Creed faces a fierce opponent from his past

     

   When Creed III opens, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) is living a luxurious retired life in Los Angeles. The former heavyweight champ spends time with his wife (Tessa Thompson) and daughter (Mila Davis-Kent). He also runs a gym where he trains promising young boxers.

   Life is good for Adonis but no one would want to watch a movie about a boxer who leads a well-adjusted and productive life outside the ring.

   Enter Damien (Jonathan Majors), a buddy from the days when Adonis was a street kid. Damien also had a promising future as a boxer but got busted for a using a gun in a fight. Adonis was with him and blames himself for escaping without consequences. Damien did 18 years in the slammer.

   Damien clearly has an agenda, and the guilt-ridden Adonis believes he can't escape a psychological debt acquired during his adolescence.

    We see some of Adonis's youth in flashbacks in which he’s played by Thaddeus James Mixson Jr. He and young Damien (Spence Moore II) once were bros.

    It’s payback time and Damien now wants Creed to arrange a title fight for him. 

   Jordan, who also directs, offers an efficient Creed sequel, banishing nuance in favor of plot points that land like punches. As Damien’s fortunes build, he remains a character Majors portrays with menacing force. 

    Currently on view in Ant-Man: Quntumania, Majors gives Damien an impacted brutality that's emphasized by his crouched fighting style. The movie's most vividly drawn character, Damien's a vengeful man driven to threats of violence against Adonis and his family.

    The only way to stop him? See a counselor who specializes in mediating emotionally charged disputes?

    Nah. Creed must come out retirement and try to recapture the title Damien has won, improbably for a guy who's a bit long in the tooth to be making a big-time professional debut.

    A showdown looms.

   Jordan stages the big fight with more oomph than realism. This, after all, isn’t Raging Bull; it’s an attempt to continue the life of a character, who, thus far, has carried two movies over a profitable finish line.  

   Absent from all of this is Sylvester Stallone, who has a producing credit. The oddball teaming of Stallone and Jordan in previous movies added something that Creed III lacks, an appropriately corny connection to the original Rocky movies.

  Still, Jordan and Masters energize the movie -- with a bit of help, of course. Phylicia Rashad signs on as Adonis’s mother and Wood Harris plays the trainer who warns Adonis against taking on Damien in the first place.

  Screenwriters Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin use Adonis’s daughter and his ailing mother to soften Creed's dramatic muscle flexing.

  Adonis’s daughter is deaf and the movie features signing between mom and daughter and dad and daughter.

  Mom, too, has experienced a hearing loss. She's had to adjust her musical career, a secondary storyline that gives her a parallel problem to Adonis's woes, accepting new personal expectations.

    Enough. Creed III doesn't always make it easy to suspend disbelief nor does the movie work as a pure fable about underdog  triumphs. To me, Jordan's Creed seldom seemed like anything but a winner.

    Creed III occupies its own world. Maybe that's sufficient. I'd give Creed III a pass but I wouldn’t be sorry if Jordan were to hang up the gloves and devote his considerable talents to other endeavors. 

     At the same time, I wouldn’t bet against Creed IV.

    Successful movie franchises are difficult to resist -- for the folks who make them and for audiences that never seem to tire of return trips.

Ant-Man goes to the Quantum Realm

 

  As everyone now knows, Marvel has created a  universe of interrelated characters who often find themselves fighting to save the world — or perhaps many worlds in the case of Marvel's multiverse extravaganzas. 

  I'm far from a Marvel zealot, so I don't always find it easy to remember all the ways in which Marvel has woven its intricate tapestry of superheroes and supervillains, Avengers and those who must be vanquished.

 Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, the third free-standing Ant-Man movie, can be seen as one more stop on Marvel's never-ending highway. It's not without some pleasures but doesn't climb to the top of the Marvel mountain either.

  In what probably counts as a miscalculation, director Peyton Reed inflates the Ant-Man universe, downplaying the low-stakes quality of the previous movies by setting most of the story in the Quantum Realm.

    What’s that? If you’re looking for a scientific explanation, you’ll have to search elsewhere. The Quantum Realm is one more big-screen arena for the display of bizarre creatures, weird landscapes, and other digital creations that, at least in this case, amount to a mixed bag of goodies.

    At one point, multiple versions of Ant-Man appear, forcing the “real” Ant-Man into a pseudo- identity crisis or some such. 

   And late in the movie, an impressive army of ants launches a pivotal attack. These ants, we’ve been told, have techno capabilities but the story is less interested in ant genius than in stuffing the Quantum Realm with as much bric-a-brac as possible.

    What’s notable about the humans who carry the Ant-Man banner?

     Paul Rudd returns as Ant-Man and continues his comic take on the character who, in his human form, is known as Scott Lang. 

    Ant-Man’s teenage daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) plays an important role, setting off the plot when she sends signals into the Quantum Realm, thus transporting the major characters to a dimension beyond space and time -- also possibly belief.

     Michael Douglas returns as Dr. Hank Pym, Ant-Man’s inventive, ant-obsessed father, and Michele Pfeiffer gets more screen time as Janet Van Dyne, mother of Hope Van Dyne, a.k.a. The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly). 

      The WASP, who shares the movie’s title with Ant-Man, appears when needed but sometimes seems like a bit of an afterthought.

     Inside the Quantum Realm, the screenplay divides the characters into groups, one centering on Janet Van Dyne; Janet’s importance stems from having spent nightmarish decades in the Quantum Realm. She knows its dangers.

      Ant-Man leads another group. Both groups are committed to a shopworn aspiration: They want to return home. 

     Of course, a villain must emerge.

     Meet Kang The Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), a soft-spoken fiend who has been banished to the Quantum Realm and is serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.     

      Well, not really. Kang, too, wants out. If only he had the power core that’s necessary to launch the ship that would allow him to travel to any realm. So many realms. So many opportunities to terrorize. 

    Say this for Powers, he imbues the story with a gravitas it barely can support.

     The movie's best creation might be MODAK, a golden sphere that houses the face of what's left of a man. MODAK bills itself as the Ultimate Weapon. It’s more like a sight gag, what might have happened had Salvador Dali decided to paint Humpty Dumpty.

    Early on, Bill Murray shows up as Lord Krylar. Seems he and Janet Van Dyne had a fling during her long stay in the Quantum Realm. Reed gives Murray an entrance befitting a significant character and then allows him to vanish. 

       A word on the name Krylar: How did the drug companies miss this one, as in “ Ask your doctor about Krylar?” 

       I can’t get too worked up about Quantumania’s stumbles. I also can’t say found this edition as amusing as the original Ant-Man, which was notable for its humor and, by Marvel standards, modesty.

       I left a preview screening with a shrug. I returned from the journey to the Quantum Realm feeling less like a satisfied moviegoer than a traveler who had acquired another stamp on my Marvel passport. 

A Western with contemporary kick

 

    The history of the Hollywood western has been a massively white affair, hardly a revelation to anyone who has spent more than a few years watching movies. Director Jeymes Samuel may have had that in mind while directing The Harder They Fall an almost entirely Black helping of genre tropes set in the Old West -- or Samuel's version of it.

   Samuel, who's British, has assembled a first-rate cast that includes Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Regina King, Zazie Beetz, Delroy Lindo, and LaKeith Stanfield.

  A revenge saga at heart, the movie wastes no time putting its brutal cards on the table. When he was only eight, Love watched Buck murder his mother and father. Buck then carved a small cross on Love's forehead.

   The movie takes place with the now-grown Love leading a gang of thieves who rob from other thieves. Nat also wants to avenge  the death of his parents. He's out for blood.

   Samuel embellishes the movie's genre ploys with rap music, jazz, and, most unusually, a modern dance interlude set in a saloon. Jay-Z and Kid Cudi's My Guns Go Bang turns up, not a tune you'd expect to find in a western -- and some of the more profane language obliterates the line between historical and contemporary talk.

    The melding of approaches is part of the point: The Harder They Fall is no throwback; it's intentionally styled to be of the moment; i.e., it’s fluent in the language of 21st Century cinema. 

    So, no, John Wayne couldn't ride into this movie and find a comfort zone.

   Although Majors's Love  is the main character, the movie has an ensemble feel and Samuel makes sure not to shortchange the female cast members. King portrays Trudy, a tough-talking, no-nonsense assistant to the soft-spoken but no less menacing Buck. 

   Beetz appears as Stagecoach Mary, an independent woman who provides Nat with a love interest -- but never plays second fiddle to him.

   Not only is the music anachronistic but so are some of the movie's gender variations. Danielle Deadwyler plays Cuffy, an outlaw of ambiguous gender identity. 

   The  story advances toward the all-Black town of Redwood City where Buck, newly sprung from prison by Trudy and cohorts, plans to establish his empire. The revenge-hungry Love has other plans.

   Samuel's over-reliance on looming close-ups can be annoying and the plot tends to trip over itself here and there. But the movie has a quality of the unexpected that fends off dullness and the actors all work at peak form, many operating in both comic and serious veins.

   The movie makes one brilliant satirical joke when Nat and his crew head to an all-white town to rob the local bank. The town  has been drained of color by a production team with a cutting sense of humor. 

   I don't know the history of the movie's characters who are based on real people, but it's clear that Samuel, who co-wrote the screenplay with Boaz Yakin, has taken great liberties in order to produce a no-holds-barred western that blazes across the screen, sometimes falling off its horse, but always creating a strong vibe -- presuming there was such thing as a "vibe" in the Old West.

Spike Lee sends four vets back to Vietnam

Da 5 Bloods doesn't entirely gel but it makes its message clear.

Spike Lee, like his movies, operates on many levels. He’s a social commentator, a director and a storyteller. He's one of the few filmmakers who can be credited for creating a one-person genre. When you hear the words “a Spike Lee Joint,” you know that you’re probably entering terrain that’s part drama, part provocation, part corrective of the US historical record and part entertainment.

These ingredients can become seamless when Lee is at his best and can sometimes trip over one another when he’s not hitting his stride.

But it’s important to remember that Lee has created an aesthetic approach that practically constitutes a brand. He can poke an angry finger in your chest or flood a moment with tenderness.

So now comes Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, a movie about Vietnam, black contributions to the US military, black bitterness about the lack of recognition for those contributions and, if that weren't enough, a story about a search for buried treasure — in this case, gold bullion — that sometimes intentionally evokes memories of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Using news footage to set the tone, Lee opens with a montage that surveys the boiling racial landscape that defined America during the war. Among the clips: protests, Muhammad Ali’s resistance, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech at Manhattan's Riverside Church in which he turned his full attention to the war.

All of this is framed by a story with a rather straightforward plot. Four former infantrymen reunite in Ho Chi Minh city. Initially, their reunion is full of bonhomie and joy. Gradually, it becomes clear that the men, known as “The Bloods,” have more in mind than renewing old friendships.

They want to retrieve gold they buried during a harrowing mission and they want to recover the body of a fallen brother known as Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman). The movie paints Norman as a kind of warrior saint who held the soldiers in his squad together and tired to direct them toward higher purposes, perhaps using the gold to help black folks at home.

Of the four Bloods, as the soldiers referred to themselves, two stand out: Clarke Peters’ Otis, a down-to-earth steadying influence who learns that he has a greater connection to Vietnam than the others. A wartime relationship resulted in a daughter, now grown, who Otis meets for the first time.

Delroy Lindo gives the movie’s most vivid, conflict-riddled performance. An anti-immigration guy who wears a MAGA hat, Lindo's Paul easily taps into his anger. He's joined by his son David (Jonathan Majors), a young man who followed his dad to Vietnam because he knows that his father occupies a PTSD-world of trouble.

Norm Lewis’ Eddie and Isiah Whitlock Jr.’s Melvin fill out the foursome of veterans.

Working with three additional writers, Lee isn’t entirely successful at fusing all the issues that crop up and some of the dialogue carries the burden of exposition or of establishing -- or at least making reference to -- political dynamics embedded in the way the US fought the Vietnam War.

Flashback scenes to the war feature Boseman, who's powerful even in a small role. The other soldiers aren’t played by younger actors in these flashbacks but by the older cast. Lee does his best to keep the camera away from their faces, but the juxtaposition of a young Boseman and the older guys can be distracting.

The story also brings in a trio of NGO do-gooders (Melanie Theirry, Paul Walter Hauser, and Jasper Paakkonen) who have taken up residence in Vietnam to defuse bombs and dig up landmines. Jean Reno turns up as a shady figure who’s supposed to help the men smuggle the gold out of the country.

As the men move deeper into the Vietnamese jungle, they begin to squabble about the size of their respective shares. Mistrust develops and before all is done, Lee gives Lindo a wild soliloquy in the jungle as he battles with thick growth, his own demons, a venomous snake, and the historical weight of 400 yeas of American racism. In a way, this single speech does more to embody the damage these men have suffered than anything else in the film. Amazingly, Lindo pulls it off.

Will the men escape with the gold? Will they be double-crossed? Will others try to kill them?

I’ll answer only one of these questions. Others will try to kill them, resulting in gunfights and explosions of violence that reprise the war-time violence the men once experienced.

Those who expect every Lee film to speak its mind won’t be disappointed and those who are put off by the same trait will find much with which to quibble. Lee even manages to work Black Lives Matter into the film’s closing moments, giving the movie an even more topical boost — as if it needed one in this moment of intensely focused discussions of race.

No matter what the subject, Lee’s voice will be heard — and that may be why Da 5 Bloods is least interesting when it’s telling its story and most compelling when Lee does what he does best — shake things up.

A broken heart in a changing city

Race and gentrification provide the background for The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a sweet and mournful story of loss.

Sometimes, dreams are rooted in a place —- a city, for example. Maybe even a neighborhood.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco deals with many issues, principal among them: race, gentrification and the ruthless onslaught of commercial imperatives. The movie tells a story of lost dreams by focusing on what once was an all-American symbol of stability, a house.

We'd like to think that houses once were repositories of family histories that would be passed from generation to generation. Grandpa's house always would be grandpa's house, if only in our imaginations.

In Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, an African-American family's triumph involved buying a house that became a brick-and-mortar symbol of upward mobility and arrival, as well as of persistence and of sustained hope. Even if we never had seen that house, we understood its power.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco also preoccupies itself with a house -- albeit in unexpected and revealing ways. A young man and his best friend occupy a house in a once-black neighborhood that's undergoing displacement prompted by gentrification. The young man believes that his grandfather built the house in the 1940s, following the style of the grand Victorian homes of 18th century San Francisco.

Even before occupying the house, Jimmie Fails -- played by Jimmie Fails (more about that in a minute) -- and his pal Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) had been trying to spiff up the house. They've painted its trim and wondered how to salvage a garden that has gone to ruin.

The current white residents of the house aren’t happy to find the young men at work but express a reluctant tolerance about their efforts.

When those residents lose the house, the fierce winds of the real estate market gather force and we know that this project — a reclamation not only of a house but of a past —- will come to naught.

We bring a bit of real-world knowledge to the movie. When it comes to real estate, market forces can be impossible to resist. If necessary, the past will be bulldozed. We know that all too well.

Director Joe Talbot, a childhood friend of Fails, tells a story that we're tempted to see as at least autobiographical in spirit because Fails uses his real name.

The movie's events may not be literarily true but they have the ring of metaphoric truth concerning the fragmentation of family in an increasingly uprooted society.

Approaching almost everything with deadpan sincerity, Fails and Montgomery reminded me of a couple of characters from a Samuel Beckett play; they're made of flesh and blood but also, slightly abstracted.

A quasi-theatrical atmosphere is enhanced by a group of neighborhood street people that serves as a Greek chorus for the story. Fails and Montgomery interact with them —- neither entirely separated from them nor entirely part of the group, either.

Most of the movie involves the efforts of the two young men to establish a home in a property they don’t own —- at least not in the conventional sense. But as the story progresses, you may find yourself thinking about issues of ownership and territory. Could there be another meaning of ownership at work here?

Talbot populates the movie with San Francisco characters and eccentricities. Danny Glover appears as Montgomery's blind grandfather; Rob Morgan plays Jimmie's embittered father; and Tichina Arnold portrays his aunt. Though sometimes tenuous, these family connections aren't lost. Jimmie grew up in various squats and in group homes.

And, then, there's the naked man at a bus stop, but I leave that for you to discover.

Emile Mosseri's musical score perfectly fits a movie that’s poetic, mournful, scrappy and sweet.

Talbot has trouble bringing the movie to a close and some of his images don't qualify as perfect blends of the real and the metaphoric. But the feeling here is one of love: for a city, for a longed-for connection with the past, and for a sense of place. There's also the love of two friends for each other.

I want to say (and please don’t take this in a negative way) that Last Black Man made me feel as if I’d attended a memorial service that mixed both grief and a sense of release, of letting go.

Late in the movie, Jimmie listens to two young white women talk on a bus. He tells them that they have to right to hate the city unless they love it. The right to hatred must be earned. Hate upscale obliterations that have ravaged neighborhoods. Hate the stress and tensions of constant economic struggle. Hate the pollution that's choking the life out of what's left of nature.

But love the memory, even if it's romanticized, of what once was. And perhaps equally important, mourn the loss of what could have been.

Drugs and despair in the streets of Detroit

Director Yann Demange grounds White Boy Rick in grim realism.

Illegal gun sales, drugs, gangs, corruption, and injustice.

You can tell from this list, and I've abbreviated it, that the new movie White Boy Rick spends little time traversing feel-good turf. Based on a true story, White Boy Rick plunges into Detroit's economic decay during the free-wheeling 1980s.

White Boy Rick focuses on three tumultuous years in the life of Rick Wershe Jr. (Richie Merritt) as he moves from a being a wayward 14-year-old with a father (Matthew McConaughey) who traffics in illegal guns to a cocaine peddler to an FBI informant and, finally, to his inevitable identity: prisoner.

In telling Rick's story, director Yann Demange pushes McConaughey into more of a supporting role than you might expect. This time, McConaughey plays a dirtbag hustler with a difference. Richard Wershe Sr. lacks the charm of some of the rogues McConaughey previously has played.

Aware of his mammoth failures as a father, Richard knows he has nothing to give his son, but the tricks of an illegal trade. McConaughey's performance hints at a sad self-awareness that borders on the tragic.

As Demange tells Rick's story, the movie evokes the ragged, jittery style of the '70s, chopping its way through lives that would be utterly empty if not for trouble.

Early on, Ricky falls in with a group of black drug dealers led by Johnny Curry (a quietly scary Jonathan Majors). Johnny's younger brother Boo (RJ Cyler), Ricky's only real friend, brings Ricky into a gang in which he's the only white guy.

For a time, it's all fun and games as Ricky finds friends and family-like ties among a group of black men who have connections to City Hall. Finally, Rick belongs to something -- or thinks he does.

Meanwhile -- and White Boy Rick is a movie of many "meanwhiles" -- Rick's sister Dawn (Bel Powley) wallows in a drug-addicted life that brings her to the edge of physical ruin. Ravaged by crack, her face seems to be rotting right along with Detroit's declining industrial landscape.

Ricky also draws the attention of two FBI agents (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane) who want Ricky to help them bring Johnny down. Ricky's given an impossible choice: Either he informs for the FBI or the FBI will shut down his father's illegal gun business. Family ties win out.

Some of the movie's scenes are given a humorous twist -- few greater than the movie's prologue which finds father and son arriving home from a successful buy at a gun show trying to convince the drug-addicted Dawn to accompany them for frozen custard, a ludicrous and inevitably futile stab at familial normalcy.

But harsh realities overshadow humor, even when it comes from Ricky's grandparents (Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie). Grandma keeps a pistol in her oven.

Merritt, who has no previous acting experience, gives a raw, natural performance as a kid who never entirely sells out his innocence. When Rick begs his father to join him in the drug business, he's not so much acting the thug as pleading for the life of his family and the ability to sustain it the only way he knows.

White Boy Rick isn't a perfect movie, perhaps because it never entirely convinces us that there's anything major to be gained from watching these characters fall prey to their devastated environment. Still, there's something to be said for movies that insist on shining realistic light on society's margins.

White Boy Rick makes a last-minute attempt to criticize the justice system that ultimately betrays Ricky, but the feeling one draws from the movie has less to do with rage at judicial inequity than with the bone-deep despair that stems from watching so many lives swirl desperately before going down the drain.