphor to be found here; Weapons is simply a magnificently structured and cleverly written horror story, the kind that makes you remember how exhilarating it can be to go to the movies—especially with a crowd of people. I will admit I spent a lot of time with my hands over my face, and Creggor does employ several well-placed jump scares—something I usually hate. I have some mixed feelings about the multiple dream sequences, and in one of them the apparition of a giant machine gun in the sky feels a little on the nose (that sounds like something close to a spoiler, but believe me, it isn’t). Weapons clocks in at two hours and eight minutes, but to say there isn’t a dull moment is an understatement.

When it comes to the comparison to Hereditary, what I would clarify here is that Hereditary was much more unsettling than Weapons, which still succeeds at it to a degree. Weapons is far more thrilling, though, especially one it takes a decisive turn in the final act—which is where most of the humor also comes along. It’s also an incredible jolt of energy in a story that was already crackling, but it pivots from suspense to a beautifully executed sort of chaos.

Most critically, Zach Cregger shows admirable restraint. The final-act chaos is over just when you think you want more, but in a fully satisfying way. Nothing gets over-explained, or indeed in many ways explained at all. Amy Madigan suddenly shows up, and I won’t dare spoil in what capacity—only that she proves to be the wildest character of all. But whether it’s her or any of the other ensemble cast, they all feel like authentic people with dimension, even when they make you giggle (there’s one moment when Josh Broken delivers a perfectly executed “What the fuck!”).

I haven’t yet mentioned Benedict Wong as the school principal, Andrew, who also gets his own chapter. We don’t even realize for a while that he plays a gay man, and I was sort of taken with the scene in which he is grocery shopping with his partner, simultaneously trying to talk down a paranoid Justine on the phone while pointing at which cereal he prefers. I loved that Wong played his part straight (so to speak), while his partner is played by Clayton Farris with a perfect touch of effeminacy. The fates of both these characters is pretty wild in the end, but in neither case does it have anything to do with their sexuality. They are simply among a great many regular people caught in extraordinary circumstances.

I mean, they’re just caught in a movie, to be fair—but, in the best way. Weapons is not something you will soon forget, and will want to talk about at length, so long as it’s with someone else who has also seen it. No spoilers! Movies like this are why we love cinema.

Run, don’t walk, to the cinema to see this movie!

Overall: A-

THE NAKED GUN

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Spoof movies in the vein of The Naked Gun had their heyday long, long ago—it started with Airplane! in 1980, and lasted perhaps through Hot Shots! in 1991. In the middle of that period, we got The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988, starring Leslie Nielsen, who had already surprised audiences by pivoting from a long career in serious dramas before pivoting to his part in Airplane! Nielsen then became, for all intents and purposes, the poster boy for spoof movies, starring in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear in 1991, then The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult in 1994. Those diminishing returns continued with little-known films such as Dracula: Dead and Loving It in 1995; the Fugitive spoof Wrongfully Accused in 1998; and his injection into the Scary Movie franchise in 2003 (Scary Movie 3) and 2006 (Scary Movie 4).

By the 2000s, the Scary Movie franchise represented a genre long run out of steam, made by people who have exhausted all the good punch lines, and who clearly no longer quite understood the assignment. Scary Movie (2000) was the cinematic equivalent of a hat on a hat, created in response to Scream (1996) and its sequels—but those films were packed with self-referential comedy, a meta exercise that did not lend itself well to parody, because parodying something already comedic makes little sense.

Enter 2025, well into the era of the rooboot and the “legasequel,” and this new The Naked Gun qualifies as both. I would have preferred a well-made film in this genre that was an original idea, but The Naked Gun is what we’ve got. And here’s the surprise: this is perhaps the first spoof movie made in thirty years by people who not only understood the assignment, but have sharp, comedic minds.

I have often wondered what it would be like to remake Airplane!—full disclosure, my all-time favorite comedy—in the modern era. The pop culture references would have to be updated, as would any of the gags related to technology. Would it play quite as well? Probably not, but I would be very interested in seeing it attempted. I’ve gotten the next-best thing with The Naked Gun in 2025, which succeeds shockingly well at updating all the references and the technology, while fully honoring the tone of the humor in the original.

Plus, this Naked Gun has something other reboots almost never have, which is restraint—not in terms of all the deliberately dumb humor, which is the overall point of this exercise, but in any penchant for self-reference, or particularly reference to the original 1998 film. Aside from the plot connection that establishes this as technically a sequel rather than a reboot (Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin, Jr, son of Leslie Nielsen’s Lieutenant Frank Drebin; Paul Walter Hauser plays Ed Hocken Jr, son of George Kennedy’s Captain Ed Hocken), there’s only a couple of references to the first film, so subtle that only audiences who well remember the original will catch them, just as the passing shot of a stuffed beaver, or the very brief cameo by “Weird Al” Yankovic, which also happened in the original. There’s even a very brief cutaway to Priscilla Presley watching the news. And yet, anyone who has never seen any of the previous films can watch and enjoy without feeling like they’re missing anything—these are just fun little Easter Eggs for those of us who do remember.

A big part of what makes The Naked Gun work is its inspired casting, once again with people known as serious actors, who play their parts straight. Liam Neeson, already enjoying a reinvention over the past 15 years as an older action star, could not be more perfect as Drebin Jr. He shot this movie at the age of 72, and although that’s 10 years older than Nielsen was in the original Naked Gun, they still have the long career of serious roles in common. And Nielsen was indeed born 26 years before Neeson, which certainly makes them believable as father and son. Paul Walter Hauser has proven to be a versatile actor across genres, and I liked him better here than I did as the Mole Man in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, also currently in theaters. As Drebin’s love interest, Beth Davenport, we get Pamela Anderson, a worthy successor to Priscilla Presley in this genre.

With the addition of Danny Huston as the Elon Musk-like villain, Richard Crane, who sells electric cars but also plans to detonate a device with sound waves that makes everyone kill each other so he can inherit and rule over the world with fellow billionaires after waiting out the carnage in a bunker, The Naked Gun features a game cast of actors who all understand what kind of movie they’re in. None of it feels like a cash-grab, and the script, by Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, and Akiva Schaffer (who also directed), manages to make the humor feel fresh rather than rehashed.

I won’t pretend that all the gags land, but with this type of humor, mileage varying comes with the territory. The run time is a wonderfully brisk 85 minutes—exactly the same as the original film—which keeps the pacing breakneck, creating a far better feeling than the countless “comedies” of the past twenty years that bafflingly clock in at over two hours, creating opportunities for lulls. There are no lulls in The Naked Gun, and if one gag doesn’t make you laugh, there will be another one that will, and in a matter of seconds. That is precisely how these movies are supposed to work.

This may not be an original idea, but police procedurals as a target of parody is an evergreen proposition, and at least The Naked Gun is a recognizable property. Well, it is for us older folks, anyway—but I already noted that this movie can work just as well for anyone who has never seen the previous films in the franchise, or indeed are unaware that they even exist. Funny is funny, and as long as you’re open to this kind of humor (dumb jokes written by smart people), the bottom line is that this movie is funny. And things look surprisingly promising for this film: a score of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes; a score of 75 on MetaCritic; a surprisingly large crowd in the theater where I went to see it, at 10:45 a.m. on a Saturday. It’s tracking to make around $20 million this weekend, exceeding initial projections.

Whether The Naked Gun will prove to be rewatchable the way its predecessor was remains to be seen; I may see it again just to look for visual gags I missed the first time around. Movies like this tend to pack in a lot, which means some of it can get missed while you’re laughing. This is the best problem a comedy can have, and god knows movie comedies that actually get a theatrical release are a dying breed. It’s fantastic to see a movie like this come along with so much more life in it than anyone had any reason to expect.

There’s so much more to offer here than you’d think!

Overall: B+

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B-

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has clearly aged past its prime. It feels a little like the “cinematic universe” equivalent of a middle-aged guy prone to reminiscing about his glory days as a high school football star.

To be fair, I never fully locked into the “MCU” project the way millions of fans did. I am a fan of movies, not of genre, which means I can appreciate the special ones that break the mold (Black Panther, Logan, even Thor: Ragnarok) but can easily forget about the rest—and there is a lot of the rest. This new Fantastic Four movie isn’t seriously bad, even if it is still definitively dumb; it’s merely average at best, which makes it slip right into that same steady stream of superhero mediocrity.

I can’t help but compare this film to Superman, the DC competitor also currently in theaters, and although I have ultimately decided The Fantastic Four: First Steps is better, the difference is negligible. The thing is, there were things I hated more about Superman (it’s mind-numbingly stupid script) but there were also things liked a lot more about Superman (its far better casting; Krypto the Superdog, overused as he was). Its worse qualities tip the scale, which is perhaps ironic because at least Superman kept me awake. I nodded off multiple times during The Fantastic Four.

Some of my issues with this movie, admittedly, are fully justifiable inclusions in a movie based on a superhero comic book—I’m just not into these things, this idea that the heroes are for all intents and purposes gods, and therefore any presentation of stakes is fully an illusion. This is the case whether it’s in a comic book or a movie, and is perhaps a big reason I never got into comic books. I never get invested in the heroes’ success because their success is guaranteed—particularly in the first in an expected line of sequels.

I am also aware that The Fantastic Four is a bit notorious as a franchise, in that this film is the fourth—nice coincidence there—attempt at cinematic adaptation, at least if you count the 1994 production that never got released theatrically but can now be found online. A second attempt that did get theatrical release, and even did well at the box office (to the tune of $333 million worldwide), came out in 2005, with a nearly-as successful sequel in 2007. The second reboot, starring Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell, tanked both critically (27 out of 100 on MetaCritic) and commercially ($56 million domestic). I never saw any one of these movies because I couldn’t be bothered to care, but I certainly know that none of them were regarded as a particularly good adaptation.

All that is to say: there was a lot riding on The Fantastic Four: First Steps, both with fans of this particular group of superheroes and with the future of Marvel Studios broadly. This is film is performing relatively well, although that success is mitigated by a $200 million budget—and this, frankly, is one of my problems with the movie. Why am I not actually seeing that money put to use, or at least put to use well, onscreen? James Cameron spent $400 million to make Avatar: The Way of Water, but that was money well spent, with visual effects so astonishing they largely made up for a frustratingly simpleminded script. The problem with movies like both Superman 2025 and The Fantastic Four: First Steps is that they have both the money and the means, and it still feels like everyone is phoning it in.

This is nitpicky, but I don’t care: the Fantastic Four have a car that flies. There is a scene in this movie where a couple of them rush in this car to the scene of some mayhem, and the car quickly stops in the air in time to skid on the ground a couple of feet, and the occupants pop right out and just keep walking like the badasses they think they are. There’s no fumbling, no recalibrating their balance, no visual acknowledgement of the physics of sudden changes in velocity—in short, it looks unnatural, because it is: bodies would never move this way, except in the results of rushed VFX. And it’s distracting when, even in a fantastical world like this, something looks straight up fake when it is clearly not meant to. There are so many things that look like this in effects-heavy movies these days, and within ten years people will rewatch this stuff and feel the same effects as we do today when watching stop-motion effects in 1930s films. Except in this case, it’s not because of any limitation of technology—it’s because people can’t be bothered to take the time to get it right.

Granted, The Fantastic Four: First Steps would not be much improved even if the effects were perfected. I found Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer to be the most compelling character—also referred to as “the herald of Galactus,” she scouts planets for the godlike Galactus (Ralph Ineson) to consume, in exchange for him sparing her home planet. Garner does a lot with a part that is limited both in screen time and in physicality: the Silver Surfer sports a body encased in silver, making her look rather like the villain from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (this may be a reference lost on you if you are younger than 30). The entire plot surrounds the Fantastic Four’s efforts to stop Galactus, and get the Silver Surfer out of their way of doing so, but in broad execution it’s all packed with so many lapses in logic that I lost count.

There’s also a subplot involving “Mole Man,” as played by Paul Walter Hauser, a talented actor who is wasted in this bit part about a rival to the Fantastic Four who ultimately comes to their aid by allowing all of New York City to evacuate—not to some area outside the city, that would make too much sense, but to his underground city of “Subterranea.” This happens after all but one of the “bridges” to another dimension around the world are destroyed, which is why Galactus must be lured to the only one still standing, conveniently for this plot, right in Times Square. And this is the only reason “Subterranea” factors into the plot at all.

As for the Fantastic Four themselves, and the actors who play them, this is a bit of a mixed bag. The overexposure of Pedro Pascal continues, as he is cast as Reed Richards, “Mister Fantastic,” clearly coded as the “head of the family,” and meant to be some wild genius, as he writes equations on chalkboards that I am sure look like gibberish to any actual genius. Also, for a genius, he sure spends a lot of the movie befuddled about what to do. I can’t say he has the greatest chemistry with Vanessa Kirby, who shines as rival to Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible movies, but here adopts an American accent for Sue Storm, the “Invisible Woman,” a part that basically exists so she can give birth in space, to a baby with as-yet-unknown superpowers (but Galactus sure wants him!). Joseph Quinn has arguably the most charisma out of the bunch, as Sue’s brother, Johnny Storm, “The Human Torch.” And Ebon Moss-Bachrach all but disappears as a personality inside the CGI suit of Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm, “The Thing.”

Much is made of Reed’s genius invention of teleportation, which he demonstrates successfully with an egg and then explains doing the same with Planet Earth should be just as easy because the difference is just “a matter of scale.” The problem is, even though it’s immediately made clear that this cast of characters exist in a different universe than ours, Reed’s teleportation scheme never explains exactly where he’ll teleport Earth to, and spoiler alert, Earth never gets teleported at all by the end of this movie. And let’s not even get started on this movie’s countless inconsistencies of scale. Except, perhaps, for this question: if Galactus is meant to consume an entire planet, why is he the size of a skyscraper?

Much like Krypto from Superman, I did enjoy H.E.R.B.I.E. (“Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics”), Reed’s lovable robot assistant. And unlike Krypto, H.E.R.B.I.E. is not overused. Indeed, one of the better things about The Fantastic Four: First Steps is its successful sidestepping of self-indulgence: mercifully, this film doesn’t even clock in at a full two hours (its runtime is 114 minutes). Just because it’s not overstuffed doesn’t mean it’s not still a bit of a mess—a judgement I make fully aware that it’s largely informed by how tired I am of superhero-movie tropes. There have just been so many of these superhero moves over so many decades now, I truly long to see ones that stand apart with narrative innovation. Pinning any hopes for such a thing with this movie would be a mistake.

I don’t know, maybe try stepping in a different direction.

Overall: B-

OH, HI!

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about this movie.

In 1992, Stephen King published a novel called Gerald’s Game, in which a woman spends most of the story stranded and tied to her bed, her husband dead on the floor after she induces a heart attack by kicking him in the nuts when he ignores her pleas to stop. I only bring this up because in the new movie Oh, Hi!, director and co-writer Sophie Brooks takes the basic premise of Gerald’s Game, swaps the genders, and turns it into a comedy.

Is it all that funny? Not really. I think I got a good, laugh-out-loud moment out of it one time. I kind of got a kick out of David Cross as the oddball neighbor who exists just this side of creepy. Even his performance is odd, though: in his first scene, in which he shows up, standing stiffly, at the lakeside admonishing the two main characters not to have sex in the lake—which they aren’t doing—his eyes appear fixed on nothing, so at first I thought he was playing a blind man. Then he shows up in another scene in which it’s clear he can see just fine.

Semi-ironic side note: one of the very minor subplots of Oh, Hi! is that Isaac (Logan Lerman), the male lead, is reading Blindness by Portuguese novelist José Saramago—a novel I found narratively compelling but a very difficult read due to its use of dashes instead of quotation marks for dialogue. Isaac never says anything about this, although he does get frustrated by two other character asking why the novel is called Blindness Blindness Blindness because of the visual design of the title on the book cover repeating the word. The second time that happened I did get a good chuckle, so I’ll give this movie credit for that.

Two other key differences between Oh, Hi! and Gerald’s Game is that Oh, Hi! isn’t in the least bit rapey—thank God—and nobody dies. Isaac does fear or his life, though, and for good reason. Iris (Molly Gordon), his girlfriend-or-is-she, is clearly mentally unwell, and when Isaac reveals he’s not looking or a relationship while still tied to a bed (let that be a lesson to us all: never share your disappointing feelings about your relationship while in handcuffs), Iris refuses to un-cuff him, and instead somehow convinces herself she can convince him to stay with him by refusing to let him free for twelve hours.

Two other characters come into the mix, about halfway through: realizing she is in far too deep, she calls in reinforcements from her good friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan), who shows up with her own boyfriend, Kenny (John Reynolds), in tow. Mind you, Isaac and Iris are renting a secluded getaway house in the country, which is why Steve the oddball neighbor is the only other person around, and allows for a primary cast of only four for ninety percent of the film’s runtime. In any case, Kenny is vaguely described as having law expertise, and once he comes into the house and sees that there is a captive upstairs who none of them has immediately freed, they are all potentially looking at jail time.

The performances are decent all around, and both Logan Lerman and especially Molly Gordon make the most of the material they are given. It’s the material itself that I am ambivalent about. I didn’t feel active contempt for this movie as I watched it, and generally the characters are compelling enough—with the exception of Iris, and given she is the central character, that’s a pretty big problem. Who was asking for a movie about a psychotic young woman who can’t handle that the guy she’s dating just isn’t that into her?

Oh, Hi! plays like it wants us to empathize with Isaac and Iris equally, and I take issue with that. Gordon may give a nuanced performance as Iris, but Iris is not nearly as nuanced a character as Sophie Brooks clearly wants us to think she is. And having Isaac soften to Iris after being literally held captive by her for so long that she has to hold a bowl for him to pee into—am I the only one who thinks that’s batshit insane? I can’t decide if I just don’t understand Millennials or if logically Isaac would actually go straight to the police the minute he had the opportunity.

I won’t spoil how Oh, Hi! ends, but I will say it ends with frustrating ambiguity. I’m not against empathy for even the worst kinds of people, in fact I very much believe in and encourage it—but not to the point of unhealthiness, and certainly not without justice. Oh, Hi! just feels a little like it doesn’t have a deep enough understanding of these things.

“It’s not that deep,” you might say. Sure, okay. I could also say that I’d like this movie a lot more, even with nothing else changed, it it were a lot funnier. But Brooks is trying to imbue the story with a certain kind of pathos, which is incongruous to the proceedings. Even a deeper backstory than the random bits of information we get on these two leads would have been helpful. In the end, I just left this movie moderately entertained at best and frustrated at worst. I was tempted to say “eternally frustrated,” except that I’ll probably forget this movie by next week.

It’s amazing how far out of hands things get when two of the hands are cuffed.

Overall: B-

EDDINGTON

Directing: B-
Acting: A-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

Soooo how many times are we going to keep writing Ari Aster a blank check just because his first two movies were the critical and commercial successes Hereditary and Midsummar? Maybe someone needs to convince him to stick with horror. Or maybe just stop making movies with Joaquin Phoenix?

There are multiple ironies here, not least of which is the fact that Joaquin Phoenix is by far the best thing in both Beau Is Afraid (a deeply unpleasant, three-hour panic attack) and Eddington, which is a straight up mess of a movie with a few redeeming qualities (like Phoenix’s performance). Another irony is that Eddington attempts to be a snapshot of the pandemic-era zeitgeist of “late May 2020,” and that was the exact month in which I finally gained the courage to watch Hereditary for the first time.

I think most of us have a perfectly vivid memory of what it felt like in May 2020, arguably the greatest collective trauma experienced across every nation around the world in a solid century. Eddington fails to reflect that moment, five years later, with any real accuracy or authenticity—hard as it tries. Granted, it seems to be going for satire, maybe half the time. The other half of the time I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was going for.

As early as April 2020, I shared, in part, that the way pop culture reflects this uniquely global experience for a long time to come was going to be interesting. Predictably, however, we haven’t gotten a lot of it: Covid-19 remains too recent (not to mention variants of it still going around to this day) for people want to revisit that collective trauma. It also remains relevant that a pandemic where millions died but for most of us the challenge was just loneliness and monotony does not provide much opportunity for excitement in a medium like film. So it’s understandable Ari Aster would gravitate toward the turbulent nationwide fallout of the George Floyd murder and subsequent violent protests, and how that fallout eventually makes its way to a fictional New Mexico town with a rivalry between its sheriff (Phoenix) and its mayor (Pedro Pascal), who are running against each other in the upcoming election.

I’m just not sure Ari Aster is the right person to tackle these things. If, say, Spike Lee or Jordan Peele had made this movie, it probably would have been good—it could have been great. As made by Aster, it’s not terrible. It’s just consistently baffling, and leaves you with a lot of questions—and not the kind of unanswered questions that make a movie more intriguing. These are the kinds of unanswered questions that makes you think: What the fuck did I just watch?

I don’t know what the population of Eddington is supposed to be, but it’s clearly meant to be very small. Filming took place partly in Truth or Consequences. New Mexico, which has a population of just over 6,000. Maybe I just don’t know enough about politics, but is it normal or a mayoral candidate of a town of such size to hold a major fundraiser six months before the election? Don’t even get me started on the scene in which Phoenix’s Joe Cross hosts a “town hall” in a local restaurant, the few attendees sitting silent (and masked) at dining tables, not one of them saying a word through Joe’s rambling speech being recorded for his socials. In what universe would not one of those people pipe up and say anything during this event—which, by the way, occurs during a contentious protest that forms all of a block away outside?

There’s a lot of White protesters who openly express their White guilt in over-written and obvious ways, clearly designed as the aforementioned satire, but never quite landing. It consistently feels contrived in a misguided way, and like something people on the right could easily misinterpret as just making fun of “woke people.” Aster’s ideas are far more nuanced than that—he just can’t seem to make the ideas come together coherently.

Both Emma Stone and Austin Butler are among the most talented actors working today, and their talents get wasted in supporting parts that never connect. Stone plays Joe’s wife, Louise, who has a peculiar romantic past with Pascal’s Mayor Ted Garcia but which has been misrepresented in local media. Butler plays the quasi-cult leader Louise eventually gravitates toward. There’s a scene in which Louise and her mother (Deirdre O’Connell) arrive home late in the evening, Austin Butler’s weirdly charismatic character and another couple in tow. This guy shares a story of bizarre childhood abuse with so many plot holes that even Joe starts to pick it apart. This might be the moment when the audience also first says: Huh? It’s certainly the point at which Eddington lost me, and it’s not even the point at which it goes completely off the rails.

I would say that both Beau Is Afraid and Eddington are roughly equal in quality, albeit for different reasons. Eddington is certainly more pleasant to watch and more entertaining, although in its final act it descends into a chaos that is very similar to the entire runtime of Beau Is Afraid. What they have in common is excellent performances—this is clearly Aster’s greatest strength, and I am increasingly interested in seeing how he would do directing someone else’s script. And while Beau Is Afraid was far too long especially for its unending sense of foreboding and anxiety, Eddington feels like it was also made as a three-hour movie, then whittled down to its current 148-minute runtime, somehow cutting out the scenes that would have made it make sense.

The opening shot is of a homeless man with some kind of mental health issue, walking into town. Call him Chekhov’s homeless man: he turns up multiple times again, until he’s predictably part of a pivotal plot turn. In the middle of the movie, there is a hard cut to a group of agitators on an airplane, clearly headed for Eddington, after Instagram video of Sheriff Joe wrestling the homeless man to the floor in a bar is shared. There have long been stories of agitators perpetrating violence among otherwise peaceful protests just to sow greater unrest and damage collective reputations, and in Eddington Ari Aster takes this idea to their most wildly violent conclusions—to what end, is very unclear. He does fold in Joe’s two local deputies, one White (Luke Grimes) and one Black (an excellent Michael Ward), just so he can show what Joe initially declares “a them problem” before the problem creeps its way inevitably into the relationships between the three of them.

Aster is just throwing everything at the wall here. The first conflict, which is the initial frustration before everything else strains the entire community as too much for them to handle, is the debate over public policy regarding mask wearing. When Joe walks maskless through a grocery store and explains the difference between public policy and law, he’s technically right, but that doesn’t make him any less of an asshole. Conversely, Mayor Ted Garcia is portrayed as nakedly ambitious and disingenuous, even if he’s correctly obsessed with following public policy. Eddington features almost no characters who are likable or empathetic (Michael the Black deputy comes closest), and this is an excusable choice only with either truly successful satire or a film with an unmistakable point of view. Eddington is neither, leaving us instead with a truly random and wild choice in its final scene. And trust me, you’ll never guess what happens in that final moment—not even while watching the movie, not until the very moment it happens. You’ll leave the theater saying, “What the fuck?” and that about sums it up.

Can’t we all just get along? Maybe if we got better movies!

Overall: B-

SORRY, BABY

Directing: A
Acting: A+
Writing: A
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

Rare is the film that is as self-assured as Sorry, Baby, which is written and directed by 31-year-old Eva Victor—who also stars in the lead role, as Agnes. Directing oneself is an impressive challenge in the best of circumstances, and doing it this successfully is practically a miracle. Victor’s performance is simultaneously subtle and astonishing, the kind of thing it’s tempting to say deserves an Oscar, except the Oscars don’t pay much attention to “small movies” like these. And Sorry, Baby has so much integrity, it’s almost condescending even to mention the Oscars, as this isn’t a movie with any aspiration for prizes.

I find myself thinking of the male gaze, because this movie so deftly sidesteps it. This is a film very much about trauma, but it takes a unique approach to it. The separated chapters, each with a title card, aren’t even presented in a fully linear timeline. Once we get to “The Year with the Bad Thing,” the bad thing itself is never shown onscreen. The camera is stationery, across the street, facing the house where it happens. There’s a hard cut to dusk, another hard cut to night. Agnes leaves the front door clearly in a bit of a daze, which continues as the camera follows her to her car, and along her drive home. We only learn exactly what happened when we hear Agnes recount it to her very close, lesbian friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie).

One of the many things I love about Sorry, Baby is how much humor is in it, and nearly all of the humor occurs after we learn of this assault. There’s humor in the doctor’s office the very next morning, when Agnes is getting “standard questions” from a clueless doctor, with Lydia by her side. There’s humor in Agnes’s meeting of a random sandwich shop owner who calms her down when she drives off the road by his shop due to a panic attack. There’s humor in Agnes’s awkward dinner with university colleagues which includes a deeply jealous woman (Kelly McCormack) who believes she should have gotten the full-time position Agnes was offered. And there’s some subtle humor in Agnes’s cautious development of a relationship with her neighbor, Gavin. Lucas Hedges is perfectly cast as Gavin, having returned to film last year after a break to focus on writing. He’s been missed, and as always he works incredibly well as a character actor in supporting parts.

And Gavin, incidentally, is the closest we get to a male point of view in Sorry, Baby. And to say it’s told from a female point of view is itself a bit complicated: Eva Victor reportedly uses both they/them and she/her pronouns. Agnes, the character, never states any preferred pronouns, except for a scene in which an arrow is pointed to the space between M an F under “gender” in a jury duty questionnaire. Lydie, on the other hand, is depicted both post- and pre-coming out in subtle ways, consistently refers to herself as gay, but is in a relationship with a nonbinary person named Fran (E.R. Fightmaster, who is themself nonbinary). These variances in gender are never the focus of the story or any particular character, which is what’s so great about it: they just are, and art getting made by younger filmmakers will inevitably do this more often, thereby slowly but surely conditioning audiences to the idea, whether some dipshit Alabama governor likes it or not.

With all that in mind, it’s somewhat amusing to think of how Eva Victor is referred to when referred to only by last name. Sorry, Baby clearly has more than just these things on its mind—and even has the way people are treated based on perceived gender on its mind. There’s a scene in which two women on the faculty basically feign concern for Agnes when one of them says, “We know what you’re going through. We’re women.” Except it sounds like a memorized script, and that’s the point. It plays funny, but with a deep subtext of sadness. People who have never experienced sexual assault might feel like such odd, awkward or wildly tone deaf reactions to it are unrealistic. People who know the experience are fully aware of how often this sort of stuff happens—both being victimized and being completely misunderstood about it.

It would seem at first glance that Sorry, Baby is a movie about the friendship between Agnes and Lydie, but it’s actually far more specifically about Agnes, and how they come to terms with this trauma. Lydie, while clearly a very good friend, is just one of the narrative threads. Still, once the story gets to Lydie and Fran having a baby, we get to how that baby is, in her way, the title character. This is only revealed in the final scene, when Agnes is looking after the baby while Lydie and Fran are on a walk, and Agnes assures the baby that she can tell her anything no matter how scary—and scary things will happen. Life will have its challenges, but we’ll help each other get through it. And I feel lucky to have Victor take me through Sorry Baby, a film that turns deeply complicated issues and themes into a gem of poignant simplicity.

This might be the smartest movie you’e seen about such heavy subject matter.

Overall: A

SUPERMAN

Directing: C+
Acting: B
Writing: C
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+
Special Effects: C+

About three quarters of the way through James Gunn’s Superman, I could no longer think of anything but this: Oh my god, this movie is dumb. But I am trying to lead with positivity!

There’s a few things I enjoyed about Superman, the seventh live action film with Superman as the top-billed character since 1978 (and I’m not even counting Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—because Batman got top billing). David Corenswet is well cast as the title character this time out, and when Gunn actually slows down long enough for us to get real character moments, the man is brimming with charisma and screen presence. He also has chemistry with Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), who works well as the scrappy reporter from the Daily Planet, because even in Gunn’s universe people apparently still care about journalism.

This many movies in—indeed, this many reboots in (I suppose this would make the third?)—it’s commendable that the story here doesn’t bother with Superman’s origin story. A series of opening titles inform us of the state of the world we are entering into, which includes “metahumans”—other people with superpowers, though Superman is the most powerful among them. I wasn’t crazy about yet another superhero movie with a supporting cast of second-tier superheroes, especially given that we never get any real chance to know “Mister Terrific” (Edi Gathegi), Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), or Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan) as characters. I understand these are all actual characters from DC Comics, but do we need to overstuff a 129-minute feature film with them? But! I did kind of love that, in this Superman movie, Lois Lane has full knowledge that Clark Kent is Superman, they are actively dating, and they even have some minor relationship problems. That is a refreshing change from how we usually see their relationship in these movies.

On the short list of things I actually liked about this movie, I have saved the best for last: Superman’s superdog, Krypto, gets extensive screen time. In fact, we meet him in the opening sequence, right after the title cards have informed us that Superman has just lost a battle for the first time. We already saw this in the very well-cut teaser trailer, in which Krypto drags Superman through the Antarctic snow back to his Fortress of Solitude. And I will say this to the dog lovers out there: if you love dogs, you are going to love Krypto.

Now, it should also be noted that Krypto is mostly an obvious CGI dog, something that is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. CGI doesn’t have to be obvious and it never has—Jurassic Park taught us that 32 years ago. You have the tools and you clearly have the budget. Maybe do it right? On the other hand, obvious or not, Krypto is adorable as hell, and possibly the best thing in Superman, which is otherwise far too busy and overstuffed, stupidly convoluted, and exhaustingly ridiculous, even by regular Superman standards.

Here’s where the casting wasn’t as inspired as I thought it was: Nicholas Hoult clearly wants to be an iconic villain as Lex Luthor, but, much like this film overall, he takes a giant swing—and then misses by a wide margin. This is hardly entirely Hoult’s fault, as he’s largely shackled by how bonkers-stupid James Gunn’s script is. Lex Luthor is supposed to be a mad genius, fine. But apparently this movie has to up the ante on that idea to such a degree that Luthor has managed to invent a means for traveling in and out of a “pocket universe” of his own creation. What? If I never hear that phrase again it'll be too soon. This level of idiocy leaves me feeling deeply wistful for the days of Gene Hackman, whose Lex Luthor had a delicious understanding of sarcasm and wit. Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor only understands cartoonish obsession.

I hate to give a piece of shit like Kevin Spacey any credit, but he was the only other Lex Luthor to come close to the spirit of Gene Hackman, when he appeared as the character in Superman Returns in 2006. That film remains the only halfway decent Superman movie since the first two Christopher Reeve films, and that one was released 19 years ago. In my review of that film, I wrote about the awkward challenge of marrying Superman’s old-school wholesome sensibility with the cynical sensibility of the 21st Century. In this new Superman, Gunn tries hard to update these characters for the current era, but sometimes it just doesn’t work. This film is rated PG-13, probably exclusively because of how frequently characters are swearing, but in a DC universe dominated by Superman, they just come across like people swearing to sound cool, which of course falls flat.

I wish I could say that at least this Superman is better than Zack Snyder’s 2016 film Man of Steel, but alas, it is not. These films just have different reasons for being cinematic beacons of big-budget mediocrity. James Gunn makes an attempt at infusing his film with some gravitas, even going so far as designing the credits in the style of those from the Richard Donner films. All this does is remind us how much better those films are—they are now very dated, to be sure, but they still manage to capture a sense of wonder that modern superhero films, and certainly those based on DC comics, lack. The Superman we get in 2025 falls victim to the same claptrap nine out of ten other superhero movies do, sagging under the weight of their own bloat, and throwing in stakes so ridiculous as to become meaningless. Other movies feature sequences wherein the villains threaten the existence of either the entire city or the entire universe—here, we get a “dimensional tear” that threatens both at once! And Lex Luthror is such an evil genius he can stop or start it with a bank of computers!

Why do filmmakers think they can improve overplayed iconic character stories by making them pointlessly convoluted with what amounts to magical nonsense? I’d love to see a new Superman that is simple but clever, inspired but straightforward. Or, I could just go watch the Richard Donner films again. The tagline for the 1978 film, which ushered in the superhero blockbuster era, was You’ll believe a man can fly. Nearly five decades later, we’ve seen so many men fly that our eyes have glazed over. The tagline for this new film might as well have been You won’t believe a man can revive a franchise.

One of the few memorable quotes in this Superman is when a guy on the news says, “The one thing liberals and conservatives can agree on is that Lex Luthor sucks.” I wish I could say that we can all agree that this Superman sucks, but conservatives are already priming liberals to defend it. And to be fair, “sucks” is a bit strong of a word. I suppose I could try to be like the cool kids these days and just say that James Gunn’s Superman is “mid.” It’s only David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, and Krypto that even raise it to that level.

If there is any reason to see Superman it’s Krypto the superdog. And I still don’t particularly recommend it.

Overall: C+

JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH

Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

Talk about a diluted franchise. Steven Spielberg’s original, 1993 film, Jurassic Park, is easily one of the greatest blockbuster movies ever made, and people have now tried six more times to recapture its magic, with varying degrees of never fully succeeding. In terms of box office, the reboot Jurassic World (2015) came the closest. Ironically, even though it felt like a significant comedown, Jurassic Park’s first sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park came closest in quality. It was the only other one also directed by Spielberg, at least—and is really the only other one that still had the same sense of wonder, alongside the monster menace.

Reporters love to note that Jurassic World made the most money out of any film in this franchise, but what they constantly ignore is that figure being in unadjusted dollars. Adjusted for inflation, Jurassic Park remains the biggest grossing film in the franchise by a fair margin—by that metric, it remains the 18th-most successful movie ever made in the U.S. Jurassic World ranks 30th, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park ranks 113th, much further down the list but notably higher than any of the other sequels.

No one even thinks about Jurassic Park III (2001) anymore. Even though Jurassic World was itself a massive success, rebooting the franchise 14 years after the end of the original trilogy, it could also be said that no one thinks about its two sequels anymore either: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), which was flawed but still pretty fun upon rewatch; and Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which held exciting promise by combining that trilogy’s cast with the cast of the original film, only to turn out to be hot garbage, easily the worst movie of either trilogy.

Should Hollywood leave well enough alone, then? Of course not! All of three years later, let’s . . . do another reboot! Functionally that’s sort of what Jurassic World: Rebirth is, although it has too much in common with its immediate predecessors to feel too separate from them, even with an entirely new cast. And let’s be honest, Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey are all far more compelling than Bryce Dallas Howard, and arguably at this point, even Chris Pratt.

Here’s the downside of these otherwise incredibly charismatic actors in Rebirth: I could not possibly give less of a shit about their characters. Scenes offering us backstory near the beginning of the film are so dull, I thought about how I’d rather be napping. This film takes some time to get to any real dinosaur action—one of several allusions to the original Jurassic Park (something even Jurassic World did, making this a bit like a copy of a copy)—but what made Jurassic Park work so incredibly well even in scenes with no action was its clever humor, vibrant performances, and genuinely compelling characters. At the end of Rebirth, when one of the principal characters turns up alive when everyone else was terrified they were dead, I found myself thinking: I’d have way more respect for this movie if the six-limbed mutant “Distorus Rex” suddenly appeared and ate that person after all.

So yes, this time around, a large number of the dinosaurs are cross-bred mutants. We meet the Distorus Rex in the opening sequence, a flashback from “17 years ago” introducing us to the second-ugliest creature ever to appear in this franchise. (The ugliest, and also the stupidest looking, would still be the feathered Pyroraptor from Dominion.) They even talk about how these genetically mutated creatures were not something any park goers wanted to see. So why do they think movie goers want to see them? Distorus Rex doesn’t even look like a real dinosaur. It looks like the xenomorph from Alien crossed with the Elephant Man.

It really kind of sounds like I hated this movie, doesn’t it? Nope! I just . . . didn’t love it. Distorus Rex aside, Rebirth still has a whole bunch of other creatures that are very cool, in sequences that are very exciting. Granted, no part of any of them is original: much of Rebirth just feels like a cross between the original Jurassic Park, Jaws (particularly the boat sequences, complete with characters shooting nonlethal devices at the sea creatures), and King Kong (specifically the sequence where they visit an island that turns out to be still inhabited with dinosaurs). Those are all great movies, at least, and when Rebirth pays homage to them, it generally does them well. Which is to say: when it’s focused on the characters, this movie is dull as hell. But when the dinosaurs start eating people, it cooks.

It was easy to feel optimistic, having the likes of Gareth Edwards as director, and David Koepp—who wrote the scripts or both Jurassic Park and The Lost World—as the writer. It may be relevant to note that Koepp is 62 now, and not exactly brimming with the original ideas he once had. (Or maybe he just needs to work with the right director: his script for Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, also released this year, was excellent.) This time out, he shoehorns a completely unrelated family into the plot: a divorced dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is sailing across the Atlantic with his two daughters (played by Luna Blaise and Adrian Miranda) and the older daughter’s boyfriend (David Iacono), and they inevitably get their boat capsized by a giant sea creature. Johansson & crew hear the distress call in their own boat, go to rescue them, and that’s the only reason why the Delgado Family winds up tagging along on a misguided and harrowing adventure.

What exactly are they doing then, you ask? Just kidding, you didn’t ask. Nobody cares! Except it’s so dumb, I’m going to tell you anyway: they need blood samples from live specimens of the largest dinosaurs of those now thriving only in the equatorial region, so they can use it to cure heart disease. Because they have such huge hearts, you see! Whatever, move along, next we have another thrilling action set piece.

None of these movies have ever been plausible, not even the original Jurassic Park—although that one at the very least had adjacency to plausibility, a clever conceit that could sound real enough to the uneducated. They’ve just gotten dumber as they went along, but they all work when characters are getting chased and sometimes eaten by menacing dinosaurs. (This was the fatal flaw in 2022’s Dominion: nobody cares about giant mutant locusts. We want dinosaurs!)

It could be argued that the action setpieces are more satisfying throughout the film in Rebirth than any of these movies at least since Jurassic World. Gareth Edwards knows how to shoot this kind of stuff with a sense of scale, if not always wonder—that’s kind of his thing. It’s the wonder, really, that’s missing here. But at least it has heart stopping thrills, and that’s all anyone is going to these movies for.

Mutadon? More like MutaDUMB!

M3GAN 2.0

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

I go to the movie so often, I often have to sit through trailers to the same movie so many times that, even if I am interested in the movie, I get deeply sick of the trailer. MEGAN 2.0 was a prime example of this, and it also means I committed a great deal of that trailer to memory—against my will. There’s M3GAN breaking through a giant doll box to strangle a man. There’s M3GAN saying to rival robot AMELIA (“Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android”), “I’ll make you a deal. You can kill Gemma, but don’t touch Cady,” before an exasperated Gemma (Allison Williams) snaps, “M3gan!” (She pronounces the 3 as an “e.”) And best of all, there’s the obviously-gay stan in a blonde wig who says, “I don’t care if she did kill four people. She is a smoking’ hot warrior princess!”

Except: none of these slips from the trailer are actually in the theatrically released cut of the movie. This is fairly common, as editing of the full film typically isn’t done when trailers are cut. But it seems particularly egregious here—some of the most fun stuff used to sell us on the movie isn’t even in the movie. Are we supposed to wait around for a “director’s cut,” or what? Of this?

The original M3GAN (2022) got surprisingly good reviews. I thought it was fine. To be fair, it seems to work better as a re-watch: I watched it again to refresh my memory before going to see this sequel, and I think I enjoyed it more the second time around. I still stand by the solid B I gave it. M3GAN 2.0 isn’t faring quite as well with critics. It is objectively less-good than its predecessor, but let’s be real: not by a huge margin. There is some bonkers-ridiculous shit that happens in this movie (in what universe would an obvious home invasion turn out to be the FBI coming in with a search warrant? Well—this one!), and yet: I still found myself having a pretty good time in spite of it all.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about M3GAN 2.0 is its existence as a reaction to an original film that found far greater success than anyone expected, thanks to a sneakily campy tone that did not fully reveal itself until the second half of the movie. Now, not only is most of the principal cast returning (including Violet McGraw as Cady, now three years older), but so are the writers (Aleka Cooper and James Wan) and the director, Gerard Johnstone. The only difference there is that this time around Johnstone is also getting a writer credit. And what every one of these people are trying to do is transparently to catch lightning in a bottle. This predictably proves impossible, mostly because it can no longer be sly about its subtle camp—and yet, it does get closer than you might expect.

They also go very obviously for a Terminator 2 version of M3GAN, where the character who was the lethal villain in the original film is brought back to become the hero, and fight against a more advanced villain. To 2.0’s credit, M3GAN the character remains pretty threatening and sinister well after getting re-introduced into this new story. The greater threat now is AMELIA, this one an android played fully by a real human (Ivanna Sakhno, perfection the art of not-blinking). It also takes a page from the Alien franchise, dialing down the horror from the original film and leaning into action.

You may be sensing a theme here, in that there aren’t really any original ideas to be found. There’s still joy in the project, and that is still to be found in the tone: M3GAN’s bitchy attitude; some of her tone deaf decisions (there’s a scene of her singing a song to Gemma at the wrong moment and I got a kick out of it); even the multiple choices clearly mirroring similar moments in the first film. Some of it lands better than others; when we get a M3GAN dance at an unexpected moment in this movie, it doesn’t work anywhere near as it did the first time around precisely because now we’re expecting it, waiting for it to happen.

Part of what made M3GAN work as well as it did—to the extent that it did work—was the character’s very size: she’s small for a girl, big for a doll, but still quite obviously a doll. This time, when Gemma redesigns her, M3GAN says “Make me taller.” This makes her a bit less effective as an amusingly creepy doll, but at least she remains markedly shorter than any of the adult humans around.

No one expects a movie like this to be plausible, but some of this stuff threatens suspension of disbelief, even by M3GAN standards. If she can construct an entire basement lair complete with wall screens and furnishings, why in the world would she need Gemma and her colleagues to help construct her an upgraded body? But whatever, when she and AMELIA are fighting, it’s fun—especially AMELIA’s cleverly gruesome kills. The action is actually used more sparingly than it needs to be, but the restraint on that front actually helps it work.

I suppose there can also be too much restraint, though. The original film was a perfect length at 102 minutes. M3GAN 2.0 is a solid two hours, which, for a movie like this, is . . . not perfect. There’s actually more to enjoy than you might expect in this film, but the flip side is how it can give you too much of a good thing. The marketers of this movie clearly attempted to capitalize on a character that instantly became a camp icon, but such things never land exactly as desired when you have to work so hard at it.

It works well enough, though. M3GAN 2.0 is mostly ridiculous and stupid, and these are things the movie knows about itself, which made it easier for me to just enjoy it for what it is, which is postmodern horror with a lot of deliberately weird humor. Even as it turned out definitively less good than the original, I kind of hope they make a M3GAN 3.0. And you never know, the next one could be better! We just won’t talk about the inevitable downsides of planned obsolescence.

You’re gonna let me finish no matter how long it takes!

Overall: B-