The visual dazzle of another 'Spider-Man'

     

   At two hours and 20 minutes, Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse is too long, too glutted with characters, and too stuffed with visual invention to keep track of it all. 

   You'd think that a couple of hours would be sufficient to complete a comic-book story, but no. Across the Spider-Verse ends with a cliffhanger that sets up the next installment. 

  OK, those are my main gripes, but it's also worth noting that Across the Spider-Verse mounts an all-out effort to dazzle the eye, simulate a comic-book environment, and flood the screen with vivid swaths of color.  At its best, the movie entertains and impresses in roughly equal measures.

   The story? Well, there's a lot of it.

   I'm sick of multi-verse movies, but this Spider-Man doubles down on space/time hopping, zipping through numerous dimensions at breakneck speeds. 

   Characters also abound. Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), now 15, still occupies the story's center but Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), who's also Spider-Woman, grabs significant screen time, as well.

   Miles and Gwen come from similar backgrounds. Gwen's father (Shea Whigham) is a cop who learns about his daughter's identity. Miles, on the other hand, keeps his Spider-Man secret from his police captain father (Brian Tyree Henry).

   A rooftop party celebrating Dad's NYPD promotion is artfully rendered with Mom (Luna Lauren Velez) adding welcome Latin flavor. 

  The Brooklyn portions of the movie, where Miles tries to balance school with superhero chores, have their charms, and, to be honest, the movie's many parallel universes can overwhelm in ways that sometimes made me wish the story never had left home.

  This edition amplifies its diversity, making room for a Spider-Man India (Karan Soni), for Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya), a.k.a. Spider-Punk, and for Issa Rae, a Spider-Woman character who looks as she might have leaped from a '60s movie. 

  Villains dot the teeming landscape, as well. They include The Vulture (Jorma Taccone) and The Spot (Jason Schwartzman). The Spot allows the animators to swell the screen with cleverness; the character's spots become holes, portals if you prefer, that swallow opposition, projecting them into new dimensions.

  Oscar Issac gives voice to Spider-Man 2099,  a superhero who has convinced himself that he's responsible for maintaining the multiverse, a responsibility that has distorted his values and inflated his ego.

   Enough.  The filmmakers seem committed to the idea that there can't be too much of a good thing. I think some pruning might have helped, but Across the Spider-Verse reflects a commitment to a visual vision that's meant to dazzle the senses -- and often does.

    

  

   

He’s Ted Lasso. No wait, he’s an ex-con

 

   In South of Heaven, Jason Sudeikis sounds an awful lot like he does as Ted Lasso, but he’s playing an entirely different character, a man who’s worlds away from the amiable American football coach who finds himself coaching soccer in England. 

     This time out, Sudeikis portrays Jimmy Ray, a former convict who’s paroled from prison after serving 10 years for a bank robbery. Jimmy wants nothing more than to marry Ann (Evangeline Lilly), the woman he loves and who is dying of lung cancer. She has waited 10 years for him.

    Director Aharon Keshales (Big Bad Wolves) takes Jimmy’s story through too many mood swings to be effective. The movie alternates hard-boiled drama, tender exchanges, and, finally, a grotesquely out-of-place shootout that pits Jimmy against a small army of foes. 

     The story’s complications begin when Jimmy is tempted into more criminal behavior by a corrupt parole officer (Shea Whigham). 

   In the course of picking up some money, Jimmy has a car accident in which a motorcyclist dies. Turns out the cyclist was a courier for Whit Price (Mike Colter), a smooth-talking but brutal gangster who was waiting for the delivery of $500,000. Price wants his money and believes Jimmy stole it.

      Eventually, Price kidnaps Ann, forcing Jimmy to kidnap Price’s son (Thaddeus J. Mixson). The movie softens as the respective kidnappers get to know and, of course, like their victims.

      The relationship between Jimmy and Ann is well-drawn, but too much of the rest of the movie can’t accommodate the screenplay's wild variations. 

Catching Up: 'Small Engine Repair' and 'Starling'

Two quick hits on movies I missed. Put these brief reviews under the heading “Better Late Than Never.” 

Small Engine Repair

Set in Manchester, New Hampshire, Small Engine Repair adapts a play by John Pollono for the screen. Pollono portrays Frank, a guy who runs the repair shop of the title. He has two pals (Shea Whigham and John Bernthal). For a while, it looks as if Small Engine Repair is going to be another evening with the bros, guys who often jockey to see who can be grosser. Pals for a long time, the men argue in a bar and stop talking. The story then leaps ahead to a night when Frank invites his estranged buddies to the repair shop for an evening of reconciliation. Another study in toxic masculinity, Small Engine Repair features performances by Jordana Spiro (as Frank's ex-wife) and Ciara Brava (as Frank's college-age daughter). The movie begins to shift gears when a college kid (Spencer House) shows up at Frank's shop and Pollono's screenplay begins to raise serious issues involving privacy, internet abuse, class conflict, and revenge. None of these themes are fleshed out enough to compensate for flashbacks of variable power and an ending that seems contrived to take some of the sting out of the meanness that precedes it. And in a movie focused largely on "the guys,'' Spiro has the movie's most commanding moment.

Starling

Starling, a movie about a husband and wife (Melissa McCarthy and Chris O'Dowd) attempting to cope with the loss of an infant daughter, casts Kevin Kline as a veterinarian who once was a prominent psychiatrist. The oddball combo of carers is indicative of something about the movie: Director Theodore Melfi mixes what seem like mismatched elements in a movie that makes a powerful subject seem almost banal. Burdened by sentiment, the movie derives its title from a bird that pesters McCarthy's character as she tries to garden. The screenplay by Matt Harris uses the bird -- a starling, of course -- as a metaphor for nest building and even, at one point, has McCarthy's Lily trying to nurse the pesky  bird back to health after she hits it with a stone. The movie mistakenly separates Lily and her husband Jack, who's in a mental institution after the loss of the child, which means we never really see them trying to work out their issues. No point in faulting the performances, but Starling is a wounded bird of a movie that just doesn't fly. 

A "Gateway' to nowhere

Despite a strong cast led by Shea Whigham, The Gateway never fuses into the gritty urban drama it seems to want to be. (The story is set in St. Louis but the movie actually was shot in Norfolk, Va.) Whigham's Parker —  another character with a single name -- works in a field that seems at odds with his behavior. Parker’s job as a social worker might well expose him to drug-world violence. But the movie amps things up by turning Parker into a pistol-packing former boxer. Parker wants to keep kids out of the foster-care system that nearly swallowed him as a child. Parker becomes increasingly involved in the lives of a woman (Olivia Munn) and her daughter (Taegen Burns) after a hot-tempered husband and father (Zach Avery) is released from prison. Avery's Mike quickly falls in with his old criminal clique led by the merciless Duke (Frank Grillo). When he gets crosswise with a drug cartel, Dahlia and Ashley are put at risk. Bruce Dern crops up as the jazz-trumpeter dad from whom Parker is estranged. Director Michele Civetta seems to be trying to say something about the complex corruptions that plague St. Louis and about one flawed man who tries to do some good. Noble aims remain unfulfilled because of lame dialogue and a plot that doesn’t fully engage the ambiguities and conflicts in Parker’s character. In sum, The Gateway's gritty stroll down mean streets leads to a dead end.

Jon Hamm anchors a thriller set in Beirut

An intricately plotted thriller set in the roiling heart of the Middle East during the 1980s, Beirut delivers much of what we expect from movies that dip into volatile political situations -- a discernible pulse and an atmosphere rife with intrigue. Jon Hamm anchors the movie as Mason Skiles, an able US negotiator whose life falls apart when his Lebanese wife (Leila Bekhti) is murdered during a terrorist attack. Not surprisingly, the attack undermines Mason's faith in nearly everything, particularly because the murderous assault on Mason's beautiful Beirut home resulted from an act of beneficence. Living in Lebanon in 1972 - prior to the country's descent into civil strife and violence -- Mason and his wife had taken a 13-year-old orphan (Yoav Sadian Rosenberg into their home. As it turns out, the boy’s older brother (Hicham Ouraqa) led the terrorist attack in which Mason's wife died. The screenplay by Tony Gilroy (the Bourne movies) reveals all of this in a jittery prologue and then leaps ahead 10 years, the time just prior to Israel’s war in Lebanon. By this time, Mason has returned to the US where he works as a small-potatoes negotiator and tries to drink away his pain. He’s pulled back into the Middle Eastern fray when he’s asked to return to Lebanon to negotiate the release of a former pal and CIA agent (Mark Pellegrino) who has been captured by the PLO. Meanwhile, the adult Karim (Idir Chender) has become an active terrorist working with the PLO. Reluctantly dragged back to shattered Beirut, Mason finds himself in the company of a supporting US crew of characters played by Dean Norris, Shea Whigham and Rosamund Pike. Each of these characters has an agenda that may have little to do with saving a valued CIA agent but which adds a cynical gloss to the story. Hamm’s predictable transition from drunk to a man in command of his skills may not be entirely credible, but his bestubbled presence helps keep the film on track. Although Beirut probably sometimes confuses complexity of plot with insight, director Brad Anderson (The Machinist) keeps the story moving. Beirut is never anything less than watchable, even if it's ultimately short on thematic clout.