2020 action-packed with superhero movies
Don’t worry comic fans, plenty of capes are on the way
This new year won’t give us another Avengers movie, but there will still be plenty of superhero action on the big screen.
Warner Bros. and DC Comics are releasing films featuring their two most popular big-screen characters of the moment (Wonder Woman and Harley Quinn), Valiant Comics is finally seeing one of its heroes hit the big screen (Bloodshot) and Venom hopes to best its previous movie’s $856 million worldwide haul in a sequel that looks to be a lot bloodier.
Marvel Studios is looking to provide a mild Avengers flashback (Black Widow) before they move on to bigger out-ofthis-world aspirations (Eternals).
Here’s the upcoming superhero movie slate for 2020.
BIRDS OF PREY — FEB. 7
Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) gets a new movie and a new team all in one film in this post-Joker-breakup adventure (no Jared Leto in sight, but no worries, he appears later on this list). Helping Quinn in the fight are lethal archer the Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), ultrasonic-voiced Black Canary (Jurnee SmollettBell), quick-handed Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco) and veteran Gotham City cop Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), as they go up against a Batman villain not commonly known by the general public (Ewan McGregor’s Black Mask).
BLOODSHOT — MARCH 13
Vin Diesel gets a superhero role with a lot more lines than when he played Groot in the Guardians of the Galaxy series. He stars as an indestructible soldier looking to put together the mystery of a past he can’t remember. This is the first live-action film from the Valiant Comics universe, which features other heroes hoping to make it to the movies, such as X-O
Manowar and Shadowman.
THE NEW MUTANTS — APRIL 3
Can a classic Marvel Comics series make for a good horror movie without the involvement of Marvel Studios? There’s a scary thought. The New Mutants is 20th Century Fox’s last stand with the X-Men universe as this film wrapped before it merged with Disney. Whether it will link to whatever Disney has planned for the X-Men is unknown. What we do know is this film features young mutants from that universe, as they get in touch with their powers for the first time while in a very creepy, prisonlike institution of some kind. Magik’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) mystic sword looks cool, though. That’s a start.
BLACK WIDOW — MAY 1
Scarlett Johansson finally gets a solo-starring turn as superhero/Russian spy Natasha Romanov. This movie obviously takes place before her death in Avengers: Endgame and involves her connecting some dots about her past. David Harbour also stars as Russia’s version of Captain America, the Red Guardian.
WONDER WOMAN 1984 — JUNE 5
Is this DC’s most anticipated sequel ever? Wonder Woman was DC’s first undisputed hit of the Justice League era and this followup, set in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, could be the biggest superhero hit of 2020. Going up against Gal Gadot’s Princess Diana is Pedro Pascal’s not-to-betrusted Max Lord, and somehow Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor is back from the dead.
MORBIUS — JULY 31
Jared Leto’s Joker didn’t work out over at DC so now he’s giving the role of Marvel’s second-most-popular vampire a try (we see you, Blade). Morbius the Living Vampire is a classic Marvel character, known more by diehard fans than a general moviegoer, and is yet another example of Sony trying to milk its rights to Spider-Man and any character connected to him. A rumoured appearance by J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson could go a long way here.
VENOM 2 — OCT. 2
Speaking of Spider-Man villain movies, Tom Hardy’s Venom is back. This time, he’ll likely be up against the villain everyone wanted to see in the first movie (Carnage, played by Woody Harrelson). Both Hardy and Harrelson should get some top-notch CGI movement instruction from
Venom 2 director Andy Serkis, who’s no stranger to such performances over his career.
ETERNALS — NOV. 6
So far, all we know about Eternals is that Kumail Nanjiani got super-swole for his role as Kingo, and that the film will also feature Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, Gemma Chan, Brian Tyree Henry and a Game of Thrones reunion between Richard Madden and Kit Harington. The Eternals, created by the late comic-book legend Jack Kirby, are an advanced alien race with the power of apparently being Marvel Studios’ next big thing.
In the latest chapter in the long-running (and longdormant) Bad Boys franchise, Will Smith’s Miami PD detective must face off against a younger clone of himself.
Nah, I’m messing with you. The threat this time is a Mexican ex-con (Kate del Castillo) and her trigger-happy son Armando (Jacob Scipio) who have a vendetta against Detective Mike Lowrey over an incident that predates even the first Bad Boys from 1995. No, it’s not The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
That first movie and its 2003 sequel were notable for their explosions, sexism and homophobia. This being 2020, returning producer Jerry Bruckheimer has dialed up the first of these and all but eliminated the other two.
But fans of the chemistry between detectives Lowrey and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) will find that little has changed. A little older and a little greyer, Mike continues to hassle Marcus over his too-careful driving, and the tension between Mike’s life as a committed bachelor and Marcus’ family-first ethos continues. Even Joe Pantoliano is back as the long-suffering Captain Howard.
New to the crew is Paola
Nunuz as Rita, heading up an elite task force called AMMO that specializes in high-tech surveillance and comic relief, and operates out of what looks like an abandoned heroes’ HQ from one of the Fantastic Four movies. Mike tolerates them because he had/has a thing for Rita, but he can only handle going by the book for so long. “Bad Boys one last time!” he says to Marcus, which is clearly a lie. Just watch the mid-credit sequence, or note that Smith is already attached to Bad Boys 4. Less duplicitous is his credo: “Violence is what we do!”
Bad Boys for Life features some fascinating bending of the laws of physics that fall into three categories: bodies, vehicles, and explode-y things. When it comes to bodies, the hand-to-hand fight scenes feel realistic enough. Not so much the vehicles, which have a tendency to show up in the right place and time regardless of whether they have enough actual time to get there. And things explode realistically, though a touch more easily than in real life.
The movie runs a shade over two hours, which is several shades longer than it needs to, but at least you can tell how close you are to the end by the level of on-screen mayhem. Once the action moves to Mexico (where else are you going to have a proper standoff?) it’s clear that things are close to winding down.
But credit to Belgian co-directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah for adroitly handling the film’s mix of comedy and drama.
It’s all grandly silly stuff, and it has been pushed around for years. There was a time when Sony removed it from its schedule altogether.
But fans at a recent promo screening seemed thrilled to have it on the screen at last. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the product fine wine, but a little extra aging seems to have done it no harm. So watcha gonna do?
If death-row politics are your thing, Hollywood has a pair of movies sure to engage your interest. Jan. 10 saw the release of Just Mercy, the true story of crusading lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s attempt to save (wrongly) convicted murderer Walter McMillian from the electric chair in the early ’90s.
Clemency, a present-day fictional offering from writer/ director Chinonye Chukwu, turns the narrative around to focus not on death-row inmates and their lawyers — though both get much humanizing screen time — but on prison warden Bernadine Williams, sympathetically portrayed by Alfre Woodard.
It raises the question: What are the effects of working in a job where one of your duties is to kill people? And the answers it finds are not pretty. Bernadine spends many of her evenings in a bar, either alone or gently flirting with her second-in-command (Richard Gunn), and struggles to maintain intimacy with her long-suffering husband (Wendell Pierce).
She is also haunted by a botched execution that opens the film, and which puts an inmate through agony before he finally dies. And while she never appears to question her
career — she defines it as caring for all the prison’s inmates, including those on death row — it can’t help that the shouts of death penalty opponents outside regular filter into her office.
Clemency is just Chukwu’s second feature, but it portrays a maturity and a willingness to grapple with difficult subjects. Justice and race are stickily entwined issues in America, where black people make up about 13 per cent of the general population, but 41 per cent of death-row inmates. Bernadine is black, as is Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), the inmate whose impending execution is the focus of the film. The couple that visits the prison with an unusual request is mixedrace.
But the screenplay is most concerned with psychology. While it never minimizes the anguish of people awaiting execution, it makes clear the trauma of those who deal in death.
Bernadine can barely sleep and suffers from nightmares when she does, while one of her employees develops PTSD and can’t continue in his job. And when Gunn’s character volunteers to be strapped to the execution rig in a practice run by the prison guards, the fear on his face is evident. Even Anthony’s lawyer (Richard Schiff) and the prison chaplain (Michael O’Neill) can’t wait to retire.
The details of prison life are telling, and often metaphorically powerful. In one scene, Anthony is let into an outdoor exercise yard whose wire ceiling is only a few inches above his head; he circles the tiny enclosure like a caged tiger. We also see Bernadine walking down a hallway, separated from passing inmates by nothing more than a yellow line on the floor. She walks very close to that line, without fear, which surely speaks volumes about her character.
Clemency, which opens on one execution, ends on another, with the difference that in this scene we are looking for three full minutes at Bernadine’s face while she witnesses the event. Think what you will about the death penalty — deterrent, necessary evil or barbarism — but you’ll leave Clemency convinced it’s horrific to behold, even at second hand.
When nominations for the 92nd annual Academy Awards were announced, the headlines wrote themselves: No women were nominated for best director, despite the fact that Greta Gerwig’s highly praised Little Women made the cut for best picture and adapted screenplay.
Gerwig wasn’t the only female filmmaker who made an impressive movie in 2019 — a year when the number of women working as directors, writers, producers, cinematographers and other behind-the-camera positions reached historic highs. Lorene Scafaria did a whiz-bang job directing the fizzy crime caper Hustlers, as did Marielle Heller with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
Tom Hanks earned a nomination for his portrayal of Mister Rogers in that film, whereas Jennifer Lopez’s commanding performance as a stripper with a heart of gold in Hustlers was ignored.
Considering that Lupita Nyong’o was also overlooked for her terrifying double-take in the horror movie Us, it’s tempting to chalk up this year’s snubs to the same racist and sexist blind spots at the Academy that led in 2016 to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign and efforts to invite more women and filmmakers of colour to join the organization.
But if this year’s nominees reflect an inherent bias, it has as much to do with genre as race and gender — not to mention the ways those three things sometimes overlap or cancel each other out in unexpected ways.
It’s not that white guys are running the entire table this year. For the first time, a film from South Korea — Bong Joon Ho’s wealth-inequality parable Parasite — has a credible shot at winning best picture, and Bong could very well take home the award for best director. Like Roma’s showing last year, that’s a progressive development, acknowledging film as a global medium. But, as imaginative and richly realized as his film is, it’s still more of a piece than not with the Hollywood films he’s competing against: Like Todd Phillips’ Joker, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, it relies on familiar tropes of explosive, stylized violence for its most visceral thrills.
Sam Mendes, nominated for his direction of 1917, has been duly recognized for his audacious decision to film the First World War actionadventure seemingly in one continuous shot, a muscular cinematic flex if ever there were one. But as a war picture about men of courage going into battle, 1917 epitomizes the kind of movie Hollywood has always deemed important and canonical enough to deserve its highest honours.
It’s no coincidence that Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for best director for The Hurt Locker in 2010. It so happens that she deserved that honour, for making a tough, technically flawless movie about a bomb technician’s experience in the Iraq War. But there’s also no doubt that The Hurt Locker fused perfectly with what the Academy has always taken seriously as cinema.
It bears noting that Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi’s whimsically anachronistic satire that was nominated for best picture, seems to have overcome the Academy’s anti-comedy snobbery, perhaps because of its anti-fascist message, Second World War setting and climactic battle.
In its efforts to be more inclusive, the Academy has welcomed hundreds of younger members, which probably accounts for recognition of such broadly popular films as Get Out and Black Panther, and holds promise for more open-mindedness when it comes to what defines greatness.
But as Gerwig once said, “If you were to take what seems to matter (from) movies, I would say male violence against other men is very high on that list.”
Most of the films being honoured are overwhelmingly male-dominated narratives, albeit sometimes self-consciously so, as in the case of Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman and Joker. Just as Joker is a protracted homage to Scorsese, Bong’s Parasite bows toward Tarantino in its penultimate, hyper-violent set piece, creating a closed loop of mutual influences that is simultaneously hermetic and self-impressed.
The end result is a hall of mirrors in which, despite nominal differences, they look weirdly — and distressingly — the same.