For the week of November 5th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing a special 4K edition of Richard Donner's 1978 masterpiece Superman: The Movie to Blu-ray. Superman is as joyous and affirming a blockbuster adventure as I've ever seen. Nowadays, it's hard to imagine a time when comic-book movies didn't dominate the theatrical landscape, but it was Donner who legitimized the genre in ways no one had imagined. Gone were the chintzy cliffhangers and rudimentary special effects of the 1950's Superman TV series; Donner opened on a massive, crystalline representation of Superman's home planet Krypton, and he got Marlon Brando to take center stage as Superman's father Jor-El. Admittedly, Brando isn't very good (famously, Brando rooked producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind out of $3.7 million and 11.75% of the total profits for what amounts to maybe fifteen minutes of screen time), but Donner uses Brando's presence and the scale of the Krypton sequences as his own Mission Statement: attention must be paid. For the next two-ish hours, Donner keeps delivering on that promise. The sequences with teenage Clark Kent (Jeff East) in Smallville play like the greatest slice of Americana ever made, all sprawling cornfields and widescreen vistas - Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography justifies the film's existence all by itself. There's more poetry in the sad, quiet death of Clark's adopted father (Glenn Ford, doing heartbreaking work) than in either Man of Steel or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. And when Superman grows up and moves to Metropolis, Donner switches tones so gracefully we almost don't notice. If Donner looked to John Ford for the Smallville sequences, then Howard Hawks deserves credit for the second half. This part of the film is practically a screwball comedy, zooming from fast-paced newspaper banter at the Daily Planet (Jackie Coogan and Margot Kidder attack the material like they're doing His Girl Friday) to the sublimely goofy dynamic between Gene Hackman's vain, deluded Big Bad Lex Luthor and his idiot henchman Otis (Ned Beatty). Some people find this material a little too broad, and I get that. I also don't care. Everyone is having too much fun. Furthermore, I'd wager we still take the second half seriously because of Donner's true masterstroke - casting a young, virtually unknown Christopher Reeve as adult Clark Kent/Superman. When Reeve is playing Clark, he does a pitch-perfect Harold Lloyd, emphasizing the character's gangly befuddlement and lack of self-confidence. He looks like a lumbering noodle, so it's all the more remarkable when Kent switches into his Superman costume and those insecurities vanish. We're looking at a moviestar, period, and the definitive live-action interpretation of the character. Sure, some elements of Superman haven't aged so well (the "Can You Read My Mind" love montage; the nonsensical way Superman saves the day at the very end), but the majority of Donner's epic, humane vision will endure far longer than anything Zack Snyder has mounted thus far.
Speaking of superhero movies: Pixar and Walt Disney Home Entertainment are offering a Blu-ray of this summer's mega-hit Incredibles 2. At its best, the film acts as a reminder that director Brad Bird remains one of the greatest action directors in the business (that opening Underminer setpiece plays like the most expensive Rube Goldberg machine I've ever seen). Better still: I've yet to see a Pixar family as relatable and wonderful as the Parrs. We think we're getting a diminishment with the Mr. Mom-esque setup (Mother Helen Parr gets to gallivant around the country being a superhero, leaving her husband Bob to flail about with the kids and house-cleaning), except Bird and his creative team are more thoughtful than that, so they keep subverting our formula expectations about gender and status. Best of all, we get an all-timer of a fight scene between baby Jack-Jack and an increasingly frustrated raccoon: I'm not sure if Bird has seamlessly integrated this beat into the narrative, but I also don't care, so breathlessly madcap is the whole sequence (it plays like a Looney Tunes short got plopped right in the middle of the movie). Yet this sequel doesn't come close to matching the impact of the first movie, and for an interesting reason. See, if this exact film came out in 2005 or 2006 (just a bit after the first picture's 2004 premiere), I'd appreciate it far more. It plays like a solid midseason episode of a TV show, with a solid-but-unremarkable villain (the Screenslaver, and you will guess their ultimate identity all too quickly) whose evil plan isn't all that earth shattering (he/she/they wants to ram a big ship into a city port so that superheroes will take the blame, or something). Think Episode 13 or 14 of any given Buffy season: it doesn't really advance the plot, but as an action/character delivery system, it satisfies. And then you'd get seven-plus more high stakes episodes, and you'd immediately forget this one. Except we only have the two Incredibles movies, separated by a fourteen-year chasm. I need more than slight-but-engaging, given all the time Pixar has had to develop this one, and I think Pixar knows that, too. My screening began with a weird clip from the main Incredibles cast-and-crew (Bird, Holly Hunter, Craig T. Nelson, and Samuel L. Jackson, whose Frozone still doesn't have as much to do as he should) basically apologizing for taking so long making Incredibles 2. I sound a little hypocritical, I realize - not long ago I praised Solo for taking a low-stakes approach to incident. But again, we get a Star Wars adventure every six-to-twelve months, so we're more willing to accept something smaller. Incredibles 2, in comparison, can't help but feel too quaint. It slowly crushes itself under the weight of its own expectations.
Still, I liked Incredibles 2; I can't say the same for Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, which ranks as 2018's biggest screen disappointment. Maybe half of the movie works, and unsurprisingly, it's when Lee is at his preachiest. If people are overrating BlacKkKlansman as a whole, I suspect it's because Lee is pushing his angriest political message in decades. By going back to 1979 and showing black undercover cop Ron Stallworth (John David Washington, son of Denzel) infiltrate the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, Lee gets to argue that our American systems subconsciously seeded the very specific racial animus that exists in 2018. Lee blames his chosen art form itself, claiming that cinema provided a Trojan Horse to help normalize racist agendas. Late in the film, Lee shows us BlacKkKlansman's KKK members hooting and hollering during a screening of D.W. Griffith's racist epic The Birth of a Nation like they were watching a football game, and we feel the terrible ways that art can inspire weak minds to horrible action. That said, while can I applaud the ambition of Lee's political agenda, I can't do the same for its messy storytelling strategies. Lee wants to excoriate our racist past, but he also wants to do so through Hollywood formula. It makes sense – Lee is trying to take a page from the Klan and sneak in a positive message through popular genre tropes – except the execution sucks. Every time he shifts into cop-movie mode, the movie loses whatever energy it's built up. Lee has no patience for the mechanics of the undercover operation, rushing through major developments so he can get back on his soapbox, except there's kind of a lot of these other mechanics. Still, I'd be a lot more forgiving if Lee didn't place such a confusing cipher at the center of BlacKkKlansman. John David Washington might be a good actor (I hear he's quite charismatic on Ballers), but I have no sense of what motivates Stallworth at any given time. He first appears in Colorado Springs as if from thin air, speaking in an affected diction (that recalls Dave Chappelle's white-guy voice) about how his desire to be a cop stems from his military father's stern and respectful parenting, and I initially thought that maybe his character's blankness was intentional, that we were going to be watching Stallworth wrestle with the disconnect between his ethnic heritage and the cultural climate surrounding him. 135 minutes later, I still have no greater handle on the character. I don't know how much of this is Washington (he only really comes to life during his phone conversations with Topher Grace's blandly menacing David Duke) and how much of it is the script, which handles his character inconsistently, to say the least. But inconsistent is the name of the game. It's in Lee's failed attempts to utilize his small budget, or his deployment of the bombastic Terence Blanchard score, or even in his puzzling overreliance on casting quintessential Noo Yawk character actors in what should be a story about Middle American rednecks (does everyone in Colorado Springs sound like they're from Queens?). And frankly, it's in the film's documentary coda, which transitions from the end of Stallworth's operation to video footage from last year's Nazi march – and subsequent riot – in Charlottesville, VA. These images are powerful, particularly the horrifying images of James Alex Fields Jr. slamming his Dodge Challenger into the counter-protestors on the Downtown Mall. That said, we're not prepared when this heightened genre polemic starts dredging up real pain and violence. Perhaps a proper documentary on the same subject would have better served Lee's intentions. As is, BlacKkKlansman sure doesn't.
Finally, we end with a new 4K pressing of F. Gary Gray's thriller Law Abiding Citizen. Who, exactly, is handling the 4K remasters over at Lionsgate? I ask because I'm genuinely perplexed as to why we still haven't received a 4K disc for Apocalypse Now (which Lionsgate now owns), yet the distributor will rush to give a high-def makeover to Law Abiding Citizen, a movie that F. Gary Gray probably doesn't remember he made. And with good reason: this is one of the most singularly bizarre star vehicles that I've ever seen. We think we're in for a revenge thriller à la Death Wish; Gerard Butler plays a loving father who loses everything in a brutal home invasion and then goes on the warpath after the punks that raped/murdered (it's that kind of movie) his family. Except then the film jumps tracks to focus on Jamie Foxx's beleaguered prosecutor, who doesn't have the evidence to fully convict the bad guys, so Butler shifts his homicidal attentions to Foxx's family and friends. And in becoming the bad guy (like, an unredeemable monster - whatever sympathy we had for the guy is gone by the halfway point), Butler starts doing this lumbering Joker impersonation, of all things, so the movie can have him set a bunch of deadly traps in and around Philadelphia in order to teach Foxx a lesson about loss. Perhaps the original Frank Darabont draft was more coherent (Darabont was supposed to write and direct until - surprise surprise! - creative differences forced him off the project), but we'll never know. All we've got is what Gray and Kurt Wimmer (who rewrote Darabont) have wrought. Yet I've always kinda liked the film, and for all its lunacies, rather than despite them. Ignore the prestige cast (besides Foxx and Butler, we get appearances from Bruce McGill, Colm Meaney, Regina Hall, and freakin' Viola Davis) and $50-million budget: this is grindhouse pulp. Gray gives it a nice sheen, sure, but when Butler starts butchering people, we're squarely in Rolling Thunder territory. And whether you find the movie's fluid approach to genre ambitious or derivative (and I suspect the latter), it does add this manic sense of unpredictability. The revenge movie turns into a courtroom drama before sliding straight into Saw-level gore with a pit stop into Cop Procedural land, and all before the film rides its low-rent Dark Knight redux into a comically sentimental finale. Law Abiding Citizen isn't good, but it's a hell of a lot of fun, and an unintentional comedy romp.