I don’t watch a lot of movies these days. Those of you who know me personally understand the irony as well as the reasons for it. For some reason, we decided to watch a couple of films last week and I wanted to share my impressions of them.
Megamind
Have you ever seen a film that had nothing in particular wrong with it but you just couldn’t love? That was Megamind for me. All the pieces fit nicely. The animation was solid. The celebrity voice acting didn’t take me out of the story like it normally does. The overall themes were good ones, although…we’ll come back to it. The ending was satisfactory. I feel like I should have liked it more than I did.
The one confusing thing, to me, was the muddling of the themes. Was it a children’s movie with the message that you aren’t constrained by the circumstances of your birth? Or, was it a rom-com farce where deception is always uncovered and then overcome in the third act? It was both, and the weaving the two of them together, and they didn’t quite pull it off.
One thing that I wish had received a little more thought was the differences between how Titan and Metro Man reacted to receiving similar powers. There was some subtext there that may or may not have been intended that I would have like to have seen brought to the surface. Maybe it’s just “Titan was a real asshole before he got his powers, so of course he’d use them selfishly,” but it would have been an interesting rabbit hole to explore.
My absolute favorite thing was Megamind’s plausible-but-wildly-incorrect pronunciations. I do that all the freakin’ time and I thought it was really charming even when it turned out to be a plot device. I’m happy to call it a good movie even if it didn’t quite land for me. I’m probably not the target audience for it, huh?
Constantine
Sigh.
I’ve been intentionally avoiding this just because I love the source material so much and, having seen the previews with the gun-totin’, black-wearin’, Keanu Reeves as John Constantine, I just wasn’t interested. I’ve long held that, if they absolutely had to make Constantine an American, the absolute best choice would have been Dennis Leary. He has both the look and the fast-talking shithousery to him that you want in a magician who doesn’t have nearly as many aces up his sleeve as he wants you to think, but the one he does have is going to land between your shoulder blades if you cross him.
Having seen Constantine, I haven’t changed my opinion, but I’m not sure Leary would have been better for the movie they actually made. It’s a deeply, deeply weird film that draws deeply from the comics in some aspects, but in others it couldn’t be less like them. The including of bits of the Dangerous Habits storyline was welcome, but…I gotta tell you, as much as I love Tilda Swinton, Gavin Rossdale would have made such a good Gabriel (or, at least, the comics version of him).
There were a lot of changes that were clearly made to make the film a little more palatable to an audience that isn’t prepared for Garth Ennis’ take on religion and, while they certainly didn’t help, I get why they did it. The inclusion of a cursory romance felt tacked on, and there was so very much scenario chewing when acting would have served the story better.
This probably makes it sound like I hated it, but I didn’t. It was a very weird but undeniably interesting movie. I think there was a very good movie in there somewhere. It felt like they were trying to walk the line between the story they wanted to tell and the story they could tell and, while I don’t see him as John Constantine at all, Reeves clearly “gets” the character, so kudos for that.
I’d still rather have seen Dennis Leary, though.