For the week of December 7th, Marvel and Walt Disney Home Entertainment are bringing Ant-Man to Blu-ray. Of all the recent Marvel adventures, Ant-Man arrived with the worst pre-release buzz. Dig it: after developing the project for almost a decade, Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright left the film only months before production due to "creative differences." Sure, Marvel seemed to do right by the property by bringing in Bring It On's Peyton Reed to direct and getting Anchorman's Adam McKay to polish the screenplay (alongside star Paul Rudd), but when Joss Whedon claimed that Wright and Cornish's original script was the best thing that Marvel had ever received, great uncertainty rippled through the MCU (rumor has it that the studio's treatment of Wright played a huge role in causing the rift between Whedon and Marvel). All that said, such bad buzz can either foretell a failure or set a very low quality bar to clear, and Ant-Man hews far closely to that latter situation. Thankfully, it's even a little better than that: even though the film never reaches the heights of Captain America: The Winter Soldier or Whedon's Avengers properties, the film hums along in such an easy, agreeable fashion that it succeeds on raw charm alone. Along with Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man qualifies as one of Marvel's few hangout movies. Sure, the plot can get pretty busy - in order to stop his egomaniacal rival (Corey Stoll) from abusing his nanotechnology, genius scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) enlists the support of master thief Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) to help him "liberate" the technology, and all while juggling the family concerns of both men (Pym holds himself responsible for the mysterious disappearance of his wife, while Lang's struggling to reconnect with his daughter) - but Reed wisely keeps the focus on personality. First among equals is Douglas. Given that his character is really an exposition machine, Douglas gives Pym such force and gravitas that he emerges as the moral center of the picture - between his work and Robert Redford's in The Winter Soldier, Marvel finally gets the importance of hiring screen icons to galvanize their work. Rudd, by comparison, is Rudd, but fans of Anchorman or I Love You, Man won't care because he's so endearing and funny, and he does as good a job as Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy in balancing his action hero and goofball duties (his interruption of a key father-daughter moment late in the film might be the big highlight). How nice, too, to see a female lead (Evangeline Lilly, playing Pym's estranged daughter) who gets to play an active participant in the workings and isn't just a humorless scold (*coughBryceDallasHowardinJurassicWorldcough*). But they aren't as key to the plot as Michael Peña, David Dastmalchian, and (and I can't believe I'm saying this) Tip "T.I." Harris. These three are the strongest indication of McKay's comic contributions - ostensibly, they comprise Rudd's sub-Ocean's Eleven team, but really they provide a steady stream of hilarious jokes and non sequiturs, with Peña the standout as an affable dolt who's blithely unaware of how much he embellishes all his criminal descriptions. Yes, Ant-Man connects into the larger Marvel environment and, yes, it provides all the thrills and banter audiences have come to expect, but characters like these make the proceedings feel less like table-setting than they might otherwise. It all builds to a third act that is easily the best climax Marvel has engineered yet, one that perfectly synthesizes its blockbuster restrictions with its "what, me worry" attitude.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "doesn't live up to the astronomical successes of its Marvel predecessors. That doesn't make it a bad movie. It's simply a bar that's just a bit too high for Marvel's tiniest (when he wants or needs to be) hero to reach. But that doesn't make it a failure, or even much of a disappointment. The movie offers good, if not fairly predictable and dramatically routine, fun. It's a little slow out of the gate and the story details - major corporation has invented a significant serum and a rotten apple wants it for nefarious purposes - are more than a little trite, but the movie soldiers through and produces a perfectly entertaining romp through a big world brought down to size by way of a barrage of entertainingly seamless visual effects. The movie necessarily resorts to a good bit of well-placed humor that juxtaposes the sense of big action inside something like a tumbling briefcase filled with an iPhone, candy, and other assorted goodies that feels like World War III but, when seen from a "normal" perspective, almost looks cute rather than deadly. The movie plays to its comic strengths both in terms of advancing the story and in one-off jokes about Baskin Robins [sic] and Titanic that work very well but never overstay their welcome or get in the way of the central story arcs, themes, and action."
From Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment comes a big boxset for The X-Files: The Complete Series. In many ways, much of today's "Golden Age of Television" begins with The X-Files. Although we can track some DNA from David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks (particularly the links between Kyle MacLachlan's Agent Dale Cooper and David Duchovny's Agent Fox Mulder), this weekly sci-fi/horror procedural, which followed two FBI agents (Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) investigating the strangest paranormal incidents, quickly struck out on its own path. Creator Chris Cooper managed such a unique mix of tones. On one hand, its episodic nature owes a lot to standard cop dramas, but at its best, The X-Files marries that convention to something darker - think an eldritch horror version of a 1970s paranoid conspiracy thriller, and you'll be on the right track. However, the chemistry between Mulder and Anderson's Dana Scully pushed the show in yet another disparate-but-oddly compelling direction: it's part Riggs and Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon, part David and Maddie from Moonlighting. As such, a big part of the reason we were willing to follow Mulder and Scully through the detritus left by, say, super-stretchy serial killers, unwitting psychics, and literally explosive racists was because we rooted so strongly for our two wryly bewildered FBI agents. All of that, and still the show provided a testing ground for such young talents as Frank Spotnitz, Howard Gordon, James Wong, and Vince Gilligan. That's right: to some degree, we owe the existence of programs like The Man in the High Castle, 24, Homeland, American Horror Story, and Breaking Bad to the success of The X-Files. Forget the mediocre second movie for a moment (also, forget that this set doesn't include either of the two X-Files movies). Forget, even, that the series ran four seasons too long (three, if you're being charitable). What we've got here is all episodes from the series' original run, remastered in HD, and compiled in one physical-media package. That's no small cause for celebration, I think.
Just as indebted to The X-Files as any show is NBC's late, great horror procedural Hannibal, the third - and final! - season of which hits Blu-ray this week. Hannibal borrowed much from the The X-Files template: a merging of the cop drama with darker genre elements, two wonderfully mismatched main characters (Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy as, respectively, the title character and FBI profiler Will Graham), and even a supporting actor or two (most notably Gillian Anderson as Hannibal's willing/unwilling paramour Bedelia du Maurier). However, over its too-short run, Hannibal eclipsed even The X-Files, and not just because it never had the time to outstay its welcome. No, even though showrunner Bryan Fuller was operating within the confines of primetime television, the end result was anything but, as he and his creative crew generated not just the most visually stunning program on any channel but also one of the most emotionally and psychologically complex ones as well. In Fuller's dark, brooding reimagining of the Hannibal Lecter lore, Hannibal and Graham became doomed soul mates, unable to co-exist with the person who would best understand them; nowhere was this conceit more pronounced than in Season Three. Structurally, Season Three is actually two mini-seasons, but what yokes them together is the intense bond between Hannibal and Will. Despite the bloody circumstances that separated the two at the end of Season Two (as in, Hannibal gutting and almost killing Will, in addition to many other graphic misdeeds), neither man knows how to exist without the other - Hannibal has found fame and fortune under and assumed name in Italy, but he keeps violently acting out to get Will's attention, while Will mounts a dangerous cross-continent pursuit of Hannibal even though his physical and mental scars are still too pronounced. All that, and the two men find themselves dodging the depredations of Mason Verger (Joe Anderson, Season Three's one big misstep - he's an unsatisfying replacement for Michael Pitt), a ghoulishly deformed Lecter victim who intends on extracting his revenge in the grisliest manner possible. I'll say this about Season Three's "Italian Campaign": for all its imperfections (a snail-slow narrative pace, a tendency to short-cut over key character developments), it generates such constant aesthetic wonderments that you can't look away, and it reinforces the core between Will and Hannibal. The closer we draw towards Hannibal's imprisonment, the more we realize that his capture represents something far more selfish than justice: a way to remain close to an ex-lover who desperately needs his distance, perhaps? Part two, by comparison, is far more conventional - it's an expanded version of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon, which Michael Mann so memorably brought to the screen in Manhunter and which finds Will soliciting the confined Hannibal for insights on how to catch a serial murderer of families (The Hobbit's Richard Armitage, who's simply terrifying) - but that focus on the Will-Hannibal union keeps the familiar material from feeling like a retread. They just don't know how to quit one another, and the show honors their relationship with a gory, tragic finale (and one much removed from Harris' source material) that puts about as definitive a bow on the series as one could imagine. During its prime, Hannibal wasn't sweet, or easy, or pandering. It was strange, and wrenching, and deeply perverse, and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
Jeffrey Kauffman called Season Three an "audacious reimagining of the inimitable Hannibal Lecter [which] never seemed to be a really good fit for broadcast television (as I discussed in my interview with Executive Producer Martha De Laurentiis when Hannibal: Season One was being released), and though the series started (at least relatively) strongly in the ratings, its viewership experienced a certain attrition over the two intervening seasons, and NBC finally pulled the plug on the show shortly after the third season began airing. That means that some of the stated plans for how the series would continue to redefine the Lecter legacy were never realized, and some viewers who put in significant viewing time in anticipation of watching supposed later developments may feel like they've been cheated a little. That said, when removed from any overarching context, the third season of Hannibal continues the series' odd but oddly compelling combination of a generous helping of horror and a dash of pitch black humor, all wrapped up with a soupçon of whimsy that gives the show, well, a rather distinctive flavor."
Finally, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing Eli Roth's psychosexual thriller Knock Knock to Blu-ray. Fans (and non-fans, I suppose) of Roth know that the horror impresario usually specializes in a celebration of all things graphic and gross (Cabin Fever, The Green Inferno, both Hostel features), a fact that, on the surface, makes Knock Knock somewhat of an outlier in Roth's career. To be sure, the film isn't for kids. Knock Knock concerns itself with what happens to successful architect and father Evan Webber (Keanu Reeves) during a weekend away from his family; more specifically, it's interested how Evan responds to the influence of the two very young and very nubile women (Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas) that appear in his family's absence. That setup reads like something you'd watch on late-night Cinemax during its prime, but for about forty minutes, Knock Knock surprises with its restraint, not its indulgences. If anything, it feels like Roth is trying to ape Brian De Palma, and he actually makes a pretty good go of it, turning (along with cinematographer Antonio Quercia) Evan's familiar domestic spaces into a tense battle of wills. It helps, too, that Reeves is so committed to what might otherwise be disreputable fluff, and that Roth has found such convincing temptresses in the form of Izzo and de Armas - both women are incredibly attractive, to be sure, but they are also able to convey the necessary spark and intelligence that gives this morality play its edge. We feel like we're watching equal partners wage psychological warfare on one another...except then Something Happens, and the whole second half of the film falls apart. Sure, Roth doesn't suddenly start giving in to his charnel-house inklings (someone dies, as they must, but not in extremely gory fashion), but he starts channeling his extreme tendencies into the narrative twists, which add all sorts of unbelievable wrinkles to the Reeves-Izzo-de Armas ménage a trois and let the suspense just leak out of the picture. Plus, we get the sneaking suspicion that Roth thinks this lurid melodrama is actually satire (some attempt at Buñuel-esque farce, perhaps?), except the humor in his other films has never risen above a sub-frat-boy level, and the Knock Knock script (by him, Guillermo Amoedo, and Nicolás López) does little to rectify that issue. Still, it's been a long time since I had anything nice to say about an Eli Roth property, so I guess this movie counts as a good start.