“Public Enemy #1″ might be a bit much, but I’m glad people are finally turning on Tom Holland.

When we last left Spider-Man, Mysterio’s dying declaration both blamed him for the latter’s death and outed him as Peter Parker. This actually isn’t important in the grand scheme of things; only the first half hour is dedicated to his identity reveal and it’s more comedic than anything. People throw things at Spider-Man, shout “Mysterio was right!”, Flash Thompson puts out a book about his ‘friendship’ with Parker, people speculate on Peter and MJ’s relationship, those sorts of things. The scene of them looking like they’re fucking and being walked in on by May and Jon Favreau carries about as much weight as any threat of prosecution. Being accused of murder seems to be a big deal until a scene with returning Netflix champion and elbow nudge #1 of #211 Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) clears everything up. If you want a better explanation than “I’m a very good lawyer”, go fuck yourself. The real crux of the plot comes when Peter and his friends don’t get into MIT, or any other school for that matter. See! It’s relatable! Kids love college admissions. If it could happen on Boy Meets World it could happen to Spider-Man. Did you know Eric and Jack’s female roommate does porn now? Now you know!

Why would Iron Man Jr. have a diaper on over his costume? It does nothing!

In a connection of dots we as a people should not stand for, Peter notices the Halloween decorations at MJ’s job resemble Dr. Strange. Why not go to him for a roofie spell! Well, it’s unethical and you shouldn’t use magic to do stupid bullshit like that, but on the other hand there are asides to Wong not remembering parties so really magic is one big joke if you think about it. Who gives a fuck, let a kid mess with the world’s memories, they dug coal together. The problem comes in when Peter keeps adding stipulations to the spell, messing it up and causing the multiverse to develop incursions by the full weight of the Sony Pictures budgeting department. They didn’t get Dane DeHaan back because he had too much damn integrity. Or he was prepping for Valerian 2. One of those. That means the sky is empty for No Way Home is full of stars: Alfred Molina! Willem Dafoe! Rhys Ifans! Thomas Haden Church (THE CHURCH!) Jamie Foxx! They’re back, and they variously want to kill Spider-Man or say hello to Spider-Man in the Church’s case. Now, Strange posits they’re all there because they learned Spider-Man is Peter Parker. But Jamie Foxx never did that. A scene later on in the film directly contradicts that premise. Look, this has less a script and more a bloated cast list so you’re lucky there’s coherent English lines being delivered in between applause periods for returning stars. It’s an episode of Cheers where Norm enters 20 times in 20 minutes.

Folks, go see Willem Dafoe in Nightmare Alley, in theatres and available on streaming now.

As a big fan of the Raimi films and a big fan of Spider-Man villains, I’ve got to say this is a poor outing for all involved. Let’s start with Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin. Early on he chucks the mask in no small part due to Internet people chirping about how it makes him look like a Power Ranger for the last 19 fucking years. So what does he get instead? Well, uh, goggles, and Willem Dafoe’s face. He becomes the Green Hobo and he looks like ass. Doctor Octopus is neutered as a threat when Spider-Man uses his Stark technology to pair his arms to the system, so there’s gags of Peter moving Ock’s arms without his consent. The result is that Ock just acts disagreeable and bitchy the entire time. Electro has transformed into Jamie Foxx with electric powers. Amazing Spider-Man 2 sucked to be sure, and my theory is no one involved in the production rewatched the film. Their hazy memories consisted of “a blue Jamie Foxx”, who is soon replaced by Jamie Foxx in a firefighter outfit. He is Duane Dibley no more! Sandman’s motivations flip from scene to scene; sometimes he helps Spider-Man, sometimes he’s attacking him, and it’s all the result of lousy writing. I can’t make heads or tails of the character. As for the Lizard, he’s such an ineffectual afterthought he’s captured by Dr. Strange offscreen. If the point wasn’t to include one villain from each film there’s no way he’d make the cut otherwise. Speaking of which, why no sixth member? Michael Keaton can’t be that busy. Sinister Five? Fuck you. Give me a Sinister Six. If you’re tickling my balls have the decency to finish me off, so to speak.

“I definitely look 68 years old! Remember, Disney’s productions are a crime against man!”

Aunt May gets it in Peter’s head that he ought to cure these wayward men, spurred on by Norman Osborn’s appearance at F.E.A.S.T. (Fetal Ethanol Alcohol Syndrome Tourette’s) at which he’s a simpleton who doesn’t know where he is or who took his pants. His company doesn’t exist, his son no longer is in Seth Rogen’s good graces, everything is fucked. Thankfully, Happy Hogan’s apartment has a Stark Magic Machine that can cure any ill, be it malfunctioning robotic tentacles or being an electricity man. Doc Ock is easiest to fix because he’s set to “evil”, but before anyone else is cured of their mental disease Green Goblin pulls a double cross, proving the lesson of the film is Don’t Trust The Mentally Ill. This is important because over the course of the action sequence Gobby kills Aunt May, who still has enough life in her to impart some life lessons and speak about six paragraphs to her nephew. Credit to director Jon Watts for not including an EMT saying “those are the biggest dead woman’s bazongas I’ve ever seen! Aooga!”. She was a gag character in the first two movies—hey isn’t it incongruous, this isn’t your daddy’s Aunt May—and trying to give her import in her last appearance comes off as trite. The Spider-Man video game did a better job of sending her off. Her reiteration of “with great power there must also come great responsibility” is a toxic concoction consisting of elbow nudge and “say the line, Bart!”. I can’t stand it.

These three assholes are like xeroxes of xeroxes of, like, annoying Buffy characters.

So things must get pretty dour once May bites it, yeah? Haha, you naïve motherfucker. There’s not a moment to breathe in this 160 minute monstrosity, so right after May gets it we have to bring out the next shiny object with which to distract the audience. Enter: Spider-Man! Enter: Another Spider-Man! Ned and MJ use their magic gauntlet to summon them and hey, are you fucking hard from nostalgia yet? How about now? Now? It better be now. Garfield, to his credit, is putting in the work, in part because I think he’s overcompensating for his series having the reception of a lead balloon. Tobey Maguire you can see picturing his card games in between takes. (Let us remember he inspired Michael Cera in Molly’s Game and was a member of the Pussy Posse.) Either way, the characters don’t particularly illuminate the MCU Peter Parker by showing the road not taken because it’s all pretty much the same road. Garfield is cast as slightly darker than everyone else because his love interest died but that’s about it. There’s a weird moment in conversation when Garfield claims he sort of lost it after Gwen’s death and started murdering people maybe? It’s unclear what exactly he means but I like to interpret as he punched through Paul Giamatti’s stupid fake Russian face after Amazing Spider-Man 2 ends.

“Where’s my heat rock? This is against the Geneva Convention!”

Garfield does get the short end as kind of the runt of the litter; he doesn’t have the experience or the generational nostalgia of Maguire and didn’t go to space and get groomed by multiple bearded sarcastic men like MCU Peter. So when he admits he sucks the “no, you’re great” from the other comes off as half-hearted. No Way Home should’ve gone more in this direction, with Garfield as a sadsack failure Spider-Man whose girlfriend is dead and whose archenemy is Dane DeHaan, but unfortunately there’s not enough time for shit like “characterization” to occur so eventually they meld into one Spider-Man. Not literally; that would be amazing if it happened. There’s no Cronenberg here, folks, don’t go looking. Shorn of the Stark fabricator, the Spider-Men nonetheless use their science skills to cure the various villains, which makes you wonder why they didn’t do that in the original timelines. I guess “becoming sand by falling into a particle accelerator with a lot of sand” is a problem that can be banged out over the course of a long night in a high school science room.

J.K. Simmons is here! Don’t expect him to do anything funny or playing a character, he’s just doing Alex Jones. See? He’s hawking pills, just like Alex Jones! It’s funny. I wonder what school shootings he believes never happened.

Like other films of its ilk, the third act becomes a cacophony of not that great special effects bouncing off against each other. In this case there’s an electric sandstorm that envelops everything and after an unsuccessful first bout, the Spider-Men realize they need to be in sync in order to defeat the villains. Cure them, whatever. Marvel third acts are increasingly the least interesting parts of their respective movies and No Way Home is not an exception. It lasts for like an hour and I can’t tell you what happened beyond Sandman and Lizard turn back into stock footage of Thomas Haden Church and Rhys Ifans from previous films and Doctor Octopus returns from Offscreenville to help wrangle Electro. MJ falls and this time Andrew Garfield catches her, righting what once went wrong and redeeming himself in the eyes of himself. That’s an elbow nudge in itself, referencing two movies and a comic book and about forty other comic books that resuscitated the scene in order to grab pathos. I’m surprised they didn’t reveal Michelle’s middle name was Gwen for maximum elbow nudgery. Anyway, all that’s left to take care of is the Goblin, whom Spider-Man, the young groomed one, wants to kill in revenge for snuffing Aunt May. Finally, a movie where superheroes learn killing is wrong, haven’t had one of those before. Given the Avengers kill willy nilly, aliens and Hydra alike, maybe Spider-Boy does need that lesson. Tobey Maguire takes a stabbing to prove that point and I thought for a second they were going to off him for maximum pathos. But then I realized it would preclude semi-retired Tobey from phoning in subsequent movies, and they already had the cry cry moment with Aunt May. He survives the stabbing, though it’s funny to think he’s going to return to his home dimension with a big stab wound and who knows how far away from medical attention he’ll be. Title card of “Raimi Spider-Man died on the way back to his home planet” would’ve been funny.

Bring back Duane Dibley Electro

Although everyone’s cured of their hideous affliction, the multiverse is still falling apart and silhouettes of shit you recognize are at the periphery of the sky. Kraven! Rhino! Scorpion! And the rest! Simply sending everyone back won’t reverse the damage, so Spider-Boy has a sacrifice to make: run the spell again, only make everyone everywhere forget who Peter Parker is. I don’t really understand how this fixes everything, but it’s magic, it doesn’t have to “make sense”. Joe Quesada taught us that! It’s not a big loss because with May dead, Peter only has three relationships of any importance, and one of those is Happy Fucking Hogan. So yeah, this is an adaptation of One More Day, only instead of giving up his marriage Peter gives up his relationships with his friends. This is known as getting older, when you spurn connections with people in favor of back breaking labor and a shitty one room apartment. It takes three movies to get Peter to the beginning of Spider-Man 2.

More like Tom Hard(l)y…Appearing In This Movie!

For all his appearances, this Spider-Man has yet to create a universe of his own; it runs off borrowed items and cultural shorthand more than anything else. Uncle Ben, Great Power, Great Responsibility, high school, you know that shit already. MCU Spidey does the opposite of its predecessors so much in an effort to differentiate itself that it’s defined by those choices. Uncle Ben? Fuck Uncle Ben. Osborns? No Osborns. MJ? No MJ, instead we’ll create our own love interest named Michelle who has the initials of MJ so it’ll be a reference, you know, that only the real fans will get. Speaking of which, can we just say that Peter Parker killed Miles Morales and hollowed out his corpse for a cycle? Because special magnet school, fat best friend who knows his secret identity, that’s all the black guy’s schtick. Now to introduce Miles either he’ll have an eerily similar setup to Tom Holland Peter Parker or they’ll have to change things up and give him, I don’t fucking know, Kaine’s origin. This is all a detour to make the point that MCU Spider-Man is as deep as a wading pool for babies, a shallow rendering of what people already basically know about the character spackled with connections to the greater Marvel Universe. No one defines “human spackle” better than Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan.

“Peter! I’m an older man with a goatee! You’re predisposed to listen to me!”

Peter’s sacrifice would be heartbreaking if I had any investment in the characters, as this trilogy (everything is a trilogy now) has not succeeded in resonating. Take his relationship with Michelle or MJ or whomever. In the first movie she was the weirdo Daria chick. In the second Peter was inexplicably head over heels for her and she still treated him like shit. It was a triumph of the unicorn phenomenon that is female negging. Third movie they’re lovey dovey lifelong lovers despite being in a relationship for a week’s time. At one point Peter admits the only time he’s felt normal about his life was when MJ found out, which doesn’t make sense because that was when Europe was in danger of being destroyed by Mysterio. Whatever, continuity is a tool, not a straitjacket. Who gives a shit if things “make sense”. The point is, I don’t buy their relationship. In the Raimi films Peter and MJ’s relationship made sense in that Peter’s the only man in her life to treat her as a person and give her positive encouragement as opposed to seeing her as an object to attain. That’s something to hang shit on. The friendship between Peter and Ned at least I understand; they’re classic skinny guy/fat guy dynamic. It’s the MCU Spade and Farley. Ned Leeds was a “fat guy in a little coat” away from viral stardom. But now that May’s dead, who’s depth on that bench? Happy Hogan? Flash Thompson? Hannibal Burress? At least Maguire had Ursula the cake girl.

“HEY PETER! DID YOU EVER WATCH DIVORCE?”

So now Peter’s adrift in a world he never made and forced to live as an illegal immigrant, taking GED classes like a fucking savage. He has a police scanner app on his phone because that’s something Maguire had, only it was a radio because 2000s. His costume is handcrafted, none of that fancy Stark bullshit or extra arms. I hate to get into the discussion of the shared universe and the rights Marvel owns and the rights Sony owns, but fuck it, let’s go. This seems to me to be a fork in a path and the franchise can go one of two ways. Clean break from the past wherein Peter goes to college and meets new people, maybe a Gwen or a Harry. He doesn’t necessarily need to see his old supporting cast or the Avengers ever again. Shunt him to his own corner and he’ll fight, like, the Chameleon. Or they could do more MCU shit. With the former Sony can definitively place Spider-Man in their shitty shared universe of Venom and Morbius and the like, and with the latter Sony can continue to suck at the overflowing teat of the MCU. Which the suits choose doesn’t interest me because I’m a human being goddamnit, my life has value outside of shared universe speculation. I guess for comedy value Sony taking its ball and going home would be funniest, because you’d have to have Tom Holland interact with Jared Leto and whatever else they’ve scraped together out of Spider-Man-related characters. Madame Web! Black Cat! Nightwatch! Throw ‘em all in there and make it a 90s shitshow. Superhero movie fatigue has set in so much so that my overriding interest now is in seeing these universes get run down and decrepit and nonsense. Fuck it!

I liked this scene only because it served as proof these actors actually were in the same space and this shit wasn’t all composed in post.

I think the problems with No Way Home boil down to the simple fact that the script is a pile of paper chewed on by a gerbil, likely by design. They must have gone through so many iterations, slotting in and out various actors and actresses subject to availability windows such that the contents ran secondary to the cast list. I imagine a version of the script exists without the other Spider-Men, one of the Spider-Men, a different roster of villains; hell, I even saw some concept art of Dr. Strange fighting Mysterio. Since these movies are less movies and more character appearance delivery systems now it makes sense that more focus was placed on who could appear than “what is going to happen in the movie” or “why anybody should care”. So much of the movie is characters who have not interacted with each other interacting with each other, and that’s it. It’s like a Judd Apatow movie if it cost $300 million and carried a slightly less socially conservative message. All that and the Spider-Men of other universes feel shortchanged by not getting devoted scenes with their counterparts. Tobey Maguire and Willem Dafoe have nary a moment together, whereas Garfield and Electro have a terrible “I thought you’d be black” moment. Elbow nudge: There’s a black Spider-Man that Sony and Marvel are too afraid to use in their live action films. The interactions are surface level glibness that is present throughout, with no real substance to anything. Moreover, multiple times No Way Home shows its belly by way of admission it’s in thrall to memes and not generating memes of its own. Norman repeats his line “I’m something of a scientist myself” because that’s a popular graphic on the Internet. The Spider-Men point at each other, because that’s a popular graphic on the Internet Into The Spider-Verse already did. (Everything this does that does multitudes better.) We should’ve seen the writing on the wall with “I’m The Juggernaut, Bitch!” in X-Men: The Last Stand, that the tail is wagging the dog now. Imagine if this came out when those newspaper cartoon edits were popular. They’d have to find a way to plug in a “Next week: ANAL!” reference.

“Man, her pussy tasted like sweet butter.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the best part of the fucking movie, aka the post-credits scene. The first one. Mid-credits, whatever. The second post-credits is just a commercial/trailer for Dr. Strange 2. This one explains what Venom did during his sojourn to the MCU: he got drunk at a bar on the Mexican beach. There’s some jokes about the Avengers, like the Hulk being a dumb name. You’ve seen the Venom movies, you know the deal. The symbiote won’t shut the fuck up, Eddie is trying to keep things copacetic but gets drawn into bickering, and before you know it they’ve returned to the Universe of Sony Spider-Man Characters. (It’s something dumb like that.) BUT! A little eensy bit of the symbiote stays in the MCU so that’s your set up for the alien costume saga. [foghorn] But I enjoyed this because it’s such a fuck you to nerds who’ve been clamoring for years for a Spider-Man vs. Venom showdown. First they got a Topher Grace in Spider-Man 3 and now the big multiverse collision was Eddie getting soused and talking to a bartender about the MCU’s greater implications for the weekend. It also reminds me of how I wish I experienced this: getting drunk.

They’d never dare reference this…because it’d constitute meaningful gay representation and China won’t allow for that.

Maybe there’s outsized expectations at play but movies that cost this much should look a lot better than this. Alfred Molina is deaged so much he looks as smooth as a seal. It’s hard to care about anything that happens in the third act when it’s a lot of CGI junk flying everywhere and everywhen. Third acts have become my least favorite for this very reason, even in superhero movies I like (see: The Suicide Squad). I know for a fact that Thomas Haden Church and Rhys Ifans post-transformation are clips taken from previous movies and repurposed. You couldn’t fucking have the Church on set for one day? What’s worse, No Way Home actually did the bullshit of improving the CGI after release and putting an updated version in theatres. Does that mean we’re going to get a No Way Home: Gold Edition or Game of the Year Edition on Blu-Ray when all is said and done? I don’t like the idea of midstream fixing or improving the movie because it suggests to me they’re perfectly fine putting out incomplete product with the hope of fixing it later. Fuck that shit. I’m not seeing this twice.

“You’re not Gwen, but close enough.”

It’s at this juncture I should admit and acknowledge I am in the extreme minority with this one and know this from the reaction from the disgusting public at the screening I attended. People cheered for Andrew Garfield. They cheered for Tobey Maguire. They cheered for the MJ save for fuck’s sake. I felt like Frank Grimes at the end of “Homer’s Enemy”; “IT’S A MOVIE FOR CHILDREN!” I’m not the out of touch one, it’s the children that are wrong. See, it’s all cheap nostalgia; it gets you high well enough, but it’s not a legitimate high. Furthermore, it provides diminishing returns. With The Flash movie and more we’re about to see a lot of fucking multiverse shenanigans, and eventually we’ll run out of Michael Keatons and Hugh Jackmans to ooh over and we’ll be down to, like, the glorious return of Shawn Ashmore as Iceman or Chris O’Donnell in the ultra gritty Old Man Robin movie. We’ve seen the lengths companies will go to joyless IP farming with the likes of Space Jam: A New Legacy; don’t think it won’t happen with the MCU. Fuck, I’m sick of it already. See, “what if this met that, and that, and that” is a substitute for shit like a good story and characterization and action sequences. I cannot name one action sequence here I’d rewatch, whereas Spider-Man 2 alone has the bank robbery, the train, the climax, Doc Ock’s surgery… at best the feeling I got from No Way Home was I sure wish Sam Raimi hadn’t taken the decade off.

This is what’s known in the biz as the “cum shot”.

Well, at least I got to vent my spleen a little bit. I recommend Spider-Man: No Way Home to no one and instead suggest you just watch the Raimi movies. Any Raimi movies. Even For The Love of the Game, and I hate For The Love of the Game.

Set in the futuristic year of 1998, Welcome to Racoon City won’t let you forget that fact. Donal Logue (Danny Trejo autobiography co-writer) has a rant that namechecks both Planet Hollywood and Blockbuster Video, a character receives instructions on a palm pilot, exposition is delivered through a video cassette, and enough problems could’ve been solved by the characters having cell phones it’s like an episode of Seinfeld. I will note an anachronism: at one point a character delivers Marc Maron’s famous catchphrase “lock the gates!”, yet Almost Famous came out in 2000. Do better, Resident Evil. Despite the period setting, the film feels well into the now as Raccoon City is a Midwestern town ravaged by the loss of its main employer, the Umbrella Corporation, a pharmaceutical company that a better movie would use as a stand-in for the companies that created and profited off the opioid epidemic. Problem #1 with this movie: we’re saddled with absolute dud characters played by actors of questionable quality. No motion picture needs an Amell brother, especially not the lesser one. He and his sister Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario, Skins) grew up in an orphanage wherein the latter met a deformed child. This actually matters. She eventually ran away whereas Chris grew up to be a member of STARS, the sort of Strike Team equivalent in the Raccoon Police Department.

Anyway, Raccoon City (you do not want to know what the outlying suburban areas have nicknamed it) has become a ghost town since the exit of Umbrella, leaving behind the six or so police officers and the waitress at a diner. That’s pretty much the extent to which we see civilians here. There’s been a body found at the old Spencer mansion so the STARS Team (Chris Redfield, Albert Wesker, Jill Valentine and dead meat) go to investigate why their colleagues haven’t returned from the call yet. This is known as adapting Resident Evil. Adapting Resident Evil 2 takes place at the police department, where zombified people are collecting at the gates for some reason and it’s up to the Prez-from-The-Wire-esque rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy, Chief Donal Logue and Claire Redfield to do something. Survive? Sounds about right. Logue has a hilarious sequence where he boxes up all his shit, promotes Kennedy and tries to get the fuck out of the city, only to be turned away by paramilitary Umbrella men in hazmat suits. See, it’s funny because he’s listening to Journey as it happens. People loved Journey in 1998.

Ricky would somehow fare really well in a zombie apocalypse. Either that or he’d be bitten and suffer no ill effects.

There’s a germ of an idea about a modern day company town that’s poisoning the town’s water and turning the citizens into monsters (basically C.H.U.D.), but whatever social commentary Resident Evil can muster is smothered by an effort to further the plot. At intervals the screen will flash a time, like “1:50 AM”, to indicate to us we’re getting closer to “6 AM”, the time at which the city is meant to be destroyed. Yet this creates no sense of urgency. I spent that time trying to suss out how long events were supposed to have taken place. This isn’t The Shining; the passage of time there is meant to establish Jack’s descent into madness. At best this just helps count down to when this piece of shit is over and done with. “Yay! We’re at 6 AM! We can go out to the parking lot now!”

Characterization is pretty rough if you’re one to believe it exists. You can argue the characters weren’t fleshed out in the game either, but that’s a game and the demands of that medium are different from the demands of this medium. At best each character has one characteristic and that’s being generous. The most nuanced out character is Wesker (Tom Hopper, I Feel Pretty), and that’s because WTRC makes the curious decision to turn the unambiguous dirtbag traitor character into a conflicted villain. He’s in it in the money to leave town, and he doesn’t know who he’s working for or even what he’s really doing. The betrayal comes off as much less egregious than it does in the source material. Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen, Ready Player One) loves guns and also sorta Wesker, Leon (Avan Jogia, Zombieland: Double Tap) is Cory & Trevor in one body, and Chris (Robbie Amell, Eat Wheaties!) is a generic white guy. The main characters don’t differentiate themselves especially from the cannon fodder. When the most memorable aspects of characters is the practice of raceswapping, you’re in trouble.

There’s a hard and fast rule when it comes to characters that I find useful. A movie or TV show tends not to be good if over the course of the duration they do not succeed at characterizing the characters better than in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song. It’s not a good product if Chuck Lorre did a better job than you. Welcome to Raccoon City‘s main characters do not exactly pass the Turtles test with flying colors. For instance, is Jill Valentine really better characterized than “does machines” or “is cool but rude”? I didn’t think so. Claire Redfield “leads”, arguably, but not with the authority of a blue bandana turtle with katanas. Again, the best characterized player here is Wesker, and “Albert Wesker is a betrayal dude” is still not much to hang on to.

The majority of the movie plays as an effort to get from varied locations (mansion/police station) to the train before the ticking clock hits 6 AM. Along the way they have to face zombified characters you all know and love, such as the Licker, lovingly rendered in the best CGI 1999 can provide. It becomes noticeable that in opposition to the hordes one has come to expect, there’s at best one of these monsters. It goes to the budget again, which I’ll touch on later. Neal McDonough’s character turns out to be the villain of the piece, a doctor/orphanage director who used these orphans as lab rats for Umbrella’s experiments. He wants to escape the city with his precious experimental vials. The little deformed girl, all grown up, helps the cast realize this, and by this point “Umbrella isn’t exactly on the up and up” is not the earth-shattering twist this wants to be.

By the end of it Neal McDonough’s become a giant tumor monster off some G-Virus shit and he’s defeated by literal Deus Ex Rocket Launcher and you’re wondering why we’re supposed to care about any of it. In the game you’d have the satisfaction of having done it yourself, maybe earn a Playstation Trophy for your trouble. Here: nothing! The video game name characters all survive because canon dictates they do, not because of anything like their actions dictating their fate. Leon is actively useless most of the time, but he survives for the sequels so there he is at the end. It wouldn’t be a mainstream movie with an after the credits teaser: Wesker wakes up in a body bag, finds he can’t see without some shades (hey! there’s that iconic accessory he always has! Retitle the movie Resident Evil: How Wesker Got His Sunglasses) and finds himself in the employ of Ada Wong. Who’s Ada Wong? What’s happening? Read the instruction manual, or wait for the sequel that won’t happen to explain it.

I want to reiterate what a shit title Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is. It’s clear they couldn’t just title it Resident Evil, because it’s been less than 20 years since something with that title came out, so they needed a subtitle to create some distance between it and the progenitor. But it just reminds me of that Frisky Dingo joke where Killface puts out a postcard that says “Welcome to You’re Doom” on it. Given everyone wants to LEAVE the shitberg, Escape From Raccoon City makes far more sense, which explains why they didn’t use it. Sense? In a Resident Evil adaptation? Who needs it!

Killface is much more of a plausible threat than Umbrella.

While superficially closer to the video games, Welcome To You’re Doom is by no means closer to knowing what it is to craft a coherent, cohesive or compelling story than the Paul Widescreen Anderson did. At least that had a couple of memorable set pieces across six films. I struggle to conjure up memories of something I saw less than a week ago. Like, I enjoy Neal McDonough and Donal Logue a lot, but they’re not given many scenes or much to do. Instead charisma vacuums like the lesser Amell are expected to hold things down. It does replicate the drab, grubby colors of a Playstation game well enough, though I’m not sure that was the intention.

The thing that surprised me most with Resident Evil: Etc. Etc. Etc. is how cheap it looks. It truly does resemble a Netflix production. The production budget was apparently $25 million. The 2002 Resident Evil, adjusted for nothing, cost $33 million. It makes sense. Bad lighting and poor CGI don’t cost a lot, especially in this age. Johannes Roberts, he of the 47 Meters Down movies “fame”, doesn’t exactly stretch the budget into something worth watching. Again, at its “best” Welcome To You’re Doom resembles a Playstation 1-era cut scene, complete with the famously badly translated English script.

For this piece I rewatched the original. Now, I won’t say it’s great, or even good. For one thing, zombies don’t show up until 40 minutes into a 100 minute movie. But there are engaging action set pieces and its pacing is about right. It has the laser hallway sequence (a sequence so memorable half the sequels use it to diminishing returns), which is one up on Welcome to Raccoon City. The score is pretty good (by Marilyn Manson—the band, not the monster). What does this have? Elbow nudges to Capcom continuity and not a whole lot else. Michelle Rodriguez alone wipes the floor with the principal cast of this, both literally and figuratively. This movie shows a dire misunderstanding of why people play video games and why people watch movies. People play video games for an immersive experience in which they’re given the illusion of free will. People watch movies to be told/shown stories. The twain rarely meet well.

Raccoon City lacks a reason to exist besides the hardcore faithful wanting to see more video game accurate iterations of their favorite characters portrayed by the best Hollywood semi-stars Canada has on offer. Even then that didn’t work because the casting director had the temerity to cast some non-white people as Jill and Leon, thus enraging the sizable “huge racist” portion of the fanbase. (To be fair, any fanbase in America has a “huge racist” portion, seemingly.) This whole debacle just reminds those Resident Evil games weren’t high art and the key to their success was mood and atmosphere, not plot or story. This one doesn’t get the mood/atmosphere right there, as the overall cheapness distracts from the terror. But hey, you get to see a lil Neal McDonough tumor face on a poorly designed monster! Name one other movie that promises you that.

And the award for best Michael Rooker impression in Slither goes to…

Following a prologue that takes great pains to obscure Egon Spengler whenever possible, up to and including the moment of his death, we settle in with our Ripped-From-The-Amblin-Playbook single mom (Carrie Coon, The Playboy Club) and two shitty kids (Finn Wolfhard, The Goldfinch; McKenna Grace, I, Tonya) as they move to a fictional town in Oklahoma because they’ve been evicted and have nowhere else to go. They are the proud owners of “the Dirt Farmer”’s property, as everyone in Summerville calls it. Because we know we’re in a Ghostbusters movie, there’s no real mystery to what resides at the farmhouse. PKE meter, firepole, various molds and funguses, they’re all there and you know they’re there because they were in the first Ghostbusters.

But let’s first characterize our characters. Carrie Coon (short for Caroline Raccoon) doesn’t have a job, can’t pay the bills, drinks to excess on a regular basis, but as Paul Rudd says, she’s a “good mom”. Carrie Coon is a tremendously talented actress so it sucks how little she gets to do here. Finn Wolfhard, well, wolfs hard and thoroughly. He’s at the cusp of his schtick no longer working and I think he knows it. As for McKenna Grace, she’s been made over to be Lil Egon, and at first I thought she was going to be spectrum or spectrum adjacent, but no, she’s just doing sort of a Harold Ramis impression. There’s a scene where she tries on Egon’s old glasses and they’re the same frames as hers. Too often her aptitude for science lapses into basically knowing magic but whatever, who comes to a sequel to Ghostbusters expecting realism and reasonable plot developments.

“What’s more, in 32 years I’m gonna buy and sell your asses!”

Running parallel to each other are Wolfhard’s Trevor, with his garbage scooping arms and twiggy alien body, fixing up the Ecto-1 and Lil Egon first playing chess with a familiar ghostly presence and then doing a Resident Evil floor puzzle in the living room to find a ghost trap. Along the way Lil Egon nets a sidekick, the shit-you-not he’s actually named Podcast. Shang-Chi, Kingo, Podcast…why, we’re positively drowning in positive pop fictional portrayals of Asian males! I know in kids movies “comic relief” is code for “the most annoying little shit in the film” but Podcast takes it to a new level. Not only does he have a podcast, he sticks recording equipment in front of people and expects them to play along. That’s not how you get guests; not even Maron does that anymore. He’s Data from The Goonies with less charm as well as the Ray Stanz surrogate. He believes in lizard people conspiracies, the supernatural, all that, but that doesn’t matter because Lil Egon sees it for herself like 10 minutes later. (I wanted to see Podcast’s conspiracy ravings devolve into rank antisemitism; it’d be an interesting choice in a movie with a dearth of interesting choices.) Podcast has no particular expertise and doesn’t even get to wield a proton pack by the end of things.

With the help of Mr. Grooberson (Paul Rudd, Role Models), Lil Egon discerns what the trap she found is when she brings it in to summer school. Paul Rudd functions as the one adult who seems to remember the Ghostbusters, as though the rest of society would consider them yesterday’s news. I’m sorry, but if what happened in 1984 New York happened, it’d be the equivalent of 300 9/11s. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man alone killed thousands of people. Speaking of which: no way in fuck is that logo staying. The company would be lucky to survive. If Ronald McDonald stomped on a few hundred people, goodbye Ronald McDonald. It’s lazy writing that no one remembers that time we learned that the supernatural exists besides some 80s kid science teacher because the other option is to imagine a world which has integrated proof of the paranormal into everyday life. That would require imagination and does not exist in the Ghostbusters blueprint so away it goes. So instead they watch YouTube clips of the original film and I sunk down into my seat and wanted to die. But imagine those YouTube comments. There’d be racial slurs against ghosts you didn’t even knew existed.

Look at it this way, kid: at least you’re not introduced with a “gong” sound.

For a film as reverential to Ghostbusters, Afterlife is not really Ghostbusters…at least at first. It’s Stranger Things, as evidenced by the fact that Stranger Things is in it. It’s the aesthetic of every Steven Spielberg film and more importantly every Steven Spielberg ripoff film of the 1980s. But it’s also closer to the material that Jason Reitman covers in his actual films. I guess he’s learned that Hollywood has crowded out the market for midsize adult dramas like Up in the Air so he asked dad for some help. “Da-ad, can I have the keys to Ghostbusters?” “Well, as long as you promise not to crash it like you did Men, Women and Children”. Anyway, it’s for this reason I call it the least Ghostbusters movie as well as the most Ghostbusters movie, because it has all the feeling of those point and click games like Gone Home only it’s littered with Ghostbusters shit everywhere. When Lil Egon goes down the firepole (why would there be a firepole in a BARN?) to Egon’s secret lab, she sees a hoarder’s worth of GB memorabilia. Molds! Funguses! That goofy helmet Rick Moranis wore when he was possessed and they were testing him! His fucking jumpsuit has a Nestle Crunch bar wrapper in the pocket, because that’s a thing from the first movie! In a later exposition dump scene it’s established Egon absconded with some proton packs and the Ecto-1 but it seems to me he took every single scrap of Ghostbusters ephemera that wasn’t nailed down. Now I’m imagining him with the firepole strapped to the roof of the Ecto-1, driving from NYC to Oklahoma.

The big set piece of the first half is them going through downtown Summerville in the Ecto-1, trying to catch this iteration’s equivalent to Slimer, Muncher. Muncher is Slimer stripped of joy, more obese than ever, voiced by Josh Gad. That we’ve gone from the spirit of John Belushi to the grunts and screams of Josh Gad is a sad and accurate indictment of society. A weird caterpillar monster that shoots bullets, Muncher “munches” on metal, hence the name. (I’m surprised he didn’t bite Podcast’s arm off, setting off the homage line “he munched me”.) This is one of the three new ideas Afterlife includes. The other two are modifications to the Ecto-1: it can release an RC car with a trap strapped to it, and now the car has a gunner seat, because why not. When did Egon add this? I guess things get tiresome on the dirt farm and sometimes you make unnecessary modifications to vehicles you no longer use. This stunt winds them up in jail, because there was a jail scene in Ghostbusters, and when Lil Egon asks for a phone call, Bokeem Woodbine says “who ya gonna call?” and I almost left the theatre. Fuck you. Woodbine, by the way, has one scene but is fifth billed. Where’s my Woodbine scenes, Mr. Costanza?

You know how I said this was the least Ghostbusters movie? Well, now it pivots to the most Ghostbusters movie. In some egregious product placement, Paul Rudd goes to an empty Walmart to pick up some ice cream after his thwarted date. As if you needed more proof this was for children. In any real situation Rudd would be hitting the beer section and drowning his sorrows in Keystone Light, because he knows he doesn’t deserve good beer. This is all set up for him to witness the mini Stay Puft Marshmallow Men, which are apparently Gremlins now. Strike another beloved 80s property off the list! Other than nostalgia value it makes no sense why they’d appear. Ray picked the mascot as the form of the Destroyer in 1984. Why would Gozer decide, hey, better recycle that mascot and have them commit mischief against each other rather than turn on Paul Rudd? Seriously, they’re turning each other into smores and shit. Far be it from me to impugn the narrative consistency of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but I must. Also at the Walmart is a terror dog, introduced with its head in a bag of dog food. Hey, that’s sort of a joke! I’ll take it. There’s so little humor to this movie that something like that is an oasis.

No longer do you have to go to Thailand to buy a little Asian boy covered in cum.

Here’s where things become a Ghostbusters speedrun. Paul Rudd is transformed into the Keymaster, Carrie Coon becomes the Gatekeeper (replete with inexplicable wardrobe change into Sigourney Weaver’s outfit from, you guessed it, Ghostbusters) and the mine that used to employ the town is actually a secret temple of the dead dedicated to Gozer. Get ready to hear the name “Ivo Shandor” a lot. (Played by J.K. Simmons, who is a tough competitor for “who gives a shit cameo role”, only matched by award winning playwright Tracy “Mr. Carrie Coon” Letts and the woman who plays Gozer.) The purpose of the lore in the original was to give the world a lived-in feel, and the seriousness of it was frequently punctured with jokey asides. Here there are multiple joke-free exposition dumps about ancient Sumerian whatever the fuck. Speaking of exposition dumps, Dan Aykroyd struggles through a real steamer that explains what happened to Egon, the Ghostbusters and why it’s called “Crystal Head Vodka” when “Crystal Skull Vodka” makes so much more sense. He shouts out Reagan specifically as the glory years (cue the “Ghostbusters is secretly reactionary and therefore Hitler so don’t you dare laugh at it” thinkpieces as well as Jonah Goldberg’s annual ill-advised “Sieg Venkman” piece in the National Review), and after that ghost sightings diminished and everyone went their own way. In a cruel twist of fate, Ernie Hudson became the most successful of them all. Ernie Hudson, who probably sleeps in his Ghostbusters uniform so he can go to cons at a moment’s notice. Aykroyd spends a lot of time on the phone with a 12 year old girl he doesn’t know is all I’m saying about that.

Summerville is awash with ghosts, including the cab driver from the original and an eyeball ghost my roommate pointed out was actually from The Real Ghostbusters cartoon. Credit to the film for divining inspiration from two sources. Where’s my Ghostbusters 2 references? Egon kept a fucking Hall of Justice trophy room for the first movie; where’s the Vigo the Carpathian painting? Where’s Peter MacNicol with a pin poked through him, under glass? Jason Reitman literally appeared in Ghostbusters 2! Maybe they’re saving it for Afterlife 2, in which a “Lost Leonardo”-like controversy about a Vigo portrait springs the ‘Busters back into action after being out of commission for five years for some reason. Anyway. It’s off to the conclusion of the original, only replace the boys with Lil Egon telling deliberately shitty science jokes to catch Gozer (Olivia Wilde because why the fuck not) off guard.

It wouldn’t be a nostalgia fistfest without cameos by the originals, so after Ray spends an hour on the phone with a child the whole gang decides to Scatman Crothers it to Bumfuck, Oklahoma, complete with the proton packs they shouldn’t have because Egon was supposed to have scampered off with them all. Man, this is just pathetic. Seeing 70 year old men wearing their old clothes from 40 years ago and trying to evince the feeling of the original filled me with the opposite of glee. They can’t defeat Gozer on their own because it’d diminish the new characters, so they’re just ineffectual. It’s going through the motions. “Are you a god?” Ray says ‘yes’ this time, because do you fucking get it, you stupid fucking baby. Crossing the streams doesn’t work because Olivia Wilde uncrosses the streams. Good thing Egon spent 30 years turning the entire farm into a trap, and again I’m wondering why Ray “I’ll believe anything” Stanz blew him off besides “this is the only way the plot ‘works’ with Harold Ramis pushing up daisies”. Maybe fucking cancel the movie on account of dead creator, ever think of that, you fucking assholes?

BEING WIPED OUT OF CANON, THAT’S WHAT

Now, you might think me precious or naïve, but I really didn’t believe they were going to go there, the route of CGI ghost Harold Ramis. There was precedent for my naivete: the opening kept faux Egon out of focus as possible and in the scenes of Lil Egon trying to fix the proton pack, Ghost Egon was an invisible presence. That was fine. I would’ve been totally okay with Egon affecting events invisibly. It hews to the demands of the plot without coming off as overly ghoulish. Speaking of overly ghoulish, that’s what they decided to do after all. Lil Egon is trying to help out with the proton pack but it’s not enough, so there comes a ghostly hand to help her out. Which doesn’t even make sense, because I don’t think pushing down harder makes for a harder stream? The hand becomes a full on Peter Cushing in Rogue One bullshit bearded Egon (because unlike Harold Ramis, Spengler stayed in shape!). Imagine you’re Bill Murray and you have to look with a mixture of melancholy and awe at Bob Gunton wearing a bunch of golf balls all over himself so he can recreate your dead friend’s visage. We get plenty of money shots of the four doing their thing and ultimately it’s mediocre white male to the rescue as Finn Wolfhard, who knows nothing about anything, shoots at the power lines and they’re able to suck up Gozer once and for all. Instead of a parade the multigenerational Ghostbusters receive nothing because Summerville ceases to be a location in this film about halfway through.

You might be wondering how Ghostbusters: Afterlife squares the circle of Egon as absent dad and Egon as great dad simultaneously, because we’re not going to sign off without redeeming his character somewhat. Well, in Egon’s lab Carrie Coon finds a whole wall that proves dad stalked her throughout her childhood. That’s enough! The “Do It For Her” collage Homer Simpson had on the wall of his sector heals all wounds. Like, having photos of your kid through stages of her development doesn’t make up for not being there literally her entire life. I have to believe there’s a version that could’ve existed that didn’t make him a deadbeat dad, especially as it uncomfortably echoes him being an inadvertent deadbeat dad in real life. This film literally ends with Ghost Egon and Carrie Coon embracing, him dissolving into stardust, and among the stars “FOR HAROLD” appears. Fuck this shit. Fuck this shit forever. I’m rarely offended by spectacle but I’m offended now. There’s a toy two-pack of Lil Egon with a Ghostly colored Spengler so don’t fucking tell me capitalism isn’t snaked around this bullshit. Technically “FOR HAROLD” doesn’t close things out, it’s the Ecto-1 driving in NYC while Ray Parker Jr.’s theme blares. Did the surviving Ghostbusters drive their old property all the way back to New York? Who knows. Who really fucking cares.

It wouldn’t be a tentpole without unnecessary post-credits that set up more fucking garbage you’ll feel compelled to watch. First, Venkman and returning champion Sigourney Weaver recreate the psychic shock tests from an obscure little flick called Ghostbusters. Baby Oscar is nowhere to be found. What I wouldn’t give for a Jonah Hill-looking 30 year old standing in the doorway and this just becomes a remake of Cyrus. (Film I’d watch be watching…) The second post-credits, because of course there has to be one, Winston and Annie Potts share drinks and talk about Winston’s financial success, intercut with him reopening the firehouse that Ray said became a Starbucks. Cue red glow of the containment unit. Better movie if it’s a Starbucks that has to deal with a ghost containment unit left over from the Ghostbusters. Would you like a mocha with SCREAMS? Literally everything outside, like, A Serbian Film would be a superior exercise in filmmaking.

The family that busts together must make very clear they’re not biologically related or else people will get into a lot of trouble with Johnny Law.

I would say there’s some subtext behind Reitman taking the reins from his dad, but it’s not subtext—it’s text. Afterlife is about your dad, and how you feel about your dad, whether your dad is Harold Ramis or not. As far as I know Harold Ramis is not Jason Reitman’s dad, but stranger things have happened. Get it? STRANGER THINGS. Afterlife is more or less taking up the family business after expressing a hereditary aptitude for it, and in the case of this specific film the family business is busting ghosts. Lil Egon feels adrift from her family until she finds out her grandfather was also a quasi-autistic science whiz. Jason Reitman slots neatly also in the Carrie Coon role, resentful of the father whose calling interfered with their relationship. (Need I also mention Harold Ramis had a secret daughter in real fucking life?) We’re supposed to go, oh, Reitman has closure now that he realizes his dad ignored him in favor of doing something truly necessary: directing that movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes pregnant. Maybe Ivan Reitman also kept a creepboard of Jason’s childhood, maybe not, I don’t know. If this fucking guy went to therapy we’d still be able to say “yep, Paul Feig made the worst Ghostbusters movie bar none”. If there’s one thing we need less of in Hollywood, it’s filmmakers exploring their daddy issues, and if there’s one thing we need even less of, it’s filmmakers exploring their daddy issues while painstakingly recreating shit you remember from four decades ago so major motion picture companies can wring some money out of the intellectual property that’s just been sitting there. Seeing this, I wish I could barge into my dad’s old company and tell everybody “hey, I’m [my dad]’s son, so I’m timekeeping now”. Fuck Jason Reitman.

Him and Gil Kenan, director of the similarly imagination bereft Poltergeist remake, write a slavish blowjob of a script that makes Stanz’ ghost beej look like first base foreplay. In the promotional rounds Reitman boasted of “easter eggs” that fans would appreciate, yet the entire fucking thing is an easter egg. As a result the “new” material isn’t given enough room to develop. Besides Lil Egon, every other character is a cypher. Did I mention Finn Wolfhard’s love interest, Lucky Domingo? Yep, she’s a black girl named Lucky, and like Winston before her, she’s the character of color that comes into the movie midstream and never receives character development relative to the others. Not that Wolfhard is much better; he likes cars and wants to get laid. That’s it. I don’t think he even gets a moment with his grandfather. I swear he’s in here because some exec went “we need some of that Stranger Things energy. Get someone like that Stranger Things kid. Not him, obviously; someone like him!” Paul Rudd’s charms can only go so far and he’s benched for a good stretch of the proceedings so he can be inside a dog monster. Carrie Coon has a few moments but again is overshadowed by a skybeam bullshit CGI ending and precocious shits taking Ivan Reitman’s movie for a spin down main street.

“He’s in those Marvel movies, he knows how to quizzically react to shit that isn’t there.”

Suffice it to say I didn’t care for Ghostbusters: Afterlife much and I am resigned to the notion that unlike Paul Feig’s shitfest, this will do well enough for a sequel to be greenlit. After all, why would a Ghost Corps production company even exist if they didn’t intend on wringing every last drop from this Gen X fantasia? If this has any relevance to the culture war, and I think it does, it’s that shallow retreads of known properties (known as “the Force Awakens maneuver”) fare better than straightforward remakes that tie into the most tedious cultural debates. Trump doesn’t have a view of Afterlife because it’s unnecessary. Say what you will about Feig’s, it took a chance. Why take a chance now when you can hollow out a beloved toyetic property and wear its skin around? What’d KMFDM say? “Nothing new it’s the same old shit/If it works this good why fuck with it”? I can’t wait to be a decrepit old fuck in 2060, watching a Finn Wolfhard ravaged by age sleepwalk grimace his way through firing a proton pack against nothing to the delight of all the zoomer man-babies. Hopefully the seas have taken us by then.

Also: Ronnie makes Jazz drink what is only known as “The Slimer”.

Created by Jack Kirby when he wanted to continue his Fourth World comics but couldn’t, the Eternals are a group of immortal robots put in place by a giant red dildo thing called a Celestial (those hoping for more Asian representation will be disappointed, we’re not using the Deadwood definition). There are ten of them and none of them have a personality to spare. We’re introduced to all this sprawling mythology with a 5 paragraph text crawl. Star Wars gets away with it. Eternals is no Star Wars. The Eternals are entrusted with the responsibility of safeguarding humanity from attacks by Deviants, who are mostly wolves made of grass and vines who can either easily defeat a single Eternal or be easily defeated by a single Eternal. It doesn’t matter; they’re there as CGI hitboxes for the characters to hurt in uninspired action sequences. Since they’re immortal, Eternals have lived many lives. We don’t get to see any of these, except in three flashbacks across 7000 years. One of them tells lightshow stories for the humans; another builds the engine for humanity and downgrades it to a plow when others tell him that’s too advanced for us.

Number of Japanese people in Eternals: zero.

The film wants to have it both ways when it comes to the extent of the Eternals’ impact on human civilization. Sersi will transmute a dagger into a metal dagger and give it to 7000 B.C. humans. Yet we’re told approximately 40 times that they are not to interfere. So the solution is to interfere but not openly interfere. Nudge, don’t push. Bad writing or subtle writing? I’m going with ‘bad’. Druig in particular wants to mind control all humans so there’s no more war and violence and such. He’s a red herring villain especially as Barry Keoghan is I Can’t Believe It’s Not We Need To Talk About Kevin. Eventually he fucks off to run his own community of mind controlled humans and the other Eternals….let him? And he faces no repercussions in the present for enslaving people for 500 years? If any of this was explored it’d be worthwhile, but it’s not. Eternals morality is basically the same as human morality. It’s easier that way.

So Sersi (Gemma Chan, Captain Marvel) teaches classes at a London museum and is dating Dane Whit(e)man (Kit Harington, Silent Hill: Revelation). She also has a ward, I guess, named Sprite (Lia McHugh, The Lodge). It’s not explained what relation they are to each other. Sersi and Sprite don’t really put an effort into establishing human cover identities, which is why they go by Sersi and Sprite. Apparently Sprite also just tells Whiteman shit about how they’re 7000 year old beings, and it’s not even played as a joke, like “those imaginative kids”. I’ve already lost the plot with “a woman named Sersi with no last name who hangs out with a preteen named Pepsi”. Anyway, a Deviant attacks London and the pair are forced to reveal themselves to the world. This doesn’t matter because humanity is irrelevant to Eternals. Ikaris (Richard Madden, Chatroom) shows up and it becomes a game of getting the band back together. Finding Ajak (Salma Hayek, Grown Ups 2), the Greg of the team, dead at her South Dakota ranch adds a Watchmen dimension to things. Who’s killing assholes wearing Jack Kirby’s 54^th best costume designs? Who cares?

Deviants are called such because they leave the bathroom without washing their hands.

If you think this article has been long and dry for spending so much time introducing the characters that make up the film, that’s it in a microcosm. It takes about 100 minutes for all of the Eternals to join together. Let’s see what other losers this movie has in store. Uh, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani, Stuber) is a Bollywood star who is introduced doing a minute long Bollywood number in English for a movie about Ikaris’ life. Thena (Angelina Jolie, Wanted) and Gilgamesh (Don Lee, Train to Busan) live together in a convalescent home type situation because Thena is suffering from space dementia that causes her eyes to cloud up and to fight everyone around her, including friends. Don’t you hate it when grandma thinks it’s 1954 again and tries to murder you? Druig (Barry Keoghan, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) went off to form his own mind controlled community in the jungles of South America whereas Phastos forsakes humanity after he creates the A-bomb so he moves to Chicago (where black people live? Uh) and gets married to a dude and has a son with him. Yes, Virginia, the MCU has a gay character slightly more developed than Grieving Man from Avengers: Endgame. If Marvel had guts this movie would just be Beau Travail; instead we get one kiss, one mention of “husband”. No sex scene for the gays. Sersi and Ikaris receive one, which consists of them synchronizing shoulder movements on the beach. If trends continue, we’ll get some man-on-man action by Marvel’s 46^th picture. Prepare yourselves for some Iceman/Northstar bareback 69ing. Whether “cinema” will still exist or whether we’ll all be underwater in a climate apocalypse are good questions beyond the purview of this article.

This is basically hardcore pornography. Did Michael Douglas body double for Richard Madden cause this is erotic.

There’s a big twist in Eternals and whether or not you see it coming depends on your level of density. The Eternals are not here to protect humanity, they’re here to burnish the human population so there’s enough people to power the birth of a new Celestial. A big dildo monster resides inside every planet with sentient life on it. The villains weren’t the vine wolfmen, it was the unknowable red dildo the entire time! Thus occurs a philosophical split among the Eternals. Some of them think the Celestials are right, others love humans too much to let the extinction of all life on Earth happen. On one side, Ikaris and Sprite. On the other, everybody else. On the sideline, Kingo, who literally exits the movie after deciding he doesn’t want to use his sick gains to fight his “family”. (He said the magic word! Everything’s a fucking family, found or not, nowadays. Thanks a lot, Michael Schur.) Sprite sides with Ikaris because she’s in love with him, an infatuation lampshaded by somebody comparing him to Peter Pan and her to Tinkerbell. Who’s the alligator with the clock in its mouth? Who gives a shit.

They depart to their big triangle spaceship to try to figure shit out, and I found it was a weird choice to make the Eternals spaceship buried in Iraq. I was hoping when Makkari (finally) showed up she was deformed and shit from all the chemical weapons and waste we dropped on the country during the occupation. The philosophical debate over whether to let the Emergence happen or defy their Celestial master to save humanity ought to be the crux of the movie, but it’s limp and taste-free like everything else. Humans are special, so they deserve to live. The opposing side to this just kicked Salma Hayek onto a hockey rink full of vine wolves. Kingo has the most interesting perspective of siding with Ikaris but refusing to fight anyone. This would be a brave choice if he hadn’t reappeared at the end to send Pepsi off to boarding school and everybody’s acting like nothing happened.

SYNERGY! BUY EVERYTHING YOU MINDLESS DRONE

At times Eternals feels like the third movie in a series because so much of it relies on established interpersonal relationships no one bothered setting up. Like, Phastos will have a remark about having wanted to clip Ikaris’ wings for some time. When? Why? Who the fuck are these people to each other? I’m not a huge fan of Marvel movies but to their credit they have condensed long running characters into simple and relatable personalities. Captain America is the humble leader. Iron Man is the sarcastic genocide participant. Thor is Homer Simpson. And so on. Whereas the Eternals are lucky to have one personality trait between them, and that’s looking dour. The diversity among them becomes the main feature because it’s easier to say “the deaf one” than “the one with a penchant for antiques, no the other one”. I cannot overstate how damp these squibs of heroes are, and if Marvel’s trying to replace the Avengers with them they’ve got another thing coming. Eternals has done the impossible and made me look back fondly at previous Marvel movies.

I joked this scene blew the movie’s kissing budget because later on Sersi/Dane only hug and Druig and Makkari touch foreheads to indicate their love. By 2025, all MCU films will be acted out by eunuchs.

 Because Phastos’ intelligence is indistinguishable from magic, he’s able to whip up a machine that combines their powers if they all put rings on their arms. Or not, because eventually Sersi can take power from characters without one too. It’s some Care Bear bullshit. The original plan is to use Druig, beloved Druig, to mind control Boss Dildo into abandoning his plans, but it falls on Sersi to use her matter transmuting powers to stop Tiamet from being “born” in the first place. Yes, reader, Eternals is about performing a Celestial abortion. They have to try doing this while also contending with Ikaris, who has the same powers as Superman. Have you ever wanted to see nobodies fight an evil Superman? Well, kids, this is slightly better than the Injustice cartoon where Superman is voiced by Justin Hartley.

The result is Tiamet crowns but doesn’t destroy the Earth, leaving this half-head of a Celestial in the ocean for kids to play on. Ikaris decides to commit the Eternal version of seppuku by flying into the Sun, thus fulfilling his character’s name. Wait, but Pepsi confirmed she made up the story about Icarus, so while he’s burning alive is he going “I am doing a killer homage to the myth!”. Big Dildo (David Kaye, Beast Wars) does his best Galactus impression yet basically goes “you got me this time, Eternals” and doesn’t, like, kill them or reset them or punish them in any way. He vows to judge and again, that’s just Galactus. Is MCU Galactus going to be a faceless red thing? Lame.

“I’m very mad at ou!”

Sersi forgives Pepsi and makes her a real girl instead of a 7000 year old who said “give me the Home Improvement kid” at the hairdresser. “No, all of them at once.” With the uni-mind Sersi can transmute anything into anything else, from fancy robot to human being, and it raises some interesting questions as to how they’ll deal with her powers—I mean, it would if there was a chance the Eternals had more than cameos in Phase 4, 5 and 6. It would be funny if the next Avengers Sersi one-shots Kang the Conqueror by turning him into candy corn. The team that’s not a team splits up to continue their lives on Earth or go into space and find more fancy robots that are feeding planets to the Celestial woodchipper. Of course, that’s already undone with one of the post-credits, so what can you do.

Speaking of which! Increasingly MCU movies are less movies and more post-credits scenes delivery apparatuses. Who cares about the thing you just saw when the next big thing is on the horizon? Starfox the love god, aka a rapist, encroaches on the Eternals ship, and Stafox is played by Harry Styles. He too is an Eternal…and Thanos’ brother! Wait, fancy robots can have brothers? There’s also another scene amidst the 15 minutes of credits. Eternals half-assedly set up Dane Whiteman’s arc by having him mention his messed up family history and Sersi suggesting he make up with his uncle when the end of the world is imminent, yada yada yada he’s heir to the Black Knight ebony blade fortune. (Aside: funniest thing is knowing the world is going to end and telling your boyfriend the one thing he should do with his time left is make amends with his uncle.) He contemplates picking it up, then a voice asks if he’s ready. Chloe Zhao confirmed the voice is Blade’s. See, Blade is in charge of seeing if Dane is ready for the Ebony Blade. Blade is black! You could call him EBONY BLADE. It’s all a tapestry.

Patton Oswalt as himself

The pre-release materials drew comparisons between this and Terrence Malick’s films, and I think that’s a disservice to both Eternals and Marvel’s stable of films, to say nothing of Terrence Malick. It seems so condescending for the marketing to hype up the use of natural lighting and real locations, as though that’s a high bar to clear. It also diminishes Marvel’s other films, basically saying they’re bullshit composited entirely on green screen. “Check out Eternals, it’s for REAL PEOPLE!” Pitching this as prestige makes their prior output decidedly NOT prestige by dint of comparison. Never once did I think of Days of Heaven or even Badlands, because no matter who’s responsible, Eternals is pretty bland visually. The colors are muted, the designs of the costumes are ugly (Ajak looks like she’s wearing Mega Man as a skin) and the final sequence that takes about 45 minutes appears to be one of those deserted quarry areas Power Rangers loved employing.

I wonder what Rita Repulsa has in store for them now!

Frankly the film doesn’t look a lot better than your average episode of Power Rangers. The lip sync may be better but the CGI is strictly Playstation 2. These fucking things cost hundreds of millions and yet the CGI always sucks. I don’t get it. 10 years from now we’re going to find out Kevin Feige embezzled a shitload of money out of these. Fucker’s probably hiding the money under his hat. The Deviants don’t look substantially better than the monsters in Lady in the Water for fuck’s sake. Phastos’ power manifests in the ability to make rings and/or fidget spinners, and Kingo does finger guns and nobody stopped that from happening. If these films didn’t rely so much on the spectacle I wouldn’t complain about everything looking somewhat cheap, but they do so I will.

I don’t think I’d be able to determine it’s a Chloe Zhao movie without being told about it beforehand. Some elements of it cry Zhao—Ajak is retired to a ranch in South Dakota—but The Marvel Machine, such as it is, overwhelms her filmmaking. Anybody who tells you this is substantially different from other Marvel movies is a liar or is the kind of freak who will go “you know, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is basically The Parallax View”. It may lack comparatively in the bants—the banter—department, but there’s more than enough comic relief and tension deflating moments to satisfy a Marvel fan. Cell phones going off at inopportune times? You betcha.

“One for the movie that’s upsetting the right people, please.” “What?”

When projections for box office starting trending downward, the marketing team and the principal actors pulled the “oh, it’s the alt-right that hates this”, the same blueprint Ghostbusters: Answer The Call used to…success? Well, they sure used it. Here’s a secret, though: something can be diverse and also suck. There’s a dimension to the woke tug-of-war neither side seems to want to acknowledge. Make no mistake: Eternals does not suck because it’s diverse, it sucks and is diverse. Got it? Speaking of diverse firsts, I do have to question the first deaf hero. Although this way lies madness, I do have to wonder how is it that American Sign Language existed before America did. Also, it seems to me that Makkari can feel the vibrations of people talking and therefore can do better than lipread, we’re falling into the Daredevil territory where a disability is itself a superpower. She can even listen to the complete discography of Spunkadelic via vibration. The fuck’s the downside?

I guess Eternals might be one of the worst MCU offerings yet; it’s hard for me to judge as a diehard hater. Making up shit about Eternals did prove far more fun than the process of actually seeing it. All the memes about Kingo’s death overwhelm the all too real death of Gilgamesh. Remember him? He dies! Nobody cares. Let me remind you: this film is 2 hours and 40 minutes and you feel every minute of that runtime. Does it matter, though? Can the MCU fail or can it only BE failed? It seems like everybody’s failing upwards on this one. The opening weekend was $70 million and Zhao is rumored to be directing the Kevin Feige produced Star Wars. Everybody wins except me, who spent his Friday morning ruminating on the interminable.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my little (long) article on how much Eternals sucked. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to protect Shailene Woodley’s reputation from the braying hordes that place the blame for Aaron Rodgers’ turn on her shoulders.

So what is Dear Evan Hansen besides a Tony Award winning musical that has been adapted years after the fact, years for critics to really stew on it and realize “hey, this is fucking bullshit”? Well, the long and short of it, and perhaps the reason I’m drawn to it, is that it’s a gene slamming of Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad and Strangers With Candy. Coincidentally those happen to both be things I enjoy a lot. The critics have seized upon comparisons between the former but not the latter, so I hope this review will make a case for Evan Hansen as basically being a male version of Amy Sedaris’ iconic Jerri Blank. The capsule synopsis for this trainwreck is that a couple who lose their son to suicide erroneously believe Evan Hansen to be their dead son’s only friend and a letter Evan wrote to himself to be dead son’s final correspondence. From there Evan is thrust into the limelight. The broad strokes apply to World’s Greatest Dad, only replace “Evan Hansen” with “Robin Williams” and the dead kid is Robin Williams’ son, not his contemporary. Needless to say, The Bobcat manages social satire a lot better than Dear Evan Hansen, showing how a suicide will often cause people to make the event about themselves to the point of rewriting their own relationship with the deceased. “But Ronnie,” you plead. “Dear Evan Hansen isn’t trying to be ‘social satire’ starring one of the finest comedic performers of a generation in a multifaceted comedic/dramatic role, it’s trying to be unrelenting nightmare fuel.”

Let’s start with the slouching, freakish elephant in the room: Ben Platt. Ben Platt played Evan Hansen on the stage, and he was carried over for the film adaptation. Here’s a fact that has nothing to do with anything: Ben’s father, Marc Platt, produced the film. I just thought you’d like to know that totally unrelated tidbit. Well, in the silent era Ben may have been age appropriate, but now he’s well past high school age and looks it. This wouldn’t be such a problem if he weren’t acting against people who still plausibly look like high schoolers, such as Kaitlyn Dever and Amandla Stenberg. (That they’re much better at acting isn’t helpful either.) Thus the comparisons to Jerri Blank, the 46 year old high school student whose rough living was a parody of public speaker/cautionary tale Florrie Fisher. Whereas Sedaris made Jerri grotesque on purpose, with Evan Hansen it seems to be unintentional. Platt tries to affect a teen demeanor by slouching (kids hate posture) and a haircut that valiantly but poorly fights against a receding hairline. He also went on a diet so as to create the emaciated look that American high schoolers have if they also did a summer trip to The Sudan. Really, if the rest of Dear Evan Hansen was of immaculate construction, Platt would still sink it because he’s such an incongruous presence. You know how chimps will kill other chimps not of their tribe? I kept waiting for the other high school students to recognize Evan was “wrong” and tear his weary, withering face off.

See, we only had to deal with an episode of this shit on Dexter. In DEH it’s 130-goddamn-7 minutes.

We’re introduced to Evan writing a letter addressed to himself (the first shot is a Word document, always a winner). In it he extols to himself to be himself, albeit more confident and approachable, claiming this year will be different from other years. Immediately there’s a problem because Ben Platt is so old looking I don’t know what the fuck year he is. Sophomore? Junior? Guy held back for the entire length of CSI: Miami’s run? He sings a jaunty little tune and takes some pill brand pills. Multiple prescriptions. Who cares “what the prescriptions are”, they’re a shorthand for THIS SENIOR CITIZEN KID IS FUCKED UP. He’s such a social disaster an interaction with a DoorDash driver is out of the question. It turns out the letter writing is an edict by a doctor and his mother, Julianne Moore (Suburbicon), seems intent on him sticking to it. He has a cast on his arm which is a Chekhovian device. (First and last time this shit gets compared to Chekhov.)

OH COME ON–THEY NAME THE TEAM THE BOBCATS? SALT IN THE WOUND, YOU ASSHOLES

His supporting cast consists of bitchy queen “family friend” Jared (Nik Dodani, student organizer for Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign) and his crush Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever, Last Man Standing). Jared shits on Evan like only a movie character would (as in Evan never says “that’s really gratuitously hurtful” or punches him in the face) and Zoe doesn’t know he exists, Evan professes, though she knows his name and immediately offers him an opportunity to talk to her. Evan rewrites the letter. “Face it, would anyone notice if I just disappeared tomorrow?” What a novel observation. The only more unpopular kid than him, Connor, signs Evan’s cast (“Now we can both pretend we have friends”), steals his letter and shortly thereafter kills himself. I would do the same if I were stuck in Dear Evan Hansen. Evan spends a long time searching social media for variations on “Evan Hansen letter”—Facebook, Reddit, the works. Revenge porn is a thing. This is not a thing.

Formerly-acclaimed-now-“her-again?” actress Amy Adams (Hillbilly Elegy) and Danny Pino (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) confront Evan with the letter, and extrapolate from its existence that he and Connor were close friends. Now this is an object lesson on what to do and what not to do in a situation. DO: Tell the truth, because the momentary embarrassment of admitting to a therapeutic exercise is nothing compared to the cruelty of giving a grieving couple a false impression. DON’T: The rest of Dear Evan Hansen. The Murphys invite him over for dinner and immediately the lie almost crumbles under its own weight because no one can find any sort of digital correspondence between the two. Amy Adams, playing her role with a Stepford smile of desperation and a glass of wine as if to say “FILL IN YOUR OWN CHARACTERIZATION BLANKS YOU STUPID FUCKS”, explains it away with talk of secret, hidden accounts. Zoe, to her credit, thinks her brother was “bad” and won’t entertain a charitable viewpoint mere days after his passing. Through a couple of context clues and a grieving family nudging him in the right direction, Evan is able to spin a tale of him and Connor going to a rundown apple orchard. What kid’s favorite place is an apple orchard? No wonder Connor hanged himself. Shot himself? The movie never specifies, which I think is a mistake. Inquiring minds want to know!

That the most elaborate the choreography gets is the song covering Evan and Jared creating fake e-mails for social profit definitely does not indicate we’re dealing with the shittiest people in the world. I kept thinking of The Producers. “We could make more money with a false friendship than a real one?”

The sassy gay helps Evan fabricate reams of digital backstory for the friendship, which he turns over to the Murphy family, as though that’s not an invasion of privacy at the least. When I die of a rage stroke ranting about the Season 29 finale of Law & Order: SVU, I hope my asshole friends don’t share all my Zoe Kazan zingers and flagellating whining from the groupchat with my parents. It’s a real ethical grey area because of course it’s all made up, but still. Evan and Zoe bond over dead and absent dads and he smuggles in his infatuation with Zoe through some “observations” from Connor. (Funny route the movie doesn’t take: Zoe misinterprets and comes under the impression Connor wanted to fuck her.) The problem with this scene is that Evan knows so much about her he’s a stalker at best and at worst we started the film about two weeks before he began his effort to make a suit out of Kaitlyn Dever. I mean, that sort of tonal discordance encapsulates the problems with this thing.

When the film doesn’t know what to do, it pivots to song, all of which are ballads that require no interesting choreography that even The Simpsons knows to do with musical numbers. You know, for a musical there’s not a whole lot of songs, to the point that I occasionally forgot what I was watching. They disrupt the momentum. I’m not a man with a long handshake, if you know what I mean ;), so I can’t judge their actual quality, but I will say you could cut them out and you would not lose plot nor aesthetical beauty. The musical interludes seem to exist so you’ll think less of World’s Greatest Dad. “Robin Williams didn’t belt out some bathetic tunes, it’s totally different”. The commercials tout the involvement of songwriters from The Greatest Showman and La La Land, which makes sense, because those two movies were also questionable rehabilitation of monsters, (P.T. Barnum and a white jazz fan, respectively). Although I am not a confirmed bachelor and as such my criterion of judging musical material is irrelevant, none of the songs are memorable. That’s what the goal is, right? The only thing I’ll remember is the cognitive dissonance of seeing Danny Pino somberly singing in his office and me thinking “man, you’re a ways off from getting half your face burned off on The Shield, aren’t you?”.

Wow. Inspiring!

The big musical number “You Will Be Found” is really the crux of the whole disaster, though. It creates problems because it happens to be recorded and placed online, whereupon it becomes a viral sensation. I’m not lying when I say one of the uploads titles it “His Best Friend Died… You Won’t Believe What He Did Next!”. Dirty pool, movie; that’s a Buzzfeed article title, not a YouTube video title. The aforementioned problems I find with this is if Evan sang a song about how none of us are truly alone (except for those of who can’t profit off of someone’s suicide, of course) and we’re to believe the singing is a conceit/artistic license and no one is actually singing…what the fuck is on the video? Is it the song lyrics only spoken? Is it the video from The Ring? Do we risk a 40 year old man calling us up and croaking “seven days”? Good musicals don’t make you think about that shit, whereas Dear Evan Hansen’s inability to create a coherent reality left me puzzled. Anyway, like I said, it goes viral and there’s a Greek chorus of people who record videos of themselves speaking to the power of the original video. A lot of these people are black and while I don’t want to really delve into the racial politics of this movie, black people by and large have institutional quality of life problems that will not be allayed by an old man singing a jaunty tune about teenage suicide. Nor would they find kinship in some fucking asshole eligible for his AARP membership laying out the most basic of homilies against alienation. No one would, really. The content mills might pick it up, but those finding it inspiring would be met in equal number by those who found it cringe. Imagine what Weird Twitter would do to Evan Hansen. It’d be elder abuse!

That face when you’re not even getting nominated.

Alana (Amandla Stenberg, that fucking movie where she was allergic to everything but it turned out her mom was gaslighting her) creates The Connor Project to raise awareness about suicide and such. First of all, terrible name. No one will give money to anything named Connor. You hear “Connor”, you picture stupid Superman clones and fey Green Arrow sons, or at least I do. Name it The Murphy Project, the kid’s last name. That way you get some old school micks who will mistake the thing as a money laundering operation for the IRA. Second, the movie never bothers to explore the commodification of grief and trauma, so this plot element passes by without comment. No one acts as though it’s fucked up the organization was founded by the striving overachiever who’s president of all the school clubs. Jared also receives a karmic free pass for faking e-mails between Evan and Connor. I thought he’d be a plot point later on, like he’d get an attack of conscience or he’d threaten to bring down Evan and Evan would have to rub him out lest the house of cards come crashing down. Well, that’d be potentially interesting conflict whereas this production would rather luxuriate in what can only be described as grief peacocking.

See, Dear Evan Hansen would’ve made a great black comedy because it did make a good black comedy when it was World’s Greatest Dad. Moreover, the conclusions Evan draws from this ordeal are the exact sort of twisted narcissism and missing the point of an episode of Strangers With Candy, which existed to make a mockery of the very idea of learning anything from heavy handed afterschool specials and public service announcement campaigns. I can picture it now: a kid at Flatpoint kills themselves, and through some comedic hijinks the lesson Jerri learns and imparts to the audience is that someone’s suicide is really about you. The issue that turns everything here to shit lies with the film’s decision to play everything straight. Evan having to be on the board of the Connor Project should be akin to George Constanza’s involvement in The Susan Ross Foundation. There’s a streak of Costanza in Evan; I would’ve given my eye teeth for his ‘confession’ to consist of being confronted and after a long pause he’d say “was that wrong? Should I not have done that? Cause I gotta tell ya…”.

“I stole the TV. Did some more time…”

Another thing: Dear Evan Hansen suffers from, well, its focus on Evan Hansen. “The solipsistic liar” is the least interesting character in the movie. To be fair, Ben Platt being a shitty actor—a collection of tics and nothing more—contributes to this. Maybe he’s a revelation on stage, I don’t know. But in movieland he fucking stinks. Whatever his talents, they don’t lie with playing a believable alienated teenage boy. He’d be better off attached to one of those umpteenth Ted Bundy projects, although Ted only lived to 42 so Platt might have aged out of the role already. I’m not saying the writing is great or any of these people portray fully realized characters but focusing on Kaitlyn Dever’s Zoe—whose arc is reconciling the bad parts of her brother with the good parts—would’ve worked. Amy Adams and Danny Pino would’ve worked. Hell, what’s Jared’s perspective? He’s Evan’s co-conspirator and he disappears for long stretches of the runtime. Is Alana running The Connor Project out of altruism or because it adds to the college application? Take the focus off the fucking old man for a moment to create a more multifaceted approach to how a community deals with and internalizes a tragic event and you’d have something better.

He’d make for a good Joker, I’ll admit. I’m terrified already!

Things escalate when Alana starts questioning the official timeline of the friendship, so Evan offers up the titular letter, which she promptly leaks online to get more donations to The Connor Project. This causes a social media firestorm in which everyone blames Connor’s family for his suicide. It takes 100 minutes in a 137 minute picture for Evan to finally confess in a poorly realized musical number. “I’m a fucking bet?” from She’s All That moment this is not. The family decides not to publicize the fraud. I like the Murphys rationale that subjecting Evan to such heat (also known as “the repercussions of his actions”) would cause him to kill himself. Maybe it’s because people would want their donations back, huh? Evan eventually does the right thing, by which I mean puts up a cell phone video of him admitting everything. It’s the “notes app” apology, people. This all does hew to the typical viral sensation in that eventually it comes out it was all calculated by some cold blooded reptile, or in this case a jittery Boomer in Gen Z-face.

For once, Reddit has it right.

Of course, we can’t end this garbage on a down note in which everybody’s unhappy and things are unresolved. What is this, The Graduate? A thousand times no! This is inspirational, somehow, I guess! Once again a pariah, Evan does the bare minimum and finds a Facebook video Connor was tagged in and starts e-mail fellow tagged people, asking for information about Connor. I’m not sure how he got past the ”yep, that’s me asking, the huge liar”, but Dear Evan Hansen is like jazz: it’s about the logical storytelling you don’t see. He looks up in the yearbook a list of Connor’s favorite books, which include Cat’s Cradle and Ready Player One, which is like saying “oh yeah, my favorite foods are filet mignon and a bag of used diapers” and starts reading them. I thought this might be leading in the direction of Evan developing a Dark Half, but unfortunately that’s not the case. He finds a video of Connor playing the guitar for his rehab buddies—it’s a plot point that Connor refused to play in front of his family—and we get this sequence of Evan mailing off flash drives containing the video like some sort of Johnny Appleseed. The staging of this movie is so bad that several characters open the big mailer while sitting in front of their computer. They don’t know it’s a flash drive yet, what the hell. Also, who sight unseen places an anonymously sent flash drive in their computer system? Idiots, I guess, so that tracks. Better title for the movie: The Town That Never Banned Lead Paint.

Every scene of Zoe and Evan together has the same tension to it as the moments between the Monster and the little girl in Frankenstein.

The film frames this journey of discovery about the real Connor being the rehabilitation of Evan, to the point that Zoe even invites him to the famed orchard that Connor so loved, so Evan could see it at least one time. Why? Why the fuck would that matter? How does any of this make up for the fact that Evan gaslit the entire goddamn town AND the world wide web? At first I thought this was gonna be a Miller’s Crossing thing and Hansen would have to beg for his life. Not so! They don’t get back together but they do depart on friendly terms. The lesson seems to be that life is one big jumble, so if a liar concerts a scheme of malicious gaslighting but it eventually pays dividends, well, fair dues. Literally no one would’ve thought “hey I wonder if the people who literally LIVED WITH HIM at a rehab facility have anything to say about him” except the Big White Guy. Zoe’s literally just a girl, she don’t know how to “research”. Never read a page of Ready Player One in her life!

Uh, you might say Kurt would be Vonnegutted to be on the same list as Ready Player One!

Director Stephen Chbosky (age 51, so a contemporary of Ben Platt) is definitely attracted to a “type” of shitty movie, in that his previous directorial efforts The Perks of Being a Wallflower (spoiler: the perk is you get to be molested by Heavenly Creatures’ Melanie Lynskey) and Wonder can both be described as paeans to outsiders, just like Dear Evan Hansen. If you need someone to do the dirty deed of “cloying trash”, Chbosky’s your man. The difference is the outsider status on those pictures is earned, by either child molestation or being an Elephant Man like Jacob Tremblay was in Wonder. What the fuck is Evan Hansen’s excuse, besides being unconscionably elderly? A lot of people, especially in high school, feel like outsiders. Sometimes it’s due to being a racial or sexual identity minority. Sometimes it’s due to mental health issues. Sometimes it comes down to “shyness”. Hansen definitely suffers from some strain of social anxiety but mainly his problem is he’s a fucking 48 year old man pretending as a teenager. There’s nothing relatable or positive to his character, because for 2 hours of the 2 hours 17 minutes he’s a lying, opportunistic Rasputin to the Murphy family with the most half-assed restitution this side of the Pentagon going “oops that drone strike actually killed seven civilians sowwy ☹”. Anybody who sees this shit and goes “it me, I’m that” ought to be put under Arkham Asylum.

It’s for this reason the big reconciliation of sorts between Evan and Julianne Moore falls flat. She’s barely been a character, being busy at the hospital factory, whenever he needs her, and when she is there he whines that he’s a burden on her and the worst thing to ever happen to her. While I don’t know the ins and outs of fictional Julianne Moore’s life, I’m going to go ahead and say “true”. The heartstring pulling “I’m broken” “no you’re not” conversation doesn’t work if the film does nothing to dispute the notion that he is broken. Let’s face it, Citytown USA would be better off if Evan Hansen’s suicide attempt worked. (It’s at this juncture he confirms the heavily foreshadowed truth that he tried to kill himself by throwing himself out of a tree. Hence the cast.) All he’s been using that cast for is showing vulnerability while moving a couch or other piece of furniture in a store parking lot. Stop this motherfucker before he even starts that woman suit, you know? I’m not exaggerating for comic effect when I claim Evan Hansen is the most detestable fictional character I’ve encountered in quite some time. Eddie Haskell, The Ice Truck Killer, Jeff Daniels in The Newsroom don’t even compare. Evan is: cowardly, deceitful, self-centered, narcissistic… I could go on but I’d sound like an FBI profiler. He’s gonna grow up to be the guy throwing cum at Starling in Silence of the Lambs.

Asking the questions DEH is afraid to ask.

While I’m at it, let me recommend another movie in which a weird outsider brings a family closer together through unorthodox methods. Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q is much, much better piece of art than Dear Evan Hansen. Really, any usurper narrative works better, from Teorema to The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. That’s what this is, when you get down to it: Evan bumbles into a family unit with a gaping hole in it and becomes a better son to Amy Adams and Danny Pino and a better brother/lover (don’t knock it; incest is ‘in’ in America, as evidenced by our porn statistics) to Kaitlyn Dever than Connor ever was. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention there’s an element of class envy here. Evan’s mom is always at working as a nurse, whereas the Murphys are rich enough that Amy Adams can take up hobbies like “Buddhism” and Danny Pino works at what can only be called the business factory. In fact, they even offer to pay for Evan’s college education, because it’s not like Connor is gonna use the money. Like most everything in this farce of a film, though, this class element is underdeveloped and may as well have been excised. Better to reintegrate those deleted scenes of Evan setting fires, wetting his bed and experimenting on animals in his shed in the woods.

Evan Hansen speaking truth to power.

I hope and expect a strong rebuke of this pandering nonsense in the only truly democratic organ in the nation: the box office. Despite already being the owner of an Emmy, Grammy and a Tony, the future does not look bright for Ben Platt. I daresay Dear Evan Hansen could be a career killing project and performance. It’s that bad. He’ll have a hell of a time achieving the EGOT, that’s for sure. I looked him up and his only upcoming film project is Merrily We Roll Along, a Richard Linklater directed adaptation of play of same name that will be, akin to Boyhood, filmed over the course of 20 years in an effort to portray realistic aging. Man, what is Dick Link thinking. This is his most curious decision since “I oughta really put a camera in front of this Alex Jones character”.  If Ben Platt already looks old for his age, what the hell will he be in 20 years, you may wonder. Well, we at Rhymes With Nerdy actually have access to a time machine and can show you what Ben Platt will look like in 2040. Here it goes.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my dissection of further proof that what works on Broadway doesn’t translate to Hollyweird, as if Cats wasn’t enough of a shot across the bow. It says a lot that a picture that has James Corden as a man-cat singing about bullshit raises my ire less than this cacophony of dark triad warning signs. The only way Universal will be able to salvage the hours that went into this is if they pull it off the market, change the title to Evan Hansen: Portrait of a Serial Killer and have it compete against Halloween Kills in October.

Steve Carell plays Gary Zimmer, an amalgamation of all the unflattering elements about Democratic DC insiders, and he’s smarting from bold proclamations about Hillary’s inevitable victory. (In a stylistic swipe so blatant Michael Moore should sue, Stewart represents the 2016 election with that footage of the cannonball hitting the guy in the stomach.) He seeks redemption in the form of trojan horsing Chris Cooper’s Col. Jack Hastings into the position of mayor of Deerlaken, Wisconsin, thereby reinvigorating the Party’s fortunes in the Rust Belt. He’s convinced to do this after witnessing a viral video of Hastings giving an impassioned common sense speech defending the rights of undocumented workers and for the indigent not to be burdened by arduous voter ID laws. (This is never brought up again in the film.) Zimmer sets his sights on Deerlaken and sets up shop, never able to get somebody’s WiFi password because WiFi is too advanced for the yokels.

Portraits in Eating Shit

The plot goes how you’d expect it to: Democrats and Republicans both comically inflate the mayoral race’s relevance and the media starts treating it as a bellwether for all sorts of national trends. The GOP is represented by Rose Byrne’s Faith Brewster, the stereotypical sexpot Republican who will lick a face as a goodbye. Zimmer supplements himself with Nate Silver data people played by Topher Grace and Natasha Lyonne, leading to lots of jokes about how they view humanity through a highly impersonal lens that contrasts with the down to earth, hard scrabble folk of the Heartland. There’s coffee jokes; it’s pretty dire. The escalation never results in anything funny either, and the fake campaign ads aren’t anywhere near as insane as real campaign ads. Carly Fiorina’s demon sheep ad remains above and beyond whatever Stewart can muster.

For long stretches the film goes episodic, like Hastings and Zimmer heading to New York to woo donors and Hastings giving a short, curt and confused “speech” that convinces Zimmer he’s on the right track about the perfidy of money in politics. He told it like it is! There’s a baffling scene of a Sheldon Adelson-type robotic geriatric whose only question in exchange for support concerns Hastings’ stance on settlements. Yet it still might be the best joke in the movie, because at least it’s something specific rooted in political reality (the Israel lobby) that represents a comedic risk. It beats Rose Byrne telling Steve Carell he has a vagina. But the general thrust resembles a number of other bad campaign movies, from The Campaign to Welcome to Mooseport to Swing Vote: escalation. The Republicans play dirty! The Democrats stoop to their level! Politics sure is ridiculous, isn’t it? I’m reminded of David X. Cohen noting on a Simpsons commentary track that most political satire boiling down to “both parties are corrupt and voting doesn’t matter” and this doesn’t stray from that.

This is meant to be a goof on the infamous “Jeb!” campaign, but it seems to think the humor in that came from the unorthodox punctuation and not the vast gap of enthusiasm between the slogan and the campaign.

Lest this article go on forever, let’s cut to the twist, and there is a twist. The election is an inside job, which the operatives realize when no one casts a vote. See, the town needed money after the military base closed and they settled upon tricking the Democrats and Republicans into sinking money into a fictional mayoral race. The video was staged. Zimmer feels betrayed, but as the townsfolk point out, the parties don’t care about small town hardscrabble salt of the earth farting off the overalls people except for when a presidential election rolls around. Take THAT, Democrats! Hastings’ attractive daughter (who previous to this exists mostly to receive leers from Steve Carell) eventually becomes the mayor FOR REAL while Zimmer and Faith Brewster are in a hate-filled sexual relationship. Get it, the Democrats and Republicans are literally in bed with each other. Does that blow your mind, man? Maybe Irresistible presumes Stewart’s audience never aged past his schtick, because these satirical points would only educate a 15 year old. Roll credits and some horseshit interview with the former chair of the FEC. Sorry, if names are on the screen I’m not paying attention anymore. You can’t make me do more homework, dad.

Steve Carell looks the way the audience feels!

It’d be pernicious enough if Irresistible was just a bad comedy, but it is much more than simply a failure to elicit laughs. It is an attempt by a beloved comedy elder statesman to make a biting, acidic satire powered by an ideology that is utterly defanged and drained of all potency. In Irresistible, Jon Stewart is trying to move the conversation by pushing a rope. Even with its Big Twist Ending, the film misunderstands its own terrain so badly and arrives at so laughable a diagnosis for What Went Wrong With Politics that this ostensibly devious upending just reinforces that Stewart is the butt of his own joke without seeming to realize it.

There are any number of things that hit a sour note for me throughout the film, but there is one major one that illustrates how limited Stewart’s political horizons are, and the twist ending does nothing to change it. Very early in the film, it is introduced that Deerlaken is in so dire a financial condition that it is at risk of losing its high school, presumably to have it be absorbed into central school at the county seat two towns over or whatever. The reason given is “the base closed.” We never learn much beyond that, but Deerlaken’s strip club and Dodge Charger dealership based economy was decimated. Deerlaken as a whole is thinly sketched, certainly in effort to be an “everytown”, but the result is that there’s no telling whether it’s a town of under 1000 people or something larger. I lean towards the former because Jon didn’t hire a lot of extras and as director has no sense of scale.

Conservatism has evolved so far past “_____ hates the troops” that this seems almost quaint.

In trying to reconstruct Stewart’s thought process, I imagine he sought to demonstrate how government budget cuts are harmful but needed something that the Real Americans in his story would be upset about were it to be cut. So he landed on that beleaguered program which is always fighting for its life to make sure its budget increases by $700 million every year: the military! Which is not to say a town next to an army base wouldn’t feel the pinch if that base were closed or relocated, but this is a fable, the reality is totally Stewart’s to shape. He could have gone with the very REAL problem of decades of disinvestment on the part of the owning class in manufacturing in the Rust Belt in favor of exploiting an even more desperate labor pool. Instead, Deerlaken’s plight results from a lack of Military Keynesianism, where we could not possibly disinvest from the global imperial war machine to deploy our collective resources elsewhere like, say, Medicare for All or transitioning to a sustainable energy model because jobs jobs jobs. Anyway, defund the military.

As mentioned before, in the inciting speech The Colonel gives, he mentions undocumented people living in Deerlaken who stand to be disenfranchised if the town passes a voter ID law. At no point do these people come up again, not even as a potential voter base for the supposedly victory-driven Zimmer to exploit through, say, a registration drive. After the Big Twist when it’s revealed that The Colonel’s speech was all contrived to attract the attention of DNC snakes like Zimmer, I was even more baffled by this choice and how I was supposed to interpret it. Either there never were people who helped save the town during a flood but who would have difficulty providing documentation, or there are such people in the vaguely sized town of Deerlaken whose continued disenfranchisement is beneath notice to every single character. I guess this can be explained away itself by the notion that the whole town was in on it to throw the election anyway, but as someone who lives in a state where the suppression of votes from impoverished people and black people is a profoundly real issue, I couldn’t gin up a lot of delight in the pluck of those slick small towners in picking the perfect issue to sucker in the Fat Cats. At best it comes off as ponderous. Ponderous is a good way to describe Irresistible, because nearly every choice, every development compels one to think “what if Stewart trying to do? What does he mean by this?”. It’s as though he created the perfect film for a freshman year critical analysis pop quiz.

When being ironically reductive becomes being reductive

Speaking of suckering the Fat Cats, let’s get to the whole raison d’etre of this grim exercise: the twist ending where it is revealed that the whole thing was a put on to bilk the Democratic party donor class into dumping dark money into a SuperPAC run by the townsfolk themselves. This entire feature length dirge of latte-sipping-Volvo-driver jokes and radical tone shifts to introduce a light ribbing of the Keep Palestine Occupied lobby was all in the service of highlighting that most dire of political issues: campaign finance reform. Lest you think that this was simply one element of a wider critique, Stewart helpfully appends the movie with a credits sequence interview with Republican campaign lawyer Trevor Potter, who explains how the Deerlakener’s (Deerlacunian’s? Deerlakerling’s?) scam would be possible under the law.

Here is where the joke is on Stewart. The entire thesis of Irresistible is that liberal politicians are unable to break through with “Red State” voters because they are so tied up in the world of special interests and donor priorities that they have lost the ability to see what ordinary people’s problems are and speak to them. This I would agree with him on, although I believe he sees it as Clouseausque bumbling, unintended ignorance, whereas I believe there is clear eyed intent. Where we seriously part ways is Stewart’s prescription of campaign finance reform to somehow redress this.

It’s pretty much spelled out by Stewart’s interview with Potter that he believes the primary impediment to making the Democratic Party relevant to a wider swath of voters in depressed parts of the country is to simply overturn Citizens United and make a few other tweaks to the campaign finance system and voila, now politicians won’t be beholden to corporate front groups and the ultrawealthy! Or at least, a level playing field (that great golden idol that liberals worship) would result in a Democratic party that is at least more responsive to the priorities of non-donor-class Americans.

If there’s anyone invested in a mayoral election, it’s the rural Wisconsin chapter of ANTIFA. Also, I like how because of COVID-19 the joke changes from “hey look it’s ANTIFA” to “hey look it’s citizens doing the bare minimum of due diligence to stem spread of the virus”.

I have nothing against campaign finance reform in itself, but this idea that it’s the skeleton key to Repair Our Democracy makes me want to tear my hair out. It’s the same rules-based theory of power that more or less well-meaning liberals spend all their energy on only to see it amount to a hill of beans when no one with the power to enforce the rule cares (see the Mueller investigation or the impeachment trial). What makes it so frustrating is that there is the glimmer of recognition of class conflict in this idea, that there are well-heeled people thwarting the will of poor people. But how does campaign financing transparency help the fact that our legislators are all personally invested in oil and gas companies? How does stopping dark money stop the fact that high ranking advisors in the Obama administration were literally on the corporate board for crowdfunding websites that make up to a third of their revenue from people begging for their lives to pay for medicine? How does campaign finance reform grapple with the fact that the very political actors themselves ARE the wealthy?

Jon Stewart is so out to sea as a director that he casts Will Sasso and gives him NOTHING TO DO.

In this attempt to skewer the hapless Democratic party for being totally out of touch with the political priorities of working people, Stewart has demonstrated just how out of step he himself is with the political priorities of working people. By combining a dated understanding of political fault lines, a parodic vision of the political lanyard class that reads more indulgently affectionate that oppositional, and a prescribed cure that amounts to so much rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic that is bourgeois representative democracy, Stewart has shown he’s as much of a joke as anyone in Irresistible.

Is Debra Messing playing herself?

A misaimed political message wouldn’t leave the film DOA if anything else in it worked. Carell bemoans the Democrats’ inability to talk to guys like Chris Cooper, as though that’s why the Democrats have lost voters to Republicans or apathy. Economics isn’t so much as mentioned. In the world of Irresistible, the Democrats’ problem is they’re elitist dweebs, which is true on the surface but facile and misleading. Yes, Dems are elitists. Yes, they are dweebs. But that doesn’t begin to explain the Party’s rightward shift that prioritized being business-friendly over its historical alliance with labor. Nor do the Republicans at all resemble what they are now: a White Nationalist party with nary a figleaf of legitimacy to hide behind. The film’s critique of the GOP is they’re mean and underhanded, which duh. But like Democrats’ selling out the labor class, nobody mentions that the Republicans trade on white grievance to win elections. This is why everything feels so dated: Rose Byrne feels welcome in the 2006 Republican Party, whereas today she’d be a Democrat. Byrne’s replacement would believe in QAnon and call opponents cuck pedophiles.

I hate it when an earnest 13 year old sneaks into the editing booth!

Really, it comes down to the film being, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, unstuck in time. Everything, from Jon’s underlying message to the premise itself, makes sense if he wrote it 15 years ago, exhumed it today, changed nothing and shot it as is. Basically every contemporary political issue of importance is absent, from Black Lives Matter to Medicare For All. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say the phrase “Campaign Finance Reform” since President Baby took office. Once someone like that is president, it’s like investing in insurance after the bull left the china shop. There’s no point! It’s all fucked! To be charitable, maybe Stewart tried to avoid the post-Trump landscape in order to create a more timeless satire. If so, it backfired, because he inadvertently tied it to The Daily Show’s heyday. Sorry, but we can’t go back there.

Don’t tell me what to do, movie! I swear to god I’ll vote Jill Stein again!

I know from the last couple thousand words of this review you’ll get the sense that under no circumstances you ought to watch Irresistible, but I actually do recommend it in the sense that seeing is believing. Jon Stewart was one of the most beloved comedic voices of an era, scattered criticism be damned. So to see him return from exile with a masterpiece of lazy both sides centrism and lame city slicker culture shock jokes may not be necessarily unexpected, but it’s certainly an event. Like when someone slips and falls down some subway stairs. That’s what you ought to think of this as: a 104 minute fail video. Do the kids still say fail? Jesus, I’m out of touch. Maybe I am the intended audience for Irresistible…