For the week of October 5th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Magic Mike XXL to Blu-ray. As with Avengers: Age of Ultron, here, too, is another "diminished" sequel to another 2012 success; the first Magic Mike grossed a phenomenal $113 million on top of its tiny $7 million budget, while part two only took in $66 million domestically on a $14-million budget (that sounds like a profit to me, but what do I know?). But whereas Ultron upped the stakes both dramatically and thematically for its popular characters, in the case of Magic Mike XXL, bigger isn't necessarily better. One of the great things about Steven Soderbergh's original film is that the big hook - that the movie was going to be nothing but dance sequences of male strippers gyrating on their adoring clientele - was a classic MacGuffin. Soderbergh wasn't making a gender-flipped Showgirls: his real target was the recent U.S. recession, with Channing Tatum's enterprising title character trying - and, in some cases, failing - to adapt to the changing realities of the economic climate using whatever skills he had. If anything, Magic Mike was chasing Hal Ashby's brilliant Shampoo, and in ditching much of the socio-political satire that made the earlier picture so bracing, Magic Mike XXL can't help but come off as thoroughly lightweight. This time around, we've switched gears to a simple road movie, as Mike and his Kings of Tampa (Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, and Kevin Nash) wend their way towards a stripping competition in Myrtle Beach, and that's about it. Writer Reid Carolin and director Gregory Jacobs (not Soderbergh, who does serve as the new film's editor and cinematographer) try to add in a little extra emotional kick, particularly concerning Tatum's fraught relationship to Bomer's sensitive dancer, but for the most part, Magic Mike XXL is content to be a simple hang-out (pun definitely not intended) movie. We watch the crew dance, we watch them joke around with one another, and then, after a few minor scrapes, the movie just kinda ends. And really, the low-stakes atmosphere isn't a terrible thing. All of the performances are good (especially from Manganiello's love-sick nice-guy and from Jada Pinkett Smith's aggressive club impresario), and Jacobs' crew cultivates an amiable, never-boring air of whimsy. But at the end of the day, this is the movie that people thought the first Magic Mike was going to be, and fans of that one might miss its surprising social conscience (that, and Matthew McConaughey, whose sleazy Dallas was the first film's MVP and is absent this time around).
On the TV front, Warner is also streeting the first season of the divisive HBO drama The Leftovers. On one hand, this series is reason for celebration. The show is an adaptation of Tom Perrotta's phenomenal 2011 novel, which watches a small New England town as its inhabitants wrestle with an unexplainable global event: at the same time on the same day, 2% of the world's population vanished. Perrotta didn't care about the how's and why's of the event; what he focused on, with the same mix of humor and horror he brought to his great Little Children, was the aftermath, the stunned acceptance (or refusal to accept) of something that seemingly Cannot Be, and the series makes that deep-burn ennui central to its existence. We watch the self-destructive impulses of town sheriff Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux, better known as the screenwriter of Tropic Thunder AND Mr. Jennifer Aniston) and his daughter (Margaret Qualley), the righteous anger of the town's reverend (Christopher Eccleston), the bottomless loss of a suddenly alone wife and mother (Gone Girl's Carrie Coon), or the silent protests of the Guilty Remnant cult members (most notably Ann Dowd and Amy Brennaman), and we lament that all their pain can't uncover a Big Bad or turn back the clock. All they can do, in their own way, is move forward, imperfectly and alive. That funereal note makes The Leftovers unlike anything else on television, and while I can't easily recommend the program - the pilot alone is one of the saddest and most wrenching hours of TV I've ever seen - the show is so uncompromising in its bleakness that it proves bracing for those hardy enough to bear its grief. However, a specter looms over the show, someone who, for many viewers, is little more than a narrative time-bomb waiting to burst. As good as Season One is (I tend to park my car in the same garage as Alan Sepinwall, who thought The Leftovers was the best show of 2014, although I will ding it for its frustratingly pulpy interludes involving Paterson Joseph's spiritual/cult leader Holy Wayne), it bears the creative imprimatur of Lost, Prometheus, and Tomorrowland architect Damon Lindelof. In the last three instances, early moments of promise gave way to frustratingly empty mystery and unsatisfactory plot twists, and it's hard not to fear the same fate for The Leftovers. Still, perhaps the show's relatively subdued milieu has tamped down Lindelof's worst storytelling instincts. Let's just hope he never decides to show us what caused the mass disappearance...
Far more straightforward a slice of television genre entertainment is Showtime's Penny Dreadful: The Complete Second Season. Of Season One, I wrote that "Penny Dreadful doles out its twists and turns at an extremely measured rate...one of its most pleasurable traits is how [showrunner John Logan] lets his protagonists luxuriate in words. Outside of Joss Whedon's great Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I can't think of a horror program that's privileged the spoken word as much as this one...It helps, too, that Logan's cast is so game...Penny Dreadful has its characters down; if it can up the creep factor, this could be a horror show for the ages." I'm pleased to report that although the series hasn't fully reached Buffy-level caliber yet, Logan has already begun implementing many positive changes. Season Two has ten episodes instead of eight, and the increase in runtime affords Logan the opportunity to pack in more plot without sacrificing character or nuance, which is a good thing, because he's upped the narrative intrigue on all fronts. Most notably, we have a new Big Bad, Helen McCrory's gleefully decadent Evelyn Poole, a powerful witch looking to corrupt the dark spirits inside Eva Green's beguiling, tortured Vanessa Ives. McCrory provides a welcome shot of energy after Season One's drab vampire nests, and she wonderfully sparks off Green, who maintains the singular mixture of feverish intensity and ethereal beauty that made her the series highlight last year. The best news is, even though Green remains the show's most compelling element, a lot of people now come close. Timothy Dalton continues his late-stage renaissance as Ives' employer - and de facto father - Sir Malcolm Murray, particularly once he develops his own complex feelings towards Poole, although his inner confusion can't match Josh Hartnett's Ethan Chandler, who has to contend with the temporal dislocation of being a lone Yank in England as well as with the murderous impulses that overtake him every full moon. Best of all is Rory Kinnear's tragic monster John Clare, who hews closer to Mary Shelley's original humanistic take on Frankenstein's monster more than any previous adaptation has. Now, you can still sense Logan working out the kinks. I still don't think he's fully justified the inclusion of Reeve Carney's immortal hedonist Dorian Gray, and while the material that Harry Treadaway's Victor Frankenstein gets to play is interesting (best of all: the dynamic that emerges between him, Clare, and Billie Piper's recently reanimated prostitute), he isn't up to the caliber of the rest of the cast. But overall, Penny Dreadful has only gotten better in its sophomore year, and I can only imagine the future strides it will take.
Finally, Warner is offering the New Line catalog titles Rumble in the Bronx and Jackie Chan's First Strike. While neither of these films is as good as the best of his early Hong Kong thrillers (for a quick, essential primer, try Shout Factory's Police Story / Police Story 2 two-pack), they do hold up better than they did in 1995 and 1996, respectively, because of how much more daring the stuntwork is. Jackie Chan has solidified his place as an action-movie God, but he's also in his sixties, so more recent efforts like The Spy Next Door and Rush Hour 3 lack the visceral thrill of watching Chan risk every fiber of his being to execute a fight scene or sight gag. Not so with Rumble in the Bronx or First Strike. If Rumble in the Bronx holds up better (it was, after all, the movie that finally helped Chan break through to the Hollywood market), it's because the film offers a nonstop barrage of action mayhem. The plot might be threadbare (something about Chan's character coming to his uncle's aid in the Bronx. Also stolen diamonds?), yet its rudimentary nature doesn't matter - we're here to watch him in motion, whether he's fighting his way through baddies in abandoned warehouses and supermarkets or jumping off roofs or waterskiing without skis. Sure, the dubbing is atrocious, and Chan's Bronx locations are clearly Vancouver (I don't remember New York and its boroughs being surrounded by mountains), but you won't care. First Strike, on the other hand, is more problematic because its ratio of fighting-to-not fighting is more skewed towards the not fighting camp. This time, Chan plays a bumbling cop on a top-secret CIA mission, and while you might think this setup would scaffold all sorts of James Bondian gags, First Strike takes forever to get started. Minus a hair-raising ski pursuit, the first forty-five minutes lack the manic inspiration of Chan's best work, and so we're left waiting until the back end, a blistering sequence that strings along a fight in a shark tank and a multi-man melee involving a portable steel ladder that ranks among the very best of Chan's stunts. By the end, you can see what the faithful see: that he's the modern-day incarnation of cinema greats like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.
Of First Strike, Michael Reuben wrote that "it's worth pausing to consider that the Blu-ray contains exactly what played in U.S. theaters, which, almost twenty years later, puts to shame most of what now passes for action movies. First Strike (as we'll call it going forward) was an obvious attempt to broaden Chan's audience beyond the core martial arts crowd by extending his balletic genius into riffs on James Bond-style stunts - performed, as always, by the star himself. The shorter cut does sacrifice some of the stunt work, but most of what is lost develops the plot, which doesn't make sense anyway, leaving a breathless succession of chases, explosions, physical combat and gun battles (though Jackie himself never fires a weapon). It's the kind of silly, popcorn fun of which it can truly be said that 'nobody does it better' than Jackie Chan. Today, no one seems to be able to do it at all, unless they shroud the scene in darkness, glower perpetually, and shoot in closeup so that you can't see what's really happening. Chan always did action in bright light, in full view, and with the lightness of a born comic."