Schlock Mercenary

This is a comic book movie in some of my favorite ways.  It's full of references to Marvel canon that you don't have to catch, it strikes the right "reluctant hero" notes for me, and it's funny. The sequence of posters starting here on IMDB works really well for me.

 

It does not clear the high bar set by The Avengers, however. Also, it invokes comic-book physics, but fails to invoke them consistently. The rules change in ways that seem like they should be pretty important, and which are blindingly obvious, but the inconsistency is NOT a story point, so paying attention is just distracting.

 

Here's the problem in a nutshell: We are told, and even shown, that shrunken Ant-Man can hit like a hundred-and-fifty pound ball-bearing. In ant-mode he dents cars and cracks tile. Perfect! He didn't lose any mass. Just volume. The science behind the "Pym particle" is all kinds of ridiculous, but the initial explanation, which says that atomic distances are decreased, serves the movie just fine.

 

But for comedy, we need to have Ant-Man riding Thomas the Tank Engine, or getting swatted out of the air with a wave of the hand. Oh, and for about half the action to work, Ant-Man needs to be able to ride on ants.  That's not something a one-hundred-and-fifty pound ball-bearing can do.

 

"Which is it?" I kept asking myself. "Tiny and heavy, or just tiny and cool?"

 

The fix, obviously, is for the Pym particle to be able to variably effect the expression of mass by affected matter. Sometimes Ant-Man is heavy, sometimes he's not. But if they'd invoked THAT, then there are a host of other abilities he could have used, and should have used, starting with flying high above his target on the back of a flying ant before dropping fifty feet through the skull of the enemy goon, and then expanding to full size in a shower of gore. And, well, this isn't that kind of movie.

 

Did I enjoy it? Absolutely. It doesn't come anywhere near being my favorite film of the year, entering my list at #8, but it did clear the Threshold of Awesome, and was a much more enjoyable movie than I expected it to be.

Minions crossed my Threshold of Disappointment, which is quite an accomplishment considering the fact that I really didn't expect much from it.

 

I think the core problem was that I didn't care. Nothing seemed to be at stake. Sure, there were some funny moments, and the animation was brilliant, but ultimately the film failed to connect with me anywhere.

 

Like Penguins of Madagascar, Minions attempts to take hilarious side characters and extend the hilarity to a feature film. Minions was hobbled by one of the key rules of the setting: the Minions themselves must never speak intelligibly.

 

Remember WALL-E? Imagine the first act of that story with a narrator interpreting it all for us.

 

That is exactly what happened for the opening scenes of Minions. I don't mind having a narrator set the tone, and Geoffrey Rush was great at that, but when the narrator must tell me what a character is thinking, feeling, and saying, something has gone terribly wrong.

 

Minions enters my list at #16. If you've got kids who are begging to see this, my advice is to take the money you would have spent on that, and buy something cool for them with it. Then rent this when it comes out on DVD.

This Saturday I'll be at the Salt Lake Public Library at the invitation of Utah Sequential Artists and Illustrators.

 

Alan Gardner, newshound-in-chief at The Daily Cartoonist, and a founding member of USAI*, did the poster above, and I love the caricature.

 

Here are the details again, because copying and pasting text from an image is tedious:

 

July 11, 2015

10:00 AM @ Salt Lake City Public Library

Conference Room A

 

I'll have slides, I'll answer questions, and the whole thing will run for about 60 minutes. Seating is limited, and the event is open to the public. A few seats will be reserved for USAI members.