You say you want a (Step Up) Revolution?

Admiration must be paid to a movie like Step Up Revolution. It promises dancing and, wow, does it deliver. No shortchanging here.

I've reviewed all the Step Up movies, almost always with wanton disregard for the actual dancing, which is frequently undercut by the atrocious acting or sloppy writing. Maybe I'm lightening up, or perhaps this Step Up is just a better movie, but I found it less grating than the others. Parts of it were even enjoyable. (Insert gasp here.)

This Step Up begins like many of the others: dancers are still spontaneously overcome by their joint-cracking, muscle-tearing dance moves. There's Boy Dancer and Girl Dancer and one of them always has a big audition that looms over the final 20 minutes of the movie. Boy Dancer usually has to teach Girl Dancer how to do a special dance move, which means he has to put his hands in some especially scandalous PG-13 zones and before long they're kissing on the dancefloor. After four movies of this, the plots really must write themselves.

Boy Dancer here is Sean (Ryan Guzman) and he works at a swanky Miami Beach hotel. Sean and his buddies sabotage public gatherings with their pre-planned flash mobs. They take over busy Miami intersections, art museums, cocktail parties and skyscraper lobbies. They call themselves The Mob and they make no attempt to distance themselves from organized crime. The mafia apparently don't dance. I don't blame the movie for this oversight because, after all, these kids have one-track minds — every second of their lives is devoted to dance. 

Step Up Revolution suggests flash mobs are performance art. That may be true, but the ones shown in the movie are some of the weakest forms. Flash mobs are less about the performers and more about the audience, especially the random pedestrians who open themselves up to personal discovery within the public spaces they occupy. People go to the theater for live shows, but with flash mobs the performance comes to them without warning, and by doing so it invokes a deeper commitment from the audience to watch, to participate and to interact. If this medium interests you, Google the flash mobbers Improv Everywhere. This is a group — with its black-tie beach parties, pants-less subway cars and frozen train stations — that is taking flash mobs into the realm of performance art. Rarely do they dance.

But here in Step Up Revolution, flash mobs are more ego-driven — "Hey, look what I can do!" They rarely involve the audience other than to fill the background. Does this make the dancing — mixtures of popping, breaking, krumping and random bits of everything else — any less effective? No, but Step Up has no clue what a real flash mob is.

Anyway, Sean teams up with his Girl Dancer, Emily (Kathryn McCormick), to take on a big corporation that plans on building a new hotel mega-fortress right where The Mob happens to practice and hang out. As it turns out, Emily is the daughter of the CEO, which adds lots of family drama to an otherwise banal "corporation is evil" plot. They often find themselves dancing to bass-heavy dubstep, which dates the movie for time and all eternity in 2011, with its humping fax machines and dial-up screech. 

People who enjoy dancing will approve of Step Up Revolution. And why shouldn't they? It's a wall-to-wall dance movie with many locations, a variety of dance styles and hundreds of talented dancers. I can't tell you if the dancing is technically challenging or innovative, but it looked impressive on a big screen as people twisted and turned, flipped over each other, slid under legs and, at one point, catapulted off the hoods of hydraulically-operated lowriders. I didn't mind all this high-octane spazz-dancing, but it did make me miss the grace of say Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers or Gene Kelly. Few dancers impress me like the greats.

You're reading my review correctly if you've understood my appreciation for this movie as a guilty pressure, so-bad-i'ts-good sorta thing. But Step Up does make a fatal error, though, one that is very hard to overlook. The whole movie is spent bashing corporations and their villainous pursuits of profits, even if it means crushing Granny's house into dust to put up one of those pools with a bar that extends below the water line. But at the end of the movie — right after The Mob finds out if they've saved the old neighborhood or not — an ad executive tells them he likes their work. "I do ads for Nike. We want to take their advertising in a new direction. What do you say you join us?" One dancer can barely contain himself: "Where do I sign?"

Nike is a huge corporation, one that has proudly sent almost all of its production to other countries, where claims of child labor, human rights violations and sweatshops have persisted for the last 20 years. By introducing Nike to the conversation — and then having The Mob accept it against their better judgment — it devalues the entire undercurrent of revolution in the movie.

What we need to do is flash mob the flash mob. Someone has to put a stop to their greedy corporate pursuits.

The Dark Knight Rises, and falls, and rises ...

It ends with less razzle dazzle than you’d imagine. Just the lift of a glass and a small nod. “So long, old friend,” it seems to say.

But it does end. Definitively. No wacky credits clip or post-credits sequence the way Marvel movies end. No cute wink at more sequels, more spinoffs, more, more, more. A passing reference is made to Batman’s sidekick, but it didn’t seem genuine, like maybe they were just shuffling him into the discard pile as opposed to prepping his own franchise. The film goes out of its way to tell us, “It’s over. Let him rest.”

That’s the beauty of The Dark Knight Rises and its predecessors: the franchise had a story arc all along, and here it plunges into cold, dark finality, a fitting tribute to a reluctant hero. The whole final conclusion feels sorta like Armageddon with its “wham-bam, thank you Batman” explosives. But the scenes after are subtle, and delicate, a stirring juxtaposition after 170 minutes of mayhem and destructo-rama.

You will see many reviews of The Dark Knight Rises. The contrarians will hate it; and they will make respectable, albeit unpopular, arguments. The fanboys will adore it, blinded by their insatiable appetites, appetites incapable of evaluating a movie’s most obvious shortcomings. This review is somewhere in the middle: I respected the care and complexity in which director Christopher Nolan executes the plot elements of the last chapter of his trilogy, but the film occasionally descends into madness, where logic and visual continuity dare not enter.

We find Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) eight years after his Dark Knight was accused of killing White Knight Harvey Dent, whose villainous final days were erased from his legacy. St. Dent now lives on in the spirits of Gotham, where crime is down and peacetime is declared by police brass. Batman has retired, and Wayne is living as a recluse in Wayne Manor. “I heard he has eight-inch fingernails and he pees in mason jars,” one character says, referring to the later madness of Howard Hughes.

Wayne may have normal-length fingernails — no word on the mason jars — but his body is surely broken: he walks with a cane (two if you count Michael), his knees have no cartilage, his brain has suffered from multiple concussions and his elbows are frail. His X-rays are what you’d expect from Batman’s lifestyle. “No heli-skiing for you, Mr. Wayne,” his doctor tells him.

I tremendously enjoyed these early parts of Rises. We’ve never seen a hero like this before, and Bale captures the tremendous defeat, and the calm rage it’s spawned, that Wayne has endured. For this trilogy to work we had to see Batman at the bottom and here we see it several times, which adds value to his eventual rise.

There may be peace, but a dark scourge swarms Gotham’s sewers. The scourge is lead by Bane, a hulking behemoth with a wheezing respirator — borrowed from a closet marked “Vader, D.” — who wants to upend the civility of Gotham with chaos and tyranny, specifically with the one-percenters and their fancy palaces. He begins his revolution  by walling off the city, blowing up the bridges, blocking the tunnels and trapping the police, who dutifully marched into an ambush deep underground. Later, after months down there with the rats and sewer runoff, they come out surprisingly rested and strong.

Bane is a formidable foe, and he certainly is of equal menace to Scarecrow (Batman Begins) and the Joker (The Dark Knight). I did like his raspy cackle in that mask; he almost had a Victorian speech pattern, grandiose and rich. Like all the villains, though, Bane's motivations don't make any sense. He wants to destroy the city, so first he bankrupts Bruce Wayne in a gutsy move on the stock exchange? Why do that at all when he has a neutron bomb in his hip pocket? (Yes, yes, I understand that Bane had to force Wayne's hand, to make him relinquish his seat on the board so as to get the bomb. It all just seems like play-acting, though, and meaningless fluff on Bane's part.) Rush Limbaugh says Bane is an attack the Romney headache of Bain Capital. I would presume to think he also calls Bane's attacks on Gotham's elite a veiled attempt to support Obama's tax on the rich. That might make sense in a movie where the villains are sophisticated crooks instead of raging madmen. And how does Rush justify Batman, who comes in to save the poor and the rich? I wish I could beat up on Limbaugh more, but Bane is such an enigma that I have to cut him some slack. 

Meanwhile, as Gotham crumbles, Batman is — minor spoiler alert — 3,500 miles away locked in an infamous pit-prison with a broken back. Outside his cell a TV screen blares back violent images of home. A man fixes his protruding vertebrae by punching it, which in another movie would be called a finishing move. This is one of the marvels of this film: I had no idea where it was going. The other comic movies are satisfied with the same rehashed plots, but this one aimed for something fresher and more visceral. Even more interesting, and perplexing, is how often we actually see Batman. Very little until the whopper finale.

Dark Knight Rises juggles many plotlines, and many new characters, including master thief Selina Kyle (real-life Catwoman Anne Hathaway) and super-cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Dark Knight Rises explains Catwoman’s fetishwear (they’re stealthy ninja-burglar pajamas), though she feels unnecessarily forced into developments in the plot. Something about fingerprints and stock trades, some of it is difficult to follow. Even worse is the Blake character, who is given lots of expositional dialogue no one asked to hear. The guys at the station probably never ask if he wants coffee in fear of a roaming explanation about his character’s history down to past pets and shoe size. He’s given a long scene in the finale that literally has no bearing on anything: he takes a bus full of kids to wait on a bridge where nothing happens. I greatly admire Gordon-Levitt — can we call him JGL? — but he needed more to do and less to say.

The bulk of the film plays out within Bruce Wayne’s tortured soul, where he will forever struggle to validate Batman’s cursed reputation. Keep in mind, Batman finished the last movie as a villain, a fall guy for Dent’s final duo-toned misdeeds. Being the Bat, it seems, is more burden than anyone realizes. Characters played by Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman — all of them great — return to offer advice, some of it contradictory, but I liked Batman’s ambiguous motivations that seemed to all at once confirm and counter his advisors’ warnings. Some fans identify with Iron Man, Spider-Man and Thor, maybe because their powers seem, for lack of a better word, cool. But Batman seems tormented by his very existence, and that translates very well into this film.

Now, I’ve mentioned how the movie resonates on an emotional level within Batman’s psyche, but let me reassure you there is action. The opening scene has a nifty plane extraction, and then there are long sequences of Bane’s mayhem, including one showstopper at a football game. The Batmobile returns, as does the Bat-cycle and a new Bat helicopter, which the film turns into a rather believable vehicle. The last sequence, a bruiser of a third act, converges all of these elements together in a Gotham free-for-all.

These sequences are exciting because Nolan is a skilled storyteller, and the horn-heavy Hans Zimmer score certainly helps, but what Nolan is terrible at is directing action. His scenes make little visual sense. Cameras are placed at angles that destroy the forward flow of the action. Scenes are choppy and they can be difficult to determine what we’re seeing, or where it’s happening. Some effects are just boring and uninteresting, like when Batman fires a light-gun at a fleeing motorcycle and all it produces is a wimpy burst of sparks. One chase scene takes place in daylight, moves into a tunnel and by the time they come out of the tunnel it’s dark outside. For such an anticipated film, the detail really is lacking.

There’s also some serious issues with guns. No one knows how to aim. Now, this is a pretty standard Hollywood cliché, the bad guys can’t shoot for shit, but this is stretched a little too far. Maybe the characters should purchase their ammo from better manufacturers. Or maybe just bend the barrels from their perpendicular position on the gun stock so they point, you know, out in front of the shooter. In one sequence, bad guys spill out of a bar into an alleyway with some SWAT guys right behind them. Bullets are fired, but it seems no one ever gets hit. Later, a worse offense: thousands of cops run down a street to meet an army of Bane’s men. Everyone is armed, but there they run toward each other like they’re auditioning for Braveheart. Who brings their fists to a gunfight? Everyone in this cast. Eventually the two sides start trading shots, but only a handful of men fall down. I know the film is rated PG-13, but surely they could have hinted at a bloodbath. As it looks here, it’s as if everyone is firing with blanks. Finally, notice the one Bane henchman who wears these giant bullets on his flak jacket — I don't think he ever fires a gun to which those rounds would fit into.

Is all this going to keep you from enjoying The Dark Knight Rises? Unlikely. It didn’t stop me. I had a blast. (I especially enjoyed the hyper-crisp IMAX picture. It’s worth the extra ticket price.) Some of the movie made my stomach swirl, my heart race and my breath shorten … it really does give appropriate weight to Batman’s journeys and trials.

Where the film really exceeds, though, is with its conclusion. It ended. I wish more films would honor their characters as much. After all, it’s better to burn out than to fade away. Spider-Man doesn’t get that, which is why Spidey movies will be in theaters until we’re all sick of looking at him. That hasn’t happened to Batman. Nolan gave him a proper send-off and we should be grateful that a superhero story was given such respect.

And really, this is the definitive Batman. Anything else would just be a footnote.

Spider-Man reboot already needs a reboot

The travesty of the new Spider-Man movie isn’t that it’s a greedy cash-grab on a franchise reboot that hardly needed rebooting, but that it couldn’t get anything in it right: the casting, the action, the plot, the woefully wooden dialogue, the menagerie of misplaced scenes and forgotten storylines … it makes Battleship look like performance art.

Oh, this is bad. Worse than most big movies. It’s just so ill-conceived and poorly executed. It lacks coherence and depth; it’s the kind of movie that has no understanding of its moving parts or even its very soul. It’s up there on the screen reciting words to which it doesn’t understand their meanings.

Obviously, there’s an audience for this movie. It’s for people who mark the passage of time by each new superhero movie they see. (Here’s yet another one; mark your calendar.) It’s also for people who admire the comic books, to which I must ask: “Were the first three movies not enough to quench your thirst?” I actually admire Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, but I am eternally grateful the series is ending this summer, before it gets bloated and frustrating. But do Spider-Man fans expect a new movie every other year? Are they ever fulfilled? Do they enjoy retreads of the same idea over and over again?

These are questions that will never get answered, which is fitting because that’s a theme that infects every mutated cell of The Amazing Spider-Man, a movie of unparalleled blandness and disappointing mystery.

Here we go again: boy genius Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) is bitten by a radioactive spider, which turns him into Spider-Man. This version of Spider-Man is only half-mutant, though, which is why he has to design mechanical web shooters that he latches to his arms like wristwatches. I liked the web effects better when they were biological functions in Spidey’s arms, but whatever. Apparently the comics clarify this, but good luck going back hundreds of issues to sort it all out.

Parker is in high school, though he’s smart enough to finish advanced bio-engineering formulas in billion-dollar labs. (He’s so smart, yet later he asks the dumbest question about cold-blooded animals.) It’s in this lab where he’s bitten by the spider and also where he falls in love with Gwen Stacy, who is dressed in knee-high boots and a micro mini-skirt, you know, because that’s what people wear when they do science experiments. Luckily she wears a lab coat so everyone knows she’s a real scientist.

Gwen Stacy is played by Emma Stone, an actress we have learned has considerable talent. Last year she was in The Help, a movie about female empowerment that breaks through a vast racial divide. Now here she is in Spider-Man playing “the girl who needs to be rescued.” They call that backwards evolution.

Stacy and Parker share dialogue that’s so inconceivably bad that it’s laugh-out-loud funny. A scene in a school hallway is especially atrocious/hilarious. Another scene at the Stacy household (with Denis Leary wearing pink lipstick?!) is ham-handed and clumsy. They just don’t work together: she’s all woman, he’s all wimp, and they both just stare at each other and fidget. I’ve seen better chemistry at grade-school science fairs, usually in that dark corner where they put all the kids with plaster volcanoes.

The movie throttles up plotline after plotline and then abandons them: an apparently ill Dr. Osborne (aka Green Goblin), a maniac high school kid who seems to be on the verge of a shooting spree, flashbacks to failed science experiments, Parker’s murdered parents and Gwen Stacy’s policeman father. In an especially infuriating sequence, Spider-Man goes on a hunt for the man who killed his beloved uncle. Vast portions of the second act are devoted to this endeavor, but then it’s dropped from the plot as if it never happened.

Mostly, though, the film is just sloppy: henchmen traverse time and space in ways that defy physics, cell phones don’t work at plot-dictated moments, characters switch allegiances on the tiniest of whims, and construction workers just so happen to have enough cranes to form a canopy over Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue so Spidey can web up the street. The film introduces places, people and events, and then just slaps them into conflicts without logically thinking how the action will progress in any sort of visually coherent way. It’s a collage of frayed ends and clumpy knots.

Director Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer) could have certainly done a better job improving the film’s clunkiness, but I reserve most of my frustration for Garfield, who is the wrong actor for this superhero. Rarely has star casting been worse. He fails to connect with every aspect of Peter Parker, from the discovery of his powers to his awe-shucks dorkiness. And the dialogue is just terrible. At one point he tells the reptilian villain: “Somebody’s been a bad lizard.” (Groan.)

Now, I didn’t care for the original Spider-Man movies (with slight exception to Spider-Man 2), to which I blamed the casting of Tobey Maguire, a weak actor playing an even weaker version of Spider-Man. After witnessing the acting calamity in The Amazing Spider-Man, though, I can’t believe I’m actually missing Maguire and his bombastic awfulness. In his place is Andrew Garfield, whose cringe-worthy acting makes Maguire look like Sir Laurence Olivier. Garfield mumbles everything out of costume, but then in costume he overplays Spider-Man like a spastic child with an attention disorder — it all comes off very disingenuous and phony.

I took a lot of vitriol for my thumping of the original Spider-Man, but I will say this: it was a better movie. And Sam Raimi is a better director, one who understands movement and plot, and one who knows how to introduce story elements and then give them meaningful resolution.

This new Spider-Man is not nearly as classy. Frankly, it’s a mess. And even worse: it doesn’t do anything new or exciting that wasn’t already done in the previous three Spider-Man movies. If only Hollywood knew it was shooting itself in the foot. After all, how many times will audiences pay for the same movie (or a worse version one)?

Who knows, but after The Amazing Spider-Man it’s one less than before.