You know when you watch a movie, and they’re making a parody movie within the movie, a la Notting Hill or The Fall Guy? This is the parody movie.

Welcome to the JLonaissance! Here, JLo is an analyst named Atlas who has dedicated her life to searching for the rogue AI who killed her mom and like three billion other people. Stuffy plotty things happen and she ends up piloting a mech suit.

“JLo in a mech suit??” you ask excitedly, if by “you” I mean “me.” Me asked this very excitedly upon seeing the trailer. I’m delighted to inform you all that this is exactly the movie you thought when you watched the trailer. It’s JLo in a mech suit, baby! What else do you need? Narrative tension? A sense of urgency? The main character’s development feeling hard-earned? A coherent message? Get outta here.

There are absolutely no surprises in Atlas. It’s a 2-hour-long video game cinematic starring a lot of actors you recognize, sort of like Death Stranding, except it’s shorter than most of the Death Stranding cinematics and Death Stranding has something to say.

The entire point of the movie is JLo neurotically saying, “I don’t trust AI!!!!” until she does. She becomes besties with an AI, hot guys die, she defeats the bad AI because she unlocks a few upgrade slots, and she’s improbably rescued at the last minute. This doesn’t feel like a spoiler to me. You already knew the ending was gonna just kinda be like “shrug, she survives.” Look within your heart. The truth is there.

But I’m gonna tell you, this movie really could have been a whole lot worse. Mark Strong’s expressions imply a subplot that wasn’t written. JLo is so committed to the material! Simu Liu is hunky and he wisely made ten thousand hunky Abraham Popoolas for me to thirst over. Sterling K Brown does a great job (like he ever does a bad job, pff). Everyone’s hot, the CGI was fine, and the script hit all the most basic Save the Cat beats. Hey, that’s not a guarantee in modern screenwriting.

Sure, it would have been better with a lot less talking and a lot more plot, action, or cool sci-fi stuff. Atlas’s emotional growth had the psychological feeling of an on-rails shooter. It’s kinda stunning how little imagination they could employ in a science fiction setting where they got to put JLo in a mech suit. What a boring planet! What prosaic world building!

Yet I really think the screenwriting is the worst part of this (by far), and the screenwriting is *mostly* dispassionate and mediocre.

I kinda think I’d have enjoyed this movie when I was a kid, though it’s not intended as a kid’s movie (who the hell is this intended for? who would be happy with slow conversations between JLo and Siri?). I’d have loved watching it intercut with lengthy toy-themed commercial breaks on TBS.

Call me a JLo simp ever since her whole “I love love” megaproject made it clear exactly how unhinged she is (~I could fix her~), but I have been more annoyed by vastly more prestigious movies. This is extremely low-grade watch-it-while-doing-something-else sci-fi-themed schlock, and gosh darnit, I love sci-fi schlock.

Come to this movie for JLo looking adorable with frizzy hair and giant glasses; stay for the video game vibes because hey, you might as well, you’re probably folding laundry or vacuuming the floor or something anyway.

(image credit: Netflix)

Furiosa is another entry into the Mad Max series of movies. This one serves as prequel to Fury Road, filling in the origin details of the titular character: stolen as a girl from a woman-friendly sanctuary, raised among the War Rig’s building and operation, seeking a way to get revenge and go home.

This is an extremely solid Mad Max entry. It lacks the symmetric narrative elegance of Fury Road, but it’s a respectable prequel that doesn’t feel inessential, either. I wasn’t sure how much they could really add that I’d care about. Of course, George Miller is the king of detail-oriented world building. He found places to elaborate.

Thanks to the convincing performance of a young Alyla Browne, I was riveted for a full half of the movie, and I genuinely believed the Furiosa she created. I also really enjoyed Chris Hemsworth (prosthetic nose aside) as a sick and charismatic Dementus. He hit all the right notes, which I understand to be challenging while working under a director as exacting as Miller.

Come to this movie for the vibes more than the set pieces. There is little of that tactile grandeur that made Fury Road such a blast to watch, but the process for making that feels like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This is a more standard Mad Max. I think anyone who likes the broader Mad Max world will like this anyway.

On a more critical note, I just didn’t care for Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Her delivery in the last dialogue wasn’t especially compelling, which might have been the dialogue at large (it really dragged). But I also didn’t love watching her at any other point, either. She didn’t pull me in the way that the younger or older actresses did while playing the same character. I’m not sure what’s happening there — maybe she’s just a little too obviously Anya Taylor-Joy the whole time, maybe the difficulty of the shoot didn’t bring out her best performance… Who knows?

The movie is a post-apocalyptic pleasure to watch, and just the experience is enough. But Furiosa as a character is better without the added context. I tend to think we got everything we need to know about her in Fury Road. Miller and Max are best with less text. His props, costumes, and overall design are packed with visuals that offer plenty subtextually for people who want to know more about what’s going on. Adding more story doesn’t necessarily improve anything. And it nukes some of the mystery that makes Fury Road such a vibe.

Still, this movie would be entirely watchable as a double feature with Fury Road, and I think it would be pretty satisfying if you like the way George Miller does his world building. If for some reason you can only watch one, you should still watch Fury Road — it’s a truly great movie. Furiosa is a good movie.

(image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)

The Fall Guy is an extremely self-aware action movie about Hannah Waddingham’s wig, and also a stunt guy who finds himself tangled in a wee bit of a murder mystery along with his director ex-girlfriend.

I really try not to watch movies I think I’m not going to like, seeing as how I prefer to come in with enthusiastic analysis rather than criticism. I probably would have skipped this one if I’d looked up the director first, since I haven’t liked David Leitch movies in the past either. I should have suspected I simply wouldn’t like it because I’m really tired of Ryan Gosling’s Kendoll schtick.

Anyway, obviously I didn’t love it, but I think it’s a harmless movie with its heart in the right place (highlighting the stunt teams who don’t usually get nearly enough regard). But I’m going to resist the urge to write an essay about why this isn’t really a good romance, or a plot with any tension, or dialogue-related complaints; it is HARMLESS and I don’t need to go off.

Instead, let me tell you who I think will enjoy this movie:

– If you like it when you don’t feel like things might actually go wrong, and you know nobody’s ever in peril, I think you’ll like it. The action scenes are so stunt-focused and well forecast as such that it’s obvious these are just exciting tricks, like you might see at a theme park. I can see folks really loving that. It’s exciting! Good stunts are always impressive. What’s not to love there?

– Are you enjoying Ryan Gosling’s whole schtick? This movie is all of that. In fact, every actor seems to be trying to meet Ryan Gosling on that level, and they’re kind of doing his whole cadence and semi-naturalistic talking-over-each-other affable chattering.

– You know that genre where Hollywood really loves Hollywood and just makes loving movies about itself? If you like that, you’ll loooove this.

– How about self-referential humor? Where (an incredibly sexy) Winston Duke cites the action scenes he’s copying while engaging in those fights? Doing split-screen while debating if split screens are any good? Random cameos?

– If you like dogs biting crotches, this movie delivers on your behalf.

I was mostly rubbed the wrong way by this, but I really don’t see any reason it didn’t perform better at the box office. It’s extremely inoffensive and a sort of fun-oriented experience movie. I really, really thought of stunt shows at theme parks while watching it. That’s not my kind of thing. Is it yours? Then you’d probably love it. Have fun y’all.

(image source: Universal Pictures)

In The Dark Knight, a chaotic new villain disrupts the status quo of Gotham’s corrupt underbelly, driving the entire city to the brink of madness. And he does it in a very fashionable purple suit with a green vest.

This movie is, in my esteem, the best of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies. The Bat is my favorite caped (anti)hero; I have a very long-lasting, very personal fondness for any and all Batman adaptations. For a few years when these movies came out, I would say that Nolan Bat was my favorite. Nowadays, it simply does not rank.

Obviously The Dark Knight hasn’t changed. I’ve changed. I was twenty-years-old in 2008, and Nolan Bat hit me hard. It hit the culture hard! I was trying to explain to my young teen how the impact of the film was absolutely seismic — which had them raising an eyebrow, because they were so bored by the movie, they almost fell asleep. Sometimes they woke up because I burst out laughing, like when I saw the Batmobile again. Least penisy Batmobile? Yes. But does anyone else think it looks like the fantasy version of a Cybertruck? I bet Bale Bruce would have bought a Cybertruck.

Nolan did a killer job hitting American culture at the right moment. At the time, the idea of all phones being surveillance devices was still kinda science fiction. We were only a few years out from 9/11, the Bush II era was sunsetting, and the discourse around terrorism was intense. Some degree of jingoism was more standard (at least, where I was back then) because of a patriotic desire to cohere against external threats, and I more readily believed in “a hero we need, but don’t deserve.” This version of the Joker is more terrorist-like in his strategies. He is chaotic evil, unpredictable, unknowable, the way that many white Americans regarded our enemies of the time.

It’s striking how much of this feels simultaneously cynical and naive. Do you really think Gotham’s cops would be horrified at Batman brutalizing the Joker in an interrogation room? Highly doubtful.

There’s nothing more 2008 than the limited palette and brutalism. This was an era where we sucked all the color out of movies, ashamed of the excesses of the 90s, and not yet arriving in the nostalgic neons of the later 10s. Really, the whole thing feels ashamed: despite being an *absurdly* gravelly Batman with *ridiculously* militaristic attitudes, the self-seriousness of Nolan Bat is doing the absolute most to distance itself from campy comic book *everything*. Several key characters seem fabricated just so he won’t have to deal with the burden of comic book lore.

In retrospect, it’s laughable. Like a parody of itself. But I can’t deny it hit perfectly at the time! Every good moment in the movie remains constantly memed, even by a generation that hasn’t necessarily sat through the laborious plodding plot of the movie itself. So many quotes have become the blood in our cultural veins. Yet I have reached a point where I feel Nolan Bat is best experienced in memes, plucking out the good bits and leaving behind everything that’s so monotone visually and dynamically.

I guess I’m tired of Nolan’s style nowadays, too. I used to say he was my favorite auteur. Now I’m so frustrated by his muddy dialogue, buried under the rest of the audio, that I can’t even appreciate the way his movies are edited to great scores like a 2.5-hour long cinematic music video. His inability to write a woman with dimension drives me nuts.

The action scenes are still pretty sweet, though.

One other thing that hasn’t changed is how utterly delightful Heath Ledger’s Joker feels. My kid perked up whenever Joker was Jokering around, and I did too. Against the wooden blocky backdrop of Batman, here we got a funny and deliberate and pitch-perfectly sinister Joker. He’s so colorful by comparison. His suit is colorful, his Bugs Bunny-like cross dressing is colorful, and his “yeah, I guess I’ll shoot this guy too” gestures are colorful. As a Millennial, I can’t let mention of Ledger pass without pining for the future career we never got to see from him. I’m still devastated.

I can recognize this movie was so good in its time and also that it’s not good for me in this time. I can imagine lots of people still loving it: great score, solid performances, great action (when you get to it), a very cohesive aesthetic (surely others are still into that). But my definitive Batman these days is absolutely Batman Returns (deliciously goth as it is) and this one left me feeling extremely beige.

(image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)