Yesterday Little Rotten Week picked up my hammer, proclaimed she wanted to help me "fix" something, held it menacingly over my wife’s iPhone, and began bringing the head of the hammer down towards the screen coming within inches of smashing it into a thousand pieces. I imagine she felt a lot like Thor. Just in time too, because this week we look at the hammer-wielder in a much anticipated sequel.
Just remember, I'm not reviewing these movies, but rather predicting where they'll end up on the Tomatometer. Let's take a look at what This Rotten Week has to offer.
Thor: The Dark World
Cities have had a bad run of it lately in comic book movies. The Avengers destroyed New York City. Man of Steel took out every single building in Metropolis. The Dark Knight Rises laid waste to Gotham before having a nuclear bomb go off only a few miles away (the next movie in the series will be "Batman: Head to the Fallout Shelter"). I think the lesson here is if superheroes ever to start showing up on Earth, flying around in tights and flexing their genetically (or alien or god) altered muscles the value of my home is going to go way, way up. Because their arrival will begin the mass exodus out of our cities and begin another round of the great suburban sprawl. More superheroes will mean more strip malls, wider state roads and a push away from the artistic and technological influences in cities. So come on Thor, ditch Asgard, bring some evil to destroy our cities and we’ll all begin enjoying the comforts of suburbia. Because when he and his homeboys show, the cities are screwed.
Thor does come back in this sequel, as a new evil presents itself, threatening the entire universe. These guys never get a break huh? Enlisting his maligned (and kind of bitchy) brother Loki (a super range-y Tom Hiddleton) to combat an evil so powerful it looks like he bought his sinister getup at a Halloween costume store. That aside, the film looks much like the first as it straddles the realms and Asgard and Earth rather seamlessly. I was concerned about that dynamic for the original Thor (77%), but those concerns were laid to rest quickly. And this follow up looks like another winner.
Director Alan Taylor doesn’t have much in the way of big screen success, but my man has crushed on the television side of things. He’s helmed some of the best shows including The Sopranos penultimate episode "Blue Comet" and Game of Thrones season two finale, "Valar Morghulis". Beyond those he’s done just a smidge more television work in Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Big Love, Bored to Death and Nurse Jackie. (There’s more, but who has the time?). So yeah, Taylor knows his way around the small screen camera. (I’m just assuming they use different cameras, I mean the television screen is so much smaller than the movie theater’s, so it stands to reason right?). And according to early reviews, this move towards the big screen superhero action flick was the right one for Taylor. Sitting in the mid-eighties through about fifty reviews, critics are more than pleased with the sequel and the Marvel Universe keeps pumping out quality movies. The first phase’s six flicks averaged about 81% on the Tomatometer with Iron Man 3 (79%) and this Thor sequel kicking off Phase Two in style. (Captain America: Winter Soldier is due in April) The franchise brings the goods and the latest appears well in line with its predecessors. Even if our cities are the ones paying the price. The Rotten Watch for Thor: The Dark World is 81%
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Recapping last week:
A pretty good week for critical predictions. To begin, Ender’s Game (Predicted: 59% Actual: 62%) dipped the requisite amount over the course of the week. The score started in the seventies, but the early reviews gave the impression the flick wasn’t without its flaws. This score is a bit of a shame, especially for me (and countless others) who loved the book. Many said this was the unfilmable movie, and this score suggests there were issues. And for those who were considering not seeing it based on author Orson Scott Card’s umm, less-than-progressive-sort-of-downright-obtuse-and-offensive views, well read Mack’s piece on why that makes no sense.
Next up was Last Vegas (Predicted: 45% Actual: 43%), very nearly a direct hit. If anything, I thought I might have gone a little high on this score. It was just so hard to see a movie with this much acting firepower (even if they did appear washed up and hokey) scoring on the bottom quarter of the Tomatometer. It’s funny. Often times movies with scores in this range will have a certain theme in the reviews. Critics will say something along the lines of, "It had it’s moments but overall the film just didn’t deliver." The reviews will hedge a bit. Not with this film. Anecdotally, reviews fell into two camps which were: "Better than the Hangover!" or "Totally dreadful mess!" with not much too else in between. Kristy’s review fell close to the latter opinion, calling the plot "insipid" and Michael Douglas and Robert De Niro’s work, "painfully one-note performances."
And finally, just in time for Thanksgiving, Free Birds (Predicted: 49% Actual: 21%) was f@#$ing awful. I wrote about the philosophical and economic principles this movie might be touching on as well as the moral quandary present anytime time travel is brought into the mix. Alas, it seems I was mislead as really it just turned out to be your standard animated piece of garbage about turkeys. Oh well.
Next time around it’s a best man’s holiday. It’s going to be a Rotten Week!
