With the weather becoming depressingly cold, on Friday night, my wife and I decided to stay in, order Chinese, and watch something mindless. We could not have asked for a better choice than this picture. The backstory takes about six minutes. We, the United States, bomb the wrong Middle Eastern family, who, for matters of what I presumed to be political correctness, are not radical jihadists, but rather, generic arms dealers who sow misery and discord wherever and whenever they can. Our chickens come home to roost several years later, when the family unleashes their long planned assault – a decapitation of world leadership at the state funeral for a British prime minister in London. Our own president (Aaron Eckhart) and his Secret Service superman (Gerard Butler) are trapped in the besieged capital, and it is up to Butler to extract the president in the face of what appears to be hundreds of bad guys.

Whatever concerns I had about excessive political correctness were quickly dashed by the character of Butler. In one instance, just before killing a bad guy, he screams at him “go back to Fuckheadistan.” In another instance, he tortures the brother of the primary bad guy, while the primary bad guy listens in via cell phone. After shoving his knife in the brother’s  stomach several times with a cruel twist, the president says to him “was that really necessary?” Butler responds “no.”

When Butler delivers the final coup, he prefaces it with a speech that is jingoistic, excessive, and hilariously satisfying.

“You know what you assholes don’t get? We’re not a fucking building! We’re not a fucking flag! We’re not just one man! Assholes like you have been trying to kill us for a long fucking time. But you know what? A thousand years from now, we’ll still fucking be here!”

Hoorah!!!

Yes, it is stupid, but it is also an exciting, well executed escape flick, with a lot of ingenious stunts, a cool re-creation of the destruction of London, and little attempt at what would otherwise be a cardboard and time-wasting story.

It’s hard to decide on what was more enjoyable about Deadpool. There’s the ingenious flash-forward, flashback in story, which keeps the action fresh. There is also an intelligent self-referential trick; as Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is dragged to the estate of the X-Men, he asks “ “So, McAvoy or Stewart?”.  The back-and-forth between Reynolds – our hero, though he insists he is not – and the other characters is sharp and profane. The utter lack of seriousness, save for a very few poignant moments that are immediately deflated by the screenwriting equivalent of fart noises – is also a joy (indeed, Reynolds actually farts as he walks by his roommate, who, unbelievably, is a geriatric blind woman). There’s the 106 minute running time, juxtaposed nicely with the bloated, Shoah-like length of the interminable Avenger movies, which keeps things humming.

But I guess my favorite part is when Reynolds meets his love interest (Morena Baccarin) and we are educated as to the depth of their ardor via a montage of their incredibly kinky sex life, which incorporates days of commemoration. The image of Reynolds bound and on all fours as Baccarin prepares to “celebrate” International Women’s Day with him is hilarious, made more so by the image of parents quickly hustling their children out of a theater they lazily thought was showing children’s fare

Very much in the vein of Godzilla, Jurassic World is just gripping and exciting enough, you almost look past its flaws.

Almost.

The script is cobbled-together from the Spielberg factory and is largely a knock-off. We come to the park with kids scarred by impending divorce bond (two, like in the first movie) where they are met by their aunt, a park executive, who has no parenting instincts (ala’ Sam Neill, in the first movie).  There is also a bad guy who wants to use velociraptors for, you guessed it, military purposes, and plenty of discussions about the ethics of all of this (much less impressive coming from the likes of B.D Wong and Chris Pratt, as opposed to Sir Richard Attenborough and Jeff Goldblum). And our heroes live because the dinosaurs fight amongst themselves (again, as in the first movie).

Speaking of Pratt, he’s in a bit of bind here. Pratt’s wheelhouse is a certain goofy but childishly masculine charm, best represented in Guardians of the Galaxy and Moneyball (as the confused, boyish catcher-turned-first-baseman). Here, when Pratt flashes that charm – mainly in banter with the aunt, Bryce Dallas Howard – he’s fun to watch. But Pratt also tries to play it straight, and he simply lacks the gravitas to do so.  A fair comparator is Bruce Willis, who went from the light comedy of TV and Moonlighting to the sarcastic aside of John McClane in the Die Hard flicks to a plausible straight hero. But Willis started late and had the rough look of an older man, coupled with a menace he could draw upon. Pratt ain’t there yet and it’s hard to tell when he is being serious or joking. 

There’s also a fair amount of lazy plotting.  It is never adequately explained why certain features of the new, terrifying animal – Indominus Rex – were allowed to manifest themselves in the creature (such as its ability to think like George Patton) without also injecting a kill switch.  Also, the response of the park staff is less professional than what you might get on a windy day at Busch Gardens, and if Busch Gardens keeps you on a metal track for the Old Time Antique Car Ride, there is no way a park would allow its patrons to self-navigate dinosaurs in one of these:

Still, this is an easy and fun movie which, at last count, has made enough dough to bail out Greece.  

This is a really fine action film, all the more impressive for its lack of CGI and enhanced by an intricate dystopian vision and some very bizarre, very cool, hard comic-book baddies.  The plot is elemental.  The world has gone to shit, and barbaric fiefdoms and clans reliant on gasoline have arisen from the ashes. Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a trusted lieutenant and gas runner of the chief bad guy, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), takes something very precious from him and in the process, is assisted by Mad Max (Tom Hardy) and a fundamentalist acolyte of the heavy (Nicholas Hoult) who turns from the dark side.  So, they are chased, and then, they double back through the dusty hell that is the future, and threaten all Immortan Joe possesses.

There isn’t much beyond action here, but it is inventive and exciting.  Hardy and Theron are taciturn, eschewing even Eastwoodian comic understatement.  They leave it to Hoult to provide most of the pathos, and he is an endearing motorized jihadist.  Thankfully, the movie does not really try to communicate how the world came to be so barren and unforgiving, a blessing, because there is nothing quite so annoying in today’s dystopian films than the inevitable philosophical discussions masquerading as backstory, where we learn how we pissed it all away, and why the sufferers must keep suffering (see Snowpiercer, Elysium, In Time).