In which the Mighty Thor fights the Conspicuously Unarmed Humans.

2) Thor vs SHIELD agents

The Fighters:

• Thor, now depowered by his father Odin as punishment for his arrogance and exiled to Earth. The movie is a tad sketchy on just how powerful Thor is at this point– in a short period of time, he undergoes two glancing hits from a car and a zap from a taser without any lasting ill effects– but he’s at least as strong as a really buff human. Played by Chris Hemsworth, who is coincidentally also a really buff human. Not that I noticed.
  • Armed with: Nuttin’, honey.
• SHIELD agents and security guards, maybe eight or so of them. No names and not played by anyone of note, though if you weren’t paying attention you’d swear the last one was Michael Clarke Duncan (RIP). Thor doesn’t kill any of them, but they’ll definitely be really thore in the morning.
  • Armed with: Presumably most or all of them have sidearms, but they never get used; see below.

This is also the first movie appearance of agent Clint Barton aka Hawkeye, but he doesn’t take an active part in the fight, even though he was ready to.

The Setup: Despite the quality of Midgard’s coffee, Thor is finding mortality not to his liking, and when he gets word that his hammer has been found in the desert, he’s keen to get it back and with it, his powers. Which is odd for him to know, considering that Thor wasn’t around when his father put the “whosoever holds this hammer…” enchantment on Mjolnir, but whatever. The Odinson gets his googly-eyed caretaker Jane to drive him to the hammer’s location, but by now the US government has gotten wind of the mystical item, and created an ad hoc lab facility around it. The whole place is crawling with SHIELD agents and Thor only has approximately the superpowers of Chris Hemsworth (not inconsiderable), so he can’t quite charge right in.

The Fight: Basically, a series of small fights/beatdowns spaced out over a moderate-sized infiltration segment. Thor is a poor man’s Solid Snake, and gets extremely lucky as he sneaks around the dark facility in a poncho. Some of this not quite luck, though: an impromptu rainstorm gives the thunder god some extra cover, and the camerawork/Thor’s reaction implies that it’s his loyal hammer lending its assistance. Either way, his luck doesn’t last forever and soon the authorities are alerted to the man Die Hard-ing his way through their facility, especially as he rips through the cloth tubing walls while beating up more government goons.

Thor ditches his poncho soon enough (this may have been unintentional, but at a few points the poncho’s movements seemed to recall the cape he wears in his godly outfit) and quickly works his way closer to Mjolnir, beating up more guys on the way. One can’t help but notice that not a single agent draws a weapon on the intruder; this is papered over somewhat by the fact that Thor keeps getting the drop on his adversaries by either sneaking up on them or getting to them just as they’re rounding a corner, but come on– there’s only so many times that trick can work. Anyway, silly or no it’s still fun to watch Thor muscle his way through so many opponents.

Just before he can reach his objective, though, he has to face the mini-boss: a hulking security guard whose facial expressions seem to indicate he’s enjoying this as much as the cocky Asgardian is (presumably that excitement is the reason he too fails to draw a gun, despite having ample time). Thor even seems to accord this huge opponent a measure of respect, as their battle spills out of the facility again and into the mud. This is less homoerotic than it sounds, even with all the slow-motion. The hero takes out his adversary with a jumping double kick, and returns to his hammer… only to find that not only is it not restoring his godliness, he’s not even considered worthy enough to pick it up. When the realization sets in he goes all blue screen of death, and doesn’t even resist when the few agents he hasn’t knocked out arrive to arrest him.

“I swear, this has never happened to me before.”

Some interesting stuff is happening on the sidelines. There’s some cuts back to Jane as she realizes that she’s in over her head, and (in a handful of shots & dialogue probably added in post-production) facility head honcho “His Name Was Phil” Coulson deploys Hawkeye to a perch above the whole place as a sniper, to keep things from getting out of hand. Barton watches with arrow nocked, snarking out some of the funniest lines of the movie (“You want me to take him down, or would you rather send in more guys for him to beat up?”) as he waits for the kill order. Another nice touch is that not only does Thor’s tenacity win Hawkeye’s grudging respect, but it’s clear that Coulson can tell that something is special about this viking intruder, and eventually is even curious enough to keep off Thor’s back while he sees what will happen when blondie finds the hammer. A federal middle-manager with an actual brain, initiative and curiosity– what is this, some kind of wacky fantasy film?

This fight’s a decent change of pace from the movie’s opening bid. No more gods, monsters and magic; just ordinary fists and feet. This provides a good bit of action diversity, and it also demonstrates that even without his supernatural strength, Thor is a force to be reckoned with; he’s a warrior with skill as well as raw power, and has adapted quickly to his reduced circumstances. He even pulls a couple martial arts-esque tricks, such as binding one opponent with his own jacket. Demerits are due for the credibility-stretching contrivances necessary to make it so that not a single government agent draws on Thor, and for just how easily he’s able to get into even this impromptu federal fortress. It’s kind of like a video game, and not in a good way.

Still, it’s entertaining for what it is, even if it doesn’t aim all that high.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY

“Don’t get in my face. No, really.”

In which a certain magic robot lives up to its name.

“EX-TER-MI-NATE!”

3) Asgardians vs The Destroyer

The Fighters:

• Thor, at first depowered but later not so much. Played by Chris Hemsworth.
  • Armed with: Nothing, and then later Mjolnir.
• Sif, played by Jaimie Alexander.
  • Armed with: same sword-staff and shield combo as before.
• Fandral the Dashing, played by Joshua Dallas.
  • Armed with: same sword as before, though he doesn’t use it.
• Hogun the Grim, played by Tadanobu Asano.
  • Armed with: same mace as before, though he doesn’t use it.
• Volstagg the Voluminous, played by Ray Stevenson.
  • Armed with: same double-bladed axe as before. He tries to use it.
• The Destroyer, a quasi-sentient suit of enchanted armor. About ten feet tall, incredibly powerful and laced with spikes down its sides. In the comics it really can’t operate on its own and has to be worn by someone in order to work but here it’s a mostly automated internal security system for Asgard, though it can be remotely controlled by the king, as well. Other than that it’s an amazingly faithful reproduction of Jack Kirby’s iconic design, an engine of pure cosmic destruction. This thing would make the Daleks piss their pants.
  • Armed with: aside from tremendous physical strength, it can fire blasts of heated energy directly from its face (which has a retractable plate).

There are also some SHIELD agents and a whole town full of civilians, but they’re mostly just cannon fodder.

The Setup: After his failure to lift Mjolnir and a few careful lies from his brother, Thor has learned humility and resigned himself to being stranded on Earth. So of course that’s just when his friends show up and plead for him to return. With Odin stuck in the Odinsleep (a comatose-like state the All-Father uses to regenerate his godly power), Loki is left in charge and has been making a hash of things, so Sif and the Warriors Three have snuck to Midgard to get Thor up to speed. Wary of his brother spoiling his upcoming plans, Loki dispatches the Destroyer to kill Thor, along with pretty much everything else in sight.

The Fight: After some funny fan-pandering where the SHIELD agents wonder if the Destroyer is Stark technology, the Asgardian relic opens up and starts Destroyerizing them (Hawkeye is off sharpening his arrowheads or something, I guess), and soon enough, the town itself. The ruthless construct is almost as amazing in moti0n as it is in design: it moves with a slow but deadly weightiness, and often lashes out with whip-fast speed. Most of its movements are very unnatural-looking, but that seems less like the product of awkward CGI and more like a deliberate choice to give it a sort of otherworldly creepiness.

Still humble, Thor knows he’d be less than useless in such a fight, and commits himself to helping evacuate the town. This leaves the remaining Asgardians to take care of business. Since they realize even together they couldn’t take the Destroyer head-on, they think up a quick plan to get the drop on it. There’s a brief shot of all four of them striding purposefully down the street in a line and it looks really cool; interesting to think that just five minutes previous the sight of them walking around a mundane Earth town was overtly comical. What a difference context makes.

The Warriors Three serve as the distraction, with Hogun and Fandral tossing Volstagg through the air (kind of weird since he’s the heaviest one, but okay) at the Destroyer, but the metallic beast swats him away before he can do anything. Just as it leans over him to finish the job, Sif comes crashing down from telephone pole and skewers the robot, from the back of the neck all the way through to the pavement.

The construct is only briefly stunned, then it pulls a T-1000 and morphs its whole body into reverse so that not only does Sif’s blade come loose, she’s now also face-to-face with her opponent.

She survives the encounter but the Destroyer resumes Destroyinating with impunity; the heroes now know there’s nothing they can do except run. Things get worse, especially when Volstagg gets barbecued as a face-blast blows up a restaurant he’d taken shelter in. Thor knows that the only way to stop this is to turn himself in.

He pleads with Loki (shown listening on his throne in Asgard) for mercy, for the innocents nearby if not for Thor himself. It seems like Loki listens to the better angels of his nature, but then he pulls a schoolyard “psych!” and the Destroyer turns to backhand Thor at the last second.

The armor’s spiked gauntlets have left deep scars on the hero’s face and neck, and verily this blow seems to have done him in. He “dies” in Jane’s distressed arms, and frankly the death scene is a little too protracted for my liking. Come on, guys, we all KNOW Thor’s not dead, and pretty much everyone guessed what’s going to come next: off in the desert, the hammer begins stirring and returns to its master, because Thor’s humility and selflessness have made him worthy again. Again, this is oversold, complete with a flashback to the moment when Odin laid the enchantment on it, I suppose just in case there are any particularly slow people in the audience who don’t remember something that happened about 80 minutes ago.

Aside from that, there is a nifty little sequence where the hammer leaps to Thor’s outstretched hand, restoring his life and power. There’s several quick close-ups of Thor’s armor rebuilding itself rapidly, and Jane sees her faith in this handsome stranger rewarded (though I think the whole superhero/demigod thing is just a bonus for her; she’s really just happy to have a boyfriend whose idea of “sweet talk” doesn’t consist of explaining all the ways she’s not like sand). The joke of her reacting with an “Oh. My. God.” (get it?) is either groanworthy or adorable, but I think Portman sells it well enough that I lean towards the latter.

To say this changes the balance of the fight is an understatement. Fresh out of his Power Rangers-style transformation sequence, Thor hits the Destroyer in the face with a well-aimed hammer throw which, in another nice touch, also clocks the construct in the back of the head on the return trip. This gives Thor time to form a tornado, which he flies to the top of and sucks his adversary up into as well.

The Destroyer unleashes a few more blasts, which Thor bats away, then he charges straight down, driving Mjolnir into the armor’s face even as it unleashes more energy. The combined strength of the blow plus Mjolnir redirecting Destroyer’s own energy back at it makes the armor explode real good. Thor calls off the nasty weather and does his cool guy thing, walking towards the remaining bystanders very casually even as the last suspended car comes crashing down behind him. Fight’s over.

[Epilogue note: shortly after, Hemsworth undersells a slight paraphrase of one of fandom's favorite Thor lines in recent history, quietly muttering "I would have words with my brother." Ah well.]

Mixed feelings here. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on: the other Asgardians being cool & professional, Thor’s mostly excellent re-ascension, a faithfully-rendered Destroyer wreaking merry havoc. There’s the aforementioned cheesy/condescending stuff that doesn’t work so well. But the main problem with this fight is that while it’s a suspenseful event for our characters, it’s just not exciting as a fight. First the Destroyer is unstoppable, then Thor is unstoppable, then it’s over; there’s no real struggle or back & forth. Ideally once Thor was restored to full power maybe he could have traded some genuine blows with the Destroyer, or at least taken more than 30 seconds to beat it. It’s a very slow build-up with a very quick resolution.

Also noteworthy: this is the only time in this superhero movie where the protagonist does “superhero” things– i.e., protects innocent humans from an enemy that’s too much for them to handle. But of course the reason the enemy is only there in the first place is because it’s looking FOR the protagonist. Again, this is an unusual superhero movie.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Brother vs  brother!

Oh, brother.

O brother, where art thou?

4) Thor vs Loki

The Fighters:

• Thor, now fully re-powered and back home. Played by Chris Hemsworth.
  • Armed with: Mjolnir
• Loki, now assuming the role of king of Asgard. Played by Tom Hiddleston.
  • Armed with: Gungnir, the “Spear of Heaven.” Also made of uru metal, and Odin’s personal weapon. At least a match for Mjolnir, though nobody does anything with it in this movie beyond just firing energy blasts.

The Setup: Thor would have words with his brother over the whole “you sent a magic robot to kill me” thing, and gets Heimdall to whisk him back to Asgard. Meanwhile, Loki has allowed a small contingent of frost giants into the kingdom and led them straight to the slumbering Odin, but, aha, triple cross: Loki spear-zaps Laufey (his biological father) at the last second, just barely stopping him from killing the All-Father. The whole thing was a trap on Loki’s part so that he could come out the hero and make Odin proud.

Thor arrives just after that, and starts blabbing about all of Loki’s machinations in front of Frigga. They could shake hands to settle their differences, but as Chris Farley almost said, brothers don’t shake hands– brothers gotta fight!

The Fight: Loki opens strong by blasting Thor right out of the tower, but rather than sticking around to finish Thor off he decides to jet away and set the Bifrost to destroy Jotunheim. This is dumb on multiple fronts: first off, tend to one problem at a time, buddy. Second, destroying Jotunheim was only part of his plan to come off as the hero after fending off Laufey’s assassination attempt; now that Frigga, Thor and a sleeping Odin (he can see what happens while in the Odinsleep) are all aware of his villainy, this part of the plan seems rather extant. Also, I think it’s a bit of movie-invented, convenient lore for the Bifrost (the rainbow bridge that connects Asgard to the other Nine Realms) to be capable of destroying whole worlds– why is their transportation system also a Death Star?

Thor flies across the bridge and catches up to Loki in the control room, even though the destruction has already begun. They talk some more, with the reformed Thor trying to reason with his brother– at one point he says, “This is madness!” to which Loki shows remarkable restraint by not replying in Internet meme-ready fashion. After Loki makes a threat against Jane, though, his bro finally comes at him.

The short hammer vs spear choreography is a little interesting. Mostly ground-based, with a few neat moves, including Loki spinning on the vertical spear like a stripper and using the momentum to kick Thor. Still a bit too short and none too spectacular, even if the weight of the fight goes a long way to sell the high power levels involved here.

It’s not long before Thor knocks the villain through the wall and out onto the pulsing Bifrost. Loki pulls his disappearing act trick again, and makes a couple dozen copies of himself to ambush Thor with. His buffer brother zaps them all away with a lightning strike, leaving the original Loki stunned. Then Thor pulls what is my favorite stunt of the whole fight: he keeps Loki from moving by placing Mjolnir, which Loki is physically incapable of moving, on top of his brother’s chest. It’s so brilliantly simple, and actually kind of hilarious.

By now the control room is too flooded with overwhelming energy for Thor to get back to, so he takes the Gordian Knot approach and recalls Mjolnir so he can use it to hit the bridge really hard until it breaks (this is said to be emotionally difficult for Thor, since the Bifrost is ostensibly the only way to leave Asgard, and without it Thor won’t be able to see Jane again). Loki eventually recovers and nearly skewers Thor with Gungnir, but once again Odin puts the “deus” in deus ex machina, arriving to save the day. He holds both his sons over the broken bridge, but when Loki sees daddy’s disapproving eyes, he lets go and falls into the space-like cosmos below. Thor bellows in sadness at his brother’s “death”, and it’s sort of weird that he doesn’t try to swoop down and save him, since he can, you know, fly. Too bad, since I’m sure Thanos is not the most cheerful company; “death” this, “conquest” that, blah blah blah.

Out of all the movie’s fights, this climactic battle is probably the least action-packed of the bunch. There’s certainly cosmic energy aplenty and a few neat moves, but the actual combat between hero & villain is brief & halting. Accepting the premise involves swallowing a few questionable plot/character elements, and the conclusion is not terribly satisfactory. I am inclined to be generous due to the high Thor content, but only so much.

[As a side note, I discovered when doing Google Images Searches for pics to use in this article that there is an alarming amount of drawings of Thor & Loki kissing each other. VERY alarming.]

Grade: B-

Recommended Links: The new teaser trailer for the movie’s sequel Thor: The Dark World, in which stuff vaguely happens and Loki’s hair grows even longer. Those dark elves won’t know what hit them (though by process of elimination they could probably guess it was Mjolnir).

Coming Attractions: A surprising change of pace and content.

wtf

The Incredibles is my favorite Pixar movie. This is not a title I bestow lightly.

Released in 2004 and directed by nerd hero Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, the Mission Impossible movie where Tom Cruise is framed by bad guys and has to go rogue from his own organization– no, the other movie where he does that. No, the OTHER other one), The Incredibles is a joyful celebration of old school superheroics. It manages the strange feat of being deeply nerdy about its comic book inspirations but not self-consciously so; smart comic fans will spot the story’s roots in everything from the Fantastic Four to Watchmen but the movie never disappears up in its own butt with overtly winking geek references. It’s also surprisingly Randian but we’ll not get into that. Instead we’ll get into….

1) Mr. Incredible vs Omnidroid

The Fighters:

• Robert “Bob” Parr aka Mr. Incredible, a major-league superhero who’s been in forced retirement thanks to hyper-litigious American society. In the years since he’s become overweight and frustrated with his mundane life, yearning to exercise his full abilities once again. Voiced by Craig T. Nelson.
  • Armed with: Nothing but his supernatural physical strength and heightened durability.
• Omnidroid version 8.0. An autonomous robot with a learning A.I., built to kill superheroes and being molded through much trial & error into the ultimate war machine. It’s already on its eighth incarnation and is plenty dangerous, currently in the shape of a huge metal sphere walking on four tentacles.. I’m not sure of the overall practicality of that design but certainly its uniform roundness leaves it with few apparent weak spots.
  • Armed with: Its main weapons are its metal tentacles which are long, flexible, retractable and equipped with gripper claws. It’s also not shy about using its enormous size as a weapon.

The Setup: Fed up with hiding his true nature, Bob Parr is an easy mark for a weapons contractor who tracks him down & hires him to stop his “malfunctioning” Omnidroid. In time it will be revealed that this employment offer is actually a trap for Mr. Incredible: the robot’s owners have programmed it to kill him or, failing that, observe enough from its defeat in order to be made even stronger in its next iteration. But for now Bob, uncomfortably squeezed into his old outfit, goes along with the fake story, gets dropped on the lush jungle island of Nomanisan (get it?) and gets to tracking down his foe.

The Fight: Even at his prime Mr. Incredible was hardly the Dark Knight Detective so he spends a good deal of time searching aimlessly for the giant machine, and he stumbles onto the telltale signs of Omnidroid mere seconds before it arrives and attacks. Despite his girth, Bob’s uncanny agility is still intact, and each swipe from the robo-beast’s grasping tentacles is a near-miss. This isn’t a slugfest; the one good punch Incredible gets in on Omnidroid launches it far backward but it’s not much worse for wear when it lands.

A lot of fun stuff happens from here on. When Parr tries to vault over the approaching robot, it calculates (we keep getting brief views from Omnidroid’s internal HUD) the trajectory of his leap and swats him out of the air effortlessly. At one point it fully retracts all its metal limbs and rolls into a ball, chasing after Mr. Incredible in a way that would probably trigger Indiana Jones’ PTSD if he were watching. That also leads to a chase down a cliff side and Omnidroid hurling rocks at a distant Bob; there’s a kind of hypnotic grace to the fluid movements of the machine’s arms.

The fight gets a lot more serious when it moves into a nearby volcano and Bob finds himself with his back against a lake of lava. The superhero is able to jiu jitsu his grasping enemy into the lava and seemingly cut the fight short– he even enjoys some gloating victory laughs which throw out his already over-stressed back. Unfortunately the machine is apparently capable of withstanding even the most extreme of temperatures and it rises from the liquid hot magma looking rather ticked.

Omnidroid even demonstrates a new technique, holding two of its arms stretched out directly in front of it and spinning the claws into whirling propellers of death. Parr escapes getting pureed by jumping out of range but the machine still seizes and slams him to the ground (should have just dropped him into the lava, silly robot), but when it tries to finish him off by ripping him in half lengthwise, the pulling motion inadvertently repairs his back– instant chiropractor!– and gives him the burst of energy he needed to escape.

Mr. Incredible opts to use the big muscle in his head for once, and in the confusion he immediately gets directly underneath the robot– while Omnidroid has sensor cameras on both its top and bottom, they don’t have a full 360 degree view, and Bob exploits the blind spot. He then rips off the bottom sensor and climbs inside the machine. As it tries futilely to get at him, Omnidroid pokes several holes in itself, and finally Bob lures it into stabbing directly into its own power core. It sinks to the ground, inert.

Though there was all sorts of spiffy superhero antics in the movie’s delightful opening prologue, this is where The Incredibles really starts to flex its action muscles, and I’m very pleased with how it delivers. The fight’s staging covers quite a bit of ground, from a dense green jungle to rocky cliff to the inside of a volcano (shouldn’t being this close to the lava be too hot for Bob, even in his suit? And shouldn’t it take longer for Omnidroid to cool off after emerging from the lava? That stuff’s like a thousand degrees). Michael Giacchino’s masterful score is appropriately menacing in the early part of the fight, but quickly turns triumphant (the movie bucks expectations with deliberately retro music motifs that sound more appropriate to a 60s spy show than a modern superhero flick) when it’s clear that Bob is going to turn the tables.

Speaking of appropriately menacing, Bird does an excellent job of selling the threat presented by the Omnidroid. Mr. Incredible gets by with some clever moves and his fair share of luck, but after seeing that metal beast in action there’s no question the fight could just as easily have gone the other way. This is important because our pal Omni is going to come back in a big way.

Strange to think that this movie’s nearly ten years old. Superhero films have come a long way since then, but few have rivaled this shining gem. This fight that closes out the first act serves as a strong opening statement as to what the master storytellers at Pixar could do on the genre’s canvas. And it will get even better.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: Dash runs away with our hearts.

No, he can be cocky. He earned it.

In describing this fight scene to you, I am burdened with glorious purpose.

I know, I was overwhelmed too.

2) The Incredibles vs Syndrome’s Henchmen

[On the audio commentary, Brad Bird says that they called the bulk of this sequence "100-Mile Dash," because Brad Bird is awesome.]

The Fighters:

• Dashiell Robert “Dash” Parr, the ten-year-old son of Bob & Helen Parr. His brash and feisty nature fits in perfectly with his superpower; both elements have gotten him into trouble at home & school in the past. Early in the movie he vocalized some of the resentment that quietly gnawed at his parents, namely that for the family to deny their true greatness in order to spare the feelings of the “ordinary” is to do a disservice to everyone. Voiced by Spencer Fox.
  • Armed with: his superpower of blinding speed, not just at running but with his whole body. It’s something he’s grown up with but never truly unleashed, thanks to the restrictions placed upon him by his family’s secret exile.
• Violet “Vi” Parr, Bob & Helen’s older daughter (age not specified but probably 13-14). Violet is at that painfully awkward stage of adolescence, simultaneously yearning for and terrified of attention. Her power set is even more appropriate to her personality than her brother’s. Voiced by Sarah Vowell.
  • Armed with: the ability to make herself invisible and, more importantly from a tactical standpoint, the ability to generate force fields in her immediate vicinity (in this aspect she is more than any of the other family members clearly modeled on a member of the Fantastic Four– namely Invisible Woman, who has the exact same seemingly unrelated pair of powers). She’s had even less exercise of this power than Dash has, owing largely to a lack of self-confidence. This is about to change.
• Helen Parr aka Elastigirl, the matriarch of the Incredible clan. Like her husband, she’s a former professional superhero forced into retirement, though she’s worked harder to adjust to “normal” life. But this little expedition to Nomanisan proves she’s still got plenty of chops. Voiced by Holly Hunter.
  • Armed with: the power to greatly elongate her limbs, torso, neck, etc. Coupled with the speed & practice she has, the ability is amazing for offense, mobility, and stealth– though I’m not covering it for the blog, one of the movie’s underrated sequences has Helen using her rubbery skills to infiltrate Syndrome’s supervillain fortress.
• Bob Parr aka Mr. Incredible, needing to be rescued after his introduction to Syndrome and an ill-timed distress call got him captured. Same powers as before and still voiced by Craig T. Nelson.
• Syndrome’s henchmen, a bunch of particularly nasty goons.
  • Armed with: some are on foot and carry small arms, but most of them are piloting a nifty sci-fi vehicle of Syndrome’s own design. Shaped like a one-man flying saucer and surrounded by a spinning/gyrating blade (ideal for both offense and cutting through the dense jungle foliage), the machines are fast, agile and each equipped with twin machine guns. Though they’re never named in the film, the Internet tells me the devices are called “Velocipods.” Which… sure, okay.

Note that all four of the Incredibles are also wearing their spiffy new outfits, courtesy of master super-suit designer Edna Mode. Each one is highly durable, resistant to extreme temperatures, tailored specifically to match each individual’s power set, and outfitted with a distress beacon in the chest.

The Setup: Mr. Incredible has been called in for a rematch with Omnidroid on Nomanisan, culminating in his aforementioned capture and the discovery of Syndrome’s scheme. Helen, suspicious about her husband’s absence but ignorant of his captivity, used Edna’s tracking device to get Bob’s location and flew to the island on a borrowed plane. Dash and Violet had secretly stowed aboard, but before she could take them back, Syndrome sent missiles to blow the plane out of the sky. They escaped, but Mr. Incredible is left bound and thinking his family’s dead.

Having swam to the island, Helen hid the kids in a nearby cave while she ninja’d her way into the villain’s lair. Before leaving, she tried to communicate to them the enormity of the danger they’re in and how they’ll have to fight to protect themselves. It’s a really quiet & powerful scene, with a mother who doesn’t want her children to have to grow up so fast but resolving that she has no other choice under the circumstances, so no point whining about it. A nearby rocket taking off (long story) floods the cave with fire and flushes the children out of their hiding place and into the open. They sleep in the jungle and wake up to a robotic sentry detecting their presence and sounding the alarm, so shortly after, they’re quickly surrounded by Syndrome’s guards. Violet vanishes from sight and reminds her brother to follow mom’s advice (in Dash’s case, to run “as fast as you can,” a prospect that filled him with awe). The boy zooms off with goons in pursuit, one of them remaining behind to look for Violet.

The Fight: An embarrassment of riches. To try to describe it “blow by blow” style would be to do it a disservice, not to mention exhausting.

So much good stuff happens, mostly involving the pint-sized speedster. All of his antics are entertaining, but there’s a clever escalation to his scenes here– he gets not just faster as the scene goes on but also more crafty and confident. Early on he makes some mistakes and runs into a swarm of bugs, then later a swing on a vine sends him flying off a cliff only to be accidentally (and conveniently) saved by a Velocipod that was swooping by. Standing on the deck face-to-face with the pilot, Dash’s blinding speed lets him dodge all the adult’s punches, and when he first hits back with a quick punch he has a look of amazement that’s perfectly natural from any ten-year-old: “Did I just punch a grown-up and get away with it?” He increases his assault but when he’s distracted by the sight of the cliff the pod’s hurtling toward (the pilot’s back is turned from the flight path), he gets clocked right in the face, and the resulting fall saves him from the crash. Soon, however, he will get by less on luck and more on skill.

There’s no shortage of other fun beats & gorgeous animation: Dash bobbing & weaving to avoid machine gun strafes, Dash bending a tree to cause a pursuing pod to crash, Dash running upside down and all around a watery cave to get two bad guys to collide with each other, etc. But it all pales next to the film’s finest moment:

The kid finds three more pursuers on his tail at one point, and after it’s too late to change course he sees he’s heading out onto open water. Assuming he’s in for a painful splash, he flinches… only to look down and discover that he’s moving so fast, he’s skimming along the ocean’s surface rather than sinking. Finally encountering the reality of his unlocked potential, of seeing what he can do after ten long years of being told what he can’t, he just… laughs. He laughs for maybe a second before zipping off quicker than ever, but there’s so much packed into that one gleeful giggle. It’s the laugh of someone who’s truly, ridiculously, stupidly happy. If this were a different kind of Disney movie he would go into a five-minute musical number about this awesome new power he is (witness the songs about flying in Peter Pan and Aladdin, for example), but The Incredibles accomplishes more with one laugh than other films could with an entire opera of songs.

I know it’s subjective, but it’s hard for me to overstate just how indelibly wonderful this moment is. It’s up there with Quint telling the story of the USS Indianapolis, Michael Corleone closing the door on Kay, Kikuchiyo lecturing the other samurai about a farmer’s life, and “you’re all clear kid, now let’s blow this thing and go home.” It’s poetry, full stop.

Dash shaking off the last of his pursuers leads to a nice break where we see Helen arriving just as her husband’s being freed by Syndrome’s assistant Mirage (herself in the middle of a Heel Face Turn). They storm out to look for the kids, who are actually doing all right on their own. Dash reunites with Violet just in time to save her from a canny guard who threw dirt at her to detect where she’d been hiding, and she immediately repays the favor by asserting her ability to create force fields just before the guard was about to gun down Dash in retaliation. The two improvise a neat trick where Dash runs in place within Vi’s spherical field and turns the thing into a giant, invincible hamster ball. Some more pursuing Velocipods bounce off before they finally encounter (and non-fatally run over) their parents.

The brief reunion is interrupted by a few straggler guards, which the Incredible parents dispatch with ruthless, Papa & Mama Bear efficiency. The hilarious moment where they look at each other and simultaneously say “I love you” in front of an enormous explosion they just caused is priceless, even in a sequence filled with priceless moments. Another squad of goons arrive to spoil the fun, and while last time the kids looked on in awe at a whole new side of their parents, this time the whole family works together.

The next bit is as brief as it is spectacular. These four had never fought as one unit until now (heck, until ten minutes ago half of them had never fought a single bad guy at all), but to see the way they work together now you’d think they’d been practicing for years… and why wouldn’t they? They’re family.

Everybody contributes. Dash runs circles around the group in order to kick up a dust storm to limit the enemy’s visibility. Violet (her devilish grin signaling the definitive end of her “wallflower” phase) puts up a shield to block automatic fire, while Mom protects her against enemies sneaking up from behind. Dad starts to wreck one of the ships but, unfortunately, it all comes to an abrupt end when Syndrome arrives and instantly traps all four with his cool but narratively boring “zero-point energy” gauntlets, capturing the whole family. Grr.

Let’s take a moment to note here that this is not the old G.I. Joe cartoons, heck it’s not even the Ninja Turtles movie– people die in this fight scene. Several of them, in fact, and though it’s all done through bloodless explosions there’s no doubt what happened to the pilots. Causing the death of a human being, even in a justified self-defense context, can be a traumatic thing even for most adults, so on the one hand it’s odd to see Dash and Violet react so casually the first time they do it (maybe they went through some therapy after the credits rolled?). But on the other hand, it’s refreshing for a big movie to take such a no-nonsense approach to the issue of genuinely bad guys, and what happens when you’re up against them in a kill-or-be-killed situation.

This scene, though: like it, love it, and gotta have it. Dash is the breakout star but everybody gets something to do. The bad guys are generic but they and their implements are suitably intimidating. Giacchino’s music soars. The staging is fantastic and covers a wide range of terrain. Even in the relatively quiet break in Bob’s prison cell, the pacing never really slows down. And this remains the greatest depiction of a superhero speedster to ever grace a movie scene.

There are things to object to, if we’re being thorough. Again, the bad guys are nameless & generic, Dash is way luckier than he should be, and that wonderful final bit where the Incredibles fight together is over almost as soon as it starts, thanks to Syndrome and his Win Button of a weapon. But then again:

Grade: A+

Coming Attractions: A giant robot is attacking the city, as those are wont to do.

We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

Freakin’ robots, man.

3) The Incredibles and Frozone vs Omnidroid

The Fighters:

• The Incredibles: Bob/Mr. Incredible, Helen/Elastigirl, Dash and Violet. An ersatz Fantastic Four family that’s finally embraced their destiny as a crime-fighting team– an old job for the parents and a new one for the kids.
• Lucius Best aka Frozone, a close friend of the Parr family (he was best man at their wedding) and another superhero. Although retired and adjusted relatively well to civilian life, he’s been going on occasional covert vigilante outings with Bob, and is doesn’t hesitate to spring back into action when he sees the Omnidroid wreaking havoc in the city– there’s a very funny segment where he argues with his wife about where she put his old superhero gear.
  • Armed with: Roughly analogous to Marvel’s Iceman, Frozone’s powers are related to ice and cold. He can instantly freeze nearby water or even moisture straight out of the air, and failing that can use the moisture in his own body. The boots on his super suit can transform instantly into a sort of high-tech snowboard. Voiced by Samuel L Jackson, who’s clearly having fun.
• Omnidroid version 10.0, the biggest & baddest one yet.
  • Armed with: In addition to being the size of a large house, this Omnidroid has SIX weaponized tentacles (the claws of which can detach or be manually launched) and a swiveling laser cannon near its sensor.

The Setup: The end-stage of Syndrome’s plan with the perfected Omnidroid is to launch and then re-drop it from orbit into a populated area so that people will assume it’s an alien craft, then eventually have it attack everything in sight– it’s kind of the inverse of the plot of The Iron Giant, come to think of it. Syndrome will then show up and “defeat” his creation, passing himself off as a new superhero. It goes off pretty well at first, but the robot has actually grown sentient enough to rebel against Syndrome, and before knocking him out was able to separate the villain from the wrist-gauntlet he’d been using to control Omnidroid. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Syndrome, the Incredibles have escaped from captivity and made their way to the site of Omnidroid’s debut.

There’s a really beautiful moment between Bob & Helen, where the big guy shows his vulnerable side as he reluctantly reveals that he’s “not strong enough” to face the very idea of losing his family. Unfortunately this nice family discussion is interrupted by the arrival of a giant murder-bot. I hate when that happens.

What follows is something superhero fans had been waiting to see actualized on the big screen for decades: a team of superheroes fighting against an honest-to-gosh giant robot attacking the city. In 2004, that was a revelation. Heck, it hasn’t been re-attempted since, though Joss Whedon deserves credit for having a team of superheroes fight off an alien armada that had been attacking the city, even if it’s not fair to the aliens because they didn’t have a Hulk.

The Fight: The initial onslaught from Omnidroid scatters the family and leaves the kids too frazzled to react properly. Violet gets her wits about her in time to save herself and Dash from the robot with a shield. She can withstand several blows from the machine’s limbs, but the force of it dropping its entire body on the shield is too much for her, breaking the force field. Mr. Incredible then stops the robot from crushing the both of them by bench-pressing it with all four limbs, which gets him seized and thrown through a nearby office building. He responds by jumping out and knocking Omnidroid down with a flying tackle. He’s helped by the arrival of Frozone, whose ice attacks against the machine’s joints don’t seem to do more than annoy it.

When Bob finds and realizes the importance of Syndrome’s remote, the tenor of the scene changes. Omnidroid does everything it can to keep the Incredibles from holding on to and using the remote (before the fight ends, random button-mashing will knock off another whole limb from the robot, and launch it several hundred feet in the air), which necessitates its changing hands a lot. In a clever callback to an earlier scene which combined their respective powers (a superhero twist on the typical “Dad tossing the football” thing), Bob tells his son to “go long” and throws the remote so far only a speedster like Dash could catch it. Helen– seizing a manhole cover and bending her arm around a light pole to create enough momentum to launch it, a rather awesome move– knocks out Omnidroid’s cannon, which is kind of too bad because it was cool as heck to watch Dash dodge all those laser blasts.

pew pew pew

The robot is still dangerous enough even with its offensive capacity diminished and pursues Dash onto a body of water, but fortunately Frozone is there to skate to Dash’s rescue, creating ice walkways for them to slide around on. There’s another fun bit where Frozone insta-freezes a giant splash from Omnidroid to cushion everyone’s fall.

We learn that the machine is still projectile-capable when it launches a claw at Robert to keep him from seizing the remote, though the loss of that claw causes the robot to stumble on one of Lucius’ ice slicks. An invisible Violet finally seizes the remote, and that, combined with Bob’s recollection that the robot’s shell is not strong enough to withstand blows from its own limbs, leads to the family launching the forgotten claw straight at Omnidroid’s metal heart, ripping its power source right out. Thunk.

Really great work is done here. The city setting is a change of scenery, since the majority of the film’s action having been on varying parts of Nomanisan. As with the previous dynamite sequence, everybody gets at least a thing or two to contribute, scoring lots of little victories against Omnidroid while never undercutting just how nigh-unstoppable and relentless it is. Giacchino’s jazzy music is as fun as ever.

As good as the staging is, I think there might be one or two “last minute saves” too many in this scene– a temptation that’s hard to resist in scenes with multiple protagonists moving in & out of the action. And as noted, the nature of the scene changes greatly when the remote is introduced: away from being a “fight” to more of a chase/defensive/keep-away sequence. After that, aside from Helen’s sweet move taking out the blaster, there’s not much in the way of back & forth with Omnidroid, just a lot of looking for an opportunity to exploit its weak point with one fatal blow. Still, it’s superheroes vs a giant robot attacking the city– how much can you really quibble with that?

Grade: A-

Recommended Links: It appears that Brad Bird felt a disturbance in the Force, because while I was writing the drafts of these posts he happened to mention that he might get to work on making an Incredibles sequel after all. I rather think we should already have had like one or two of those already, but I won’t complain.

Coming Attractions: I’ve been too easy on myself for a while now, what with these positive examples and all. For the next series my disappointment will be…

Yep, you probably thought I’d do the brand-new, ostensibly action-heavy cinematic reboot Man of Steel, but [cue record scratch noise]:

Tricked ya.

Without getting overly fanboy-ish (… yet), let’s just say I have major problems with the treatment Snyder, Nolan and Goyer gave The Man of Steel’s title character. Even putting aside from a lot of narrative problems and logical head-bangers, the Superman in the film is not really recognizable as Superman in several very crucial ways (to the extent he is at all it is largely thanks to the absolutely fantastic performance by Henry Cavill).

Superman Vs The Elite (an admittedly cheesy and bland title, but less unwieldy than that of the comic issue it was based on, Joe Kelly’s “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?”), is not a great movie, even if it is one of the better examples of DC Entertainment’s many straight-to-DVD one-offs; the animation aesthetic is a little off-putting if still smoothly done, the PG-13 language is gratuitous, and the voice acting doesn’t always click.

It does, however, have a great Superman. One who is recognizably the Superman that has endured for 70+ years while still retaining vulnerability and the ability to kick some ass. It’s a Superman who is definitely about something– he has a specific meaning to the people he protects, he’s not just an action figure. This, and some other things we’ll get to, will put him into stark contrast against the caped Kryptonian you can currently see in theaters. And while this movie has of course been seen much less, it’s currently available on Netflix Streaming, so I’d advise you to check it out.

I’ll note here that the comic book story this was specifically based on came out in March of 2001, which demonstrates that all these hand-wringing “is Superman still relevant?” essays you’ve seen over the past year or so are hardly anything new; the question was an old one back when Kelly penned this issue. It was also a response to certain comic book trends in early 21st century, and the film’s ultimate villains (spoiler), the Elite, are a blatant pastiche of the Authority– one of Warren Ellis’ abandoned projects, the Authority were a pointedly proactive team from the Wildstorm label who upended their world’s status quo and took life & death into their own hands.

1) Superman vs Atomic Skull

The Fighters:

• Superman, aka Clark Kent aka Kal-El. He’s… look, I’m not going to explain Superman’s powers to you. This is not an origin story; Superman is already a well-established hero in this film, and married to Lois Lane. Voiced by George Newbern, already a veteran at voicing the Man of Steel thanks to five seasons of the animated Justice League series.
• The Atomic Skull, aka Joseph Martin. His powers are based on being exposed to some kind of “gene bomb,” which in the comics was courtesy of an alien race, but his origin is only obliquely referred to here. He can discharge powerful blasts of radioactive energy (often strong enough to turn non-powered humans to ash on contact), and has advanced strength & durability somewhere in the neighborhood of Superman’s own. Voiced by Dee Bradley Baker.

The Setup: Refreshingly simple. Atomic Skull has escaped from custody somehow, and he literally goes looking for a fight, specifically for one with the last son of Krypton. He starts killing bystanders in Metropolis left & right so as to goad Superman into showing up. It’s not spelled out whether the villain is just spoiling for violence or if he wants payback against Superman specifically (it’s clear from dialogue that they’ve tangled before), but when the hero expresses shock at how callous he would be, the Skull simply replies “you do what you do, I do what I do.” Indeed.

Kinda hard NOT to be a villain when you look like this.

And just before Atomic Skull can do what he does to a mother and her screaming baby, Superman flies in and clocks him g0od.

The Fight: The Man of Steel wastes no time following up with a tackle that takes them both farther away from civilians. Superman quite notably does use the terrain against his adversary here, but (and this is important), ONLY in minimal ways. He drags the Skull up the side of a building but only causes surface damage to its wall, he smacks him into other buildings but again only in glancing ways that cause superficial damage. This of course means that Atomic Skull is likewise not caused maximum harm, but that’s the price Superman pays for being cautious and conscientious. The hero’s deliberate restraint is not spelled out here, but it will become clear much later on just how damage a more careless Superman could cause.

After some more blows, the Skull gains the upper hand when he’s able to get a grip on Superman– direct contact increases the damage his powers can dish out, apparently. Superman frees himself by using his super-shout to bellow “LET GO!” with a shockwave that shatters nearby windows (more property damage), and creates some distance from his opponent’s deadly reach by seizing a telephone pole (one of Skull’s blasts had tore it from its moorings) and smacking the villain around with it for a while.

Eventually the whole thing ends when a blow from the Kryptonian sends the airborne Atomic Skull into a pond in a nearby park, which for some science or comic book “science” reason foams up around the villain and renders him unconscious. To the cheers of bystanders, Superman flies the villain away into custody.

Like many opening fights, it’s fairly brief and not particularly impressive but it does set the right tone. The movie establishes a proper “superhero” aesthetic early on, roughly demonstrating the scale these kind of players operate at.

The setup is also deceptively simple: the villain shows up spoiling for a fight and gets one, right in the middle of a crowded urban area. That’s the kind of thing that’s entertaining for us to watch on screen (or read on a page) but what would it be like to live in a world like that, where your loved ones could end up dead or your business trashed just as collateral damage to a grudge match between two superpowered weirdos? Wouldn’t you want that to be solved once and for all via drastic means? How many times do these freaks have to escape from an inefficient system before someone puts them down for good?

We’ll see.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: We meet the new guys.

Elite, but not beat agents.

In which we meet monsters.

(SUBTLE DOUBLE MEANING)

2) Superman and the Elite vs Pokolistan monsters

The Fighters:

• Superman, duh. Prior to this event he hasn’t met or heard of the Elite before; this is where they make their debut. Voiced by George Newbern.
• Manchester Black (sometimes shortened to “Chester”), leader of the Elite and a lower-class Brit with a punk look. Gifted with inherent psychic abilities. Black’s telepathy lets him read (most) people’s minds, project his thoughts to others, and launch mental attacks directly at the victim’s brain. His telekinesis allows him to lift objects and people with his own mind, as well as project waves of raw force (portrayed in the film as a glowing green energy). Quick-talking and humorous, but also crude and more than a little shady. Mostly an analogue of the Authority’s Jenny Sparks. Voiced by Robin Atkin Downes.
• Coldcast aka Nathan Jones (real name never said in the film). An American and the Elite’s bruiser, Coldcast’s powers are electromagnetic in nature. He can absorb and discharge many different types of energy, an ability which also seems to enhance his physical strength and durability greatly. Voiced by Catero Colbert.
• Menagerie, aka Pam– unlike Coldcast, her superhero name is the one never used in the film; everyone seems particularly chummy with her. The team’s lone woman, she has a reptilian appearance, with leathery bat wings that allow her to fly with surprising speed and dexterity. Her real value, though, comes from the seemingly unlimited number of deadly slugs she can generate from her body and control remotely. The slugs (apparently the result of bonding her to an alien weapons cache) have a surprising number of offensive capabilities, and she can even use them to briefly enhance her senses. She’s supposedly Puerto Rican, which I don’t buy because not ONCE does she have a hilariously dramatic outburst of anger. Mostly an analogue of the Authority’s Swift. Voiced by Melissa Disney (yep, from those Disneys).
• The Hat, an Asian man (Japanese in the comic but implied to be Chinese here, and he speaks perfect American English anyway) with mystical powers seemingly centered in his normal-looking hat. The hat’s powers are vague but vast; he generally uses it to summon enormous creatures but it can produce other effects as well. The Hat’s body is also said later to be protected by a magical field, thus minimizing his potential for injury. Clearly an analogue of the Authority’s Doctor, with whom he shares not just similar magical powers but also a substance abuse problem– the Hat is clearly an alcoholic. Voiced by Andrew Kishino.
• An enormous monster. The product of Pokolistan’s biological weapons division. Resembling nothing so much as a giant, weird, weaponized cockroach, the monster walks on four enormous legs and has an extra limb in its mouth, as well as dual retractable laser cannons on its back. Incredibly strong and durable. Apparently capable of multiplying itself at will. It’s… well, it’s like something a child would design. Voiced by a bunch of inarticulate sound effects.

“rarr,” etc

The Setup: In the aftermath of the previous tussle with Atomic Skull, Superman showed up in person at the United Nations in order to attend to some sort of debate/lecture about the role of superheroes in society (because that’s the sort of thing the UN does, I guess?). Superman admirer Professor Efrain Baxter plays devil’s advocate for the crowd, pondering if these repetitive battles (the previous one cost millions of dollars in property damage, apparently), marked by restraint are really the best way to defend against evildoers. Should those with power not be more proactive and seek more definitive solutions? Is it time to take the kid gloves off? Superman answers in the negative and says that his ideals are worth sticking to, even when things get difficult.

The event is interrupted by news that violence between Pokolistan and Bialya (two fictional Middle Eastern countries; presumably the writers made up fake ones so as to avoid offending any *actual* Middle Eastern countries by suggesting they’re constantly locked in pointless wars) has flared up again. Superman flies off to the war zone, seeking to do what he can to minimize damage. Instead, he arrives to find that rumors of one side deploying WMD in the conflict are true, except that in Pokolistan the “M” stands for “monster,” as Gamera’s retarded cousin is tearing things up left and right.

The Fight: Superman gets some Bialyan regulars (their weapons are no match for the creature’s thick hide) away from the thick of things, and is surprised to find that Coldcast is already blasting away at one of the beasts, albeit ineffectually. Menagerie flies by and lodges about a dozen slugs along the back of the creature’s spine, which causes it to split in half right down the middle. This apparent victory is short-lived, however, as each half grows another new half, forming two monsters each the size of the previous.

Whoops. Superman is able to fly in and knock one monster on its back, but it recovers and cheap shots him through a building just as he goes to town on the other one. It seems like a stalemate, but the hero is soon contacted telepathically by Manchester Black, who, while watching from a distance, tells him that the monsters are brainless and technically not even alive (which he confirms with X-ray vision), so he’s free to use extreme force. A few passes with super breath freezes one monster solid, leaving Superman free to shatter it in a thousand frozen chunks with a single blow.

The second creature is dispatched when it’s swallowed by an enormous magical dragon, which then shrinks down to hand-held size and returns to its summoner, the Hat. The battle finished, Superman approaches the Elite as a friend and they, for all their too-cool attitude, are actually a bit star-struck. The conversation doesn’t last long, however, as they soon teleport out. (Transportation provided, it will later be revealed, by the team’s dimension-hopping sentient ship– another nod to the Authority.)

This one’s a bit underwhelming, and more than a bit silly. Giant bug-monsters as a form of warfare is a kind of bonkers-fun idea, but the creatures themselves are, for all their strength, a bit underwhelming. Not to mention they’d probably be inefficient in traditional combat. Plus they present all sorts of logical/science Fails: if they don’t have brains, how are they controlled? If they can multiply at will, why not send in two (or more) to begin with? And when they multiply, where does all that extra mass come from?

They’re dispatched a little perfunctorily as well. The freeze/smash thing is a nice, but the Hat’s swallowing act is a  abrupt, and this, the first combat use of his power, is shockingly broad: if he can simply absorb anything he wants into his magical hat, you wonder why he doesn’t just do that every time.

The fight does a handy enough job of introducing the Elite one by one, with a nice if hardly thorough demonstration of their abilities. Too bad it’s short and a touch on the goofy side. Fortunately there’s better to come.

Grade: C+

Coming Attractions: Your second-favorite flaming skeleton returns.

Your first favorite damn well better be this guy.

An Atomic rematch.

Who NEEDS Kryptonite?

3) Superman and the Elite vs Atomic Skull

The Fighters:

• Superman, who’s been running hot & then cold with the new team. Voiced by George Newbern.
• The Elite: Manchester Black, Coldcast, Menagerie/Pam, and The Hat, who’ve risen in popularity lately. Voiced by Robin Atkin Downes, Catero Colbert, Melissa Disney, and Andrew Kishino, respectively.
• The Atomic Skull, the radiation-powered supervillain. Although basically still the same, he’s quite obviously bigger (possibly eight feet tall or more), badder and a whole lot more dangerous, not to mention pissed off.

The Setup: During Atomic Skull’s incarceration he’s been hooked up to a reactor, siphoning off his unlimited energy supply and using it to generate free electricity for, apparently, a sizable portion of Metropolis. Unfortunately some sort of power outage/surge brings the whole system down (seems flimsy) and he’s escaped, looking for blood.

Meanwhile, since their initial meeting, Superman and the Elite’s relationship has deepened. He sought them out and received a brief history from Black, then the five were brought together in an impromptu rescue mission as they worked together to save the victims of a terrorist attack on the Chunnel. After that, however, Superman has been increasingly troubled by the group’s methods, not to mention their attitude– they’ve already fatally intervened during the most recent flare-up in the Middle East. Superman is out in Smallville, grousing with Pa Kent, when Lois calls with the word that the Skull is stomping around Metropolis.

The Fight: Although Superman speeds off, it’s the Elite who arrive first– just in time to save Lois & Jimmy from getting crushed by a falling car, actually. Seeing on the news that his new heroes the Elite are in town, Efrain Baxter’s rebellious son, Terence, runs off to see the action in person, with dad in pursuit.

The Elite’s cocky attitude fails to impress Atomic Skull– he dismisses them as “the interns” before scattering them with a major blast. He easily shrugs off Menagerie’s counter-attack and beats on Coldcast pretty hard. Black catches him with a telekinetic surge and gets assisted by an arriving Superman. The two rivals slug it out pretty hard, but Skull’s time away has improved his power so much he’s able to uppercut Superman into the sky and through several buildings.

Manchester is left alone with Skull, and when they go head to head, Black’s telekinesis against Skull’s radioactive energy, the Brit is no match, and gets knocked back pretty hard. He’s saved by a returning Superman, but when Skull gets the upper hand again and unleashes another devastating blast on the hero, the resulting shockwave kills several people in the nearby area… including Efrain Baxter, absorbing the pulse that would have hit his son. He’s turned into a statue of dead ash right before Terence’s eyes.

Superman recovers and, buying some time by blasting Atomic Skull with his heat vision, orders the Hat to form a perimeter and prevent further collateral damage. The Hat– whose vast abilities are apparently only useful under close supervision, because he’s been sitting around uselessly up to this point– complies by summoning up a bunch of huge terracotta warriors to scare away pedestrians. He also asks if Coldcast can absorb energy as well as direct it, which he can.

Though Black bristles at Superman taking charge of his team, everyone sort of silently agrees to a loose plan where four of them take turns hitting the Skull with harassing attacks while Coldcast finds an opening to get in close. This is probably the best part of the fight, with each superpowered titan having a quick skirmish with the villain before getting batted away, only to get replaced by another hero. The Skull is one heck of a blunt instrument, but he’s quickly outclassed by a coordinated effort. And when Coldcast lunges in and lays hands on the beast, there’s little he can do (thanks to Superman and Pam holding down his limbs) to resist as his excess energy is leeched out, leaving him shrunken and helpless on the ground.

The aftermath, however, is what’s important. Black wants to execute Skull on the spot, which Superman naturally resists. But it’s Terence Baxter who turns the whole crowd against the rule of law, as he urges Black on and blames Superman for his father’s death, saying that this wouldn’t have happened if the hero had put down the Skull for good last time. With the mob’s approval, Manchester sends a point-black psychic pulse that explodes Atomic Skull’s skeletal head– Superman just barely fails to stop him, as he’d stepped away from Black to console Terence. The vigilante group quickly teleports out, leaving Superman to cover up the corpse of the person he’d failed to save.

A lot of improvement here. The Skull’s dramatic change in appearance and his casual murder of even more innocents– notably Baxter, who we’ve gotten to know a bit by this point– really raise the stakes. This isn’t fun & games, people’s lives are on the line. Things get ugly and desperate enough here that it’s less like a superpowered romp and more like a war.

Unlike the previous tussle with Skull, it’s set at night, which is a rather simple but effective way to accompany the thematic with a literal one. And the staging is subtly different: unlike the city-spanning and building-hopping antics of last time, this all goes down on, basically, one street, making for a more tight and intimate feel. The music score (by Robert J Kral) is exciting but plays out in a slow, moody, rhythmic and low-key way, conveying an ever-growing dread.

By the end of the fight, you yourself hate the Skull and rather feel like killing him– when Superman cries out for restraint you see it being almost as pathetic and ineffectual as the crowd in the movie does… yet simultaneously, you pity him. You know the deck is stacked against him, that this is the time when principles are tough to hold onto. We’ve all been there.

Superman is left alone in many senses of the word. Pretty dark.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: It gets darker.

THIS dark.

“Is that… Superman?”

“Not anymore.”

4) Superman vs The Elite

The Fighters:

• Superman, voiced by George Newbern.
• The Elite: Manchester Black, Coldcast, Menagerie/Pam, and The Hat. Voiced by Robin Atkin Downes, Catero Colbert, Melissa Disney, and Andrew Kishino, respectively.

The Setup: Since their last tango, the Elite have decided that Superman is yesterday’s news, and declared themselves to be the new world police. They announced they’d settle the Bialya/Pokolistan conflict once & for all, which Superman tried to head off by (in an excellent sequence) non-lethally destroying a squadron of jets that had been sent to attack a civilian population center… only to discover that while he’d been doing so, the Elite had assassinated the bloodthirsty leaders of each nation. An enraged Superman decked Manchester Black over this, which resulted in the miffed Brit issuing a grudge match between the two forces, tomorrow.

Superman spends an anxious night pondering his options– even Lois thinks he might not be able to win– and leaves at dawn to face them. They arrive on the streets of Metropolis but, at his request, the fight is moved to a less-populated area. Flashy as ever, the Elite teleport all five combatants to the moon (Alice), in which the Hat’s magic has thankfully created an artificial atmosphere. But the group has brought along several floating cameras, which they use to broadcast the  conflict to the entire world.

Superman tries one last time to reason with the Elite, but they laugh it off and get right to business.

The Fight: Really, Superman fights against only three of the Elite, while Black hangs back and monologues. Addressing the watching world via camera (and implicitly the viewer, since the speech mostly plays over our view of the battle), Manchester lectures about how the time of old-fashioned “capes” like Superman is over, it’s the 21st century and the world is more complicated than dropping off bank robbers at the police station and getting kittens out of trees. The Elite are an authority (ahem) unto themselves, and they’ll punish as they see fit. “He who has the power makes the rules,” and so forth.

Superman performs well against the other three but like Atomic Skull was in the last fight, he’s overwhelmed by sustained, alternating attacks from multiple opponents– not to mention visibly hamstrung by his moral restraint.

And crazy reptile chicks on his back.

The staging here is probably the most viscerally exciting portion of the whole fight: incredibly smooth animation does a great job with cool stuff like Coldcast smashing away at the hero’s face, Pam straddling him and trying to bite his head off with a giant slug, the Hat summoning rock formations out of the ground to crush him and missiles for him to dodge.The music here is different than anything that’s come before: exciting, but filled with a sense of desperation and sadness. There’s an overwhelming sense of wrongness to seeing these smug punks pound on the Man of Steel.

Finally a tired but determined Superman makes a lunge at Black, who halts his narcissistic speech to hit the Kryptonian’s mind. Superman has adequate mental defenses to keep his mind from being read, but he seems helpless against a direct psychic attack. Manchester induces a stroke that gives him Superman a major nosebleed and sends him to the ground, shouting in pain.

He’s just defenseless enough to be seized Coldcast, who unleashes a full-force, all-out blast of power (it’s unstated but safe to assume he’s stronger than ever after stealing the Skull’s energy) right in Superman’s face. A massive explosion (visible from space) rents the ground, and when the smoke clears there’s nothing left of Superman except the tattered end of his cape.

Smug about their apparent victory, the four re-unite (Black’s telekinetic shield protected them from the area of effect on Coldcast’s blast) and prepare to leave, when suddenly they hear their enemy’s voice. He sounds… different, unlike he has this whole time. He doesn’t even sound angry; he merely speaks with a steady and terrible calmness.

“I finally get it. Thank you… I made the mistake of treating you people like… people. Now, I understand better… I understand now what the world wants, what it NEEDS. The world needs people in charge, willing to put the animals DOWN.”

As he speaks there’s a slow pan around the Elite as their dread mounts. Not only are they thrown off-guard by the fact that they failed to kill their enemy, they also have a palpable sense that the rules have changed. The worst kind of bullies are the ones who derive their advantage from their targets’ innate decency, and it’s clearly no more Mr Nice Superman.

Out of nowhere, Menagerie gets hit by a dart, with Superman’s Kryptonian crest on it. The effects are immediate: she howls in pain and falls to the ground as her slug symbiotes forcibly come out of her. Coldcast picks her up and he can’t tell if she’s breathing. The truth hits home for the rest that they might not get out of this alive (“He’s playing it our way!” Black frets), and suddenly a whirlwind forms on the moon’s surface, courtesy of Superman’s incredible speed. He briefly appears in the center of it, a dark silhouette with glowing red eyes.

As the tornado approaches, the Hat cockily levitates higher and begins a spell to undo it, but suddenly chokes off in mid-word, clasping his throat. As he’s carried off into space, the others deduce that magic barrier or no, the Hat still needs to breathe, and Superman’s vortex sucked the air right out of his lungs.

Black and Coldcast teleport back down to Metropolis, thinking that Superman won’t be so destructive in the midst of his favorite town. Black plans to “flatten the whole city” (some protector!) the moment their opponent shows up, but his team’s numbers dwindle yet again when a red & blue blur collides with Coldcast and sends him out of view in the blink of an eye.

Crashing to the ground like a meteor (and sending debris flying everywhere, including apparently on people), Superman informs Black where his teammate went. “Orbit. He went into orbit at Mach 7. If you had super-hearing, any second now you’d hear the… pop.” Superman shows his face for the first time since “dying” and the beating he took has only made him MORE intimidating. He’s streaked with blood, his costume is torn up, and a burst blood vessel has made one eye go red. He looks– and acts– more than a little deranged.

Above: WAY better than how they handled this in Superman III.

Black bellows about Superman having killed his whole team, to which he calmly replies “Your team of killers. Now they won’t be killing anyone else.” As he does so, Black uses telekinesis to throw piles of debris at Superman, which the hero casually sidesteps, so fast that his actual motion can’t be seen, only the still moments in-between. It’s super cool in a way that’s hard to convey in words, so:

Manchester puts up a green force field that Superman wears down with repeated blows, the last one knocking him backward. He summons up debris from all over and tries to crush Superman in the middle of it, but the Kryptonian calmly frees himself and sends several tons of car and concrete out into the crowded area around him… one batch of rubble actually seems to land on Lois, which Superman doesn’t even notice. Or care about.

As Superman slowly walks through a sustained psychic pulse that Black lashes out with, he asks the Brit how it feels to be deconstructed, to be the victim, to watch his dreams die. Manchester responds with an enormous telekinetic blast that pushes Superman farther away, so the hero plays his trump card. His eyes glow briefly, and although Black thinks he was attempting to melt his face off, Superman had actually launched a microscopic ray of heat straight through Black’s eyes, found the abnormality in his brain that’s responsible for his psychic abilities, and cut it out. “Instant lobotomy.”

Black is now utterly helpless, a fact which Superman underscores by calmly approaching and slapping him around. Literally slapping.

Super Pimp.

The fourth and final slap knocks some blood and probably a few teeth loose from Black’s mouth. In tears, he snuffles out “This isn’t you, you don’t do this!” to which Superman replies “I do now.”

It’s ugly and it’s mean. Everyone sees it and is distressed. Even Terence Baxter, the pissed off little urchin who was so enamored of lethal vigilantism earlier (and is nearby this fight too, in an odd coincidence), begs Superman to stand down and not stoop to his opponents’ level. But the hero lets it sink in– the fact that he’s giving them what they think they wanted, and showing them what it would really look like.

Superman can move at the speed of thought, he can level mountains with a blow, he can count the molecules in the air, he has a whole fortress full of advanced alien technology, and he’s nearly impossible to kill. If he abandons his principles, if he believes that life is cheap, if he arbitrates rather than enforces justice, if he decides that his might makes him right, then he’s no longer a protector or a hero. He’s an angry god. And this is what he was actively arguing and fighting against the whole story, if anyone had cared to listen. They’re listening now.

But fortunately for all involved (especially current crybaby Manchester Black), Superman didn’t give up the fight against his dark nature. With a deservedly smug grin, he reveals to all how he’d planned this show right from the beginning, with more than a little help from the Kryptonian robots he has stashed in his fortress. His helpers were always there to sneakily protect bystanders so that it looked like he was being reckless with collateral damage, and they’ve similarly whisked off the  remaining members of the Elite– they’re all chilling in the fortress as he speaks, imprisoned and unconscious but alive. Superman’s helpers had even enlisted the Elite’s bio-ship, Bonnie, by promising that they’d free it from the team’s enslavement.

It was hard work, just like the difficulties Superman faces every day when he clings to his principles in an ever-harsher world. Meanwhile, hatred and violence are easy, but worse for everyone in the end. So Superman threaded the needle and maintained his code while still getting everyone real familiar with what they’d see if he didn’t… and what they’d probably see from the Elite, after enough time of unchallenged rule.

Black tells Superman if he thinks this is over, he’s living in a dream world. To which, corny as ever but still right, Superman replies:

“Good. Dreams save us. Dreams lift us up and transform us into something better. And on my soul, I swear that until my dream of a world where dignity, honor and justice are the reality we all share, I’ll never stop fighting. Ever.”

The people cheer. Superman wins, and more importantly, his dream does.

So it’s not perfect. The genuinely exciting portions of the fight are over by the halfway mark, and while the second half keeps up plenty of narrative excitement to make up for it, upon re-watch you find yourself wanting to see Superman take just a bit longer to dismantle the Elite. Though of course that’s probably the primitive lizard-brain part of you talking, the part heroes like Superman want you to overcome. Also, that “heat vision surgery” thing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Newbern plays it terrifically here, especially interesting after years of hearing him as such a boy scout in Justice League (even the “bad” alternate version of him from one episode sounded pretty cheery). Parts of his performance are even better when you re-watch the film in light of the final revelation: when he lets loose an over-the-top melodramatic laugh during the tornado scene, it’s not because Newbern is hamming it up, Superman is.

And of course all praise due to the writing of Joe Kelly, adapting his own story here. Kelly is somewhat notorious for inserting overt and clumsy political messages into his comics (he even shoehorns them in this film a few times, retroactively applying a War on Terror angle to a March 2001 story), but his dialogue here shines. And he gets Superman.

This is the Superman I love, and the one the world loved for roughly 70 or so years of comic history. If, as the navel-gazers like to say, the old kind of Superman is no longer “relevant” in today’s world, then that’s the world’s problem, not Superman’s. He’s not a reflective figure but an aspirational one.

And this is not, Henry Cavill’s dazzling performance aside, the Superman we got in Man of Steel. (SPOILER WARNING for next sentence). That’s a Superman who not only kills his adversary at the finish, but also causes untold thousands of deaths in collateral damage as he callously tosses his foe through a surprising amount of buildings, taking down whole city blocks just so the filmmakers can aesthetically highlight the scale of superpowers involved. A Superman who exists not to protect or inspire but only to fight… and as the absolute last person on the Internet who should have to demonstrate his affection for fight scenes, I can safely say that I want something a little more from Superman. Something better. Man of Steel’s Superman resembles nothing so much as the act Superman puts on in this movie, in order to fool the Elite and prove a point.

(Not to dump on the movie relentlessly, but… speaking of those fight scenes–you know, the fight scenes that the movie sacrifices so much to portray and are supposed to be its major saving grace? Man of Steel basically has a whopping two fight scenes. Superman vs the Elite has, in case you missed the title cards here, four fight scenes of varying quality, plus a few neat sequences of Superman saving people and the like. And it does all that in half the time.)

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: You & I have unfinished business.

Well look who came crawling back.

I fully admit that the pun makes no sense in this context.

After eleven years that have seen two increasingly bloated sequels, a spectacularly pointless reboot, and a veritable renaissance of other Marvel movies, it’s easy to forget what a breath of fresh air Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was when it came out. After 2000′s X-Men, shaky as it was, first demonstrated that on-screen comic book superheroics could be legitimately cool, Spidey came along to prove that they could be amazing. If it had flopped, we’d quite likely not be having our multiplexes filled with any Avengers, let alone six of them at once.

It’s got its flaws and in many ways it’s almost quaint, but in 2002 this movie was a revelation. I saw it in the theater three times and who knows how many at home. I adore this movie so much I’d make out with it upside down in the rain. Not coincidentally, it’s positively loaded with fights.

I was tempted to skip at least this early one, since it’s fairly brief and very one-sided. But it’s set up so much like a traditional fight– complete with a crowd of on-lookers chanting “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!”– and an important building block for the protagonist that I couldn’t help myself.

1) Peter Parker vs Flash Thompson

The Fighters:

• Peter Parker. He’s Spider-Man. Let’s not waste your time or mine by explaining what that entails. But this is his first day after the big bite, quickly becoming more aware of his new abilities. Played by Tobey Maguire, never better.
• Eugene “Flash” Thompson, one of the alpha males at Peter’s high school (and dating Peter’s crush, Mary Jane) and a character straight out of the comic, though his appearance is a bit less Aryan here than in the source material. Like many teen bullies he’s not exactly a skilled fighter, just burly and mean enough to be dangerous. Played by Joe Mangianello, a talented actor who’s gone on to find solid success (and even more muscle mass) in recent years.

The Setup: Stumbling through the discovery of his sticky new spider powers, our hero accidentally nailed Flash in the back of the head with a cafeteria tray, spilling food on him. Peter quietly tries to leave the scene of the crime, but Flash stalks him down the hallway.

In a really cool blend of CGI and live-action footage, Raimi gives us a glimpse of the “spider sense” that alerts Peter to immediate dangers and makes him aware of his surroundings; just as Flash’s fist comes crashing in, everything freezes and we get a panoramic tour of the nearby environment. Parker dodges the blow and Flash’s punch leaves a small dent in Peter’s locker, rather than the back of his head. The hero tries to persuade the bully to stand down, but the fight is on. (“I wouldn’t wanna fight me either” is a pretty good comeback, as dim bulb bullies go.)

The Fight: Flash throws a couple strong, swift punches that Peter dodges with ease, thanks to his newfound speed and reflexes. Raimi pulls off another neat trick to convey the hero’s amazing new senses, taking the movie into slow-motion for one punch. While Flash’s arm is still fully extended, Peter (apparently moving at “normal” speed in contrast) has time to move his head to the side and register his surprise. Such a simple yet effective technique.

Wonder Boy is wondering

Peter then dodges a lunging punch by bending his torso all the way backwards while keeping his legs fully planted, like some kind of master gymnast. MJ, having failed to talk her boyfriend down, urges Harry (James Franco! A shame nothing ever became of that promising young lad) to help Peter out, but that quickly proves to be unnecessary, as Harry himself notes.

One of Flash’s friends briefly tries to join the fray, rushing at Peter from behind (no honor with these jocks, huh?), but Peter evades by jumping in the air… and flipping end over end an absurd amount. Seriously, he does it like eight times, it’s ridiculous. It comes off stupid and cartoony even for the superhero genre. Much better effect could have been achieved with something simpler but still impressive, much like the punch-dodging picture above.

But it’s impressive enough for Flash’s friend, who bows out. An enraged Thompson charges again with a series of punches that Peter blocks. He stops the last one by grabbing the bully’s wrist and twisting his arm upright with intimidating strength, then knocking him back about 20 feet with a simple blow to the chest.

You just got Ice Storm’d!

Flash skids into a passing teacher, knocking the man’s tray loose and dumping yet more food over the bully’s face. Ha ha. As a smart epilogue to the tussle, Flash’s friend remarks with genuine disgust that Peter really is a “freak,” which puts a slight damper on what would otherwise be a more jubilant triumph. It’s a clever foreshadowing about how being Spider-Man isn’t all just wish fulfillment and fun.

Except for the miscalculation of the obvious wire work, this is all very good stuff. The hero is of course never in real danger, but it’s always a treat to see a bully get his comeuppance, and this is great character-building for Peter– indeed, the entire day where Peter learns all his new powers really is a marvel of economic storytelling. Raimi just hops from one discovery to the next, covering a range of emotions from confusion to panic to exuberance, and stopping for some nice beats along the way like understated flirting with Mary Jane and, of course, a neat little fight scene. Well done.

[Note that in that reboot from last year, they had their own scene of Peter taking Flash down a peg, but it was this weirdness involving a passive-aggressive game of basketball. Such is the nature of an unnecessary reboot to a series that began within recent memory: the new Spidey film had to zag wherever the original one zigged, hence they had to come up with an alternate approach even though Raimi's straightforward take on this story beat was just fine.]

Grade: B-

Coming Attractions: HEY FREAK-O

That’s how many boxes of Slim Jims he eats for breakfast every morning

ART THOU BORED??!

No, thou art scared. Justifiably.

2) Spider-Man vs Bonesaw McGraw

The Fighters:

• Peter Parker aka Spider-Man, though he only barely qualifies to be called that name at this point. His proficiency with his powers has increased significantly since his tussle with Flash, though not to the point of mastery. And his “costume”-designing skills still leave much to be desired. Played by Tobey Maguire.
• Bonesaw McGraw, a popular local wrestler with a lot of style and no mercy. Obscenely over-muscled and aggressive. Played by Randall Mario Poffo, aka Randy “Macho Man” Savage, one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all-time and gone from us too soon. RIP.

The Setup: Theorizing that chicks do, in fact, dig cars, Peter is on the hunt for some quick money in order to score himself a jalopy, and settles on the unorthodox method of participating in a local “open” wrestling challenge: anyone who can survive three minutes in the ring against Bonesaw will be awarded $3000. After being signed in by pie-pooper Octavia Spencer and getting his signature name from a Bruce Campbell improv, Peter finds himself stuck in a steel cage with a very macho man.

Unfortunately, none of the adjectives he prefaces Spider-Man’s name with are “groovy.”

The Fight: After delivering some trademark Savage-esque trash talk, Bonesaw rushes in at his scrawny foe, but Parker hops away and sticks up to the high wall. From his position of brief safety, Peter tries out some taunting of his own, with a remark that would have caused at least a minor media tiff about this movie being “homophobic” if it had been released today. Hey, 2002 was a different era.

Despite his previous mission statement of staying away from Bonesaw, Peter jumps back down again shortly, and (gratuitously) uses his webs to jump over another running charge. Even with all his reflexes, caution and psychic spider sense, somehow Peter is caught completely by surprise as Bonesaw is handed a metal folding chair from one of his lovely assistants, which he then proceeds to brain Peter with repeatedly.

He couldn’t smell what the Spider was cookin.

Bonesaw is pretty intense, though not quite “Ric Flair just told everyone he used to bone my wife” intense. He hits Peter five times total with that chair, even after he’s down on the ground, and finishes off by tossing him into the bars. Next, Bonesaw’s assistant hands him a crowbar (!), but before he can close in, Peter nails him with several strong kicks, and throws him against the ropes. The fall knocks him out, with the referee declaring Spider-Man the winner. On paper it’s kind of silly to think the Macho Man could be brought low by the brat from Pleasantville, but once you’ve jobbed for the Ultimate Warrior you can pretty much sell anything.

This isn’t a great fight, but it was never going to be. It’s an entertaining sideshow, and the only way to improve it would be to have just made more of it, especially with such a dynamite performer like Savage on hand. As it is, the only thing it does truly wrong is a complete lack of wrestling moves on Peter’s part, and arguably not enough from Bonesaw; The Chair is of course an inevitably iconic part of every movie wrestling match, but did they have to go to that well so quickly? Would a few turnbuckle charges and flying elbow drops have been too much to ask?

Unlike the million flips in the last fight, the level of willful silliness works out excellently here– to the point of eliding over the sequence’s logical failures (chief among them: wrestling’s not real) in favor of just giving everyone a good time. Kind of like any good pro wrestling match, come to think of it.

Grade: B

Subjective Grade Adjusted for Randy Savage’s Involvement: A+++

Alternate Grade Using Non-Traditional Grading Format: Four Out Of Four Slim Jims

Alternate Grade Using Non-Traditional Grading Format #2: OHHHH YEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

Alternate Grade Using Non-Traditional Grading Format #3:

Ric Flair Grade: WOO!

Recommended Links: A great Dead Spin column on Macho Man’s career, just after his passing.

Blogger Trivia: I posit that Bruce Campbell does not play three different characters in all his Spider-Man cameo roles. They’re all the same character, because the trilogy is one big prequel crossover with Burn Notice and Campbell is playing Sam Axe under a bunch of different aliases as he keeps tabs on Spider-Man for the government.

Coming Attractions: Tobey wrecks the director’s car.

Worst. Windshield bug. Ever.

In which Spider-Man learns the hard way that great power should be used for more than just wrestling matches.

Mega Powers come with mega responsibilities.

[This also barely counts as a fight, but it's important enough for the character to merit inclusion. Plus I'll cheat a bit by writing up the car chase too.]

3) Spider-Man vs Carjacker

The Fighters:

• Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, straight off his wrestling “win” and wearing his homemade costume. Played by Tobey Maguire.
• A carjacker, no name given here but in the third film it’s revealed that it’s Dennis Carradine (he’s not named in the comics at all). He’s desperate enough you can practically see the flop sweat, but is definitely no “misunderstood” sweetie with a good heart; just a petty thug, through and through. Played by Michael Papajohn, a veteran stuntman who has probably had to hear a lot of stupid pizza jokes.
  • Armed with: Pistol and knife.

The Setup: After Peter leaves the fight promoter’s office, a thug storms in and robs him at gunpoint. He soon storms out with security in pursuit, and Peter, having just been cheated out of his winnings by the promoter on a technicality, deliberately lets the robber escape rather than stopping him.

After Peter exits the building to meet up with his ride home, he finds emergency personnel swarming over a recent crime scene– his saintly Uncle Ben has been shot by a carjacker, while waiting for Peter. Ben (who Peter had last exchanged harsh words with), expires quickly, but Peter hears police talking about their pursuit of the suspect, and is spurred into action.

The Fight: Peter flees the scene and strips down to his rasslin’ costume, crawling up to a high building. Spotting his uncle’s stolen car (actually Sam Raimi’s own 1973 Oldsmobile, which has a cameo in almost all his movies), Peter hooks a web line, and even in his rage he pauses, knowing he’s about to try something crazy. His previous attempt at genuine web-swinging had merely sent him careening face-first into a wall, so a sustained chase is like going straight from crawling to cartwheeling.

And he almost does repeat that first performance, but narrowly avoids it by launching a web from his other hand and swining away. It’s in this sequence that Peter intuitively, if frantically, determines how to make his web-slinging work: latch onto the corners of buildings, and when necessary use an alternate hand to correct the momentum. Comic book artists have it comparatively easy because they can just show Spider-Man’s web disappearing from the top of each individual frame, but when filming action like this in movies (in wide shots, at least), it gets a bit more complicated. (This is also why superhero movies and even cartoons have a hard time believably incorporating super-speed into action sequences.)

Spastic or no, Peter does manage to catch up to the car, landing on the roof. The carjacker (smartly filmed from this point on either moving frantically and/or in the dark, with a cap or ski mask obscuring the top of his head) fires a few rounds upwards. Peter isn’t hit but he does get shaken off. Further pursuit allows him to land with a backflip on the car’s hood, where he takes the liberty of punching the windshield and crashing the car.

While pursuer and prey are briefly separated, the carjacker flees on foot into a nearby abandoned building– a factory, by the looks of it– and takes refuge on a higher floor (dumb move, because if the police show up he has nowhere to run). Though the police are in hot pursuit, Peter does take a few mintues to stalk and menace his panicked target, almost giving off a Batman-esque vibe.

“DO I LOOK LIKE A COP?!”

But he soon reveals himself, and immediately grabs the crook from behind, slamming his face through a couple of glass windows. He knocks the gun out of Carradine’s hands, and when the thief switches to his knife, Peter dodges a swing from that, and disarms him once again with this nifty backflip move: as he spins over backwards, Peter’s feet kick the handle of the knife, and the momentum of his flip sends the weapon flying straight into the wall behind him. Wildly unnecessary but really cool.

Peter then kicks Carradine against the wall, and in the shot between when the kick is delivered and when the actor stops moving, Papajohn has somehow regained his gun and lost his cap. It’s a really bad editing mistake, but then I’ve seen this movie at least six times and I didn’t notice it until I was going through parts of this scene frame by frame to look for screen grabs, so how bad is it really?

He begs for mercy and Peter refuses to give it. But when Carradine’s face is illuminated by a police spotlight, he’s revealed– what a tweest!– to be the same crook that Peter smugly let pass. Again pulling from the Simple & Effective playbook, Raimi and co. made the smart decision to give the criminal a distinctive (though not completely bizarre) hair style: pronounced widow’s peak, with a thick mop of peroxide blonde on top and dark, short hair down low. Thus, the audience immediately recognizes him (ironically, this is the opposite of smart thieves, who try to cover up or just not have any distinguishing features that would make them easy to remember. But of course, most thieves aren’t smart). Unfortunately, Raimi negates that immediately by replaying the elevator encounter in slow-motion (it’s not a flashback of the exact same footage, but Peter’s subjective memory of it), but even that was probably necessary– don’t ever underestimate how slow and inattentive some audience members can be.

Anyway, Carradine takes advantage of Peter’s stunned shock to level his magical teleporting handgun at the boy’s face.

In the comics, Peter’s spider sense can be circumvented by the Venom symbiote and also some specially made Green Goblin chemicals. In the movies it’s only canceled out by overwhelming personal guilt and/or plot contrivance.

But Peter’s still fast enough to knock the gun away, again, and Peter twists Carradine’s wrist pretty bad, seemingly breaking it. The crook stumbles backward a bit in pain, trips over an exposed pipe, and falls out through the window, dead on impact. Peter flees the scene.

When it comes to the actual fighting, this is another skimpy and one-sided battle; no real challenge, just quick and intense. Maguire plays a great range of fear and fury, and Papajohn is appropriately skeevy as an all-too-realistic type of dangerous low life. It might have been gratifying to see Peter wail on the thug some more, but actually his brief acts of brutality hit the sweet spot: providing a touch of non-exploitative excitement and still clearly out of character for Peter to be deliberately jarring. The only thing the scene really does wrong is the aforementioned editing error, and again, how bad is that really in the grand scheme of things?

Grade: B

Random Pondering: The circumstances of Uncle Ben’s death (arguably improved here from the more convoluted and coincidence-reliant version in the source material) are well-known to just about all comics fans, but from what I’ve seen, before this movie they didn’t enjoy the same level of cultural penetration as did, say, the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents. And even without knowing that, the back-to-back occurrences of Peter letting an armed criminal escape and then his uncle getting shot off-screen seem way too easy to connect for that final reveal of Carradine’s face to be a genuine surprise. So I ask: were YOU, or someone you know, genuinely shocked when you first saw this movie and found out the carjacker was also the thief? Don’t be afraid to admit it, this is a safe place. Much like fighting in the war room, there’s no judging at Grading Fight Scenes.

Coming Attractions: Every day I’m gob-ble-in

It’s about to not be easy bein’ green

Finally, some real hero vs villain action.

“What a novel idea!”

4) Spider-Man vs Green Goblin, round one

The Fighters:

• Peter Parker aka Spider-Man, now fully embracing his role as a protector of the innocent and sporting a sweet costume. He’s spent the last few months building up a reputation in the city as a mythical vigilante. Played by Tobey Maguire.
• Norman Osborn aka The Green Goblin, a millionaire inventor and industrialist whose rash experiment with his own enhancement formula has unleashed a murderous alter ego. In addition to making him go ax-crazy, the formula has given Osborn increased physical strength and stamina; between that and his armor, he’s more than enough to be a physical match for Spider-Man. He’s also the father of Peter’s best friend, which is a funny coincidence. Played by Willem Dafoe, national treasure and Doug Benson’s former bete noire.
  • Armed with: In addition to his armor and helmet, the Goblin is rarely without his trusty jet-propelled glider, which is highly fast & maneuverable. More importantly, it’s outfitted with all sorts of guns, rockets, and (this will be important later), a retractable blade. And since I don’t see any pockets on that suit, it also seems to be where the Goblin stores his supply of pumpkin-themed grenades.

And because it’s inevitable: people LOVE to complain about the movie design of the Green Goblin, specifically his “Power Ranger” mask*. And, look, it’s not great– the mask is awkward for having an open mouth that doesn’t move, and the monochromatic color scheme gives off a distinct “naked” vibe– but it’s not that bad. And the complaints would be less grating if so many of them were not rooted in “they didn’t make it look like the comic,” which is only the zillionth example of nerds not understanding that something that works visually on a comics page or even a cartoon does not always translate well with actual human beings. Even if you could make the Goblin’s original look work on-screen, a lot of viewers would be scratching their heads as to why Osborn would go to the effort of dressing up like something straight out of Lord of the Rings; as it is, the implication that the Goblin helmet is an extension of Norman’s interest in tribal masks is quite sufficient.

[*I've seen many episodes of Power Rangers. Neither the heroes nor the villains look like that.]

If he’d just stretched his arms out a bit more this would have been quite the sly Platoon reference

The Setup: At a “world unity fair” (are those a thing?) being attended by Peter, Mary Jane, and Harry– in addition to several hundred civilians and musical supervillain Macy Gray– the Green Goblin makes his public debut, gunning for the board members who had been planning to edge him out of his own company.

A few bombs from Osborn wreck the balcony (part of what looks like a huge cathedral) that the board members had been on, preventing escape. Peter sees all this from down on the ground, where he’d been taking pictures, and runs off to change into his costume. Briefly taunting his corporate foes, the Goblin tosses a special bomb that instantly turns them into nothing but skeletons, which immediately crumble to dust. Harry and MJ are on a separate part of the balcony, the former having been quickly knocked out by some debris and the latter quickly becoming isolated on a crumbling ledge. (It’s unclear if the Goblin either knows, or cares, that he’s putting his son in jeopardy; he doesn’t seem to see him there, but Norman did know his son would be attending the event. He sees and reacts to Harry’s girlfriend MJ soon enough, but he probably wouldn’t recognize her, having never met her before.)

That taken care of, Norman starts feeling a little randy, and he hovers near the terrified Miss Watson, lustily menacing her. Pervert.

Still much more savory than what Marvel had him do to Gwen in the “Sins Past” storyline.

Fortunately, that’s when Peter comes swinging in in costume– complete with his arrival being announced by an exuberant girl pointing in the air and shouting “Look, it’s Spider-Man!” It’s adorably cheesy.

The Fight: Our hero arrives and kicks Gobby off his perch immediately, knocking him onto one of the many huge balloons nearby. While he’s briefly incapacitated, Spider-Man has to divert his attention to saving the World’s Dumbest Child, who earns his title by just standing there dumbfounded as another huge inflatable device collapses on him. (At this point, Spider-Man has already saved more people than Superman did in the entire Man of Steel movie. And it didn’t take him 17 years of wandering to get there.)

Meanwhile, the Goblin rises to his feet with a cartoonishly angry growl. Several of New York’s finest approach him, at which point he raises his arms with a pointedly sarcastic “I surrender!” and proceeds to beat them up with ease. Sheesh, what happened to their guns? Anyway, Spidey approaches and tries his own luck.

I mean, at most the metal helmet has a SLIGHT Lord Zedd vibe to it.

Gobby stops the fist with a cheeky “impressive!” and then kicks the hero through some scenery. He hops back on his glider (apparently it has some sort of homing device that can take it back to him if he’s dislodged), and pursues him with automatic fire. It’s a little odd-looking because Spider-Man’s just running in a straight line directly in front of the glider, and the hail of bullets keeps landing on either side of him because the glider keeps moving in a straight line as well. Goblin finishes by launching a missile, which creates a suspiciously small explosion just as the hero web-slings away to safety. That crazy formula may have made him super-strong but he still shoots like a stormtrooper.

Continuing to evade the villain, Spidey bounces amongst the remaining balloons and focuses on saving Mary Jane, whose position is getting more precarious by the second. But just before he can arrive, Green Goblin swoops in on his glider and rams our hero into a huge set of windows. The visual is somewhat… unfortunate.

But again, STILL much better than “Sins Past.”

There’s some decent scuffling after that, but Peter gets the worst of it and ends up falling down a bit when he’s knocked off the glider. The Goblin turns about but gets a face full of webbing, obscuring his vision. Spider-Man takes advantage of the distraction and rips a healthy chunk of wiring out of the glider’s undercarriage. His ride going haywire, the villain flies away spastically, crying out, “WE’LL MEET AGAIN, SPIDER-MAN!” so hammily it makes me wish Willem Dafoe was my dad.

Peter then of course dives down and saves Mary Jane just before she takes a fatal fall. That’ll be the last time that happens, right?

To say this is far from perfect would be an understatement. Characters make questionable tactical decisions. The CGI is not always convincing, and there’s a high visual contrast between the more aerial/acrobatic stuff and the up-close altercations. The scale of the fight is surprisingly limited, especially given the mobility of both fighters; it wouldn’t be until the sequel that Spidey finally had a truly proper city-spanning brawl.

It is, nonetheless, ridiculously fun. Though he never really did nail the comic character’s trademark taunting, Maguire is solid as our hero. But it’s Dafoe who truly shines, hamming it up without even the barest lingering trace of irony. Dafoe has expressed regret in interviews that the nature of his mask prevented him from fully using his face to emote; he clearly attempts to compensate for that vocally, and how. He comes right up to that line where unacceptable cartooniness would begin, and presses against it like a mime in an invisible box.

And for all its faults, this is most definitely a superhero fight. Though the action keeps within a small area it’s still dynamic, going from air to ground to air again, with both opponents employing a variety of different attacks. The sound design cranks up appropriately to sell even the more glancing blows, conveying the power involved here (Matrix Reloaded, this isn’t). I remember seeing this in the theater and thinking, “wow, I really am seeing it. I’m seeing Spider-Man fight Green Goblin.” Like I said earlier, nowadays we take things like that for granted because we get to watch a full team of Avengers fight off an alien invasion and then go out for schwarma together afterwards, but in 2002, this was more than enough.

Grade: B+. A very high one.

Recommended Links: They actually did experiment with a more articulated Goblin mask, but oddly the problem with it was that it was too good. This is a character who should come off like a man dressing up in a monster-themed outfit, not an actual monster.

Great Weird Al song about this movie. I still love Al even though he makes that same Power Ranger comment.

Who deserves most of the credit for creating Spider-Man? Hint: it ain’t that guy in the first picture up top.

Coming Attractions: Fire fight.

Burn, Gobby, burn.

The fiery middle of a feud sandwich.

People who don’t love this image: what’s it like being awful?

5) Spider-Man vs Green Goblin, round two

[Oh, I realized I forgot to include a couple nebulous "fights," one in which Spider-Man beats up some armored car robbers and one in which he beats up a gang of would-be rapists in an alley. They're fine, but since they're exactly what they sound like, there's not much else to say. Besides, you're already getting six entries for this movie, so.]

The Fighters:

• Peter Parker aka Spider-Man, played by Tobey Maguire. Or perhaps more accurately, voiced by Tobey Maguire and played by Tobey Maguire’s stunt man and also some CGI.
• Norman Osborn aka the Green Goblin, played by Willem Dafoe.
  • Armed with: Interestingly the Goblin’s trademark glider does not play a role at all in this fight, but he did bring along some specialized metal spheres that turn into flying circular saws– each one having four metal blades spinning at a high rate of speed and apparently have some sort of A.I. because they’re able to hone in on the correct target for multiple passes. Completely ridiculous but the guy’s a supervillain, so why not?

The Setup: After a mirror confrontation revealed the truth to Norman about his split personality (and lead him to gradually merge with it), he decides to track down his greatest threat, Spider-Man. Which is interesting because up until now, the Goblin had only acted to wipe out threats to Osborn’s business; as long as he kept out of sight from then on, Spidey wouldn’t be a threat to him. Anyway, villain confronted hero at the Daily Bugle office and gassed him into paralysis, making him the offer of an alliance rather than a rivalry. He gives him some time to think about it, and he’ll get back to him.

Later, Spider-Man arrives at the scene of a burning apartment building. A woman outside shrieks about her baby still being trapped inside (what is it with people in movies who leave their babies inside burning buildings? I understand being in a hurry but shouldn’t your baby be the FIRST thing you grab on the way out? Even before your pants?), so naturally our hero retrieves the poor thing. After an awkward confrontation with the cops outside, more shrieks are heard, so Peter swings back in for another rescue. But as he approaches the robed figure with its back turned to him, SURPRISE!

Still better than getting Rickrolled.

The Fight: You have to love the Green Goblin. He waits until there’s a big fire in broad daylight, then goes to the trouble of sneaking inside a burning building– portions of which could collapse at any time– just so he can confront and if necessary kill Spider-Man. That’s stupidly, wonderfully convoluted. New York’s a big city– how many fires did he hover around before this one just hoping his nemesis would show up? Or maybe HE started this fire (and possibly many before it) just to get Spidey’s attention? That’s terrible and bonkers and I love it.

Anyway, somehow overriding that unreliable Spider sense again, Goblin whips around and immediately hits the hero with a punch that knocks him clear across the room. He tells him he’s “pathetically predictable” (classic comic book use of alliteration) for showing up at the scene of a disaster, and re-iterates his offer, asking if he’s in or out. Peter’s response asceneds him to Cornball Valhalla: “You’re the one who’s out, Gobby… out of your mind!”

“Gobby” is none too pleased with that answer (perhaps because he was out-hammed for a moment), and starts tossing out the blade projectiles he was already preparing behind his back. Spider-Man immediately sets to contorting his body to dodge them–it ends up being five in total– during an extended slow-motion sequence. It’s fine, if a little Matrix-y.

As soon as he avoid them all, the Goblin leaps in and starts beating on him, then they break as Spidey ducks a couple of the projectiles whirling back around at him from behind. When the two resume fisticuffs, the hero starts coming back pretty hard with a few blows and knocks him back. He’s even more impressive when he starts swatting the pinwheeling blades out of the air, though the third one manages to slice him on the arm first. Raimi takes a moment to zoom in on the wound, which is smart because that’ll be a plot point pretty soon.

Oh, don’t be such a sissy.

Spider-Man gets rid of the last two projectiles by bending far over backwards as they fly at him from either direction, letting them collide in mid-air and explode harmlessly. It’s kind of neat that they kept track of how many of those things were active at once and where they’d be coming from, especially in light of the obvious continuity error in the carjacker fight.

The villain rushes in again but the spider nails him with another big punch, and even as the force of it flings the Goblin backwards Spider-Man snags him with a web and pulls him back for a follow-up kick– a tactically smart way that uses the hero’s unique abilities to keep up the pressure while his opponent’s still unbalanced. Raimi & co were certainly faced with a lot challenges when it came to transitioning the one-moment-at-a-time fights of the comic panels into continuous action the audience can see all of, and they came up with some pretty clever stuff.

They’re separated again as the kick sends Osborn through some wreckage, and when he rises he sees that Spider-Man has left the building, the condition of which is deteriorating rapidly. “No one says no to me!” he shouts impotently. He just got  kicked through a pile of fiery debris and his main beef is being turned down? Yeesh.

This is very short, though of course that fits the skirmish-y nature of it. Even with the slow mo it’s all over in a minute or two. But for being so short it’s packed pretty well with some unusual beats and a nice change-up. Besides that it’s in a cool setting, conveying urgency and excitement.

One of the more fun aspects of the Spider-Man character is that because he’s so relatable and sympathetic, it’s not until you step outside Peter Parker’s POV that you’re reminded he’s a hero who’s really only a hard-luck underdog in his own mind; many of the villains he faces regard him as kind of an unstoppable badass. Peter’s narration & thought bubbles betray to us how terrified he is in most encounters and how narrowly he keeps escaping death, but all his adversaries can think of is how impossible he is to kill. (Similarly, reading team books where you get his nonstop wisecracking but are denied his humanizing moments make him look like quite the unflappable weirdo.) This is something the reboot dropped the ball on, of course, as the new Spidey was never anything more than an annoyance to the Lizard.

And that really comes across here, as you can see the Green Goblin perceiving Spider-Man as an even more formidable threat who he will have to use some pretty dirty tactics to defeat; meanwhile we the audience just know him as a scared and lonely kid.

This isn’t a great conflict on its own, but it’s good for what it is and it’s a solid stepping stone to the big finish.

Grade: B+

Random Observation: You don’t find out until the next scene, but this fight does, in fact, take place on Thanksgiving Day (perhaps the fire was started by someone cooking a turkey catastrophically wrong? My money is on the baby-forgetting lady). All the main characters gather at Peter & Harry’s apartment for dinner, and Norman guesses Peter’s alter ego when his telltale wound bleeds through his shirt. Wouldn’t the overwhelming smell of smoke have given it away first?

And hey, this post is going up the day before Thanksgiving! I swear I didn’t plan that out beforehand.

Coming Attractions: Is this the end of Spider-Man?

“Imagine a boot stamping on an organic web shooter — forever.”

With great power comes awesome macho poses.

You may be cool, but you’ll never be “dual bicep-flexing Spider-Man” cool.

6) Spider-Man vs Green Goblin, final round

The Fighters:

• Spider-Man and Green Goblin, duh.

The Setup: Having deduced his rival’s secret identity, the Goblin bursts through Aunt May’s bedroom window while she’s praying and puts her in the hospital (does she ever wonder what that was all about, or does she just assume that’s something he does to random people? Either way, rough year for her). Then he kidnaps Mary Jane and tells Peter to meet them at the Queensboro Bridge, where he arrives to find the villain holding her in one hand and (via cable) a tram car full of children in the other. Just before he drops them both simultaneously, Goblin taunts Spider-Man and explicitly describes this choice as “sadistic.” Points given for honesty.

Points deducted for gratuitous angle of Goblin-crotch.

(Even casual comic fans recognize this setup as an homage, if a superficial one, to the death of Gwen Stacy from the classic comic books.)

Like Captain Kirk, Spider-Man tends not to spring for the no-win scenario, so he audaciously jumps in to personally catch MJ, then immediately web-swings to the other side and catches the tram car’s steel cable with his free hand while his lady friend clings desperately to his torso. Impressive, but in addition to probably giving him the mother of all muscle-cramps, the ploy exposes Spider-Man to a couple of flyby-punches from his adversary, the second of which even makes him drop the cable briefly. He regains it, and desperately holds on while a small civilian boat races to get underneath him and catch the dangling car.

Just as the Green Goblin extends his glider’s blade and prepares to swoop in for the kill, he’s distracted by a rain of debris from a group of good Samaritans watching from the bridge, expressing solidarity with the city’s hero. This is done because Spidey is a hero in need of validation due to all the bad press he receives (is he a threat or menace?), and also because this movie was set in New York and came out less than a year after 9/11.

“Patriotism, my one weakness!”

The gambit buys Peter enough time to drop off Mary Jane and the hostages, but unfortunately he’s not quick enough to defend when the Goblin flies in & lassoes him with another steel cable, dropping him unceremoniously in the ruins of a wrecked building and following up with a pumpkin bomb to the face.

Sick burn.

This of course leads right into the modern trend of superheroes losing their mask (in whole or in part) for the final portion of their movie. Hey, why shell out big bucks for a recognizable actor if you’re not going to show their face?

The Fight: The explosion leaves Spider-Man pretty banged up and weakened, which Goblin takes full advantage of, hitting him with a series of powerful blows– some of that shot in painful-looking slow-motion. No music, just hard hits and high stakes.

To both his and the movie’s credit, the hero doesn’t just take it like a chump. He tries to block, to swing away and even creates a big web barrier to faze his opponent, but the Goblin just keeps coming, systematically shutting him down. After kicking Spidey against a stone wall, he holds his wrist in place with a boot stomp and rubs the imminent defeat in his face, telling him that this all could have gone differently if the hero had just played ball. He brandishes an extendable spear thing (where’d he get it? The glider is not within arm’s reach and he certainly wasn’t holding it during the fisticuffs) and prepares to run Peter through.

But his taunt about how he’ll follow up by killing MJ in a slow and presumably unsavory manner gives Spider-Man a second wind. He catches the blade mere centimeters from his face, and two successive shots (interrupted by a view of angry disbelief from the villain) show his resistance progressing from desperate to determined.

Heroic music swells up. Spidey finally pushes back so hard he sends the Goblin flying back several feet into a partially wrecked wall, then webs his feet to trip him forward. Another set of dual webs pulls the entire wall down on the villain, and when he emerges he’s much the worse for wear. Not wanting to give him a moment to breathe, Spider-Man swings in and seizes Gobby, then uses the momentum to hurl him into another wall. He lands and delivers a series of blows to his now helpless nemesis, until the Goblin removes his helmet and pleads for mercy.

The “fight” portion is pretty much over from here. The Goblin’s switch back to the Osborn persona is a feint, trying to distract Peter while he remotely activates his glider and brings it up to impale the hero from behind. Fortunately Peter is having none of it, rejecting Norman’s entreaty to be a father figure by re-affirming poor Uncle Ben as the man who made him who he is.

Two weird things happen then. The first is that this rejection causes Norman to revert to his more villainous voice and declare “Godspeed, Spider-Man” for no reason I can think of. It seems an odd thing to say before killing someone, and why tip him off too early anyway? Or is the “Norman” personality, speaking with the Goblin voice, trying to warn him? Either way, between that moment and his helpful spider sense (hey, remember that?), Peter is able to leap over the glider as it charges in, and instead hits the man directly in front of him: the Green Goblin. The second weird thing is that Raimi inserts a very brief close-up shot of Dafoe’s face just before impact and the actor says “oh” in a very casual, wimpy and resigned sort of voice– like he’d just missed a green traffic light or something. It’s meant to be funny, and it sort of is, but it’s very unnecessary and tonally jarring, considering the rest of the scene is played for high pathos rather than laughs.

Arguably a third weird thing is the position the glider impales him in. Not a good way to go.

Right in his little goblin.

Tonal missteps and the odd continuity error aside, this is really excellent stuff. The bleak and desolate setting indicates the finality of this last rematch. It follows the predictable pattern of Villain Is Totally Winning But Now Hero Is Totally Winning, but throws a few curveballs in there with Spidey’s fruitless resistance in the first part and his unexpected ferocity in the second; not to mention the bridge encounter that immediately precedes the fight proper provides a different sort of challenge for the hero, and a reason he’s so vulnerable at the outset. Ultimately it isn’t just clever tactics or sheer physical strength that allows Spider-Man to triumph, but drawing upon his own determination to do what must be done… an idea that’s played no small role in the comic’s history, as well as tying into co-creator Steve Ditko’s philosophy of doing everything you can to fulfill your own personal responsibilities, no excuses.

The method of Goblin’s demise is well-done, too. Superhero movies are cursed with getting caught between needing to put down the film’s villain permanently while also having a protagonist who doesn’t kill people, even in self-defense; it can be hard to thread that needle without it coming off as cheap. (The abysmal TV show Smallville faced this unenviable challenge on nearly a weekly basis, resulting in quite a lot of convenient amnesia.) But Osborn’s death works here in a way that feels both earned and deserved while still absolving Peter of any guilt (not that Harry will see it that way for the next one and a three-quarter movies). It’s also pretty much the same way the original Green Goblin “died” way back in the 70s comics after the Gwen Stacy incident, and at least the movie’s Osborn has the decency to stay dead.

A fitting end for a movie that helped kicked off the superhero cinematic renaissance.

Grade: A-

Recommended Links: Beware of what else Spider-Man can do to you.

Chris Sims makes a good case as to what differentiates Marvel heroes from their Distinguished Competition, and why the very nature of their limitations makes it so inspiring when they surpass them. Spider-Man gets a lot of spotlight.

Coming Attractions: We’ll go straight to the sequel, why not?

Just dive right in.

Spidey makes bank.

There’s a “bailout” joke to be made somewhere in this post. I can’t promise I’ll find it.

Everyone’s wild about Spider-Man 2; personally I always found it somewhat overrated. It raises way too many storytelling red flags: the whole clunky plotline about how Peter keeps losing his powers because he subconsciously doesn’t want them (even in the middle of a life-or-death situation? I would have to think his survival instinct would override his girlfriend angst), the half-assed/poorly-resolved love triangle with Mary Jane & her poor fiancee, and, most grating of all, the film’s overwhelming negativity. It’s true that great swathes of the comic book source material could be accurately reduced to “life craps on Peter Parker” but being subjected to so much of it at once over the course of a two-hour+ movie is tiresome. I mean, there’s seriously a scene in this movie where an already-bummed Peter is at a party and gets literally slapped around by his drunken best friend, and then right after that Peter has to watch a handsome astronaut gleefully announce his engagement to the love of Peter’s life. It’s so transparently abusive it crosses the line into comical; I half-expected Peter to then get a phone call from Aunt May letting him know she had cancer. In her butt.

It also comparably skimps on the fight scenes. There’s still no shortage of superhero action– Spidey swinging around New York, foiling criminals and mad science experiments alike– but actual fights are very few. Fortunately, what do we get is quite impressive indeed.

1) Spider-Man vs Doctor Octopus, round one

The Fighters:

• Peter Parker aka Spider-Man, who you well know. Settled even more into his alter ego now, which is wreaking havoc on his real life. Played by Tobey Maguire.
• Otto Octavius aka “Doctor Octopus,” a name given to him by the Daily Bugle after a science experiment gone wrong left him with eight total limbs. In contrast to the comics, this Otto’s “personality is different, which is to say, it actually exists,” in the words of one of my favorite bloggers. Otto is a kindly but driven scientist who loses his beloved wife in the same grisly accident that makes him a monster. Played by the great Alfred Molina, who is less crazy playing an actual supervillain than he was in Boogie Nights.
  • Armed with: Those extra four limbs are impressive steel appendages from a harness on Otto’s back that are easily over four feet long, each about as flexible as a garden hose and equipped with deadly gripper claws, cameras, and a few other tricks. They have a limited A.I. and so can move semi-independently of Otto, and in return can influence him; the explosion that fused the harness to his back also destroyed the “inhibitor chip” that kept them from getting into his head. Originally the device was created so he could perform dangerous experiments from a remote distance, but it’s actually quite the impressive scientific achievement itself. Maybe he should have patented that instead.

The Setup: Peter and his sweet Aunt May are at a large bank, applying for a loan; she’s fallen on financial hard times because, again, Spider-Man 2 is nothing if not a relenting onslaught of depression. The smarmy loan officer who denies (of course) their request is none other than TV’s Joel McHale.

Classic Winger

Meanwhile, by incredible coincidence, Dr. Octopus is also present. Due to a combination of grief-induced madness and the influence of his tentacles’ wacky A.I., poor Otto has become convinced that his one purpose left in life is to succeed at the cold-fusion experiment that screwed everything up in the first place. Naturally, he’s taken up bank robbery (a grand supervillain tradition) in order to finance it. I’d love to see the lab equipment distributors who’d accept literals bags ‘o cash payment from a robo-tentacled lunatic, but okay. Maybe he “knows a guy.”

Dressed in fedora and trench coat like a dime-store version of The Shadow, Dock Ock just walks right in and straight-up rips off the vault door like a baller.

Classic Otto.

After narrowly avoiding the discarded door, Peter ditches May and changes into his costume while Octavius fights off some guards. The hero re-enters the scene quickly and tries to sneak up on Otto from behind, but one of the tentacles can still “see” even when the villain’s back is turned.

The Fight: Dr. Octopous whips around and uses his tentacles (in fact, at this point let’s just assume that most major fight functions Otto does are performed by his metal limbs rather than his organic ones unless otherwise stated, okay?) to fling some of his heavy loot bags at Spider-Man. The hero dodges them easily, even snagging one with a web and flinging it back in Otto’s face with a cheery “here’s your change!” Not quite on the level of comic Spidey’s legendary wit, but cute.

Octavius is briefly fazed, but he soon returns to flinging bags again. Spider-Man tries to dodge and deflect, but that stupid power-failing thing happens again, so he ends up eating a sack of cash and taking a dive. Otto grabs seizes the hero in a pretty dire-looking bind.

It’s the kind of thing you might think would be funny to describe as “hot tentacle action,” if you were me nine years ago

The two have a fun exchange (“You’re starting to get on my nerves.” “I have a knack for that.”) but before our spider gets his head squished, he uses his free-ish hands to web two large desks on either side of him and pull them in. This makes Otto drop him while he defends himself against one piece of flying furniture but still gets creamed by the other and knocked through the window onto the street.

The police are waiting outside, so Dr. Octopus prudently takes a hostage… wouldn’t you know it, it’s Aunt May! He climbs up a nearby building while his signature music– a delightful monster movie-esque motif– kicks in. Spider-Man lands up higher on the wall and demands that Octavius turn her over. He seems willing to do so, but of course IT’S A TRAP! and the villain drops her. Peter is able to dive down and catch her then web them both up high, which leaves him vulnerable to attack.

After Otto gets in a few licks the two start going at it in earnest, largely trading blows up close as they fall down the side of the building.

The CGI is not always convincing and the action is a little confusing, but it’s intense and fun nonetheless. Octavius is finally able to seize his foe and fling him all the way across the street, and re-positions himself near May, who’s only just found her footing. As he taunts Spider-Man to come back over & play, he prepares a steel spike behind his back, which May sees.

An unsuspecting Spidey across the street does that trick from the first movie where he uses two webs to pull back and slingshot himself at high velocity. He flies in like a bullet, and before Doc Ock can spear him, the hero gets some unlikely assistance.

Betty White-style

The distraction allows Peter to dodge the spike, grab his aunt as she falls, and take her to safety as Otto scurries off. May is pleased to be proven wrong about “that awful Spider-Man” but still implies she deserves credit for the outcome of the fight. Oh, you wacky old people.

This is some solid superhero fun. It’s not quite an epic clash but the fight does score points for moving briskly from inside the bank to the street then to fairly up high in the air. The expected punches and tentacle-swipes are augmented with blows in the form of desks and money bags (and one mean umbrella), making for a more dynamic encounter.

The octopus elephant in the room here is how hard it is for our hero to take Dr. Octopus down. Unlike the Green Goblin, Octavius’ overall physiology was left largely unchanged by the incident that made him a supervillain; except for that tentacle-harness and some bad brain wiring, he’s completely human… and a paunchy, middle-aged scientist at that. Once Peter gets in close, Otto should be even easier to take down than Flash Thompson; one punch ought to be enough to knock his block off (and in the comics, it typically was), yet movie-Ock absorbs a numerous spider blows, not to mention getting bowled over by a massive desk and so forth.

Does it matter? Your mileage may vary. Personally, I’d say Raimi and co. had enough of a challenge constructing dynamic & quasi-believable superhero fights as it was without having to worry about the additional restriction of not letting the hero lay a finger on the villain until the very end. Think of this suspension of disbelief as similar to the one that must be engaged whenever the film switches over to obvious (but still necessary) CGI.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: Rumble in the jungle.

Uh, the urban jungle.

Choo choo.

He damn near catches the last train for the coast.

2) Spider-Man vs Doctor Octopus

The Fighters:

• Spider-Man and Dr. Octopus. No real changes since last time, except Spidey’s powers are working consistently again.

The Setup: Knowing that the last component for his experiment is a sample of the ultra rare isotope tritium, Octavius goes to threaten Harry Osborn (who has taken over his father’s company) for his remaining tritium stash. Harry agrees to hand the MacGuffin over to Octavius if Octavius brings Spider-Man to Harry, alive; this is a pretty serious improvement over Otto’s initial offer of “give me the tritium or I’ll kill you”. Harry further informs the villain that the best way to find Spider-Man (other than robbing a bank, hanging around a fire, etc) is via Peter Parker, the guy who “takes his pictures” for the paper.

The mad doctor decides to get Peter’s attention via the unusual method of throwing a car at the back of his head (something he only dodged thanks to his spider sense, which Otto didn’t know he had), and then taking a nearby Mary Jane hostage, telling Peter to have his “buddy” Spider-Man meet him up for a brawl or else he’ll kill her. So: Octavius kidnaps Mary Jane so that will motivate Peter Parker to convince Spider-Man to come fight Octavius so Octavius can beat up & deliver Spider-Man to Harry so that Harry will give Octavius tritium which will let Octavius try his experiment again. Perfectly straightforward.

[Pretty funny how Peter rejected his chance at happiness with Mary Jane at the end of the last movie in order to keep from making her a target for his enemies, yet lookee here, that's exactly what happens anyway.]

The Fight: Spider-Man arrives (his powers having been fully restored by the danger to MJ), at what’s apparently their pre-arranged meeting place: the top of a high clock tower.

(BTW, I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but if any proud New Yawkers spot any errors in my description of their fine city’s geography or notice that I fail to point out any notable landmarks, feel free to point this out. [Obviously I have to explicitly invite this, since native NYC residents are so known for their shy, reserved nature and don't like to make a big deal of their town's features.])

The two waste little time before getting right down to bidness, doing their up-close tussling act from before. Spidey soon gets knocked from their perch, but is unfazed: he launches a couple web “bullets” (hey, those are new) on the way down which stun his foe, then swings back up and lassoes a chunk of broken clock arm at Octavius with his free hand. That’s multi-tasking.

Octavius tries using that same piece of scenery as a projectile himself, but Spider-Man is still able to seize him with a pair of webs and pulls them both down. They land not on the ground but on the top of an elevated subway train– apparently one that doesn’t make a lot of stops, because it never stops moving for this whole fight. Also apparently New York doesn’t have elevated trains anymore, but oh well.

The two don’t care, and keep up their fighting. Doc Ock blocks some webbing with his tentacles, but the hero just improvises and instead uses those webs to pull himself in close for a few kicks to the face.

C’mon, man, don’t let him walk all over you.

They both take a break to duck under a low overpass (apparently Otto has Octo-sense, because his back was turned at the time). Octavius is able to seize Spider-Man and fling him high in the air against an above-ground walkway, but Spidey manages to contort himself juuuuust enough to fit through the stone mesh “walls” and lands back on the train to deliver another punch.

The blow knocks them both to the side of the train, where they both just decide “f–k it, we’ll fight here now.” There’s lots of cool stuff as they scuffle from here on, as Spider-Man gets knocked inside of the train twice, at one point grabbing a pole and spinning around it sideways (he was bitten by a radioactive stripper!) to launch himself back out another window. At another point our hero has to flatten himself up tightly against the side of the car as another train comes barrelling down the opposite track. All the while several dozen passengers stand by, dumbfounded.

Eventually Otto is able to sneak around and get the drop on Spidey, knocking him to the ground outside, but with some quick use of his webbing the hero is able to snag onto the train and also dodges all the vehicular traffic he’s now being dragged around in. It’s almost certainly a quick, cute reference to the legendary train chase in the Friedkin classic The French Connection.

As long as Peter doesn’t use as many racial slurs as Gene Hackman.

As Spider-Man swings to catch up, Octavius tries to mess with him by grabbing civilians out of the train and tossing them the hero’s way. First one, then two at a time. This only barely slows the hero down, though, as he’s able to use his webs to pluck them out of the air and then create netting to toss them safely into. It’s… unclear what Otto’s goal with this is. Typically, villains use civilians in such a manner so they can escape, but Dr. Octopus doesn’t want to escape here, he wants to beat his adversary to a pulp. He expresses frustration when this tactic doesn’t work but what was his idea of it “working”? Surely he didn’t want to kill those people just for fun. Similarly, Spider-Man should not be so desperate to keep up with the train, because he knows for a fact that Octavius wants him. If he just pulled off to the side he would probably figure that Doc Ock would probably also take a time-out and they could continue their fight in a less insane location.

Ah, well. This not being enough, Otto decides to destroy the train’s brake mechanism, sending it plummeting down to the terminal point. Which of course leads into that superb non-fight sequence where an unmasked Peter summons up all his spider strength in a desperate bid to stop the train; it’d be a lot more awesome if it didn’t lead into that incredibly mawkish denouement where the hero gets splayed out as a hamfistedly-obvious Christ figure. Blergh.

When Spider-Man finally comes to, he’s barely strong enough to stand, let alone adequately defend himself against the returning Dr. Octopus, so at least that tactic made sense. Spidey gets conked out, tied up and delivered to Son of Goblin. That’s rough.

This fight, though, isn’t. For all its messiness it truly is an epic fight– perhaps the most complex and ambitious super-brawl seen in film up to that point. It covers an absurd amount of real estate (even if much of that is arguably a cheat because they’re standing on a train), makes a lot of use of its environments and the diverse opportunities each combatant’s abilities provide. A major sticking point is even how the hero willingly hobbles himself in order to minimize collateral damage to innocent civilians. (Zack Snyder was unavailable for comment.)

There’s a sense of excitement here that a simple blow-by-blow can’t really convey, a real “gee whiz, look at that and now look at THAT!” giddiness to it. It’s not just an incredible technical achievement (uncanny valley warts & all) but a labor of love. On the surface it may be irritating that the two’s definitive encounter (there’s actually not really any fighting during the film’s real climax) doesn’t have a definitive defeat, but then, it doesn’t need one: Otto Octavius is the villain but he’s not really a bad guy, just a good guy driven to do some awful things by circumstances not wholly within his control. He needs sympathy and reformation, not a beatdown. Thus the fight ends with an act of raw, self-sacrificing heroism rather than violence. Good show.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: A brief interlude, then something a bit more… redeeming.

They have an Army, but we have a…

Um. Not quite.

2008′s The Incredible Hulk is underrated. It’s not great by any means, being underwhelming in certain aspects and lacking in others. But its heart is in the right place, and more importantly, it helped continue the groundwork its same-summer companion Iron Man had just recently begun. Again, this sort of thing is taken for granted in Marvel movies now, but all throughout the film you can feel a solid sense of respect & affection for the source material, an understanding that these people get the property, and want to have fun with it.

Certainly it can be credited with swerving the franchise sharply away from the dour, pretentious Ang Lee version. The director of the reboot, Louis Laterrier, is generally known as a genre schlockmeister, but in addition to all the competent action Laterrier actually pulls off some very striking shots and a few other nice tricks.

Unfortunately, while the movie fulfills its action quota, only two of its action beats could be reasonably qualified as “fights.” The first real Hulk-out, in a bottling plant after a tense chase through Brazilian favelas, is excellent but over too quickly and takes place mostly in the shadows; in one of the film’s smarter moves, it’s seen mostly from the perspectives of Hulk’s tormentors, and plays out more like a horror sequence.

But there’s still plenty of fun left to be had.

2) Hulk vs The Army

The Fighters:

• The Incredible Hulk, aka Bruce Banner. In case you haven’t heard, Banner is a mild-mannered scientist who, thanks to a lab accident involving gamma radiation, turns into a nigh-unstoppable rage beast whenever he becomes too angry or afraid. (This movie seems to tie the transformations directly to his heart rate reaching a certain threshold, a rather bland interpretation.) The Hulk is enormous, incredibly strong, durable, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound. He’s also typically seen as “dumb” in contrast to the brilliant Banner, but this varies with each adaptation and even more so throughout the comic’s history; some Hulks are child-like idiots, some have a normal intellect, and some have just flat-out been Bruce Banner in a big green body. More recent work has even claimed that all incarnations of the Hulk retain Banner’s genius on some level, allowing the creature to intuitively calculate his seemingly random destruction so as not to harm innocent bystanders. Also important: not only does rage trigger the Hulk’s transformation, increased anger will amplify his power. “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets.” Played by Edward Norton, who acquits himself well as a brooding & thoughtful man of action, and also apparently did extensive but uncredited re-writes of the script.
• A small element of the United States Army, maybe a few dozen. They’re mostly equipped with small arms, but have several Humvees, a few of which are mounted with .50 caliber machine guns, and two more have some other interesting tech. Additionally, there’s a helicopter gunship nearby. (They’re also all wearing the woodland-camouflage Battle Dress Uniform, which the Army had fully phased out before 2008, the year this was released– let alone by 2011, the year this apparently takes place. Oops.) The troops are led by Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, a general deeply involved with the DoD’s gamma radiation/”special weapons” department, who has been obsessively hunting the Hulk for years and is also the father of Banner’s ex-girlfriend, Betty (awwwwwwkward). Played by William Hurt.
• Emil Blonsky, Ross’ point man in this endeavor. A British Royal Marine “on loan” to Ross for the Hulk chase, Blonsky is a cold-blooded special forces veteran. As the lone non-casualty of the bottling plant encounter, Blonsky has a bone to pick with Hulk, and Ross has worked to enable this rematch by pumping Blonsky full of an unthawed attempt at a re-creation of the super-soldier serum– the same one that made Captain America. Played by GFS hall-of-famer Tim Roth.

“Huge invincible super-monster? Pfft, we got this.”

The Setup: Ross, as usual, is chasing Bruce Banner. This time around he’s pinpointed the fugitive’s location to the sprawling university campus where Betty works, after he’d re-surfaced there seeking assistance. Uncle Sam wants Banner alive, so they can figure out from his body how to re-create the Hulk, so as before they’re going after the guy with non-lethal means. After the hero bolts, Betty tracks down her father and implores him to stop. She is less than successful, and gets detained on the sidelines.

Though Banner’s inside, Blonsky and the majority of the troops remain out front, knowing that’s where they’ll need to be if they can’t subdue him before a transformation. In a neat practical effect, Blonsky is shown very easily out-running the rest of the infantry behind him– a cool way to introduce the effects his “treatments” are having.

Banner leads them on a merry chase across the campus, stopping at one point to swallow a thumb drive containing important data. Gross, but a necessary move for a guy whose pockets are about to get jacked up. Eventually, Banner finds himself trapped in a nifty glass walkway separating two buildings. Soldiers lock the doors on either side, and on Ross’ orders they fire knockout gas into his confined space. He starts to succumb, but when he looks outside and sees Betty distressed, his eyes turn green….

And then this happens.

The Fight: At Ross’ order, all the soldiers start to unload on him, mostly with M16s. It’s little more than an annoyance to Hulk’s thick skin, and deters him not at all as he charges forward. A few Hummers with mounted .50 cals show up and begin firing, but even good old Ma Deuce can only cause Hulk moderate pain. Before they can even try to do worse, Hulk knocks over the nearest Humvee to him, then picks up another and smashes it repeatedly into a nearby sculpture, then the ground. Not one to let a nice piece of wreckage go to waste, the beast rips out part of the vehicle’s engine block and hurls at at a third Humvee, hard enough to knock that one into another Humvee. They both explode, which is always welcome.

This leaves Blonsky to take on the Hulk directly. Armed with a grenade launcher, he starts closing in on the Hulk, firing at intervals the whole way. The first couple rounds catch Hulk before he can react and do knock him back a bit, but soon he’s able to display some battlefield improvisation, and seizes two huge chunks of the metal lawn sculpture and uses them as shields.

Isn’t the guy with the super soldier serum supposed to be using a shield?

After he gets in close enough, Blonksy drops the weapon, though it’s not clear if it’s because he ran out of ammo or if he lost his grip when he has to leap forward to avoid Hulk’s first counter-swing. Either way, Emil is reduced to just using his sidearm from here, which obviously doesn’t faze the big green guy at all. But his acrobatic dodging is quite incredibly, leaping and flipping all around Hulk’s would-be swings.

Ross, impressed, orders Blonsky to draw the target into the next phase of the plan: the sonic cannons.

Sonic BOOM

These new weapons (apparently made by Stark Industries, of course) are non-lethal devices which fire visible waves of “sound” into the air and somehow incapacitate the target. It’s not clear if they do so merely by causing overwhelming pain to the target’s hearing/inner ear, or if they have their own concussive force, as is implied when Blonksy gets grazed by one just as he’s jumping out the way, which sends him tumbling too. But either way, you have to love these things: they’re SUCH a deliciously comic book-y contrivance, symbolic of how much fun this movie’s willing to have.

The cannons, once they’re both trained on Hulk, actually fix him pretty well at first, bringing him to the ground in pain. But once again, Hulk draws his strength at the sight of Betty’s visible distress over him, and forces himself back to his feet. Mitigating the sonic waves somewhat by first putting the metal shields in their path, and then he throws one right down the middle of the vehicle it’s mounted on, blowing it up. With the damage output reduced by half, Hulk is free enough to leap right onto the other cannon, destroying it personally.

Nearly out of options, Ross calls in the nearby gunship. Overly confident and disregarding orders to stand down, Blonsky takes a few more rifle shots at Hulk. When he’s out of ammo, he confronts Hulk face-to-face, daring him to continue their wildly disproportionate duel. “Is that all you got?” he taunts.

This seems… unwise.

Disgusted, Hulk casually but swiftly boots Blonsky right in the chest, propelling into a tree about a hundred feet ahead. It looks like it hurts.

Betty tries to get close to the Hulk to make him calm down, which her dad somehow fails to notice before the gunship closes in. He tells them to not fire but it’s too late, leaving Hulk to use his body to protect her from the hail of powerful ammunition. The entire patch of grass they’re standing on is reduced to a smoking pit by the strafing helicopter, but Hulk survived it. Cradling an unconscious Betty, he leaps away to safety. Mark this one as another loss in the government’s War on Hulk.

This is good, if not great, stuff for the superhero genre. It’s a tight and confined to one location, but still fairly epic in its small-scale way; the 2003 Hulk disaster had another, bigger confrontation with the military which eventually wore out its welcome. Hulk goes up against not just conventional Army might but also some wonky sci-fi weaponry and a deranged, British version of Captain America (not to be confused with the other British version of Captain America), which adds to the fun. And throughout there’s nice beats like the Hulk’s improvised shields, proving the creature’s tactical intelligence.

We even some nice character moments: right after the Hulk transforms, Ross mutters to himself, “now she’ll see,” thinking that Betty will lose her affection for Bruce now that she personally witnesses how much of a monster the Hulk is. But ultimately it’s the Hulk who bravely rescues Betty from Ross’ own monstrous bad decisions.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Something abominable.

Ladies.

Rumble in the Bronx.

“WRONG BOROUGH, PUNY BLOGGER!”

2) Hulk vs Abomination

The Fighters:

• The Incredible Hulk, aka Bruce Banner. For probably the first time, Bruce has willingly triggered a transformation, hoping that he can, if not control the beast, then at least “guide” it to the right target. Played by Edward Norton, but mostly CGI.
• The Abomination, aka Emil Blonsky. (Note that this is the character’s comic book name, not something he’s addressed as here. There’s only a cute reference to the word when Dr. Sterns says it as a warning of what Blonsky could become.) The combination of Blonsky’s repeated treatments with an unstable super-soldier serum and a dose of Banner’s gamma-radiated blood have transformed him into an enormous monstrosity. He’s roughly Hulk-sized if not bigger, but more reptilian, with scaly skin and spiky bone protrusions. Unlike the Hulk he seemingly retains more of his intellect, as evidenced by his fluent speech, but between Blonsky’s previously deteriorated mental state and anything else the transformation might have done to him, the Abomination is wildly aggressive and hungers for destruction. Played by, again, Tim Roth and CGI.

The Setup: Once again the military has managed to track Banner, but this time they actually get him– probably because they quietly sniped him with a tranquilizer rather than charging at him with a small army in full view. They get him just after he’s hooked up with his digital pen pal “Mr. Blue,” aka Dr. Samuel Sterns (teased to become the comic villain “The Leader,” if Marvel Studios ever gets around to it), who gets some samples of Banner’s blood and manages to suppress a transformation. Before they can determine whether the process was permanent or not, Bruce gets taken out and the Army storms the lab.

Later, an unhinged Blonsky coerces Sterns into applying the Hulk formula to him, and the results are… ugly.

As in, “scaly Goomba Hulk without pants” ugly.

The transformed Blonsky rampages through nearby Harlem, easily fighting off the military’s attempts to subdue him. When captured on a video feed going to Ross, in a helicopter with Betty taking Bruce into custody, the Abomination bellows “GIVE ME A REAL FIGHT.”

Before you can say “challenge accepted,” Banner convinces Ross to release him into the urban war zone– send a monster to stop a monster. Relying on an adrenaline charge to trigger the transformation, Bruce has them drop him from very high. He apparently Hulks out at the last moment, emerging from a crater as his jolly green self.

The Fight: There’s a nice moment of quiet after Hulk’s crash landing, as the two eye each other. Hulk roars, and Abomination charges over gleefully. The two fling themselves at each other in a glorious slow-motion shot.

Abomination gets the better of the collision, tackling Hulk to the ground and immediately using his momentum to fling Hulk several dozen feet away.

The green guy is actually quite dazed after he gets up, but once he gets his head right, he displays a bit more of that tactical thinking when he rips open a nearby police car, then shoves one hand in each half of it, effectively turning the vehicle into boxing gloves. (This move is a longtime favorite of Hulk’s in the comic, even popular enough to make its way into a great video game several years before this movie.)

With the reach-advantage the car-gloves give Hulk, he’s able to get the first strike on his abominable foe, and beats him down quite thoroughly, until the car parts are all ground away and Blonsky is embedded in the pavement. However, the monster reveals his resilience with a callback to his line from the previous confrontation, taunting Hulk with “is that all you got?” Before Hulk can respond with a finishing blow, Abomination kicks him hard enough to launch him into the air and through a neighboring building.

Sadly, the best parts of the fight are now all over. Abomination’s search for Hulk soon changes into him avoiding heavy automatic fire from Ross’ helicopter (which, incidentally, keeps getting way too close to its target for comfort).

The two titans tangle again when hero just barely prevents villain from tackling the helicopter (which also has Betty in it, because of course it does) right out of the sky. With Abomination dangling from the landing gear and Hulk dangling from Abomination’s leg, the chopper has to make a crash landing on a rooftop, trapping all inside and knocking everyone who isn’t a main character unconscious.

The combatants clash again at the crash site, with Abomination pinning Hulk against a nearby wall through sheer brute force. Telling him “you don’t deserve this power,” he stabs Hulk’s pectoral with one of his shoulder spikes and invites him to watch Betty die.

Opting not to, Hulk once again draws strength from the sight of Betty in distress, and slowly breaks free, then smashes Abomination’s head into the wall. He takes a moment to quell the fire spreading around the helicopter with the force of a super-powered clap (cool!), which gives Blonsky enough time to rise behind him and grab a chain attached to… something. I’m not really clear on what this very long, very heavy chain with a heavy weight on one end is doing atop this random Harlem building, but okay.

Abomination blindsides Hulk and puts him down with a couple swings from his chain. The villain begins to swing it again in preparation to bring it down on the chopper, asking the general if he has any last words. Hulk replies in Ross’ stead, bellowing his iconic “HULK SMASH!” for the first time on the big screen.

Curiously, what he actually smashes is the rooftop in front of him. The point of impact creates a wide crack that snakes over to where Abomination’s standing, trapping his foot inside.

Thrown off-balance, the monster loses control of his weapon, which falls right back down on his ugly mug. Hulk wastes no time grabbing the chain and choking his opponent with it, fending off all his scrambling attempts to fight back. Truly bloodthirsty, he seems quite ready to hold on until Blonsky stops breathing, but Betty cries for him to stop.

With Abomination subdued, Hulk has a quiet moment with his love and says her name, before fleeing again to leave Ross to clean up the mess so he can go do more sad-music-accompanied hitchhiking.

This is a lot of fun, but its biggest sin is that 90% of the fighting happens in one brief, furious spurt right at the beginning; from there it’s an uninspired chase scene that we know will come to nothing (come on, a whole battalion AND a gunship couldn’t take down Hulk in the last battle, what’s a lone helicopter going to do to Abomination now?) and some back & forth between the two on the rooftop.

That brief bout of fighting, however, is everything a titanic superhero fight should be. There’s suitable dramatic buildup to the confrontation, and the CGI is not just empty special effects; it’s obviously not real but there’s some genuine weight to it, and the combatants move in ways both believable yet fantastically impressive; you can almost feel the power behind each punch. Also welcome is how you can generally keep track of the action– a more significant accomplishment than it sounds considering it’s a night-time battle between two fast-moving CGI monsters of similar size & shape. And the Abomination, with motion-capture work apparently done by Roth himself, makes for a fantastic villain.

The fight’s ultimate solution is yet another example of a time when we find ourselves in a bind because it’s laudably clever/unexpected yet somewhat disappointing; you don’t usually expect a Hulk fight to end with him tripping his enemy and then choking him out from behind. Still, hearing Hulk say his trademark line (said by Lou Ferrigno, in a gratuitous but sweet bit of fan-service) goes a long way, and there is some cold brutality to go along with Hulk’s smart thinking. Not to mention the delights of the oh-so-comic-booky elements like the car gloves, the sonic clap and the aimable mini-earthquake.

As with before, the movie’s heart being in the right place helps smooth over its imperfections. That aforementioned dramatic buildup is something to be applauded– the movie has the courage to put some real action gravitas behind what is frankly a very boilerplate and predictable confrontation. It was very refreshing at the time for a big-budget superhero movie to be so straightforward and have the Hulk square off against what’s basically another, more evil Hulk… and not, say, a goofy absorbing weirdo who turns into a giant electric cloud.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: An even more dangerous man named Bruce.

Don’t make him Bruce Lee. You wouldn’t like him when he’s Bruce Lee.