The Fantastic Five

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Fourteen years after The Incredibles hit theatres we finally get the wittily titled Incredibles 2. Each member of the family has a different super-power whilst the franchise as a whole displays the amazing skill of having not being sued by Marvel for ripping of the Fantastic Four. Mr Incredible is super-strong, his son and daughter are super-fast and posses the power of invisibility. Meanwhile Elastigirl, the family matriarch, has the kind of power that makes her super flexible and therefore able to easily achieve the kind of positions that we men would usually have to have a rib removed to achieve. As her name suggests her body also appears to be made of elastic with her limbs and torso able to stretch much further than my patience when at the cinema with a bunch of screaming fucking brats. At this point in the story, all superheroes have been made illegal because, at the end of the day, I guess they're just a bunch of fucking do-gooders with too much time on their hands and a latex fetish. In which case it's even more admirable of Elastigirl that, when forced to give up her job as a hero she chose to live a quite domestic life, when she could be making a fucking fortune in Amsterdam.

I mention Elastigirl more than the other members of her family because this sequel is very much belonging to her. Despite the decade and a half gap since the original film was released, this second part to the franchise only takes place a mere minute or two after we left off. For live-action, this would of course be impossible due to an actors insistence on ageing as humans do, or attempting to dodge the aging process by turning into whatever the fuck Mickey Rourke is. However one of the little joys of the film is in how it starts with the gang still facing off against that mole-man villain that's also a rip-off of a Fantastic Four villain. The family quickly decide to deal with him only to find themselves in even more trouble due to the destruction that the ensuing battle ends up causing to the city. Although if I was a member of that family I'd simply show them the end of Man Of Steel in which Superman leaves Metropolis in such a state that you could filter it through a fucking sieve and tell them to count their lucky fucking stars. As such, Elastigirl finds herself being picked up by an influential brother and sister who claim that they can change the super-hero image around and have her profession re-legalised by winning public favour. All she has to do is a few missions that will show her in a more positive light. Although the way the world seems to be going right now, she could save herself the bother by just mentioning some “shithole countries”, locking a few kids up at the border, and then watching her fuckwit followers grow by the day. 

Throwing a small spanner in her works however is the arrival of a new super-villain known as the Screenslaver who essentially acts like an evil Derren Brown and dresses like Tom Hardy's Bane in a gimp-suit. I won't give too much away here except to say that any twists revolving this character are about as obvious as a mans cock in a pair of speedos and you've have to be pretty dense not to see them coming. At the same time as all of this, Mr Incredible is forced to stay at home with the children and seems to be having such a miserable time with it that I began to understand why wrestlers go mad and kill their families. Originally oblivious to his baby Jack-Jack's super-powers, we watch and laugh as he struggles to keep track of the infant as it reveals more and more of its gifts. There's at least one particularly hilarious sequence in which the father attempts to control his baby as it fights a racoon that really does hammer home how much Louise Woodward over-reacted when all hers did was cry a bit too much. If there's any criticism of the stuff with Mr Incredible it's that, although the funniest part of the movie, his section has almost nothing to do with the main story at all. Where Elastigirl is really pushing the narrative forward we simply seem to cut back to the rest of her family whenever it's time to lighten things up with a funny scene. If a perfect film is like a clock with everything ticking over then this is like a sundial in which you're allowed to tug one out every twenty minutes. Both essentially get the job done it's just one is a little messier. 

If we take for granted that everything else about the movie was pretty great, from the animation to the action, then I'd like to point out that one of the things that I enjoyed about it was its message. Screenslaver's power is that he can hypnotise you to do his bidding but only if you stare at a monitor which is something that we obviously all do these days. Whether it be the television, your phone, or a computer, I'm at the point now where I consider reality my loading screen and I can't wait to get back to staring at my precious pixels. As such I suppose the villain of the movie is a subtle warning about the powers of manipulation that these screens can have on you which, in an online world of Russian bots, is something remarkably current. Just look at adverts alone which can have a remarkable effect on our behaviour and you might see this film as a cautionary tale of giving in to the demands of the screen. Essentially the film used trailers to get you to come and stare at it on the big screen and then gave you a lecture about having given in to these demands. Although watching Elastigirl discovering the source of the villains power and seeing her run about manically attempting to stop people staring at the monitors, I was reminded of my own Mum during my childhood. Except with Elastigirl I understood that it was to the benefit of everybody's health to turn the televisions and computers off and she wasn't just being a fucking kill joy. 

The other thing that the film does pretty brilliantly is take a look at the correlation between legality and morality. Is something bad simply because it's illegal? And is breaking the law justified if it's an unjust law in the first place? As I take a drag from an outlawed but ultimately relaxing substance, I have to admit that I'm not sure where I stand on this. But it's also interesting to see a family film deal with a subject so interesting, when only a mere few weeks after the James Corden-voiced Peter Rabbit made us ponder how far we can kick a fucking rabbit. It was also interesting to see Elastigirl justify her own hypocrisy of believing the law to be absolute and then setting about breaking that law in order to have it changed. Essentially she has to be a superhero to prove that being a superhero is a good thing in order for the law prohibiting super-heroics to be abolished. I guess she's of a similar mind to the members of MI6 inCasino Royale who only give out a licence to kill to agents like Bond once he's proven that he can kill at least two people first. Incredibles 2 doesn't delve as hugely into this issue as perhaps I would have liked it to, but it's still a pretty lofty and impressive subject for it to touch on. Toy Story is obviously a great movie but the only real idea that it has is that you should have your action figures facing away from you when you want to knock one out... unless you're a perv. 

So overall I'd say that this sequel is a completely worthy follow-up to the original movie, if never quite being as brilliant as it. If the first movie was Kurt Russell then this one is his son Wyatt in that they look the same, are both great, but I've spent longer loving the original to be able to consider them equal. If you want a film that you can take everybody to see and don't mind the widespread sexual harassment and deeply worrying misogyny from the studio behind it then Incredibles 2 is the film for you. I have no idea if they'll make a sequel to this movie but if they do I'll certainly be first in line to watch it. And then I'll be boarding up the fucking doors when I get in because I hate children and it pisses me off that I have to endure their noise just because I want to see a film in which they're the target audience. At two hours long I suppose this movie might test the youngest of children's patients but it's also rated PG. Which means if you're taking your very young child to see this movie then you're probably a terrible parent anyway and so may as well go one fucking further and show them it on a double feature with The fucking First Purge.Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.

Black Heroes Matter

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Saying that there are too many superhero movies is a bit like claiming to be a “stable genius” in that the only realistic response to both should be to ask, “what the fuck are you talking about?” Both Thor: Ragnarok and Justice League are technically 'superhero' movies but do they have any real similarities? The former was like getting stoned and watching Masters Of The Universe through a kaleidoscope whereas the latter was like stumbling over in the dark and getting dog shit in your eyes... except in that case you kind of hoped you'd go blind. Black Panther is the latest film to be released within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and again it couldn't be more different from what's come before. I guess when people think of 'superhero' movies they think of a super-powered nobody putting on a mask to protect their identity before going out to fight crime. And I suppose Black Panther does wear a mask to fight things. But so do Mexican wrestlers and nobody seems to include them despite how many dwarves they defeat. Rather than tackling crime though, Black Panther is actually about a newly coronated king as he attempts to protect the throne of his advanced albeit isolated African nation from an outsider that's understandably bitter about colonisation and the treatment of his race. To dismiss that as 'just another superhero movie' would be like indiscriminately breathing in carbon monoxide on the grounds of “fuck it.. it's all just gas”.

The Insect Who Dreamt He Was A Man

I would say that in general, film remakes are a lazy bag of wank that are made as cash-ins on the fame and success of the superior original. I could rattle off the ones that I hate and why but really, what's the point when we all know which they are and the rage would only result in me rupturing something and shitting blood. However on principal I'm not against the idea of somebody doing a film again so long as there's an actual creative reason for doing it- some Hollywood Executive needing a quick buck to pay off a pimp whose whore they've just murdered is an example of a non-creative reason. However there's surely no denying the fun of something like A Fistful of Dollars which took Yojimbo's idea of a Samaria gang war and then turned into a western starring Clint Eastwood. In fact, ignoring the genre switch, I can't think of a single film that couldn't be improved by having Clint Eastwood simply replace the lead character. Well, not other than Deep Throat, anyway.

However, if A Fistful of Dollars is one of the few morsels of nutrients in a steaming pile of remake shit then there is one film buzzing around it that I probably love even more. The Fly was released in 1986 and was itself a remake of a 1958 film starring Vincent Price. In the original, a scientist swaps heads with a fly after an experiment goes pretty fucking wrong. In the remake, Jeff Goldblum slowly becomes a fly in a transformation that involves his ear and dick dropping off. This is very much an example of creative reasoning for remaking a film. Just in case you've not seen the remake, Goldblum plays an eccentric scientist who believes he has invented a teleportation device that will revolutionise our ability to travel, nullifying concepts of long-distance trains, planes and automobiles. After testing the machine for himself, a freeloading fly gets in with him and as the two are zapped about, their DNA splices and recombines to create a being that is a juicy cocktail of them both. Initially, Goldblum's scientist is empowered by some new found strength and so spends the first half of the film literally fucking his energy away, however as things progress he begins to mutate with his appearance disintegrating at a speed even more rapid than that of Mickey Rourke's real life pork-chop face.

...I think my rash has spread..

In fact, possibly one of the main differences between the original film and the remake is the more recent effort focuses on the horror of a person literally falling apart. Due to its creative effects and intense gore, the film has been labelled as an example of 'body horror' which is a sub-genre pretty much invented by its director David Cronenberg. To quickly explain this term, it's basically exactly what it sounds like with a story depicting a graphic degeneration of our flesh and often as a way of exploring some greater metaphor. I like intelligent films as much as the next person but if we can express big ideas through the use of vomit and a rotten wanking hand then all the better. In the case of The Fly, I suppose the obvious subtext is of the transformation through diseases such as cancer or even everybody’s favourite post-monkey-fuck illness, AIDs. As has been recently pointed out by Cronenberg in an interview, the film is about a man who falls in love and then begins to suffer from a terrible wasting disease. However by wrapping all of that up in sci-fi and horror it becomes more appealing to both producers and a wider audience. I guess from this it can be assumed that on mass we either don't like to be depressed by realism or rather that if we have to watch somebody die then reality just isn't fucking grim enough.

Speaking of interviews, it's interesting to see how much people like Cronenberg have spoken about the love story between Goldblum's turd like scientist and his girfriend Geena Davis. Although it might not initially be the most memorable thing amongst all of the loose limbs and jars of cock, it is, I suppose, the spine of the film. Generally I'm not a fan of romance in movies because it tends to be sappy and unbelievable however here, the relationship is filled with an excess of fucking, unwanted pregnancy, constant fighting and at least one death. I can't relate to any of the saccharin bullshit that Richard Curtis pisses out into cinemas, but all of that bile between a woman and her man-fly does seem depressingly familiar. On which subject it is also worth noting how good Geena Davis's performance here is as she perfectly captures the horror of having a scabby eunuch for a boyfriend.

Introducing the Astonishing Puking Fly-Man!

Also in regards to the DNA of the film, I quite like to think of this as being a kind of deconstruction of the Superhero genre. Like most comic book characters, Goldblum's scientist is involved in a tragic accident but he's sadly not gifted with any powers at all. I mean he does have the ability to dissolve things with his own puke but that shouldn't count because after a heavy night, out so does Lindsey Lohan. The film is sort of like a twisted version of Spiderman but instead of gaining the beneficial ability of climbing walls, Peter Parker grew six more eyes and started shitting out his webs like a sticky net of arse-jizz. The other way to look at The Fly in regards to comic books is that instead of following what could have happened to someone like Spiderman, it's actually following one of the genres villains. People like Doc Ock also have tragic back stories involving scientific fuck ups but in Goldblum's case, the only difference is that there's nobody here to fight him. Well nobody more powerful than some bearded, yuppie twat with a shotgun who wants to fuck his ex anyway.

However, if this was a reaction to the superhero genre then the genius of Cronenberg is that he managed to subvert them about twenty years before they started raping cash at the box office. Although this is probably my favourite of his films, it is a pretty close race with all his work exploring themes of transformation, identity and obsession. I suppose that for me the thing that pushes this above any of his others is the performance from Goldblum as it manages to remain both human and hilarious whilst he continues to grimly rot into a giant, talking scab. Thanks to him there's an unmissable, kafka-esque tragedy to this which is brilliantly depicted during a speech on, “Insect Politics”. But like I say, Cronenberg is one of my favourite directors and I'm almost equally as fond of Videodrome, Crash and Existenz. He's basically the go to guy if you're in the mood for a film about people putting random shit inside their bodies.

So to end on the topic I started on, if a film has to be remade then The Fly demonstrates exactly how it should be done. Whilst maintaining his artistic integrity, Cronenberg has taken a pre-existing movie and updated it for the audience of its time by applying his own iconic sensibilities. I guess in the end, the key to a successful remake is to make sure that the director has a legacy that they just don't want to piss all over. 

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