Summer movies of mixed emotions
Some have called Summer 2016 the worst movie season in history. The box office grosses almost justify the hyperbole.
Minus a few exceptions, audiences rejected big budget sequels and ignored the original concepts even more. If a movie wasn’t about talking animals or superheroes, America didn’t see it.
My report card on the season is incomplete, as I ignored many of the sequels. I never felt the need to sit through “Warcraft.” I still don’t believe the remake of “Ben-Hur” is a real movie. There are positives to ignorance. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” can’t disappoint you if you pretend it doesn’t exist.
The season opened strong with “Captain America: Civil War,” a sprawling and exciting superhero epic with nearly a dozen compelling characters and a story that balanced fun with heavy, real-world undertones.
After “Civil War,” superhero movies crashed and burned faster than the Human Torch could say, “Flame On.”
Following the best installment in the “X-Men” series (2014’s “Days of Future Past”), the 2016 entry, “X-Men: Apocalypse,” stunk up the screen with all of the franchise’s worst tendencies. The inexplicable late-summer hit, “Suicide Squad” made its DC Comics companion film, March’s “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” seem coherent by comparison. Even I can’t remember a thing about “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows,” and I own the entire second “Ninja Turtles” cartoon series on DVD.
Outside the superhero realm, “Independence Day: Resurgence” proved Will Smith really did make all the difference to the 1996 original. Had Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman said no to it, “Resurgence” would have premiered alongside a “Sharknado” sequel on the Syfy channel.
Side note: The summer’s mainstream shark offering, “The Shallows,” kind of worked for me.
For all the absurd online chatter, the new “Ghostbusters” leaned way too hard on nostalgia for the original film, making the new movie little more than a novel imitation. Even with that terrific cast, it needed more laughs.
A far more controversial film, Seth Rogen’s filthy talking food cartoon, “Sausage Party,” suffered a similar humor deficiency problem. For all its audacious ideas, the movie lacked comedic punch. Meanwhile, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson may be the most compelling movie star in the world, but even he couldn’t save “Central Intelligence” from being a lukewarm copy of better odd-couple comedies.
Two other mainstream comedies at least scored with critics – the Shane Black buddy cop adventure, “The Nice Guys,” and Andy Samberg’s music parody, “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.” Not surprisingly, both underwhelmed at the box office. “The Nice Guys” was a refreshing throwback, but I missed the two-week window when “Popstar” played in local theaters.
Of all the blockbuster offerings of 2016, it was the summer’s most financially successful movie I liked the most. “Finding Dory,” while not on the level of its 2003 predecessor, delivered enough of the Pixar-patented blend of innocent humor and heartstring-tugging drama.
I liked some other big stuff too: “Star Trek Beyond” mixed spectacle with old school “Trek” sensibility, and Steven Spielberg’s family-friendly “The BFG” deserved better than its box office belly flop.
Moreover, when I look back at summer 2016, I’ll most remember the things I loved in some of the smaller releases – Daniel Radcliffe playing a magical talking corpse in “Swiss Army Man,” the infuriatingly brilliant final scene of “The Lobster,” the precise texture of dialogue in “Hell or High Water,” the 360-degree camera “montages” in “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” and, most especially, the gymnasium dance sequence in “Sing Street.”
With those moments in mind, I can’t come close to calling Summer 2016 the worst movie season ever. But I didn’t see “Angry Birds.”
Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.
Footnote: I just saw “Angry Birds.” It was… fine.