Planet Hulk

Planet Hulk came out in 2010, directed by Sam Liu and starring Rick D. Wasserman as the Hulk, Lisa Ann Beley as his girlfriend Caiera, and Mark Hildreth as the Red King. This movie is based off one of the few Hulk stories I've read, which shares the same name. Sadly, the balance of the story, World War Hulk, was not adapted into a sequel for this movie.

At first, I was skeptical with how good a Hulk story could be without Bruce Banner. But the comic managed to pull it off, giving me hope for the movie. I was also happy to see the animation was a step up from some of the earlier Marvel animated films. So let's see what my final verdict here. As a reminder, I start with a score of 5 out of 10 then add and subtract points throughout the movie.

I have to take a point off for the disappointing beginning. In the comic, the all-powerful team called the Illuminati decide to send Hulk to a different world after a particularly bad rampage. That pretty much happens here, except we don't get to see the whole Illuminati. Iron Man and Dr. Strange are clearly visible, but the other two — Mr. Fantastic and Professor Xavier — are reduced to ambiguous shadows that may or may not be those heroes. This isn't the movie's fault — it's Marvel's fault for splintering its properties and killing its strong sense of shared continuity for all movies. However, it is this movie's fault for not giving us a compelling reason to send Hulk into space in the first place. Iron Man (played again by the lackluster Marc Worden) gives a very dry monologue, briefly describing Hulk's powers in the broadest of terms but not fully explaining why the Hulk could not live on Earth anymore. I know this movie had a lot of story to get through in a short amount of time, but I think they could have used the opening credit sequence to show the Hulk destroying New York or something like that.

But I will bring the score back to a 5 for the strong sci-fi world this film portrays. I love the religion, the corrupt government, the gladiator arena, the variety of alien races and even simple things, like the talkbots. What a quick and simple way to explain why everyone is speaking English. This movie almost can stand alone as a great science fiction story without any connection to the Marvel universe. However, I wouldn't be reviewing it if it wasn't connected to Marvel.

I'll add another point for the great action scenes here. The fighting was captivating, the animation was stellar, and the violence took full advantage of the PG-13 rating. I particularly like the bug people being squished like bugs, and one of them had his eyeballs squeezed out of his head. It was a bit gruesome, but not as disturbing as it could have been. The violence and action enhanced the movie, giving it the gritty edge the story demanded.

Now it's time to bring the score back down to a 5 for the mistreatment of my favorite character from the comic, Miek. As his name implies, he is a meek, small bug man. But he undergoes the largest transformation in the story, literally growing into a larger insect toward the end. He also became the Hulk's most devoted follower, carrying that devotion to the point of fanaticism. And it was Miek who set up the events in World War Hulk because he felt the demands of justice had not been met. All this was taken out for time constraints (and most of it would have come in the nonexistent sequel, anyway). But the little we did get of Miek in this movie was quite frustrating to me. During the scene when each of the gladiators tells their story, Miek tries to tell his story three times, but constantly gets cut off. Why won't anyone let him tell his story?

I will give a point for the spikes. They are great. A little like deadly, parasitic aliens, and a little like zombies, they were a truly frightening threat. And it was quite traumatic watching a young Caiera have to kill her infected family, including her younger sister in her arms.

But now I have to take a point off for the biggest complaint of the film — replacing Silver Surfer with Beta Ray Bill. Again, this is a result of Marvel giving the rights of Silver Surfer to a different company, but in this case, they really needed to work out some kind of deal. Because Beta Ray Bill, the odd horse-Thor, is a poor substitute for one of Marvel's most powerful beings, the Silver Surfer. The scene didn't have near the impact it did in the comics.

Well, that's enough negativity. The score rises to a 6 for the Red King. He is a wonderful villain, maliciously ordering the gladiators to kill their friend and, even worse, engineering the threat of the spikes to set himself up as a hero. I loved his giant gold armor, his attitude, his voice, everything. And his death was satisfying. All in all, everything I want from a villain.

And I'll add one final point for the most tragic scene in the movie — a young girl disintegrating in Caiera's arms. That poor woman is just destined to have children die in her arms. But it was a captivating visual and an emotionally touching scene, lending this story more depth than one might normally expect from an Incredible Hulk story. Yeah, we sacrificed the classic conflict with Bruce Banner and his inner monster, but we got something entirely different and wonderful with this story.

All in all, Planet Hulk is a very good movie. With a few adjustments it could have been a truly great movie. And if Marvel would have made World War Hulk as a direct sequel, with the same animation and voices, that would have been a great movie as well.

Final score: 7

The Wolverine

Almost a year ago, Marvel released The Wolverine, something of a makeup for the disastrous X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Hugh Jackman once again reprised the role that made him famous, and director James Mangold surrounded him with an almost entirely Japanese cast. Surprisingly, this movie attempted to continue the already convoluted X-Men movie continuity by taking place after X-Men: The Last Stand.

I'll start by adding a point for the captivating opening of this film. I loved seeing Wolverine during World War II — at Nagasaki, no less. It's about time we saw some of Wolverine's past adventures not in a montage.

And I'll raise the score to a 7 for this lovable, charming hermit Wolverine. It makes sense that he would want to retire from all civilization after a lifetime of wars culminating in him having to murder his girlfriend, Jean Grey. And the bits with Wolverine, the bear and the hunters were great. And it was really funny, too. That's one advantage of having Jackman play this character for so long — he knows how to inject just the right amount of humor without overdoing it.

I've heard there are some epic Wolverine stories that take place in Japan, but I've never read them. However, I will add another point for putting this movie in Japan. We got to see a lot of both traditional Japan and modern Japan. And I think both are fascinating, visually appealing places. I also enjoyed how this movie followed the same subtitle practice used on the TV show Lost. Whenever Wolverine was around and not understanding what anybody was saying, we weren't given any subtitles. It sometimes made following the story difficult, especially with all the foreign names, but I don't mind having to work a little to understand the story.

My first deduction will be for the ridiculous fight on the train. Wolverine is fighting normal humans — ninjas, but not mutants — and they are somehow able to stay on top of a bullet train moving 300 mph by jamming their knives into the roof. No. Wolverine can do that, sure. But not these guys. Or maybe you could show them try, but then fail. But no, this scene just went on and on and on with these ninjas jumping and stabbing the train and crawling on its roof. Just too much for me.

I'll take the score down to a 6 for Wolverine sleeping with Mariko. I don't care if she was his girlfriend in the comics. In this movie, it feels completely out of place. Wolverine looks old enough to be her dad, and he's spent all movie talking about saving her grandfather. Plus, he's been having nightly dreams with Jean. Everything about him sleeping with Mariko felt creepy and wrong.

But I will bring the score back up to a 7 for the intricate plot. We've got ninjas, double betrayals, corrupt politicians and family members. It's all really great. Now let's add on to that an injured and very angry Wolverine. We've rarely seen him actually kill anybody, and it was actually kind of refreshing.

Yashida is an interesting character, but his ultimate plan really fell apart at the end. Ultimately, he wanted Wolverine's healing factor so he could live forever. It took him a year to track Wolverine down and get him to Japan. He made his proposal, which was a fairly convincing argument. Wolverine naturally refused at first, but then he slept on it and had a dream with Jean, and I think he was leaning toward taking Yashida's offer. But instead of waiting for Wolverine to change his mind, Yashida immediately enacted Plan B, which involved faking his death and retreating to a giant samurai suit made of adamantium. That was just too much for me. Minus one point.

And now we fall down to a perfectly average 5 for the disappointing character of Viper. I really liked her showing up to the funeral in a glittery gold dress and happily recording all the fighting with her iPhone. I was really disappointed to find out she was a mutant, but this is an X-Men movie, so I guess  we need at least one mutant for Wolverine to fight. But what really made me mad was how disappointing her mutant powers turned out to be. I was fine with her simply manipulating poisons, but then she got shot and dramatically shed her skin. That was kind of exciting, and I was hoping to see some hideous snake creature underneath. But no. She ripped off her skin to reveal ... the exact same person underneath. Oh, and she lost her hair. Big whoop.

Now, if the movie ended there, this would simply be an average superhero movie, which is more than several X-Men films can say. But this movie doesn't end here. As is the case with all good Marvel films, we have a mid-credit scene, which is by far the best mid- or post-credit scene I've ever seen. Sure, seeing Samuel L. Jackson introduce himself as Nick Fury was pretty neat. But seeing Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart return as Magneto and Professor X was infinitely more exciting. I had forgotten how fun it was to have those two together on the big screen. This was the perfect tease to X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Final score: 6

Iron Man 3

So I've been putting off this review for a long time, but I think it's nice to have some distance between the initial hype of the movie. Iron Man 3 came out almost a full year ago, in May 2013. It returns Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts and Don Cheadle as Rhodey. New are Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley as the bad guys, and director Shane Black, who had previously directed only one other movie, something called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

This Iron Man movie follows two incredible Iron Man movies and the enormously successful Avengers movie. Marvel had been carefully building up their movie universe for this shared continuity world, and now that we're in the post-Avengers world, what would these movies look like? And how would these movies feel under the increased supervision of Disney? It came as no surprise that this movie grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, but does that mean this movie is any good?

I'll start by giving a point for the opening scene. It was great to start in 1999 with "I'm Blue" blasting away. Pre-Iron Man Tony Stark is a wonderful character, and the more we get of him the better. Plus, we got a fun quick cameo by the kindly heart surgeon who saved Tony's life after the accident. It would have been great to have also seen Pepper in 1999, but that probably would have been asking too much.

I'll raise the score to a 7 for the Mandarin's terrorist videos. The Mandarin used to be Iron Man's biggest villain, but has kind of grown out of favor lately because of his magical powers and potential racial undertones. But they had to use him in an Iron Man movie. He just needed a bit of cleaning up. And making him an Osama bin Laden figure was perfect. And getting Academy Award-winning Ben Kingsley to play him was even more perfect. These Mandarin videos were creepy and gripping.

Now I have to take a point off for the renaming of War Machine to Iron Patriot. There was absolutely no reason for this to happen other than giving the fan boys something to squeal about. "Ooo, Iron Patriot! He's from the comics!" But 90% of those fan boys know that Iron Patriot is actually a completely different character in completely different circumstances in a different and interesting story. Now that story is completely blocked off just because Marvel decided to randomly throw that name out.

I did, however, enjoy Tony's panic attacks. When you think about it, he really did have quite a traumatic experience in The Avengers. He battled an alien invasion, grabbed a nuclear warhead, and flew it into a different dimension, where he thought he was going to die. That's more than enough to mess with somebody's head — especially somebody who had previously only battled other people in suits just like the one he built. So I'll bring the score back up to a 7.

Now we begin the downward slope. I was very sad with what happened to Happy. He was played by Jon Favreau, who directed the first Iron Man movie, launching this whole movie empire. Sadly, he did not direct this one, and was relegated to a strange, annoying role that I guess was supposed to be funny, but really wasn't. He was then attacked, and it seemed like he was going to die. But for some reason, he didn't. Even though Tony kind of freaked out like he had died. Was he originally written to die in the script but Disney came in and said that's too dark? I don't really want to be making accusations like that and blame all the faults of this movie on the family-friendly Disney, but it really makes me wonder. Ultimately, to me, this movie felt like Happy needed to die. But he didn't. So I'll drop the score to a 6.

Never once did I say, "You know what these Iron Man movies need? Pepper Potts become an action hero." I'm kind of getting ahead of myself, but it really began when Tony put the suit on Pepper. I groaned in the theater. It felt unnecessary and unnatural. And then it only got worse at the end when Pepper actually became an action hero — gaining the Extremis  powers and suddenly the ability to fight like a trained martial artist. No thank you. Minus one point.

Now, the annoying little boy actually wasn't that annoying. But he was completely extraneous. Imagine this movie without him. Everything turns out exactly the same. The boy does absolutely nothing other than provide Tony an opportunity to crack some jokes. But he can crack jokes anytime with anyone. I'm not mad that a little boy was thrown into this movie — I'm mad that he was randomly and pointlessly thrown into this movie. It felt like a last-minute mandate from Disney, saying we need to throw in a kid here. Now we're down to a 4.

Rhodey is still a difficult character for me. Even though this is Don Cheadle's second time playing him, I still find myself longing for Terrence Howard. But that's neither here nor there. What really bugs me is this is the second movie in a row where the bad guy has taken over Rhodey's suit. You'd think he and Tony would put measures in place to prevent this after it happened the first time. But if anything, it seemed like it was even easier to get into the "Iron Patriot" suit this time. Yes, I know AIM oversaw the suit's redesign, but to be able to shut the whole thing down just by slightly burning its arm is way too easy. And then we had a weird thing going on, where a bad guy was able to hop into the suit and control, then they put the president in it, but he couldn't use it. Rhodey then saved the president, got him out of the suit, put it on and used it just fine. You'd think the president would at least try to free himself. He was, after all, trapped in one of the most powerful pieces of equipment in the world. I have to take off another point for this.

And now we fall to a low score of 2 because the MANDARIN IS A FAKE! How dare they waste Ben Kingsley like this! I kept waiting for them to show that the Mandarin was only pretending to be the goofy, druggy actor, or to be a body double or something. But no. The real bad guy was dorky Aldrich Killian, who got so mad about being stood up by Tony Stark on New Year's 13 years ago. By the way, why is this a Christmas movie when it was released in May? Anyway, when I found out the Mandarin was a fake, I became eternally embittered toward this film and lost all interest in it. They completely ruined the best thing going for it! Why should I keep caring?

Oh yeah, the barrel of monkeys scene. This was in all the trailers, with the truly spine tingling moment of Iron Man realizing 13 people have fallen out of an airplane, and he can only carry four. This was by far the best part of the whole movie, and the filmmakers knew it. One of the only bonuses on my DVD was a huge featurette explaining this scene in meticulous detail. They really did get a team of trained sky divers and jumped out of a real plane dozens of times to get all the shots. They only used CGI when absolutely necessary, and it really showed. It was an exciting, breath-taking scene that was very realistic and memorable. Unfortunately, it was almost too good. Everything else that followed afterward paled by comparison. I'll raise the score to a 3 for this scene, but the climatic battle won't get any points.

The final fight really wasn't so bad, although it was full of some annoying conveniences. Oh, so Tony's suits couldn't reach him earlier because of the rubble, and now, suddenly, when he needs them most, they just happen to show up. And during the fight, there were lots of weird little moments when he just happened to be able to get into a suit at just the right time, or when he suddenly found himself unable to locate one of his 40 suits flying around. Or the really weird part when his earpiece randomly fell out so he couldn't tell his suits not to attack Pepper. Don't worry, Tony, Pepper suddenly knows how to fight better than you ever could. And lets not even get started on how easily destructible these suits were. I thought he was supposed to be the invincible Iron Man. Now, I know I'm complaining a lot, but I won't take away a point, because the action was rather enjoyable and the special effects were very good.

But altogether, this was an incredibly disappointing installment in the Iron Man franchise and a poor way to kick off the second wave of the Marvel movie franchise. I think, sadly, it's time for Iron Man to stop having his own movies. Let's keep him in all the Avenger movies, and give him some cameos in other people's movies, but I don't want to see Iron Man struggle through another solo adventure like this one again.

Final score: 3

Hulk

I've been avoiding this movie for a solid decade. But now, I've finally seen 2003's Hulk, and while it still is a terrible movie, it isn't as bad as I thought it'd be. Ang Lee, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame, was the director, Eric Bana was Bruce Banner, Jennifer Connelly his girlfriend, Betty Ross, Sam Elliott her dad, General Ross, and Nick Nolte was the villain of this movie, Bruce's dad, David Banner. Universal held the rights to this movie — they even built a massive Hulk roller coaster in Florida — but it took them nearly 15 years to get the movie started. They went through tons of different scripts, including a comedy with Jim Carrey, and even the great J.J. Abrams was involved at one point. When they finally settled on the direction they wanted to go, Edward Norton was the lead candidate to play Banner, but he was disappointed with the script. Luckily, he did return for the superior sequel/reboot.

At the end of the day, Universal poured $137 million into this movie, plus tons and tons of money on advertising. I remember Hulk stuff being everywhere — annoyingly so. Universal even paid for a big commercial during the Super Bowl, but the special effects weren't ready, and it looked like crap. Even though this was 2003, we already had the Star Wars prequels, Spider-Man, X-Men, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, so we had developed pretty high standards for special effects. However, the excitement to see the Hulk on the big screen was still very high, and it opened to a very large weekend. But then word of mouth instantly killed the movie, and it set a record for having the largest drop ever from the opening weekend. Ultimately, Hulk did earn more than $245 million, but Universal was expecting a lot more from all their advertising dollars spent. Plus, the fans — casual and hardcore — absolutely hated this movie, prompting Universal to give the rights back to Marvel. So now that the background's out of the way, let's head into the synopsis/review to see just how bad Hulk was.

The opening credits were actually pretty cool. They started in the 1960s, with David Banner conducting experiments on regeneration qualities. He starts with jellyfish, starfish and sea cucumbers, eventually working his way up to more complex animals like lizards and even monkeys. It's a really neat storytelling device that crams in a lot of information if you pay attention. We also get a pretty fun theme by Danny Elfman, but unfortunately, it seemed that Ang Lee didn't care for Elfman's music, as at least 50 percent of this movie has no music whatsoever.

So anyway, David Banner is a scientist working on a military base, and he thinks he's found a breakthrough in his regeneration formula. But his superior, Sam Ross, sees how risky it is, and he prevents Banner from testing it on humans. So, like all good mad scientists, Banner naturally tries it on himself, but nothing happens to him. Later, his wife becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a son, Bruce. Whenever little Bruce gets angry, parts of him turn a slight shade of grayish green. David realizes that his serum passed on to his son, and he begins to try to find an antidote for Bruce. When Bruce is 4 years old, Ross finds David still working on the forbidden research, and he officially shuts him down this time. David snaps, causing an explosion at his lab, runs home, has a heated argument with his wife, then the screen cuts black.

So that's our new origin for the Hulk … mostly. Surprisingly, I'm not too bothered by it at this point in the movie. I mean, originally in the comics, Bruce Banner only turned into the Hulk at night — it had nothing to do with anger. So I'm alright with a few tweaks, even if this is a bit overly-complicated. I suppose I should also take this moment to address the much-derided split-screen effect Ang Lee used constantly in this movie. I suppose the desire was to make the movie feel more like a comic book, which I believe is a terrible mistake. Comics should be comics and movies should be movies. Take the same stories and characters, but don't try to re-create the experience of seeing multiple panels of action on each page. Having said that, there were a few moments where the split-screen trick was used to good effect — to actually show multiple things at once, or to symbolically illustrate emotional distance between characters. But most of the time, the split-screens simply showed the exact same action from a slightly different angle. That's when it became really annoying.

Let's head back to the movie, which has now skipped ahead 30 years to Bruce Banner arriving at his work at a fancy lab. This is where we get our Stan Lee cameo, who is a security guard with Lou Ferringo, the Hulk from '70s TV show. Sadly, this unfunny scene is the closest thing this movie ever comes to any sort of comedy. There is not a drop of humor in this whole film, and it suffers because of it. Anyway, Bruce is still working with his ex-girlfriend, Betty Ross, and some unnamed, unimportant assistant. I'm not sure why they stressed the fact that Betty and Bruce were exes, when it really didn't seem to affect the story at all. As for Betty, I can't stand her one bit. She is cold, emotionless, and constantly whispering. This movie was so, so quiet, with way too many scenes of people just sitting around whispering at each other.

There is one nice spot in the film when Daniel Dae Kim, from "Lost," appears. He's a soldier named Kim (so I guess he starred as himself?), but only shows up for one scene. I'm not saying he would have saved this movie, but it would have been nice to see more of him. Anyway, I'd better try to get back to this plot, but it's really hard to do, since it jumps around so much with flashbacks, dreams, and dreams in flashbacks. No joke. At one point, Bruce is sadly looking at picture of him and Betty, and he remembers a time when she told him about a dream she had that was half-memory. When she was 2, living on the same military base as Bruce, her dad was urgently called away after David Banner blew up the lab. Then Betty's early memory shifts into a dream when an adult Bruce comes in to protect her, but then starts choking her. And the movie is full of crap like that. Ang Lee puts a lot of stock in dreams, but I could have done without them. They just bogged everything down.

We finally get to the big "accident" scene, and this is where the origin story starts to unravel a bit. The unnamed assistant is stuck in the lab, and it about to be bombarded with gamma rays! Luckily, the heroic Bruce steps in from of him to absorb the blast of radiation. Umm … wouldn't that go right through him? Anyway, the problem with this scene is that it's anti-climatic. This was supposed to be the big event that triggered his transformation. But we've already spent half an hour meticulously explaining that the Hulk was already inside Banner. So what was the point of the big accident? It doesn't even trigger the initial transformation. We just skip to him in a hospital bed, saying how good he feels. How boring.

That night, the mysterious custodian comes to visit Bruce and reveals himself as — shocker! — his dad! He said he'd been locked away for 30 years, but now he's out and he's been tracking Bruce because of the serum in him. Bruce yells at him, and he goes away. The next morning, a completely worthless character named Talbot apparently shuts down Bruce's research. Or something like that. I don't really care. I guess Talbot is some corrupt military contractor that wants the regeneration serum that Bruce and Betty happened to be working on. Anyway, whatever he did, it must have been pretty devastating to Bruce, because it caused his first transformation into the Hulk. This happens at the 41-minute mark of the movie (way too long for my taste) and it occurred in an empty lab at night. So all he does is smash up some equipment, then runs to Betty's home and goes to sleep. What should have been an extremely powerful moment in the film ended up rather boring. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if we didn't have to wait so long for it.

Now I need to discuss the Hulk himself. He is the primary special effect in this movie, and its entire success is dependent on getting him right. But they didn't. He looks pretty fake. What really messes him up is his very bright shade of green. This whole movie is very dark, drab and serious. All the colors, actors, and scenery are muted and plain. Then suddenly this enormous, almost-neon green thing appears and dominates the screen for the second half of the movie. It just felt so out of place. Almost like the Hulk ruined this movie called Hulk. They really should have made him a darker shade of green and mixed some gray in with him, like they eventually did in The Incredible Hulk. But that would've only helped so much. The Hulk only looked somewhat realistic when they did a closeup on his sad face. The rest of the time, it didn't feel like he was interacting with the other characters and scenery — just this big floating green blob. Another interesting thing they added was making him literally grow larger the angrier he got. I used to like this concept as a kid, but I think I've kind of grown out of it now, especially after seeing how ridiculous it looked in this movie. The only thing worse than a 10-foot-tall cheesy-looking Hulk is a 20-foot-tall cheesy-looking Hulk. In summation, you could throw out every other aspect of this movie, and pin everything on the Hulk. The Hulk sucked, so the movie sucked.

Back to our crappy film, Bruce awakens from his first transformation at Betty's house. She tells him that their lab was destroyed and she asks where he was last night. He says, "I had the most vivid dream. It was like I was being born again. Coming up for air." OK … that's a pretty good description of what it feels like to be the Hulk, but that doesn't answer the question. Nor does it sound like a very vivid dream. I think the word vivid requires some details with it. Anyway, General Ross shows up to interrupt this awkward breakfast scene, and he immediately starts grilling Bruce about where his dad is. He also implies about some tragedy from when Bruce was 4, but he doesn't elaborate. If Ross was smart enough to track down Bruce Banner, then why couldn't he find David Banner? This only looks worse, when Betty easily tracks down David.

This is where Ang Lee just stops caring about characters' motives, personalities, and logic. He just has people do bad things for the sake of being bad in order to create conflict and an excuse for Bruce to turn into the Hulk again. Betty has a very boring and awkward whispering conversation with David, and he steals her scarf to give to his dogs. David then calls Bruce to tell him that he's given his dogs the serum and has sent them out to kill Betty. Why? Why does he want to kill her and why does he bother telling Bruce this? Talbot then visits Bruce in his home and starts beating the crap out of him for no reason. Maybe he said why, something about government contracts, I guess, I don't know or care, but it definitely didn't feel like something worth physically assaulting someone over. Naturally, this causes Bruce to turn into the Hulk, and he does enough damage to Talbot to kill him, but he miraculously survives. Hulk then runs to Betty's aid, and fights three very fake-looking dogs. And one of the dogs is a poodle. I can imagine someone asking Ang Lee why one of the dogs had to be a poodle, and him answering, "Shut up! That's why!"

The whole dog fight is incredibly stupid for three reasons. One, the dogs looked terrible. CGI at its worst. Two, Betty was "trapped" in her truck, couldn't start the engine, but then did, then decided to turn it off and stay there to watch this 15-foot-tall green giant fight three monstrous dogs. At this point, Betty doesn't know the Hulk is Bruce. So why is she staying? Run! Run far away from these monsters! And the third reason this fight sucked ties into the first reason. Whenever the Hulk killed one of the dogs, it instantly evaporated into a cloud of green smoke. This isn't a video game! … Or is it? If it is, it reminds me a lot of those Metal Gear Solid games with boring movies of everybody sitting around and talking for over an hour.

So now the movie has fallen past the point of no return. It's hit rock bottom and can't possibly get any worse, although it certainly does try. Betty betrays Bruce and turns him in to her dad, who takes him to a super-secure facility at the Salt Flats. For some reason, Talbot is put in charge, and he wants to turn Bruce into the Hulk so he can extract a sample from him. He initially says that he doesn't care if Bruce dies, because he can then acquire his sample through the autopsy. But then once the Hulk is running loose through the halls, he starts screaming at everybody to use nonlethal weapons so he can extract his sample. He momentarily stops the Hulk with some foam, and tries to personally get his "sample" by attempting to drill into the Hulk's eyeball, I guess. But this makes Hulk mad, and he breaks out of the foam, so Talbot grabs a rocket launcher to shoot at the Hulk. What happened to nonlethals? Anyway, the rocket shell bounces off the Hulk's chest and explodes behind Talbot in one of the weirdest movie deaths I've seen. He leapt into the front of the frame, which froze, cut him out like a bad Photoshop job, then condensed the image to a comic book panel. I guess really stupid characters deserve really stupid deaths.

So with Talbot's death, Ross is back in charge, and he decides to lure the Hulk outside, because, you know, he didn't want Hulk to smash up his secret Salt Flats lab — just all the innocent people out in the world. Ross personally gets in a helicopter and chases the Hulk around a scenic tour of the most famous national parks in Utah, including Delicate Arch. Apparently Ang Lee was banking on the fact that most people in the world aren't very familiar with Utah's geography, and would't notice that Hulk, the helicopters, and the tanks traveled 500 miles in two seconds.

Now, this is probably the best part of the movie — it's certainly what we've wanted all along — the Hulk to smash up some tanks. But it was hurt by the geography errors and the stupid fact that the Hulk doesn't kill anyone. They went to great lengths to show all the soldiers crawl out of the tanks or say they were fine over the radio when they clearly should have died. So ultimately, the only things the Hulk kills in this movie are the dogs, since Talbot kind of killed himself. I don't have a problem with the Hulk not killing, but when he performs actions violent enough to kill people, then they should be dead.

So anyway, Ross kind of stops the Hulk by blowing up priceless rock formations to bury him under. Naturally, this doesn't work, and Hulk suddenly shows up at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. Fearing for Betty's safety, Ross quickly arrives there a moment later, since Utah and San Francisco are so close to each other. At one point, the Hulk performs his single act of heroism by jumping on a fighter jet so it doesn't crash into the bridge. The jet eventually shakes Hulk by flying up into the edge of the atmosphere, and it was a pretty neat scene. Finally, Betty gets the bright idea to show up to try to calm down the Hulk. So she instantly arrives, and the Hulk instantly turns back into Bruce.

At this point, I really wanted the movie to end. We've already hit the two-hour mark, and it felt much longer. But no, we still need to have one more confrontation with Bruce's dad. Since seeing the Hulk, David tried to replicate the experiment, but it instead gave him the ability to absorb materials he touches and turn his body into that material. Yeah, that makes sense, right? Anyway, he gets the bright idea to use his new powers to drain all the power from the Hulk. So he turns himself in to General Ross, contingent on him meeting Bruce in person. For some reason, Ross agrees to this request, and we get a very long, very boring scene of Bruce and David talking. David rants and raves forever about the corrupt nature of society, then in a moment of sheer lunacy, picks up a wire and bites into it. This turns him into a being of electricity. Conveniently, Bruce also turns into the Hulk, so these two can now fight. They kind of blast up into the clouds, and we only see quick still images of Hulk "fighting" his dad in the clouds. They then land on a bunch of rocks by a lake. David turns into some rocks for a bit, but then Hulk throws him in the lake. David then turns into water, and starts to drown the Hulk, trying to absorb his energy. Then the lake instantly freezes, and Betty Ross is conveniently on hand to explain to us that they're absorbing all the ambient energy. Of course! Why couldn't I see that!

Well, just when you thought things got weird enough, the Hulk says to his dad, "You want my power? You think you can handle it? Take it! Take it ALL!" And then David turns into a mushroom cloud(?) shouting, "YES! YES! NO! Take it back! Take it back! It won't stop!" Huh? Luckily, everything ends when Ross drops a nuke on them. And one year later, we see Bruce helping people in South America.

Well, that was … that. Ang Lee definitely had some good ideas, but I think he over-thought some stuff and under-thought some really important stuff. Luckily, there is another Hulk movie out there I can enjoy, so I can continue to ignore this film and pretend it doesn't exist like I have for the past 10 years.

Final score: 0

Doctor Strange

In 2007, after the disastrous Invincible Iron Man, Marvel decided to take its animated movies in a completely different direction — choosing something that would have an extremely hard time becoming a live action movie. Doctor Strange was directed by Patrick Archibald, Jay Oliva and Richard Sebast, and stars Bryce Johnson as Dr. Strange, Paul Nakauchi as his trainer, Wong, Michael Yama as the Ancient One, and Kevin Michael Richardson as the traitorous Mordo. Richardson is a personal favorite of mine — he's also voiced Trigon on Teen Titans and Panthro on Thundercats.

Now, I do have to preface this review by saying I've never read a single Doctor Strange comic, nor have I seen much of him in any forms of media. I've always known he was the Sorcerer Supreme, and that was about it. I think my limited knowledge of the character helped me enjoy this movie, because I wasn't held back by any ideas of what was supposed to be or how good things could have been. I took everything presented here at face value, and I kind of liked it.

I'll start with the fun opening that tells us exactly what's in store for us. We get a bunch of sorcerers fighting a demon, and everything's pretty neat. The action is good, the variety of powers is nice, and the demon itself was kind of cool looking. I even buy the main premise of magical beings fighting demons unseen in the streets of the "real" world. I'm not normally a big fan of magic, but in this case, I accept it. Actually, I think all my problems with magic arise when it gets meshed with other worlds. I absolutely hate it when Iron Man has to deal with magic, but this movie makes no mention of any other superheroes, so it's all good for me.

This movie had a lot of the same people working on it who worked on Invincible Iron Man. Luckily, it seems they more or less learned their lessons from that fiasco of a film. One of my complaints there was that Tony Stark's injury to his heart was brushed off like it was nothing. But in this movie, Dr. Strange's injury to his hands was an essential part of his character and the story. I also liked the how the accident happened — with creepy ghost kids. This movie did include a nice mix of horror. But even more importantly, we got to see Strange deal with his injury. We saw him travel the world and exhaust all his resources in search of a remedy. It was only after he had done all he could, spent his last dime, when he was ready to enter the world of magic. And that's the way it's supposed to be.

Another problem with the Iron Man movie is that we never saw Tony Stark become a hero. He was just always naturally heroic, then they tried to make him a playboy by showing him in a *gasp* hot tub with a girl! Scandalous! Anyway, Doctor Strange made sure to actually give us a character arc. Dr. Strange truly did start out as a jerk, and we followed his journey toward becoming a hero. We also got a nice backstory with his little sister to show us how he became a jerk. Having your little sister die while you operated on her would mess up anybody. And I give credit to this movie for not making Strange instantly flip a switch when he decided to join the monastery. He still had more training to do, which usually involved him tearing down a wall that was a physical manifestation of the metaphorical wall of emotion and self-doubt in his head. If they ever do make a live action Doctor Strange movie, I hope they remember this essential element.

Now, the entire ending with Dormammu using the nightmares of children to return(?) makes absolutely no sense. However, I was surprisingly fine with it. Part of it was because I was in a more accepting mood through this whole movie. These are sorcerers who fight demons. What more do I need to know? Another reason I accepted this ending was because the action was pretty cool — especially the flying piranha-like demons that instantly devoured the flesh off people. So that's another big lesson for the live action movie people: If you focus on character development and keep the action cool, then people won't worry about the demon's plots making sense.

I enjoyed this movie. I never wanted a sequel to it, or a spinoff TV series, nor has this movie inspired me to read a Doctor Strange comic. And I'm completely indifferent about a live action movie. I'd see it if they made it, but I wouldn't be upset if they didn't make it. And that's because this movie gave me all the Doctor Strange I ever wanted and probably ever needed. Sure, he's been a part of the Marvel universe for a long time, but I think he's best left alone in his own corner, only to be occasionally visited.

Final score: 8

The Invincible Iron Man

In 2007, Marvel was busy making its first live-action Iron Man movie. So to prepare for this — and capitalize on any potential popularity — Marvel decided to discontinue its burgeoning Ultimate Avengers franchise, and instead tell the origin of Iron Man. Unfortunately, it is difficult to say whether this movie can serve as an actual prequel to Ultimate Avengers. The animation style is exactly the same, and Marc Worden reprises his role as Iron Man, but that's about where the similarities stop. It is also worth noting that many people consider this to be the worst Marvel animated movie ever, and I just might agree with that. So without further ado, here is my review of The Invincible Iron Man, directed by Patrick Archibald and Jay Oliva, and starring Gwendoline Yeo as Iron Man's girlfriend, Li Mei, and Rodney Saulsberry as his trusty sidekick, Rhodey.

Since this is such an awful movie that would have scored less than a zero, I'm not going to bother with recording my point deductions. Instead, I'll just give you my laundry list of complaints about this film. I don't mean to be negative — I truly wanted to like this movie — but it just sucked so bad. My first complaint is Tony Stark's voice. Marc Worden was serviceable as Iron Man in the Ultimate Avengers movies, but he also didn't have very many lines in them. Here, he is given very lengthy monologues, and is required to run the whole gamut of emotions. He's supposed to be a charming womanizer, a suave businessman, an emotionally-distressed friend, an injured prisoner, and a heartbroken superhero. Unfortunately, Worden used the exact same tone of voice to convey all those emotions. He talks the exact same way to the woman in the hot tub as he does to his father in the board meeting. He is not charming, emotive, or relatable. And this is a major problem when he's talking nonstop through the whole movie.

But a probably even bigger complaint is the inclusion of magic and the supernatural into this Iron Man origin story. Iron Man is one of Marvel's most realistic, scientific-based heroes. Why throw all that away by making him fight magical demons? It does not fit at all, and it especially doesn't fit when we see a prophecy that shows an "Iron Knight" defeating the Mandarin. Seriously? And to make matters even worse, all these demons were CGI, and it was painfully obvious. They didn't interact with their environment correctly, and just looked overall awful. It was also jarring when they would switch from CGI to standard animation whenever Iron Man had to punch one of them. On a whole, the action sequences in this movie was terrible, especially compared to the Ultimate Avengers movies.

Another extremely disappointing fact of this movie is that Iron Man's classic red-and-gold suit is only seen briefly in this movie. To recap the plot briefly, Tony Stark gets captured while trying to save Rhodey, who was captured while on an archeological dig in China. Tony's heart gets destroyed in this attack, and his captors want him and Rhodey to build some device to re-bury the lost city they just uncovered. Instead, Tony makes a big clunky Iron Man suit to escape. Turns out he has already made a ton of Iron Man suits, so it was easy for him to do it in captivity. He also finds out that the city they unearthed has unleashed four elemental demons, bent on resurrecting the Mandarin by collecting his five (not ten) rings. A wise old monk gave Tony a map of the rings, so he decides to find them before the demons do. The first ring is at the bottom of the ocean, so he heads there in an ugly yellow underwater suit. The second ring is in a volcano, and this is where he dons the classic red-and-gold suit. But then for the final battle, he wears another ugly and boring gray suit. The cover of the DVD shows the Iron Man suit we all know and love. So why then did we only get a couple of minutes in the whole movie in that suit?

This movie also fails at telling a compelling Iron Man origin story. Let's compare this to the live-action version. In that movie, Tony was a selfish, obnoxious weapons dealer, who was nearly killed by his own weapons while selfishly selling more weapons. This experience teaches him to rethink his life and try to undo all the damage he caused, beginning by escaping with a suit powered by the same device that keeps him alive. He started the movie as a jerk, but ended it as a hero. Now in this movie, Tony does not go on a journey like this at all. He's already a great hero before his accident. He staunchly opposes the weapons his dad's company is selling, and he only gets in trouble for wasting company money on goodwill missions and his secret stash of Iron Man suits. We get a quick scene of him in a hot tub with a girl, but that hardly makes him a jerk. Especially when he drops everything to try to save Rhodey. So to surmise, Tony Stark already was a hero before this movie started. He already had tons of suits, and was doing everything in his power to make the world a better place. The only thing new that happened to him was getting his heart blown apart, but that's hardly an essential characteristic in this movie. It might as well have been a small scar on his cheek. So really, all this movie boils down to is a random adventure for Iron Man against ancient Chinese demons — something he should never be concerned with.

Now let's talk about how this movie fails to connect to the Ultimate Avengers movies. When we first see Tony Stark in Ultimate Avengers, it is implied that he is in complete control of his company. But in this movie, he didn't own his company until the very end, then he promptly handed control of it over to his dad, even though he was at odds with his dad the whole time and it seemed like he was pretty corrupt. Whatever. I guess Howard Stark eventually died or just handed control back to Tony at some point. We also replaced Jarvis with Pepper Potts in this movie, which seemed like a complete waste of time since Pepper acted exactly like Jarvis. And it brings up the question: Where was Jarvis in this movie and/or where was Pepper in the Ultimate Avengers movies? I could make up excuses for both, but I shouldn't have to. We also see some S.H.I.E.L.D. agents running around in this movie, but there is no reference to Nick Fury or any other superheroes for that matter. I wish this movie would've taken place after Ultimate Avengers 2, with Iron Man's story told through flashbacks. They still could've made this an Iron Man adventure, while showing some brief scenes of him talking with the other Avengers. That way Marvel would've been able to keep building on their nice animated movie continuity, and it probably would've forced this movie to be a bit more grounded.

And when I say this movie needed to be grounded, I mean it was as out there as it possibly could have been. Like past Jupiter. The ending sequence made absolutely no sense. I would almost like somebody to explain it all for me, but that would require me to live through it one more time. Here's what I caught.  Li Mei, Iron Man's default girlfriend, acted like she wanted to stop the Mandarin through the whole movie. She also spends a lot of time crying and complaining about her destiny, but she never elaborates on it. Until the very end, when it's too late. Iron Man gathered up four of the five rings and gave them to her, because that's what he was supposed to do. But it turns out Li Mei was actually the Mandarin's sole-surviving descendant, destined to revive the Mandarin. It also turns out that the fifth ring conveniently happened to be the bracelet she'd been wearing all movie. I guess ancient Chinese overlords didn't know the difference between rings and bracelets.

So anyway, Li Mei revives the Mandarin, which somehow requires her to become naked and surrounded by a giant ethereal form of the Mandarin, which conveniently creates enough clouds and shadows to cover her naughty bits. It's also really hard to tell if she's controlling the giant Mandarin or vice versa, because the larger Mandarin body sometimes mimics Li's actions, but also picks her up at times and orders her to kill Iron Man. It's all very strange, and probably best to not worry about it. Naturally we know Iron Man is going to win this fight — he is the hero, after all — but how do you think he does it? Does he use his incredible scientific mind to find a solution? Did he create some technological wonder for this sort of occasion? No. He beats the Mandarin by shouting (or coming as close to shouting as Marc Worden can), "You are Li Mei!" over and over again. This somehow gets through to her emotionally, and she … beats the Mandarin? I don't know. All I know is the giant ghost thing disappeared and for some reason Li Mei also died. Whatever. I'm just glad it's over know.

One complaint I had about both the Ultimate Avengers movies was the short running time. Seventy minutes was just not enough to get through their big stories and large casts. This movie was given 83 minutes to tell a story with a smaller cast and what should have been a simpler story. Instead we got a bare bones Iron Man origin and spent way too much time in China and dealing with stuff I don't care about as an Iron Man fan. This movie just dragged on forever and ever and failed to impress or entertain me even once. Well, at least we have the live-action movies.

Final score: 0

Ultimate Avengers 2

Marvel's first animated movie was Ultimate Avengers, which came out in Feb. 2006. It was so successful, that its sequel, Ultimate Avengers 2, came out in Aug. 2006. The remarkable thing about that quick turnaround is that the sequel was just as good, if not better than the original. Two new directors headed this movie — Will Meugniot and Richard Sebast — and all the original voices reprised their roles, with the addition of Jeffrey D. Sams as Black Panther.

My favorite thing about this sequel is that it ties directly into the first movie. Steve Rogers is still struggling with life in the future. Not only that, but he's struggling with life off the battlefield. He went immediately from World War II to fighting aliens. He hasn't had any time to decompress, and I love that this movie acknowledged that. I also really enjoyed seeing that Bruce Banner must pay the consequences of his actions. He purposefully and deceitfully turned himself into the Hulk and made a huge mess of things. Now he has to stay constantly sedated in a glass prison, being forced to relive the moment he lost control. I think it is a bit of a stretch to make his interrogator have a personal grudge against him — wouldn't Nick Fury know about that and prevent it? — but altogether, I really enjoyed this plot line. Plus one point.

Now, the whole premise of this film is that Black Panther's kingdom, Wakanda, is being attacked by the lone shape-shifting chitari, who went under the guise of Herr Kleiser in World War II. Since Kleiser fought Captain America, Black Panther seeks his aid in this fight. It's nice to give Captain America a personal connection, but I couldn't stop wondering why the shape-shifting chitari continued to remain in the form of a Nazi leader. We know he can change into other things — he disguises himself as Black Panther at one point — so why does he feel compelled to continue to pledge allegiance to a party that was destroyed 60 years ago? And what was he doing for the 60 years Captain America was frozen? Was he also frozen? Who found him and why? It would have been better had this chitari been revealed as Kleiser later on in the movie, but even if he was, they still would have had a few questions to answer, which I don't think they were prepared to. I have to take a point off for that.

But I will restore the score to a 6 for the extended background stories on all our characters. The first movie gave us just the bare essentials, but kind of made me mad with how vague some things were. But this movie clearly spelled out that Thor is indeed an Asgardian and regularly has conversations with Odin — although it was a shame we never got to see him. We also got to see Tony Stark's artificial heart and a great shot into his lab with his many replacement suits. And we even got to learn that Giant-Man's powers have some specific limitations. All these moments were made possible with the movie series format, and it makes me sad that we didn't get any more of these.

Just as with the first one, this movie suffers from occasionally having things happen for no apparent reason. When the chitari launch their full-scale invasion on Earth, a couple of soldiers head directly to Bruce Banner's prison. They can't break through the glass, and they indicate to the corrupt scientist that they want to kill him, which he tries to do by administering a lethal amount of sedatives. Now, it is nice that this chump was killed for his efforts, but it raises the question: Why did the chitari want to kill Bruce Banner? Did they know he was the Hulk? Is so, how? Or were these aliens simply extremely efficient killers and wanted to make sure that even Earth's prisoners were killed? I don't know. It's annoying. What's also annoying is that the filmmakers try to make it look like Banner died here, and gave him a touching scene with Betty Ross. But shouldn't the Hulk take over anytime Banner's life is in danger. True, we do see the Hulk later in the movie, but it's much later. Why did this transformation take so long? I have to take off a point for this.

We'll now fall to a 4 for the Black Panther. He's the new guy here, and for the most part, I liked him and his country. It was neat that his dad was the Black Panther and he passed on the role after his death. But they didn't explain the suit or its powers at all. At first it seemed just like a normal suit with some fancy claws, but then occasionally it would turn the Black Panther into an actual panther for a limited time. Huh? What? This movie went to great lengths to explain that all of Wakanda's power was technological, but now all of a sudden we have some supernatural elements in here? And I am fine with having magic and stuff in a story with Thor in it, but I would have liked the movie to address it.

One great thing this movie did that the first failed at was conveying that the chitari is a true global threat. The heart of the battle was in Wakanda, which was intense enough, but then we also saw the aliens landing all around the world, causing destruction wherever they went. The first movie's fight with the chitari seemed to go by very quickly, but this one lasted an appropriate amount of time. And that may be because we didn't have a Hulk rampage here, which is fine; I wouldn't want an exact repeat of last movie. So I guess I'll stop complaining about Black Panther and make the score a 5 again.

I really do enjoy the ending, but probably not for the reasons I'm supposed to. Giant-Man sacrifices himself and dies, which makes me very happy, because he was a big lame jerk through both of these movies. Oddly, the filmmakers decided we needed a second near-death scene immediately after Giant-Man's death, and we had Iron Man sacrifice himself to save everybody one last time. This was, of course, preceded by tons of talk about how selfish Tony Stark is, etc., etc., and the whole thing was repeated in the live-action Avengers movie. But instead of lamely being awoken by the Hulk's roar, this Iron Man was revived by a bolt of lightning from Thor. That makes more sense and is a lot cooler. Ironically, nobody mentions that maybe Thor should try to revive Giant-Man. True, he doesn't have a mechanical heart like Iron Man, but they still could have tried. However, I'm completely fine with this. I hated Giant-Man, and I was glad that nobody tried to save him and nobody seemed particularly sad that he died in the first place. Even his wife, Wasp, didn't even seem to shed a tear. I should be criticizing the film for this, but I can't. I was happy that Giant-Man died, and I think everybody else secretly was. Plus one point.

So there we have it. A direct sequel to a perfectly average film that was only slightly better. The main story, scope and action of this movie was superior, but it also suffered many of the same flaws of the first one. And most of those problems I believe come from the too-brief 70-minute running time. However, I was happy to have a nice little movie series of this Marvel Ultimate universe building on itself. I would have loved to have had a few more movies here that continued to teach us more about our favorite characters and introduce us to more heroes and villains. Instead, Marvel went on to make a handful of separate, disconnected movies and try a few more cartoon shows that I never really could get into. So with this, I bid farewell to the short-lived Ultimate Avengers movie series.

Final score: 6

Ultimate Avengers

DC's first animated movie was based off their most popular character and tied directly to their current popular TV series. I am, of course, speaking about 1993's Mask of the Phantasm, which was a success, despite having such an abbreviated production schedule. This movie inspired several more Batman movies, which I will get to eventually. But first, I decided to review Marvel's first animated movie, Ultimate Avengers, which didn't come out until 2006. It was directed by Curt Geda, Steven E. Gordon and Bob Richardson, starring Justin Gross as Captain America, Grey DeLisle as Wasp, Michael Massee as Bruce Banner, Marc Worden as Iron Man, and Olivia d'Abo as Black Widow.

Even though Marvel had successful cartoons in the '90s about Spider-Man and X-Men, the company sold away the movie rights to those characters to avoid bankruptcy. I'm not sure if those movie deals included animated versions, but I do find it telling that Marvel's first venture into this direct-to-video medium avoided their most popular characters. I also found it interesting that Marvel chose to not tell the original stories of these characters, but a revamped origin story based on the Ultimates series. The Ultimates was started in 2002 as a way to draw in new readers by telling new stories without being tied down to the large and complicated Marvel continuity. Everybody was redesigned and got a more modernized origin story, which provided the perfect plot for new audiences this movie could reach. And it did work for me, at least. I knew very little about these characters in 2006, and this movie educated me fairly well — but only about these alternate versions of the characters. It would have been nice had they been able to tell a story exactly like this while still keeping it in the main Marvel universe.

After recently re-watching this movie, I was surprised at how similar it is to The Avengers. Nick Fury gathers together Earth's mightiest heroes one at a time, allowing us to become acquainted with their powers and personalities, then they all fight an alien invasion. And it even happens to be the chitari in both movies. But unlike it's live action counterpart, Ultimate Avengers did not have the luxury of four complete origin movies for each of its characters. So everything had to move pretty fast here. And since they had so many characters and so little time, they decided to focus mainly on Captain America, which I think was a nice choice. But maybe that's just because I like Captain America so much. Then again, this movie was one of my first exposures to him, so it's probably responsible for a lot of my enjoyment in the character. I loved Captain America's origin story in this movie — especially the fact that it was tied to the chitari threat later in the film. The movie also did a great job with showing Steve Rogers awake and adjust to the new world — something I felt like the live action movies kind of skimped out on. So for this, I will award one point.

But now I have to take a point off for the redesign of Thor. I don't like anything about him in this movie. I hate his costume that is lacking a beautiful red cape, I hate that his hammer is half an axe, and I hate that the biggest battles he can find to fight are those against whale poachers. Really, Thor? There isn't anybody else causing a bigger threat to the planet? I also didn't like how Nick Fury kept implying that Thor was not really the god of thunder, but just a delusional super-powered being. Was Fury right, or was he just unable to accept that Thor actually was from Asgard? This movie never explained, and it bugged me. Now, I know that this movie is just an adaptation of a comic book, and most of my complaints about this new Thor should be directed at that book, and not the movie. But it still made me mad and pulled me out of the movie, so I'm going to have to take a point off.

I'll now drop the score to a 4 for a pretty big plot hole. Unlike the live action movies, this Nick Fury was initially hesitant to recruit the superheroes. He also has a hard time getting some of them to join. He has to twist Captain America's arm to get him to help, then is turned down by Thor and Iron Man twice — once as Tony Stark and once as Iron Man. Not only was this a waste of time in a 70-minute movie, but it set up a pretty big contradiction. When Nick Fury gathered the Avengers into the war room to explain the chitari threat, Iron Man shows up for no reason whatsoever. And nobody bats an eye. Was their a missing scene planned where something happened to Iron Man that caused him to change his mind? And was there another one to explain how Thor showed up conveniently at the final battle? The most annoying thing about this is everybody knows Iron Man and Thor are going to join the Avengers — they're on the DVD cover for crying out loud! So don't waste time with them saying no, then randomly saying yes and showing up at the most convenient time.

Another scene that I think was hurt by the time constraint was the destruction of the SHIELD helicarrier. We never saw it before it blew up. Nobody we cared about it ever set foot on it, so watching it crash into the ocean had no emotional impact at all. It also really hurt that this scene came right after the entire Avenger team disbanded after failing their first mission and then reunited without any prompting from anybody. People just randomly showing up is a main theme of this movie. We're down to a 3 now.

Of course, everything in this movie is building up to the final fight, and I do have to say the animation and action work very well here. And in a pleasant twist, the true danger at the end wasn't the chitari, but the Hulk — something I wish they would've done in The Avengers. I absolutely loved the moment when the battle is over, all the aliens are dead, but the Hulk is still going strong and violently turns on his teammates. He is large, he is out of control, and he is unstoppable. Plus one point.

And for my final point, I have to reward my favorite moment in the entire movie — Hulk picking up Thor's hammer. In some versions, only Thor is able to lift his hammer, but I liked this one, where it is simply a very, very heavy hammer. And what really made this moment was the build up to it. Hulk was on a rampage, and then Thor shows up with his great soundtrack (as much as I didn't like this Thor, I did love the choir music that constantly played behind him). And for a moment, it looks like Thor will be able to subdue the Hulk. But in a moment that surprises even him, Hulk lifts Thor's own weapon and uses it to knock him out. Fun stuff.

So we'll end with a perfectly average 5 for Marvel's first animated direct-to-video movie. Having never actually read the source material, I can't comment on the accuracy of this adaptation. But it was an overall fun, yet slightly flawed movie. I think it was too short and a bit repetitive in places. But it did do well enough for Marvel to start making some more of these animated movies, including a direct sequel to this movie, which I will be reviewing soon.

Final score: 5

Daredevil

In 2003, Marvel was enjoying the beginning of it movie golden age. X-Men and Spider-Man were huge hits, and even the R-rated Blade franchise had made two successful movies. So Marvel decided to have a go with another popular character, Daredevil. Mark Steven Johnson was the director, Ben Affleck played the lead, Jennifer Garner (Affleck's real-life wife) played his girlfriend, Elektra, Michael Clarke Duncan played the notorious Kingpin, and Colin Farrell played the second villain, Bullseye.

Now, I've never really enjoyed Daredevil. I've read a few of his comics, but they always seemed to dark and too similar to Batman. I kinda always felt that the Daredevil creators were just people who wanted to work on Batman, but weren't allowed to. But I think the similarities to Batman did help this movie, which came out before Batman Begins — the public consciousness demands quality Batman films, and anything that approximates it will do well. And Daredevil did do well — earning $179 million off its $79 million budget. It is interesting to note though, that once Christopher Nolan made his first Batman movie, Daredevil dropped off the face of the Earth. But getting back to the dark aspect of this character, I was glad that this movie came with a PG-13 rating. It could have easily been rated R — and there is an R-rated director's cut on Blu-Ray — but I personally believe that all superhero movies should be PG-13. For this review, I only watched the PG-13 version.

Overall, I have to say I enjoyed this beginning. A young Matt Murdock, who fights for his father's honor, gets blinded immediately after he sees his dad working for the mob. And the part with him waking up in the hospital to his newly-heightened senses was nice, as well. And I particularly enjoyed this Stan Lee cameo. The blind Matt stops him from crossing the street, saving the prolific comic creator. I like the symbolism here: Stan Lee is saved and supported by his creations — not the other way around. Because while Stan the Man did technically create most of the Marvel staples, many of them did not become popular until another writer took over. And Daredevil was one such character who never did anything until Frank Miller started writing him. And Frank Miller also makes a cameo in this movie as one of Bullseye's victims. And another popular Daredevil writer, Kevin Smith, even got a speaking role as a nerdy lab assistant. Plus, every boxer Matt's dad fought had the name of a Daredevil writer or artist. It's kind of cool to have all these cameos when you recognize them, but it's also kind of distracting.

The movie takes its first major dive very shortly after the Stan Lee appearance. Blind Matt is again cornered by his local bullies, who decide to make fun of the kid now that he's blind. Seriously? You're picking on the blind kid? What next, are you going to toss him and his puppy into the ocean? But anyway, they challenge Matt to a fight, and he accepts. First he lightly taps one of them on the face with his walking stick, and one of them immediately freaks out and runs away screaming. But he also receives the unrelenting fury of Matt's light taps. Then Matt randomly does a backflip to kick the last bully in the chin. What? I know he just said his sense of touch was increased, but that doesn't mean he can instantly do backflips!

So Matt's dad was an aging boxer who worked for the mob. But after Matt's accident, he decided to go clean and focus on his boxing career. He then went on a huge win streak, and was even the featured fighter on the marquee. But then one day, his old mob buddies told him that all his past fights were rigged, and now it's time for him to throw the fight. First of all, wouldn't the mob make more money if the aging star kept beating the odds and continued to win? And secondly, why didn't the mob care that he stopped working for them? It seems like that should have been a bigger deal, but they specifically say several times throughout this movie that Jack Murdock was killed only because he refused to throw the fight. Lame!

We now cut forward to an adult Matt Murdock, who is a lawyer trying to defend a rape victim. But the alleged rapist is one of Kingpin's men, and has a high-priced lawyer, who basically kicks Matt's butt in court. I would have liked our hero to be a little more competent in the courtroom. But all he really does here is tell the guy, "I hope justice is found here today before justice finds you." That's a neat line, but it would have worked a whole lot better had Murdock been going up against a corrupt judge, instead of a more qualified, high-priced lawyer.

Keeping true to his word, Murdock follows this alleged rapist as the vigilante Daredevil. But instead of cornering this guy alone in a dark alley, Daredevil waits until he's in a bar surrounded by tons and tons of people. Naturally, Daredevil has to beat the crap out of every single one of them before he gets to the one guy he wants. And it takes forever. Sure, the action's OK, it just felt unnecessary. Finally, Daredevil corners his man in the subway tunnel, which is empty, since it's the middle of the night. Daredevil briefly loses his grip, when the very loud passing of a train startles him. But he quickly rebounds, and throws the guy onto the tracks, cracking his back. Then, two seconds later, another train comes by, killing the scumbag. Two things: First, subway trains do not run in such quick succession of each other, especially at the middle of the night. There would be at least a half-hour delay between the trains, if not longer. Second, superheroes are not supposed to kill! Yes, I know this guy raped a girl, which is very, very, very wrong. But I don't think he should be killed for it. He only got free because Murdock got outworked and outclassed by a better lawyer in the courtroom. Just because you lost the case doesn't give you the right to go out and kill people! Maybe instead of making elaborate costumes and weapons, you should be studying your brail law books more. But then, that would make for a very boring movie, now wouldn't it?

But there is a bright point in this movie in the form of Murdock's trusty, yet bumbling partner, Foggy, played by the always fun Jon Favreau. I've only seen a few movies with Favreau, but I've liked all of them, especially the Iron Man ones he also directed. Technically speaking, this movie was produced by Fox and is not in the same universe as the Avengers Marvel universe. But I like to pretend that Foggy decided to leave Murdock at the end of this movie, and go work for Tony Stark under the name Happy. Regardless, I really liked Foggy's humor here and his fun relationship with Murdock. From arguing about alligators in the sewers to sneaking mustard into each other's coffee, it's all fun and absolutely needed in such a dark and serious movie.

However, as much as I love Foggy, I hate Elektra even more. Right from the get-go, I just wanted to smack her. She enters the coffee shop, takes about two sips, and decides to leave as soon as Murdock starts hitting on her. He grabs her arm, and she coldly says, "I don't like being touched." He then follows her to a park and the two immediately engage in a very long and dull martial arts fight. To tell us, the audience, that this fight is exciting, they brought in a bunch of kids to cheer them on. Maybe this fight would have worked had they cast someone else as Elektra, because Jennifer Garner never comes across as someone tough enough to pull all those moves. Sure she's pretty, but she's probably too pretty. She at least shows way too much cleavage, especially for someone who wants to become a vigilante in high heels herself. The whole movie, I was looking for something, anything, that would warrant this Elektra getting her own sequel, and I didn't see anything. I'm already dreading reviewing that movie.

Now we finally get to a character I know and love — Kingpin. He was a legendary force on the '90s Spider-Man cartoon, running all organized crime in New York, commissioning crazy robots to take down the web-slinger, and even uniting the Sinister Six. And lest you think he's just a big fat guy, he even got into a couple of fights with ol' Spidey, tossing him around like a rag doll. He quite possibly is my favorite Spider-Man villain. But then Marvel decided to give him to Daredevil because he doesn't have enough good villains, and Spider-Man has plenty. That bugged me 10 years ago, as did making Kingpin black. But now, it doesn't bother me at all, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Michael Clarke Duncan's portrayal here. No, he wasn't as big as Kingpin in the comics, but he was about as big as they could make him in a movie. Duncan was naturally a very large man, and they helped add to that by constantly putting a really short guy right next to him. And overall, Kingpin in this movie was everything I'd want him to be — vicious, calculating, and always in control of the situation. And then this movie added the fun aspect of Kingpin giving each of his victims a single rose. It was fun. Sadly, Michael Clarke Duncan died of a heart attack at age 54.


The second villain in this movie was surprisingly likable. Colin Farrell as Bullseye was absolutely crazy, which made him kind of fun. His best scene was on the airplane next to a talkative grandma. He flicked a peanut off the seat and into her windpipe, quietly choking her so people just thought she fell asleep. We've all been there, and we've all secretly wanted to do something like that. However, I was really sad that Bullseye never got a proper costume, especially after he specifically asked for one. Daredevil has a nice costume, why not Bullseye?

I do have to take points off for the obligatory and ultimately unnecessary sex scene with Daredevil and Elektra. They easily could have shown a lot loss and still gotten the point across. Also, it seemed to totally come out of the blue. These two haven't even been on a date, unless you count that "fight" in the park. All in all, it was just in poor taste.

What's worse than watching Elektra try to fight? Watching Elektra try to shoot a gun. In an extremely pivotal, yet stupid scene, Bullseye kills Elektra's dad with Daredevil's stick. I don't know how that stick managed to go into that man's chest — it didn't seem particularly sharp — but that's beside the point. For some reason, Elektra didn't see Bullseye, but she did see Daredevil and instantly assumed he killed her dad. She randomly picks up a gun that just happens to be there, and opens fire on Daredevil, just holding the gun in one hand and looking exactly like someone who'd never fired a gun would look. It was unbearable.

Speaking of unbearable fight scenes, let's skip ahead to Daredevil's big fight with Bullseye in the church. It started off alright, but then more and more CGI came into play as these two began scaling the massive organ. And then the worst effect was when Bullseye caught a bunch of shards of glass to throw at Daredevil. This movie is 10 years old, and CGI does not age well. Also, what was with all the bats that randomly flew out of the organ? I know you guys wanted to do Batman, but you couldn't, so stop pretending this is Batman!

So to recap, in the space of maybe one hour, Elektra fights Daredevil and stabs him pretty bad in the shoulder. Bullseye then shows up and kills her, so Daredevil fights him for a long time, finally tossing him out of a window and onto a moving car. Immediately after this, an injured and exhausted Daredevil decides to go take on the Kingpin. You really had to do it right then and there? Luckily for him, Kingpin called off all his guards so he could fight the Man Without Fear by himself.

Now, this is supposed to be the big, ultimate final fight. But it really wasn't much of a fight at all. This is exactly what happens: Kingpin grabs Daredevil and throws him up against the ceiling. He then picks him up and throws him across the room. He then stops to smell a rose and taunts the hero a bit, before wisely removing his mask. Upon seeing the blind lawyer, Kingpin starts laughing, and then Daredevil breaks open a water pipe that conveniently happens to be right next to him. All the water splashing around helps Daredevil "see" his enemy, and he slides between his legs and kicks out his kneecaps. He then refuses to kill the Kingpin, saying he's not the bad guy. This makes no sense, because we've already seen Daredevil kill at least one man and attempt to kill Bullseye — he miraculously survived his huge fall, but really should have died. Kingpin is kneeling on the ground laughing, saying he'll reveal Daredevil's identity to the world. Daredevil says, "Go ahead. Tell everyone you got beat by a blind man." Guess what, Daredevil? Kingpin's not going to care about that! If you let him live, he will find a way to kill you, even from behind bars. And since we didn't get a Daredevil sequel, I'm going to pretend that was what happened. Kingpin still has tons of connections, and one day, he'll get a special visitor. Kingpin will give him a small note, and a couple of hours later, Matt Murdock will get shot by a sniper between the eyes. It's not a good sign when fans start fantasizing about the main character's death.

So yeah, that was Daredevil. Nowhere near as good as it could have been, but definitely not the worst movie I've ever seen. It was, however, bad enough to make Ben Affleck swear off superheroes. Hence, the next movie in this series stars Elektra and not Daredevil. Luckily, Fox has now relinquished the Daredevil movie rights back to Marvel, so now there's a possibility he could be included in their ever-growing movie universe. And, as everybody knows by now, Affleck has recently lifted his ban on superheroes. But he's not going to be playing any superhero — he's going to play THE superhero in Batman. In Daredevil, I thought he was alright. Not particularly good, but not awful like Jennifer Garner was as Elektra. With a good script, I think Affleck could make a great Batman.

Final score: 1

Blade II

After the big success of 1998's Blade, Marvel went on to make the much more successful X-Men and Spider-Man, but took four years to get Blade II off the ground. The original script involved some wacky time travel, and at some point the original director left. But they eventually found a serviceable replacement in Guillermo del Toro, and they managed to bring back Wesley Snipes in the title role and Kris Kristofferson as his sidekick. The new faces included Ron Perlman as a tough-guy vampire, and Leonor Varela as the new romantic interest, who happens to also be a vampire. The first Blade movie had a $45 million budget and made more than $130 million in the box office. Its sequel was given a slightly larger budget of $55 million, and earned more than $150 million. So they had pretty much figured out a stable, reliable formula for turning a profit with these vampire-hunter movies.

The movie opens in Prague, Czech Republic! I don't know why, but I love it! Having lived in that city for six months, that place is near and dear to my heart, so I always get real excited to see it. And they actually shot this on location, giving us a few (yet still not enough) great views of the city's skyline. Plus, about half the people who worked on this movie were Czech, and it was a Czech who created the vampire language, which sounded an awful lot like Czech with a little Russian mixed in. There were even a couple of vampire phrases that I understood, even though it's supposed to be a fictional language.

So anyway, we're in Prague, and we see a rather sickly-looking fellow enter a blood bank. He's led into a very sinister-looking room, and we quickly discover the doctors are all vampires. The guy starts to cry, then laugh, and he jumps up and starts attacking and biting the vampires. He then looks into a security camera and says, "I hate vampires!"

We then cut to the opening credits with Blade providing a voice over recapping the events of the previous film, which apparently happened two years ago. He reminds us that he's half-vampire, has all their strengths and none of their weaknesses, but then he says that his friend and weapons provider, Whistler, actually did not die in the last movie. Even though we knew 100% that Whistler shot himself before he could turn into a vampire, this movie replayed that scene to prove to us that they never actually showed him dying, so we're supposed to believe that he actually did turn into a vampire, then was captured by other vampires and taken over to Prague, while Blade was busy killing Deacon Frost and his group. Whatever.

Right away, we can tell with these open action scenes that they're trying to out-do the previous movie. I'd be OK with that, if they didn't rely heavily on outdated CGI and speeding up/slowing down the film speed. We have to remember, this was 2002, height of the Matrix phase, and these filmmakers were very proud with what they could do on a computer. A full decade later, these effects look really crappy, which is especially troubling since they take away from Wesley Snipes' superb martial arts.

Anyway, Blade kills a whole bunch of vampires (but intentionally lets one live) while he's hunting down Whistler. He finally finds him floating in a big tank of blood, frees him, and takes him back to his base with his new weapons provider, Scud. Scud is an annoying punk, who is constantly smoking, eating Krispy Kremes, and is always, always watching Powerpuff Girls. It's so random! I tried to figure out why this cartoon was featured so prominently, and all I could find was that the director wanted to make this movie look like a Japanese anime, and he originally wanted to show Speed Racer on Scud's TVs. But the Speed Racer people turned him down — they had plans in the works for their own movie in the near future — so Guillermo del Toro went with his second option(?) Powerpuff Girls. I guess it kinda looks like an anime ...

So yeah, Blade gives Whistler an antidote, and even though he doesn't mention her, I'm assuming this came from his hematologist girlfriend from the last movie. But the important thing is, whether I like it or not, Whistler is back, alive and well, and now caught in a petty little rivalry with Scud to see who can make the best weapons. The movie spends a lot of time making us suspect that Whistler is secretly working for the bad guys, but that turns out not to be the case — really making me wonder why they went to such lengths to bring him back from the dead in the first place. It's not like he was particularly memorable from the first movie.

Enough griping from me, and on to the plot. A couple of ninja vampire sneak into Blade's base, and he fights them for a very long time, before one of them finally yells stop, and for no apparent reason, Blade decides to stop and talk to the vampires. The vampires offer a truce and seek Blade's help with a problem they're having. They all go to their aging vampire overlord, who shows them security footage of the new monster from the beginning. His name is Jared Nomak, and he was born a vampire, but developed a type of cancer that turned him into a reaper. He now feeds on vampires, turning them into reapers. Apparently they need to feed every day, so their numbers are growing exponentially. The vampires convince Blade to help them stop the reapers before they grow out of control and begin feeding on humans as well.

Blade is put in charge of a team called the Blood Pack, which has way too many people to keep straight, but the notable members are Nyssa, the daughter of the overlord, and Rheinhardt, played by the incredible Ron Perlman. I know him best as the voice of Slade on Teen Titans and the star of Hellboy. Perlman has such a wonderful voice, I love it whenever he talks. He also has a really goofy-looking head, which works great for a vampire. So Ron Perlman is the big tough guy, and he starts trash-talking Blade. Blade then shows him who's boss by sticking a silver bomb to the back of his head.

Blade then leads the Blood Pack to their first mission, staking out a vampire night club to try to find the reapers. This is where the music gets really annoying. The first movie had tons of techno, which sucked, and this one continues the trend. I guess it makes sense for the Czech vampires to be a little behind the trend with popular music, but that still doesn't prevent the music from being sucky. Also, this where the movie becomes a horror film. Or at least tries to be. Everybody splits up, and naturally attacked separately. We learn that reapers are stronger than vampires (of course), and are immune to silver and garlic, but sunlight still kills them. We also see that their jaws can open up like a venus fly trap, and they have weird sucker-tentacle things. It is pretty gross, but mildly interesting.

During this big fight, Nomak has a chance to kill Nyssa, but doesn't, and Blade calls her out on it. One of the vampires in the Blood Pack is bitten, and his friends try to alleviate him from his pain by killing him. They slice off a big chunk of his head, but he still lives until Blade exposes him to sunlight. In a very strange bit of CGI, we see the severed portion of the head remaining after the main body explodes, and its eyes still moves around and blinks. Why did they include this? It's so strange. Isn't this movie strange enough?

The Blood Pack managed to capture a reaper and take it back the base to perform an autopsy on it. This is another gross, yet interesting scene. We learn that reapers have the added protection of incasing their hearts in bone, leaving only an opening on the side. At some point after this, Blade and Nyssa begin to fall in love for no apparent reason other than the fact that he's the main character and she's the female lead.

Blade plans to hunt for the reapers at daylight, and Whistler and Scud create a couple of nonsensical UV light bombs, while the vampires create some spiffy-looking armor to the tune of some more horrible techno music. But none of them cover their heads, which turns out to hurt them in the end. I find this part odd, because we saw in the first movie how vampires could withstand the sunlight by wearing shaded motorcycle helmets or copious amounts of sunscreen. But these vampires decided they didn't need to take such precautions.

So they head on into the sewers, using reaper pheromones to attract them (don't ask), and naturally everybody splits up and everybody dies. This is supposed to be a tense, horror-movie scene with our "heroes" slowly being picked off one by one, but I found it incredibly boring. I don't know, I guess most horror doesn't work for me. Anyway, at one point, Nomak corners Whistler, and whispers a dark secret into his ear. Blade kills all the reapers (except for Nomak, conveniently) with a big UV light bomb that causes light to look and act a lot like fire. Hmm. Whatever. So like I said, everybody dies, except for Blade, Whistler, Ron Perlman and Nyssa. But Nyssa is severely weakened by the UV light bomb, so Blade slices open his wrist and allows his newfound girlfriend to drink some of his blood. This scene is very similar to a scene in the first movie, although it is much more tender and much less sexual than the first movie's. Unfortunately, I still can't figure out why Blade likes this girl vampire so much and is saving her life.

As soon as Nyssa is back to full health, Blade and Whistler are ambushed and captured by the vampires. They're taken back to the vampire overlord, and Whistler reveals the Truth, as told to him by Nomak. The reaper virus was actually created by the overlord in an attempt to rid vampires of their weaknesses. Nomak, his son, was a failed experiment. Nyssa is shocked and saddened to hear this, and when she confronts her father, he simply says, "I would have thought it was obvious at this point." And it was obvious — Nomak and the overlord look exactly the same.

Ron Perlman then prepares to kill Blade and Whistler, so Blade pushes the trigger to activate the bomb on his head, but it doesn't work! Ron Perlman rips it off and hands it to Scud, who reveals that he has secretly been working for the vampires all along, and the bomb he created was just a dud. But then Blade reveals that he secretly knew Scud was a traitor the whole time and the bomb is actually not a dud, and he activates it, blowing Scud up.

Blade is then taken to an operating table, where his blood and organs will be harvested so the vampires can study it to further their research. There's a lot of confusion and commotion caused when Nomak attacks the stronghold, and Whistler escapes from Ron Perlman and saves Blade. Blade then bathes in a random pool of blood, and emerges to fight tons of vampires to more awful techno music. Finally, it's just Blade and Ron Perlman left. Ron Perlman has Blade's sword, and he tries to use it to kill Blade, but he somehow catches the blade with his hands and wrestles it from Ron Perlman's grasp. He then cuts the evil vampire in half, and it looks pretty cheesy. To end this scene, Whistler tosses Blade his signature sunglasses, and he catches them in the most dramatic way possible.

Meanwhile, Nyssa and her dad are running away from Nomak, but then Nyssa suddenly betrays her father and locks the three of them in a room. Nomak kills the old vampire, who has green blood for some reason, and then Nyssa willingly surrenders to her brother, and I have no idea why. Blade doesn't arrive until after Nomak bites his sister, so while she lies on the floor slowly changing into a reaper, Blade fights Nomak for what seems like forever. Again, the action is mostly good, but then they'll randomly put in a CGI Blade to perform a very fake-looking flip, and then they'll speed up the film to make it look even worse. Eventually Blade beats Nomak by stabbing him in the side and reaching his heart's one weak spot. Nyssa then requests to die as a vampire by seeing the sun rise, so Blade takes her in his arms outside, and sadly watches as she dissolves away in the beautiful sunrise. It's a sweet, tender scene, but it really feels out of left field. Why does Blade love her?

And then, instead of ending the movie on this genuinely beautiful and touching moment, we head over to London to see Blade kill the vampire he let live in the beginning. It was supposed to be funny, I guess.

So yeah, that was Blade II. In some ways, I felt this was better than the first movie. Wesley Snipes seemed to have a better handle on what worked and what didn't work for his character — he had fewer cheesy one-liners and didn't try so much to be funny. He also had a stronger supporting cast around him, including his new love interest, even if that romance was not properly developed. However, this sequel really annoyed me with quite a few things. I felt they cheated to bring back Whistler, and their was no real payoff for that. I also hated the cliche plot of making our hero team up with his enemies to take down an even stronger evil. I would've been perfectly content to just watch Blade kill more normal vampires. Another big problem was the over-reliance of special effects, which killed the action in this movie — a movie that wanted to be both action and horror, and kinda ended up as neither. And finally, this movie let me down by not being about Blade very much. The real plot of this story was about the struggle between this vampire father, son and daughter. And Blade is stuck in the middle of it all. It reminds me a lot of another Guillermo del Toro movie, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which had very little to do with Hellboy and a lot to do with this weird brother-sister dynamic.

I wish I could take my favorite elements from Blade and combine them with my favorite elements of Blade II. I'd then tone it down to a PG-13 rating, and it would be the perfect Blade movie. But that is not possible. I just have to hope that the next movie they did make, Blade: Trinity, can live up to my dreams.

Final score: 1