Iron Man 3 - *1/2

Iron Man 3 has everything I've come to expect out of a $200 million franchise film, and most of the things I desire out of one: a bold villain, snarky hero, surprisingly sharp wit, and a whole tangled mess of unnecessary explosions. And yet the most amazing thing about Iron Man 3 is how indifferent I felt about it walking out. The whole thing feels empty, routine, with no discernible style or voice. Yes, it dispenses it's action and humor at the necessary intervals, but it feels more like a connect-the-dot exercise with which the writers are hitting a series of obligatory points rather than using these sequences to tell a story. And not that blockbusters like this need to be an intellectual experience, but the only thought Iron Man 3 manages to evoke in its 2+ hour running time is, "So what?"

Taking place on the heels of the events of last year's Marvelous display of hollow fatuity, The Avengers, this new (and hopefully final) Iron Man shows us a Tony Stark addled by panic attacks and sleep deprivation, holing up in his basement, producing an endless series of prototypical variations on his Iron Man suit. Meanwhile, the Mandarin taunts the President, using malfunctioned genetically enhanced amputee war veterans (yes, you read that correctly) as bombs to teach a series of "lessons" to America.

Of course there is more to it, but every bit of summarization exponentially increases the number of plot holes and convolutions which coincide with each detail, and outside of a rather inspired plot twist concerning the Mandarin I don't have the heart to spoil, none of it is really worth the endurance necessary to either write or read such a description. The most irritating of all of Iron Man 3's myriad issues is its needless tie-in to The Avengers, which constantly provokes the question, "Where the hell are the other Avengers during this crisis? Why is this a solo world-saving adventure? Why does Tony enlist the help of a twelve-year-old rather than, say, Thor?

Though the finale does provide some solid spectacle in the form of forty of those insomnia-inspired prototype suits on auto-pilot attacking a bunch of bad guys on an oil rig... Swooping, firing energy rays, and blowing up with no real purpose or effect, Iron Man 3 has already numbed you to anything but the poignant realization that such a sequence is the perfect metaphor for the ephemeral pleasures of the recent rash of superhero films. I wish I could say this signals the downturn of disappointments like Iron Man 3, that the superhero craze has finally run its course and is sputtering out into obscurity, but I'm sure that, like Tony's army of remote-powered suits, there will be plenty more to take its place and do the same goddamned thing.

Brooklyn's Finest - Zero Stars

Brooklyn's Finest is a film that allows for the emotional detachment necessary to experience just how bad movies can be. The only thing I took away from it was the assurance that most of the movies that I hate are probably not as bad as I thought they were. It fails on some of the most fundamental levels; there were very few moments when I had any idea of what was going on, why it was going on, what it meant, or what it was intended to mean, who the characters were, what they were trying to do, what the consequences would be if they didn't do it, who I was supposed to care about, or if I was even supposed to care about someone at all, because I didn't care about any of them.

It takes place in a world where actions have no consequences, alcoholics don't drink, where there's a police raid every day, and every character speaks like he's rehearsing lines for an audition for a TNT original. Has a real cop ever said "The media's shoveling shit on our badges?" I hope not. It's an action film with no action, and it's two hours and eighteen minutes long. Bad movies are not allowed to be self-indulgent.

The film follows three characters who are cops, or scumbags, or scumbag cops. It opens with some pseudo-philosophical bullshit about "the righter and the wronger." Then some other stuff happens, guys pull guns on each other, act tough, wear doo-rags, and put their guns away. The film is devoid of any entertainment whatsoever, and there is no real drama in any of the three stories, which never converge at any point to make any sort of statement or observation about what it is to be a cop, a criminal, a resident of Brooklyn, an eater of pizza, anything. Nothing. There's nothing there. At all. Seriously.