Solo Act

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) was definitely a fun movie. It’s faults all seemed to be related to the fact that it is “A Star Wars Story”.

It starts on Corellia, the factory planet Solo famously came from (“famously” = it was mentioned once maybe, and the super fans latched on to it). Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) and his girlfriend Qi’ra (Emilia Clark, not Keira Knightley as I guessed) anger a mob boss/giant armored worm (Linda Hunt) and have to get off the planet. Solo makes it, but Qi’ra gets left behind. So Solo joins the Imperial Armed Forces, and promises to come back for her.

Three years later, he’s fighting in some kind of WWI battlefield and meets up with roguish Woody Harrelson as Tobias Beckett. They spar a little, then he gets thrown into a Wookiee pit to be eaten. But he talks Wookiee, and convinces the monster down there (guess who) to escape with him. Harrelson’s crew let him come along. So now we get a kind of Guardians of the Galaxy section - they even have a talking four-armed monkey (Jon Favreau).

The criminal Crimson Dawn organization, run by Paul Bettany, hires them to steal some starship fuel. But he wants them to take along his girlfriend - ta-dah! - Qi’ra. She’s been through some stuff, doesn’t want to talk about it. But she’s happy to see Han.

To get a ship, they go to meet Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover). Him and Solo play a high-stakes game of Sabac for the ship, known as (SPOILER) the Millenium Falcon. Solo loses, but Lando lends them the ship for a cut.

So, it’s off to a mining planet with Calrissian’s sassy sexdroid (OK, maybe just a protocol droid) - Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays her as a feisty android-rights activist, but her CGI body has some great big chicken legs. First, they need to make the Kessler run, taking a shortcut that will let them do it in 25 parsnips. Then they have to rob a train. And we’re only about a third of the way in.

This is a great space adventure, with nice touches of humor and pathos. I’m not sure I cared for Solo having a great love affair, but I liked the way it kind of fizzled out - and she wasn’t in any of the lore, as far as I know. Because the whole thing of explaining or referencing everything we know about Solo from the other movies gets tedious. We even see him shoot first.

I wonder - would this be as enjoyable if it weren’t tied into a beloved franchise? It’s pedigree is impeccable: director Ron Howard, always competent, taking over from Lord and Miller (The LEGO Movie), who were judged to be too jokey. The script is by Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark, and several Star Wars movies, along with his son Jonathan. It could have been a fun new franchise or even a one-off.

Of course, it probably couldn’t have been made outside the Star Wars Universe. Never mind.

Wunnerfull, Wunnerfull

I guess the reason I’ve never seen Wonderwall (1968) is that pretty much no one has. Directed by Joe Masson in 1968, it was semi-famous for George Harrison’s score. But it didn’t get much distribution until it was re-released in the late 90s.

It stars Jack MacGowran (Fearless Vampire Killers) as a kind of mad scientist. He works all day peering through a brass microscope at what looks like a power station. He comes home to an apartment decorated with Pre-Rafaelite poetry and crowded with dusty stacks of books. When he turns out the lights, he notices that light from the apartment next door was projecting an image on the wall, camera obscura style. The image is of hippie chick and model Jane Birkin.

Maybe you know her as mother of Charlotte Gainsbourg. I know her as the girl who sang the orgasmic “Oui, je t’aime” in that French song. She is a very 60s girl, young, skinny, wild and innocent. Most of the movie is really just MacGowran watching through chinks in the dividing wall while she poses, dances, parties and makes love.

So that’s about it. There are some other characters, but not many. There’s some action, and it is both creepy and a little sweet. But mostly there’s George Harrison’s Indian classical music score, plus a little rock, including a song by the Remo Four, who sound a lot like Harrison.

There’s also some nice set decoration, both for the professor and for Birkin’s hippy pad. Note that she goes by the name Penny Lane in this. All in all, only worth it for the psychedelia.

Dark Tale

Dark Was the Night (2015) is one I picked for Ms. Spenser, what I hoped would be a classic creature feature. We were satisfied.

It starts in a logging camp, with the foreman checking in each team, but finding one logger missing. When he goes looking, he only finds body parts. But he finds out why pretty quickly, and fatally.

We now move the nearby town of Maiden Woods (isn’t that the ancient term for a grove dedicated to the Virgin Goddess? Needs research). Sheriff Kevin Durant and his deputy Lukas Haas are visiting a local farmer and crank about his missing horse. He claims it was stolen, they figure it just got away. We get to meet some of the townsfolk, and learn that Durant is depressed and, when he picks up his kid from his estranged wife, separated. We later learn that he let their other son drown while he was supposed to be watching him. Hope that doesn’t count as a spoiler.

Anyway, his living son hears a monster in the backyard, but Durant doesn’t find anything - though he does hear it. The next morning, he finds odd tracks of a huge bipedal hoofed beast. In fact, everyone in town has found them.

So we follow the usual pattern of unusual wildlife behavior and people going missing, or turning up gruesomely dead. Actually, there isn’t as much of a body count as you might expect. Also, there isn’t as much of a Wendigo factor as we hoped. Got to love a good Wendigo story, but this isn’t it.

It all ends up with the survivors gathered in a difficult to defend church - even though the Sheriff works out of a brick townhall with barred windows. Oh well, if you want find out how it comes out, you’ll have to watch yourself. This didn’t break much new ground, but it did its job well, with a minimum of fuss or grossouts. Just good old-fashioned horror.

Way of the Gun

The first scene in Winchester '73 (1950) explains the setup: for the Centenial, Dodge City was holding a shooting competition, with the titular rifle as prize. It was not just the finest repeating rifle made, it was a “One of a Thousand”, a rifle that came our just perfect, one of a thousand. We see the rifle and the crowd gathered to check it out, including a bunch of kids and some extras who actually looked native. Sadly, we wouldn’t be seeing much of them.

Also in the crowd are James Stewart and his sidekick High-Spade played by Millard Mitchell. They are looking for Dutch Henry, and expected him to show up for the contest. But first they have to surrender their guns to Will Greer as Sheriff Wyatt Earp - as Ms. Spenser said, derisively, “That’s not Wyat Earp”. Still he was enforcing the West’s famous gun control regulations.

The contest winds up of course with Stewart against Dutch Henry (Stephen McNally). They seem pretty evenly matched, until Steward shoots the face out of a postage stamp glued to a ring tossed high in the air, without touching the ring itself. So he wins the One in a Thousand. Then he goes to the saloon and beats up Dan Duryea as the villainous Waco Johnny Dean. But before he can get out of town, Dutch and his goons steal the rifle and hightail.

Now the movie shifts focus to follow the rifle on its own journey. Dutch and gang go meet up with some traders and try to buy guns, since they left theirs back in Dodge. The traders gouge the heck out of them, refusing to sell them anything, although they’ll give them all guns and $300 cash for the Winchester. Out of options, they take the deal - and then Dutch loses the money playing poker.

The traders are selling arms to the Indians, but you won’t be seeing any of those native extras - instead we get Rock Hudson as the chief. He sees the Winchester and when the trader won’t sell, he kills him and takes it.

Meanwhile, Stewart and High-Spade have been tracking Dutch, and are now worried about the Indians. They run into Shelly Winters and her coward husband, but they might as well not be in this movie, so I’ll skip them. They join up with the cavalry, but they are all green men, expecting to get wiped out when the Indians attack.

It all ends up in a big shoot out, but I was more interested in the way the movie decided to follow the rifle as it went from hand to hand. It was almost like the tailcoat in Tales of Manhattan. It also showed a touch more understanding for the damage a gun can do, even to those who aren’t killed by it.

A Gala Day

I got a recommendation for The Relic (1997) from a Tor.com article, and they didn't steer me wrong. B-movie creature feature with a little bit of style.

It starts in the Amazonian jungle, where a white man sits and quietly chuckles at the antics of the natives. When they offer him a brew made with weird leaves (bannisteria caapi?), he shrugs and drinks it. Soon, he is freaking out. At the harbor, he begs a ship’s captain to take some cargo off, and when he won’t, he sneaks aboard and starts going through the crates. What he finds...

Cut to Chicago. The ship has arrived (I guess you can sail from South America to Chicago?) and everyone one board has been mysteriously killed - and Chicago detective Tom Sizemore is on the case.

Meanwhile, at the Chicago Field Museum, researcher Penelope Ann Miller is losing her grant, and her job unless she can get the patronage of the Drysdales at the big Gala. Her competition will be semi-comic relief Chi Muoi Lo. They find the crates from South America, one with an ugly statue, the other empty except for some weird leaves used as packing material.

Then a security guard is killed horribly, leaving nothing behind but a half-smoked joint. Could deadly marijuana be the cause? Sizemore shuts down the museum. But the mayor calls to tell him he better have it open in time for the Gala. The director of the museum, Linda Hunt, is of the same mind. So the police start searching the basements.

There are a couple of kids down there playing hooky. So when the police hail bullets down on a suspicious shadow, you fear the worst. But it turns out to be a homeless ex-con sex-offender, and everyone feels like they have their man. Everyone but Tom Sizemore.

As the Gala gets under way, Sizemore and crew continue searching the basements. When one of them is found murdered, he sends someone up to halt the Gala. But he’s too late, one of the policemen guarding the Gala gets killed in front of everyone. There’s a panic, the alarm is tripped, and they are locked in! Sizemore’s plan is to go under the museum, through the sewers, and come up next door. Because if there’s one thing we know about museums, it is that they are wide open to secret passages through sewers.

Of course, when they are all chest deep in water and the monster is sneaking around, they begin to wish they’d stayed upstairs.

All in all, lots of fun. The monster (the “Kothoga”) is kept mostly hidden, and revealed bit by bit, as you want in a creature feature. The museum setting is nice, and Penelope Ann Miller is one of those plucky women scientists who don’t need rescuing. This is just as well, because Sizemore is a bit out of his depth.

Of course, Linda Hunt steals all of her scenes, but that’s just a little something extra.

Going to the Dogs

I was kind of worried about Isle of Dogs (2018). How many sad dog deaths were there going to be, and how emotionally damaged would I, and especially Ms. Spenser, be? SPOILER - not as bad as expected.

This is a stop-motion animation, directed by Wes Anderson. It is set in a near future Japan, where a bad strain of dog flu is going around. As a result, Mayor Kobayashi and his major domo Mayor Domo order all dogs exiled to a garbage island. He starts with his own son, Atari's dog, Spots. Spots is put on the island in a locked carrier, and can't figure out how to get out.

Then, it's six months later. We meet some of the dogs eking out an existence on Garbage Island, lead by black dog Chief. They all long for the life they once had, in comfortable homes with beloved masters - except Chief, who is his own dog.

Then Atari Kobayashi crashes on the island. He has stolen a plane to save his dog. He gets help from the dogs (except Chief, who has gone feral). They find the cage with a pile of bones and a name tag, so it looks like Spots is dead - dies of starvation and thirst in a locked carrier. Nightmare!

Shortly after this, one of Atari's classmates, an American exchange student, comes out to the island as well. She's a student journalist who thinks something fishy is going on with the dog edict.

I'll skip the spoilers. except to say that Spots is actually fine. The movie isn't really so much about the plot (or I just missed a few pieces). It's about the setup and the visuals. The setup is cute - the dogs speak English, so we can understand them. The people only speak Japanese, and if dogs are listening, they aren't subtitled. Just like the dogs, we don't understand people-talk. Actually, I understand a little Japanese, and it really isn't necessary. It's obvious what they are talking about, even if you don't know the words.

There was some concern about how stereotypically Japan is portrayed. Sumo wrestlers, poisoned wasabi, and a boy named Atari. However, my Japanese friends like it well enough, so if they don't have a problem, I guess I can live with it.

Can’t We Get Beyond Anarchy?

Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (2017) seems to be more or less a sequel to Death Race: Inferno, yet somehow manages to have nothing in common with it (except Danny Trejo).

In this round, the prison is a huge walled-off city called the Sprawl (see: William Gibson), run by the Weyland Corporation (see: Alien franchise), run by the prisoners. Danny Glover runs the Death Races, which are now illegal. He broadcasts them on the Dark Web with the help of his tech Fred Koehler (from Inferno). Danny Trejo is their man on the outside, who delivers weapons in exchange for a cut of the profits.

A new prisoner shows up, Zach McGowan. He quickly fights his way into the elite, for a chance to drive in the Death Race against Frankenstein. He also makes a connection with Christine Marzano, while all the other females are chasing him as well. But it’s revealed that he is actually a Special Forces commando, sent in by the warden and Weyland Corp to kill Frankenstein. Frankenstein will race him, but he takes Marzano as navigator, so McGowan can’t kill him.

One thing about this outing - it is way bloodier and grosser than the others. Of course, they all have ridiculous kills, so when the guards invade the Sprawl, they all get slaughtered like you’d think. Then, big guys in leather aprons come in with chainsaws and hack up the dead and wounded. That’s extreme.

Other than that, there isn’t much new in this outing. Danny Glover seems to be having fun. Trejo, less so. Zach McGowan makes no impression, and I’m not even sure we see Frankenstein without the mask. The plot isn’t actually that bad, but everything else seems played out. It might be time to let the franchise die.

Hell is Other People

The Legend of Hell House (1973) went on our list due to the Netflix Haunting of Hill House series (which, by the way, we started watching but gave up - too generic, not enough Shirley Jackson). Someone compared the story to the 1963 movie to the series, and threw this one in as a side note. So we watched it.

It starts with psychic researcher Clive Revill getting the assignment to bring back proof of life after death from an eccentric tycoon. He immediately recruits mental medium Pamela Franklin and physical medium Roddy McDowell to spend a week in the “Mount Everest of haunted houses, Bellasco House”. All members of previous expeditions to this house had died, except Roddy McDowell, who was left a little peculiar. Revill also takes his wife, Gayle Hunnicut.

The house set is certainly both sumptuous and spooky. It was built by “Beast” Bellasco, a sadistic, perverted murderer and cannibal, who disappeared in the house and may haunt it still. Our intrepid researchers get chandeliers dropped on them and all the usual, plus Hunnicut gets a bit possessed by a sexy spirit. Franklin thinks the spirit haunting the place is Bellasco’s bastard child, and McDowell mostly just wants to hunker down and survive.

There isn’t that much of Shirley Jackson in this, although the makeup of the party does have some similarities. There are some twists to the plot, some scares and a body count. But mostly I thought it had a nice glossy 70s Euro look - fun and attractive. As long as you don’t try to compare it to Jackson’s book or movie.

More Boris

The Walking Dead/Frankenstein: 1970 (1936/1958) are a pair of Karloff horrors. One of them is pretty good.

That is, The Walking Dead. Karloff plays a recently released convict - convicted for what isn’t  mentioned, I think. He is a gentle, humble man, and an accomplished pianist. But a bunch of gangsters, lead by Ricardo Cortez, frame him for the murder of the judge that originally convicted him. As he is being lead to the chair, another prisoner plays a melody on a violin - and in another part of town, a group is working to get him pardoned. At the last minute, the governor calls for a stay of execution, but it’s too late.

Scientist Edmund Gwenn convinces them to let him have the body for dissection, but instead revives it with an artificial heart. So he comes back to life, bent on revenge. And he gets it, too, mostly by giving the crooks his Boris Karloff glare, and letting them throw themselves out the window.

Directed by Michael Curtiz, this has all the little touches you look for in a B-movie, like Eddie Acuff as Betcha, the gambling henchman comic relief. Karloff is as charismatic as you would expect, both before and after his demise.

Frankenstein: 1970, made 20 years later by Red Barry, isn’t so great. It has a typical monster movie start, and that’s because we’re watching a movie company making a monster movie. The current Baron Frankenstein (Karloff) is renting his German castle to them to get the money to buy an atomic reactor. Which is an interesting premise, at least. He was tortured by the Nazis and has horrible facial scars, which also adds something. There’s quite a bit of gore, as the good doctor starts killing the actors and crew for parts. But it doesn’t add up to much more than the trashy movie they are making.

It also doesn’t seem to take place in 1970 (the Future!), although TV movies may have been a little futuristic.

Feel free to skip this one, but catch Walking Dead.

Get Your Boots On

Sorry to Bother You (2018), written and directed by Boots Riley, is another one of those Black/black comedies of manners that seem to be all the rage now. OK, there's really only one other example, Get Out. But I think that one counts a lot.

It starts with Lakeith Stanfield as Cassius Green in bed with his girlfriend Tessa Thompson as Detroit. Then the garage door opens because he is living in his uncle’s garage. He needs money badly.  A friend helps him get a job as a telemarketer, which looks hideous. But Danny Glover explains that he just has to use his “white voice” and people will buy from him. And it works. He climbs the corporate ladder to become a Power Caller, selling “life contracts” - in this version of America, you can sign up to have all your food, housing, and clothes supplied in exchange for a lifetime labor contract - which is different from slavery in some way.

Meanwhile, Detroit is rocking some amazing earrings and getting ready for her gallery show, and Steven Yuen is unionizing the telemarketers. Will Cash make it to the show? Will he cross the picket lines? Of course, but that’s not what’s weird. What’s weird is what the life contract people, lead by celebrity entrepreneur Armie Hammer, are really up to.

That’s the outline of the setup, more or less. It leaves out a lot of the absurdity - like when Stanfield telemarketing someone, his desk crashes into their home. It leaves out the Left Eye rebels, fighting the system. It leaves out the incredible cuteness of Detroit and her awesome earrings. Mostly, I just can’t describe the density of this movie, the rich, realistic picture of a crazy world, pretty much like the one we’re living in. I don’t think it’s as funny as Get Out, and maybe not so focussed, but it’s beautiful.

And if you don’t think it’s a horror film, just wait until the end.

Crooked Tale

When we saw the previews, we had hoped that Crooked House (2017) would be at least horror adjacent. We got a good old Agatha Christie movie, with just a smidge of horror - and a great cast.

It starts when Stefani Martini visits private detective Max Irons in post-war England. Her grandfather, a super-rich business tycoon Aristide Leonides, is dead, and she fears murder. Irons is reluctant - it seems he has history with Martini, when he was a diplomat in Cairo. But he goes along and heads out to the mansion of the title.

There he meets Leonides' various offspring, wife and ex-wives, and related hangers-on. First and foremost is Glenn Close, his sister-in-law, who is a no-nonsense gardener type lady. There's also Julian Sands writes plays for his wife. Gillian Anderson. But Leonides would never give them the money they need to produce them. They also have several children, including one who likes to spy and gossip.

Another son is Christian McKay, who has been managing the company, and doing a poor job of it, leading to low self-esteem - he's also held in low esteem by his wife.

There's also sexy showgirl Christina Hendricks, who be having an affair the children's tutor. She was also the one who administered the poison that killed her husband, although it looked like an accident.

And then people start getting killed, a new will shows up, and someone tries to kill the gossipy little girl, maybe because she knows too much.

This is all done in the most lovely luxe style. The titular house is beautiful, with the private quarters of the different sub-factions done in different, fancy styles. McKay's wife, for instance, has their quarters done in mid-Century Modern.

All in all, pretty much your standard Agatha Christie movie: High production values, some big names in the cast, and a few twists in the ending. We did not get much in the way of old-dark-housiness, but that's ok, this was fine.

Warwilf?

You know, I should have tacked The Undying Monster (1942) onto the last post, or combine it with The Lodger. They both have the same director, John Brahm, who later did a ton of TV. Also, I don't really have much to say about it, even less than about The Lodger.

It breaks down like this: The Hammond family has been cursed for centuries, and now someone or something is killing members of the family and threatening folk round the mansion. James Ellison from Scotland Yard, along with Heather Thatcher, his lab assistant and comic relief, are called in to get to the bottom of it. We get the usual old dark house adjacent stuff, like dungeons, clanking chains and hidden compartments, as well as a werewolf rhyme that isn't about what happens when the wolfbane blooms.

This entry in the werewolf chronicles (SPOILER?) is good, but sort of unnecessary. It looks very atmospheric, and the cast gives it their all. It doesn't seem to add to the canon, or bring anything new, except maybe a non-mad scientist and his comedienne sidekick. However, at one-hour three-minutes long, it does it all pretty quickly.

Random Movies

Random Harvest (1942) is a classic, sure, but we generally aren’t big on melodramas, and so we had missed it. But it stars Ronald Colman and Greer Garson, directed by Melvyn LeRoy, so we figured it would be good. And then we found out about the double amnesia.

It starts with Coleman going AWOL from a mental institution. He was apparently a soldier in WWI who lost his memory - and no one knows who he is. While hungry and broke, he meets music hall dancer Greer Garson, who starts taking care of him. To help him recuperate, she takes him to a cottage in the country, where he starts writing.

When he sells a story, he rushes to Liverpool to get a job with a newspaper. But he is struck by a cab, and - BOOM! - double amnesia. He now remembers who he was before the war, but not what he’s been doing since. Since he doesn’t have any ID, he heads back to his rich family and takes up his role as captain of industry. He has a cute teen-aged cousin of some sort who wants to marry him when she grows up - I mainly mention this because she’s played by Susan Peters, who is astonishingly beautiful. He is even running for Parliament.

But did you notice his secretary? It’s Garson. She took the position to be close to him, hoping he will recognize her, or maybe just fall in love with her. But she won’t tell him what was going on during his first amnesia, because she wants him to want her for herself, or something. I think you know how it comes out.

This is truly a romantic film, with great stars. But it is far from perfect. I had problems with the structure - in the second amnesia, it seems like Garson just sort of appears as Colman’s secretary, without showing how she got there (unless I fell asleep for a scene or two - it happens). It makes the second part seem disconnected from the first, and not in a good way. For double amnesia movies, I prefer the Joseph Cotton/Jennifer Jones Love Letters.

Speaking of men in tragic relations with music hall dancers, we also caught up with The Lodger (1944). While loose women are being killed all over Whitechapel, formerly well-to-do Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood take in a lodger. It is Laird Cregar, a devout but somewhat mysterious man. Although they sometimes think he may be up to something, their daughter, dancer Merle Oberon, is quite taken with him. She keeps insisting that he come see her show, although he thinks such goings-on are ungodly. She should have left him alone.

I was quite taken with the atmosphere of this one, and of Cregar’s menace. I now feel like the Lodger should have been a member of the classic monster cadre, at least a junior member, like the hunchback.

The Bus that Couldn’t Slow Down

OK, here’s on that has been on my Saved list for a long time that finally came off: Speed (1994). Yes, even though I am a legit Keanu Reeves fan, I’d never seen this one.

It starts with Reeves and partner Jeff Daniels as a bomb squad trying to get a bunch of businesspeople off of a bomb-boobytrapped elevator. They succeed through a combination of action movie banter and unlikely contrivance. But the bomber (Dennis Hopper), even though Reeves shoots through a hostage to get him.

Later, Reeves gets a call from the bomber, telling him about a bus that is rigged to blow up. The bomb will be armed when they first go over 50 mph, and blow when they go below 50. He makes it onto the bus and tries to keep things cool until he can figure out what to do. That doesn’t work out, and the driver gets shot. So America’s Sweetheart Sandra Bullock has to take over the wheel.

And that’s about all you need to know about the plot. The movie was directed by Jan de Bont, from a script by George Yost, with quipped dialog by Joss Whedon. The “elevator pitch” of Die Hard on a bus” is pretty accurate: cool protagonist in impossible situation, lots of amazing set pieces and cute banter. But it doesn’t all take place on a bus - it starts on an elevator and ends on a subway.

There’s also a cute romance, and one of the better quips: Bullock tells Reeves that relationships built on extreme experiences never work out. “So we’ll have to base ours on sex.”

Encore?

Deadpool 2 (2018) is sort of the answer to “What do you do for an encore?” Deadpool itself was a kind of new thing when it came out, all goofy and meta. So, where do you go from there?

Well first, they kill off the love of his life before the credits. So instead of being written by “The Real Heroes Here”, the writing credits go to “The Real Villains Here.” Then Deadpool commits suicide. You know what they say about suicide: What do you do for an encore? It’s a pretty good suicide, but it doesn’t take - he heals too well, even if it means growing a new body. Colossus takes him to the X-Mansion where again, the only X-Men he meets are Collosus and Teen-age Negasonic Warhead (because all the other X-Men are hiding from him). They offer to take him on as a Trainee, with the first mission to calm down an encounter between a young mutant and the authorities.

The young mutant is Julian Dennison as Firefist, and chubby adolescent who can hurl fire and is being treated in the Icebox, a sort of anti-Xavier School. He is rounded up and re-imprisoned, but Deadpool thinks they are abusing him in the institution and decides to break him out.

This requires a new team of heroes that he decides to call X-Force, in a fit of unoriginality. He holds tryouts and picks up quite a group, including Domino (Zazie Beets), who is just very lucky, and Rob Delaney as Peter. Peter doesn’t have powers, he just thought it sounded fun and a good way to meet people.

I haven’t mentioned Cable (Josh Brolin), the cyborg from the future whose family was killed by the older Firefist. Guess what his agenda is.

Even though this movie shares a lot with the previous (including running gags), it has a bit darker tone, due to the death of his love, and later —SPOILER— the death of Peter and pretty much the entire X-Force. But it also has plenty of laughs and thrills, plus real feelings and a happy ending - believe it or not.

This may even be a better movie than the last - more focused, better plot, no origin story. But it didn’t feel as fresh as the first one, which really seemed to be breaking new ground. Be interesting to see where they take this next - maybe just integrate Mr. Pool into the overall MCU. That should be interesting.