Avengers: Endgame is just amazing!

Storytelling is hard, especially when it comes to movie-making. Telling a single story is difficult; turning that story into 21 others is almost unfathomable; and turning all 22 into a cohesive whole is a Herculean task. Yet that is what writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and directors Joe and Anthony Russo have achieved with Avengers: Endgame, a film which sets new standards for its genre.

What these men have done, working with source material from the inestimable Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, is to create a modern-day Iliad or the equivalent of a Norse saga. Endgame is an epic story with a pantheon of heroes which spans generations in its telling. It is also worth remembering that a whole contemporary generation of movie goers has grown up and matured in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) which gives the story an added resonance.

Compare the cohesion of the MCU with the Star Wars franchises, for example, which seldom seen to know where they are going from film to film never mind a 22-episode arc. In those terms you appreciate how good these people are at what they do.

Avengers: Endgame is a genuine epic in terms of scale, but it also reaches epic proportions on an emotional level. It’s not just about the spectacle, although there is plenty of that, but it is neatly constructed around a series of beats that create a maximum emotional resonance. The audience cares about these characters and we know they care about each other and that provides the emotional resonance; lots of sentiment with very little sentimentality.

Endgame follows almost immediately on from the events of last year’s Avengers: Infinity War but where that was all bombast and action, this is more reflective and sombre. The stakes are established right at the start. Half of the world’s population, including 50% of its heroes, have ceased to exist thanks to the mad god Thanos and his acquisition of the six Infinity Stones. The remaining Avengers and the other MCU heroes must set things right.

The film is a whisker over three hours, minus credits, but it is immaculately constructed by Markus and McFeely. The bold but downbeat first hour shows how these characters cope with the consequences of defeat, the middle hour has them struggle to find a solution, and the final hour is a Donnybrook of a resolution with some poignant emotional notes.

Credit must go to cinematographer Trent Opaloch who gradually adjusts the temperature of his colour palette throughout to perfectly match the mood of the story at any given point. The superb technical craft on display coupled with some seamless writing and smooth direction means Endgame never felt long. For me the pacing was spot on.

The themes of the film are note perfect. This is a film that is about loss and regret and reconciliation, it’s also about legacy and baton passing. There is a strong sense of family too; these characters have changed and grown since Iron Man in 2008 and most of this audience has come to see them as important parts of their lives.

None of this is to suggest that this film is gloomy or depressing. There are some very funny moments and the film has some of the best dialogue of the 22 films in the story arc. Ant-Man’s realisation about Back to the Future might be the funniest line in the whole MCU.

The performances are marvellous too. Some of these actors are saying farewell to these characters and they have brought their ‘A’ game. Paul Rudd is great as Ant-Man, but Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, and Chris Hemsworth are excellent as Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor – the big three of the Marvel universe.

A personal highlight for me is the way Captain America is handled. Everyone looks to him and he does not disappoint, especially in one scene in the final battle which is simply majestic. And, in the 22^nd film in the extended franchise, he finally gets to say ‘the line’. It can only be said once, and the delivery and the circumstances are absolutely matchless.

The MCU has changed the way we consume movies. Eleven years ago, a movie about a comic book playboy featuring a fading star was a gamble, now franchise movie-making is the new normal. That has serious consequences for the rest of the industry which are still being worked out, but when the product is as excellent as this I’m inclined to be forgiving.

Wild Rose shows off Glasgow's country roots

In my days as a journalist I was frequently tasked to find a Scottish angle on a national news story, the better to relate it to our readers. This was known in the trade as ‘putting a kilt on it’ and worked to varying degrees of success. I could see the same sort of logic at play in Wild Rose which is, at heart, and attempt to put a kilt on The Wizard of Oz.

In this case our Dorothy is a young woman Rose-Lynn Harlan (Jessie Buckley) who aspires to be a country music star. We meet her as she is getting out of jail for smuggling drugs into prison and she is living in Priesthill but, in the best X-Factor traditions, this is merely colour in Rose-Lynn’s journey.

Rose-Lynn has a great voice – kudos to Jessie Buckley doing her own singing – but she doesn’t really have any desire to put in the hard yards. She doesn’t play an instrument, she doesn’t write songs, and she has a very chippy sense of entitlement; sooner or later someone else will give her the money to go to Nashville and stardom will follow as night follows day. In the meantime she gets by on Harlan Howard’s quote about country music – ‘three chords and the truth’ – and a general unwillingness to actually do anything about her dream.

Rose-Lynn is a very passive sort of dreamer, she has no agency in her own story. The help finally comes from the most improbable of sources and Rose-Lynn is left to discover the same lesson as Dorothy did all those years ago.

I don’t want to give the impression that Wild Rose isn’t a good film, there is much to enjoy here, but it is, for me, a frequently unsatisfying one. It is being marketed as a feel-good movie but there isn’t actually a lot of that on display.

Rose-Lynn is not a very pleasant character. She is selfish, entitled, ungrateful, and is generally waiting for things to be handed to her on a plate. This makes Buckley’s performance even better because she doesn’t shy away from the character’s inherent unlikeability. She is matched in a less showy performance by Julie Walters as her long-suffering mother.

The music is good too and it is great to see Glasgow’s long and deep-rooted cultural connection to country music embraced with such enthusiasm and lack of condescension.  Gordon Steel’s cinematography brings these moments to life; there is a transformative quality to the music and this is reflected visually in some lovely moments.

For all that though the film feels patchy, largely because of a script which seems to exist entirely in the present tense. No one has a back story; least of all Rose-Lynn. With a name like that you would assume there is country in her background somewhere. Maybe from her absent father or possibly her mother but there is no hint of it, Rose-Lynn is a country singer and that’s the end of it.

The story also lacks any kind of internal consistency. The London episode is problematic– how does she function with no money, no transport, and no means of support? Her race across the city is barely credible and seems to happen just because it needs to. The Nashville experience is similarly thin.

Similarly many of the other characters are simply sketched in. Sophie Okenodo as her employer has a conversion to country so rapid it makes St Paul seem a little sceptical. Likewise the always reliable Jamie Sives is reduced to basically a plot device.

In the end Rose-Lynn’s redemption seems a little unearned. It just happens because that’s what usually happens in films like this and it would look odd without it.

There is still a lot to like in Wild Rose but, for me, it doesn’t quite land. It should however be celebrated as different kind of film from this part of the world and a welcome break from Scottish miserabilism.

And if anyone out there hasn’t seen the BBC’s War and Peace, The Last Post or The Woman in White, and is in any doubt about Jessie Buckley’s ability, take it from me this woman is a major talent.

Will the real Captain Marvel please stand up.

Finally, the real Captain Marvel makes an appearance on the big screen as part of the DC Universe. Captain Marvel made his debut in Whiz Comics in 1939, a year after Superman. The similarities between the two characters were striking but, to be fair, this was not uncommon in 1940s comicdom.

However when he started outselling Superman the lawyers got involved. DC sued Fawcett, the publishers of Captain Marvel, and eventually won a copyright infringement case putting Fawcett out of business. Then in the early Seventies DC licensed the character from Fawcett to revive the comic book. By this time Marvel Comics had been publishing their own Captain Marvel since 1967, so DC could no longer use the name.

Instead they took the title from the magic word which orphan Billy Batson uses to turn into the World’s Mightiest Mortal – Shazam! – hence the title of the movie.

There can’t be many of us in our teenage years who wondered what we might do if we had superpowers? It’s a popular teenage fantasy and one which Shazam! taps into with a nostalgic affection. It’s also the source of much of the joy of this film in that we have an omnipowered superhero who is at heart just a 15-year-old boy. This is Big with a cape and to avoid any doubt there is an affectionate nod to Steven Spielberg’s 1988 movie in one of the fight scenes.

Up till now the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) has been largely the domain of Zack Snyder and was generally a dark and miserable place with films that largely failed to click with the audience. In publishing terms DC Comics ditched this darkness with their Rebirth exercise in 2016 which harked back to the legacy of iconic characters and a celebration of their more noble virtues. It was and continues to be a huge success with readers.

The appointment of former DC Editor in Chief Geoff Johns to effectively ride shotgun on the movie franchises has paid big dividends by reflecting what is going on in print. His input can clearly be felt in Wonder Woman (2017), Aquaman (2018) and now Shazam!, which looks like being a box office threepeat hit for their new policy of stand-alone hero stories.

Shazam! has an unalloyed exuberance, a quality seldom seen in the DCEU, and there are many moments of sheer joy in Zachary Levi’s title performance which call back to Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), the foundation myth of the modern superhero movie. It’s surely no coincidence that Geoff Johns was Donner’s assistant and still considers the director to be his mentor.

It’s not all sweetness and light however. Apart from trading on familiar fictional tropes such as childhood abandonment in our teen hero Billy Batson (Asher Angel), there is a very dark edge to the first act. However it is there to be countered by the light and helps establish the stakes. Nonetheless the film deserves its 12A classification.

We begin with Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong) as a young boy who is suddenly spirited away to the lair of a mysterious wizard. The wizard, Shazam (Djimon Hounsou), is looking for someone to inherit his power but Sivana is not pure of heart. He cannot resist the temptation of the Seven Deadly Sins and ends up being the human avatar of all evil.

Meanwhile streetwise orphan Billy has been looking unsuccessfully for his mother. After running away from another foster home he too finds himself magicked into appearing in front of the wizard. For all his mischief Billy is pure of heart and when he says the magician’s name he transforms into the World’s Mightiest Mortal.

Billy goes from being a 15-year-old kid to a strapping six foot plus superhero. And he has no idea what to do. The scenes where Billy, with the aid of his superhero crazy foster brother Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), try to work out the extent of his abilities are some of the best in the film.

Even when Sivana turns up to threaten Billy and steal his powers the film has a goofy exuberance. The fight scenes are like a live-action Road Runner movie and Levi does a great job of capturing the panicky, unsure 15-year-old who is trapped inside this incredibly powerful exterior.

There’s enough going on here for an academic journal paper with the ego and superego and the inner child and all that stuff. Happily Shazam! forsakes all of that. This is a hero who was affectionately known as The Big Red Cheese and the film makes no apology for wallowing unashamedly in its own cheesiness. The transformation scenes in particular are a lot of fun, and also answer the big, difficult question of how do you pee in spandex?

The original Captain Marvel was envisioned by creator C.C. Beck as Fred MacMurray (look him up) in a cape. The film version has Zachary Levi as a big, goofy, fun, but essentially good hearted guy   – much like the comic book. He behaves exactly as a teenager with no impulse control would; it’s all about showing off, settling scores, and trying to get stuff for free. This I’m pretty sure is how we would all behave in those circumstances.

The action scenes are very good; usually funny but dark when they need to be and director David F. Sandberg seems to revel in the time, space, and budget he has not been afforded thus far. The score by Benjamin Wallfisch is suitably epic and again brings to mind notes of John Williams’s score for Donner’s Superman.

The film is embedded in the DCEU and it is a given that this is a world where superhumans exist but Shazam! is essentially character driven and Billy’s sense of loss, along with Sivana’s for that matter, are at the heart of their characterisations.

That said there are Easter eggs aplenty – appropriate for the time of year – and anyone who knows the comics will not be surprised but should be delighted by the third act twist. Of course there are two post-credits scene; one sets up an inevitable sequel, the other is just harsh – but funny. However the end credits themselves are a source of delight and carry the upbeat mood of the film right out of the theatre.

The one issue for me is that even by the end of the film the character doesn’t really have a name. This is something that will doubtless be resolved in future films but whatever they choose he’ll always be Captain Marvel to me.

Captain Marvel flies but doesn't soar

When it comes to paying dues there are few superheroes who have done more than Captain Marvel. In various incarnations the character has been male, dead, female, objectified, raped, abused, and generally treated as an irrelevance. So, no one could grudge Marvel her two hours in the spotlight in this movie. It’s pronounced ‘Mar-VELL’ by the way, suggesting the Kree were big fans of Elizabethan poetry.

Although until recently she has never been more than a second string character Marvel, like Doctor Strange and, to a certain extent, Ant-Man, seems destined to play a significant role in a number of forthcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe stories. The end of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) was a big clue in that direction.

In those circumstance it makes sense that this movie acts as something of a placeholder filling in some gaps in various backstories before this phase of the MCU saga comes to an end in a couple of months. And on that basis, the film is no better than it ought to be. It works well as a broadly entertaining adventure with a couple of engaging performances from Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson at its heart.

Larson is the titular heroine, a young woman with a mysterious past who becomes a key combatant in an intergalactic war between two alien nations - the Kree and the Skrulls - with Earth as a proxy battlefield. Jackson finally gives us his first substantive outing as Nick Fury since Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014). Since this story takes place in 1995 there is a lot of digital de-ageing going on with Fury, but Jackson does a good job in performing through the pixels.

The back and forth between him and Larson is one of the highlights of the film which at times struggles to decide whether it as an intergalactic saga a bickering romcom or an emo drama. The transition between these two themes from co-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck is a little less sure-footed than it might have been. Their lo-fi indie efforts such as the excellent Half Nelson (2006) don’t seem like the ideal fit for this film.

There are moments, especially in the action set-pieces, where you get a sense that they have put rather too much trust in the second unit and there is a slight disconnect between the action scenes and the character moments. I did however like the 1995 style visual palette for the 1995 car chase; a nice touch.

Even so, the film feels clunky and a little leaden in places and could probably have done with a little more zip in the cut to improve the rhythm.

One of the big issues for me with the action sequences is the lack of jeopardy. It’s established early on that Mar-vell is one of the most powerful beings in the universe so there’s not a lot of harm that can come to her. This tends to reduce the fight scenes to the level of video games and makes for a less passive experience than we have become used to.

Overall Captain Marvel lacks that sense of thrilling excitement that comes from the best of the MCU offerings. It has to act as a piece of exposition linking ten years of a franchise so it is inevitable the sailing is not quite as smooth as it might be.

The performances are good though and there are nice turns from Jude Law and Ben Mendelsohn in supporting roles. And those gaps that need to be filled in have been filled in and MCU completists can now construct a pretty credible time line from 1941 to 2019 if they really want to.

Inevitably you would expect to see Captain Marvel back in a sequel and this is indicated in the finale of the movie. However if you stick around for the mid-credits sequence – and who doesn’t these days? – it becomes apparent you’ll be seeing her a lot sooner than that.

Fighting with My Family will make you submit

When you think of WWE, formerly the World Wrestling Federation, lots of things come to mind. Violence, spectacle, noise, extravagance, action, and so on. The WWE is superhero comics come to life in its larger than reality offering, but one thing you don’t normally associate with the spandex clad warriors is heart, or love, or warmth, or affection.

Yet these are the values at the heart of Fighting with My Family which demonstrates the soft power of this multibillion-dollar enterprise. Of course, it is relentlessly on brand, it is a WWE film after all, but writer-director Stephen Merchant has slipped some human values under the radar in this simple but heartfelt story.

The WWE with its world of bad guys (heels) and clean-cut heroes (babyfaces) loves an underdog story and this may be the best of them all. It is the true story of the Knight family, who lived a life of borderline villainy in a Norwich council estate until wrestling saves them. They have their own tatty franchise – the WAW – and dad Ricky (Nick Frost) and mum Julia (Lena Headey) run the shows and their son Zak (Jack Lowden) is the star. However, when an opponent doesn’t turn up his sister Saraya (Florence Pugh) gets in the ring to save the family from financial ruin. She is a huge success and becomes a star in their very small pond.

Ricky has been pestering the WWE for a shot for his kids and when the big show comes to London, they get a try-out. Surprisingly they want Saraya and not Zak.

This is pretty much where the Channel 4 documentary on which this film is based left them, but this is also where the film gets interesting. The story focuses on both siblings; Saraya in her fish out of water existence in pro wrestling, and Zak having to deal with losing the only shot he had of making something of himself and his imminently arriving new family.

Both Lowden and Pugh are excellent and completely convincing. The real star for me is a wonderful script from Merchant which avoids the clichés but is full of beautiful character moments. There is genuine warmth to this script which informs the performances and makes sure that the film is often surprisingly moving.

The disconnect between the surface glitz of Florida and the hardscrabble streets of Norwich – which is where the heart of the film lies – makes for compelling viewing. It also provides a solid grounding for both Zak and Saraya’s ambition. Like The Simpsons, the Knight family may be dysfunctional, but their love for each other is unconditional.

The support from Frost and Headey is equally good but Merchant allows them to provide a frame in which Pugh and Lowden can shine. Great things are predicted for both and this is a major calling card for them.

Obviously there has to be Transatlantic appeal and Dwayne Johnson – one of the co-producers – lends his clout by stepping back in time to his earlier incarnation of The Rock. Vince Vaughn, who is getting better and better as a character actor with every movie, does a nice turn as the tough but fair wrestling coach who can make Soraya a star.

Fighting with My Family is a film which is full of sentiment without ever being sentimental, a neat trick to pull off, and shows that even in the fictional world of professional wrestling there is still room for real dreams to come true.