Zack Snyder finally did it. Despite taking on a heist movie and a zombie picture in a major action movie, he wrote a script and delivered the type of action blockbuster he has not yet been able to create. Army of the Dead is his first movie to get it right, a load of tropes, a mash-up of genre ideas, a tightly written story with a great cast, and wall-to-wall fun. Not a comedy like Shaun of the Dead or iZombie,Army of the Dead features the right amount of humor for this story, while incorporating all the expectations of any fan of the father of the genre, George A. Romero. Rivaling the incredible action and effects in 6 Underground, it also rises to become one of Netflix’s most promising productions.
Could an aircraft carrier support that kind of weight?
Warner Brothers released its new trailer (below) for the next Godzilla movie this weekend–Godzilla vs. Kong–the follow-up to the 2019 sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters (reviewed here at borg). It’s one of the hundreds of movies delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this one originally scheduled for a Thanksgiving week 2019 release. The next effort of U.S. studios to one-up the Japanese kaiju genre doesn’t try to hide what it is: what the director calls a “massive monster brawl,” a straightforward mash-up of MUTOs (massive unidentified terrestrial organisms). It merges the 2017 King Kong reboot Kong: Skull Island, and the Godzilla reboot story centered around the secret agency Monarch, which began with the 2014 Gareth Edwards-directed Godzilla. For this fourth film in Legendary Pictures “MonsterVerse,” young director Adam Wingard brings back Godzilla storyline characters played by Millie Bobby Brown and Kyle Chandler and adds familiar action stars new to the franchise Eiza González (Bloodshot) and Brian Tyree Henry (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse). It doesn’t look like any characters are being brought over from the Kong franchise.
What Ant-Man was for Marvel Studios’ Avengers franchise, Deadpool is for 20th Century Fox’s X-Men franchise, proving that a good story and good delivery can outperform big budget, team-up blockbusters. Ant-Man stepped away from the standard superhero movie tropes to give us a flawed human trying to do right by way of some good tech, and Deadpool went to the next step and took the superhero story that much further away from the norm. As the #1 box office success of any Rated R film, it also proved you cannot predict what will fail and what will succeed.
But all the press that distinguished Deadpool as something completely new and different was really just feeding into the marketing hype. Seemingly collectively shocked by the impending change-up of “the first Rated R superhero movie,” press and critics ignored so much. From an over-the-top action standpoint was Deadpool that far different from RoboCop, The Crow, or V for Vendetta–all also carrying the R rating? And from a crude humor standpoint, is Deadpool any different from the similarly hilarious Kick-Ass and Kick-Ass 2, or if darkness is your thing Sin City or Watchmen–also Rated R?
The reality is that the success of Deadpool can be found in the melding of all the elements you need for any good superhero movie. If you skipped this one or only watched it in the theater, now is a good time to revisit it on Blu-ray or DVD. You no doubt missed some great elements during your first watch, and the special features that accompany the home release point out plenty that will likely elevate whatever view you already have about this release.
The Blu-ray we reviewed included both the Blu-ray and DVD as well as a digital Ultraviolet code for viewing on your Vudu or Flixster account. Deadpool includes the best behind the scenes coverage of any Blu-ray we’ve reviewed this year in its “From Comics to Screen… to Screen” segment. Who knew how much stunt work was required for all the elaborately choreographed action sequences and how much was actually CGI? Sure, we knew star Ryan Reynolds was in the “Deadpool red” supersuit for part of the film, but his two stuntmen really carried a lot of the film with one stuntman tearing his ACL for one of the less-involved sequences. And like the movie’s in-joke, the two other X-Men that appear may well be lesser characters when compared to the team in X-Men: Apocalypse, yet the fact we get to focus on far fewer means we got to know Colossus that much better. Plus director Tim Miller and costume designer Angus Strathie made sure Negasonic Teenage Warhead wore the classic X-Men yellow supersuit.
