I will not have time to write a full review for all of the movies that I have seen since I last updated (before I went overseas), so I will be writing one sentence reviews of them all.

The Good Shepherd:  3/5, A pretty standard production, not blown away by anything, the story was not as gripping as I expected/wanted.

21:  2/5, I suppose Kevin Spacey needs some money, which is why he chose to star in this.

88 Minutes:  2/5, about 66 minutes too long.  Pacino needs money, too, apparently.

Penelope:  3/5, a cute story, ok performances, nothing particularly outstanding

Kung Fu Panda:  2/5, Computer animation isn’t enough, let’s get some real characters in the voices and script.

Dr. No:  3/5, not the best Bond, not the worst, a bit brief and unmotivated, but you have to start somewhere.

Pink Panther: 4/5, Peter Sellers is, as always, fantastic.

Bourne Identity: 3/5, there are better spy movies out there, but this was pretty original, does not do the book justice.

Austin Powers 1: 3/5; 2: 3/5; 3: 2/5, This is a trilogy that has not worn well with time.  And the third one didn’t even do well in it’s own time.  Also, I think that my not being in middle school may have had something to do with it being just ok, and not raucously funny.

Departed: 5/5, Fantastic movie on all accounts.  So good I went back and watched it 3 days later and was still blown away by it.

The Bunker:  5/5, a fantastic performance by Anthony Hopkins as Hitler

Raising Arizona: 4/5, a very good Coen brothers film, funny and fast.

Fido:  4/5, A good zombie comedy, with absolutely beautiful design and color choices.

Lars and the Real Girl:  5/5, fantastic performances and story.  Touching and thoughtful.

Brick:  5/5, a high school film noir that is both intriguing and beautiful.

Be Kind, Rewind:  4/5, a good movie, but the movies that they film overshadow the actual plot, pretty standard Gondry, I suppose.

Conspiracy:  4/5, great performances, a movie about a discussion that could have changed the world.

28 Days Later: 4/5, a good zombie movie that takes an honest look at how people will react if the world falls apart.

28 Weeks Later: 2/5, took all the thoughtfulness of 28 Days Later and threw it out the window in favor of standard zombie fare.

From Hell (graphic novel):  5/5, Allan Moore provides a fantastic story, that is made all the better by the 50 pages of endnotes from his research

1776 (book):  3/5, a brief, superficial look at the revolutionary war.

God of Small Things (book): 5/5, I wouldn’t normally like books that juggle time, but it is an engaging story with beautiful language, that trumps a rather trite author’s tool.

Maurice Maeterlinck (book):  4/5, interesting, but pretentious.

I was on vacation and then work started up again, I’m keeping records of what I need to write about and so I will be trying to catch up at some point.

In the meantime, I have been watching Carnivale and I really want Tim DeKay to play the Green Lantern (Hal Jordan version) in a movie.

How do I go about making this happen?

I am ashamed to say that I’ve lived so long without watching this movie.  But in my defense, I read the Mad Magazine parody when I was twelve.  And it was really good, too.

This movie, as I’m sure most of the readers here know, takes place in the not too distant future, or perhaps an alternate present or past.  Violence and rape are rampant and society is falling apart.  Alex and his gang go out every night to wreak havoc for the fun of it.

Alex is the leader of a gang of four guys who hit up the milk bar at night and they go out and rob, rape, or beat up whomever they can find.  This is all going very well and they are loving life.  Alex is skipping school and then picking up women at the mall and then going out with his Droogs.  Until his Droogs decide that they have a good idea for the big time.  Earning some real money in a robbery rather than the petty cash they get off the people on the street.  Alex won’t stand the dissension and beats his crew, but then they end up going on with the plan anyhow.  His crew betrays him and he is caught by the police.

He is sentenced to fourteen years for murder and works his way into an experimental cure for antisocial behavior, where they condition him against sex and violence in much the same way the army uses disulfiram.  They give him a drug that will make him sick and then they show him movies of sex and violence.

It works very well and he is released into a world where, even though he has changed, no one else has.  And he gets abused by his family, his old friends, and his old victims.

This was a fantastic movie.  It is a movie about juxtaposition and dichotomy.  Alex loves violence, but he also loves Beethoven.  The setting is futuristic, but people are still using typewriters.  The language is full of ‘thees’, ‘thys’, and ‘thous’, but at the same time has new slang peppered in everywhere.  The camera work and acting were superb, particularly from Malcolm McDowell as Alex.  All of the characters though were blown out of proportion.  They all had nervous tics or characterizations that showed what a truly insane world that this was.  It wasn’t that Alex and his gang were living outside of the world, but that the world had created them and created all these other vague monsters, too.

I hear that the book is even better and I am looking forward to reading it in the near future.

Overall:  5/5, I loved it.  A must see, however be aware there is a lot of nudity and violence and I was feeling a little sick myself by the end.

I have a bit of an illness when it comes to owning movies and I have to finish what my mind sees as a collection.  Since I own Batman movies, it is a natural extension that I should own Catwoman.  I happened to find myself in a video store that was two hours away from where I live and they had 5 copies of this movie for 6.99 each.  I went up to buy one and the computer, proving that not even the used video store wanted it, rang it up as 4.99.  I paid cash so that it could not be traced back to me, because I’ve heard the stories (and you know it is bad if Amazon is suggesting you buy Catwoman and Elektra together, so as to minimize embarrassment).  According to the urban legends, this is the video that the Ring was based on.

And the stories are all true.  If you watch this movie all the way through, something horrible will happen.  You will be sitting through the end credits and wondering what happened to the last hour and forty minutes.  Then in a desperate attempt to glean some kind of worth out of the DVD you will watch the three deleted scenes, despite saying to yourself, “If that is what they kept, what must they have cut out?”  They cut out a minute of a boss being nice to Catwoman, a minute of making out, and an alternate ending that was slightly more satisfying than the one they left in.  However, they left in the two and a half minutes of shaky camerawork of Halle Berry playing basketball.

Someone decided that a woman in a leather-suit who had an affinity for cats and was a jewel thief was not a good enough selling point, so they completely re-imagined the character.  There was no more Selina Kyle, instead we had Patience Phillips, a meek art director in a beauty supply company that was about to release “Beauline” which reverses the effects of aging.

She finds out that Beauline has terrible side effects and is killed by the boss’s wife’s goons.  Killed.  To death.  Then a cat brings her back to life.  A cat.  Breathes on her.  And brings her back to life.  

She then exhibits basic split personality disorder traits.  And apparently turns CGI.  Which is fine, I suppose because the cats were all CGI.  She returns the cat to its owner where she finds out that she is one of a long line of Catwomen.  Somehow a badass woman who is a jewel thief was pushed aside to try and pawn off the Witchblade plotline.

Blah, blah, blah.  Revenge, revenge, revenge.  Love interest, love interest, love interest.  End of movie.  Thank God.

Beyond the new origin story and plot points, which, try as I might, I can’t understand.  The art team seemed to decide that the audience was blind.  They were throwing poorly CGI’ed buildings and cats and people at us.  Whenever Catwoman had to run across a roof or anything like that, she gained “COMPUTER POWER” which also meant she seemed to lose a couple of joints and became much stiffer.  And her CGI whip could never decide how long it actually was and was conveniently always long enough to do whatever she needed to do. Jessica Hagy just today uploaded a diagram to show exactly what this phenomenon of CGI is like.

On top of this, Halle Berry seems to have never watched a cat move, so when she is trying to be catlike (and is actually on screen), she is moving more like a bird, with these jerky head movements.  And she decided that, since she needs two personalities,  the best choice for the second personality would be the King of Pop.  She is channeling Michael Jackson for the majority of the movie.

And one of the most frustrating things about this is that they had a beauty company that was selling a product that would ruin people if they stopped using, which sounds like, for all you Batman: The Animated Series fans out there, the perfect set up for Clayface as a villain.  Nope.  That would require some thought.  Instead the “villain” is the boss’s wife who has been using the stuff so much she is invulnerable.  Until she is killed in a manner that is still unclear to me.

Benjamin Bratt did okay in this movie.  Alex Borstein was in it and was a nuisance.  Also there was some kind of underlying feminist ideals that were just awkward.  The villain says at one point “I’m used to doing what I’m told, I’m a woman, well no more, I am now taking control,” or something like that and it just rang false.  I agree with feminist ideals, but the movie just tried to pass lip service to it in order to try and make us think that they had a stronger heroine than they actually did.

Overall:  This movie is worse than AVP-R.  Do not watch.  1/5 I hated it.  I detested it.  I loathed it.  I was yelling at the screen through much of the movie.

Without a Clue is a movie that I would never have heard of if it hadn’t been for a friend of mine who has been recommending it to me for years.

The premise of this story is that Dr. Watson (Ben Kingsley) is a brilliant crime-solver, however, in order to keep his position in society, he has hired a drunken actor to play the real detective.  Thus he creates the character of Sherlock Holmes (Michael Caine).  The two solve crimes with a good amount of personal tension, until Watson is killed and Holmes must bumble along alone in order to find and apprehend Moriarty.

This is a solid movie with a number of very good lines.  The premise is quite original and the writers and actors take it to the hilt.  Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine are both fantastic actors in their own right and when they are playing against each other they are even better.  I found towards the ending it started to drag some, however it picked itself up again and finished strong.

This is a straightforward movie once you get past the initial twist. 

Overall:  4 out of 5, I really liked it.  A solid movie that is worth watching, though I think that it would lose some its shine in a second or third viewing.

I love Batman.  Who doesn’t?  A friend and I were actually discussing Shoot ‘Em Up, when she hit the reason why everyone likes Batman.  Everyone likes to believe that deep down inside there lies the mettle to be something incredible, someone just needs to be pushed far enough.  And we’re not talking incredible like reciting pi out to one hundred places or being able to whip up a really great meringue with only heavy cream and cumin in the house.  I’m talking about going to the ends of the earth to train and then going out every night to protect the city you love.  There are a number of heroes that have that anger and drive to them:  Batman, Punisher, Daredevil.  Generally in their history there is a loss of family.  My friend said, “It really only takes a good dead family story to sell me,” and I (almost) completely agree, because it resonates with that primal hero or villain in each of us.  The part of us that would go batshit nuts and find justice and vengeance.  The part of us that says, “I don’t need superpowers to be a hero, I have stamina and drive (and dead loved ones).”  The Batman in each of us.

That said, I am a sucker for Batman.  I watched the Animated series as a kid and read the comics.  So Gotham Knight came out, and, in my blind enthusiasm for the upcoming Dark Knight, I went out and got the two disc special edition (I haven’t looked at the special features, after all, this is a movie review, not a DVD review).

What Gotham Knight is, if you don’t know, is six Batman stories loosely connected and put on one DVD.  One of the most striking things about this movie was the range of the stories.  Some are told with Batman almost not speaking at all.  Some are told from Bruce Wayne’s perspective.  Some have action, some have emotion.  

Of the six stories, my favorite was the first one, “Have I got a story for you,” which is the story of Batman chasing a villain across the city, as told by 3 kids who saw pieces of it.  Each one saw Batman as a wholly different creature.  The story was not only engaging, but the artwork was beautiful.  Not in the traditional comic book sense, but it reminded me of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, which was one of the first graphic novels I read with Batman and which, to this day, stands out in my mind as a gritty, dark, Batman-esque world in which he should function.  

The second one, “Crossfire,” was a pretty standard story, reminding me of a series of Spider-Man comics called Tangled Web where we see the effects of Spider-Man’s action on the normal people of New York.  Here it was the effects of Batman on two Gotham police officers.

The third story was my least favorite for a number of reasons.  One of the strengths of the “Anime” style in my view is the ability to create really muscular masked heroes.  One of the downfalls is the propensity to create weedy looking normal people.  We meet Bruce Wayne in this one and, for some reason, he has a huge nose and a terrible underbite.  He looks more like Cowboy Bebop than Batman.  Couple that with the fact that the story revolves around the gadgets and one should see why I didn’t like it.  Sure, Batman has toys.  He has a utility belt.  But he also has guts and I don’t want to see a story about his toys.  I am willing to bet that there were people who got suckered in by this one because of the ending, showing compassion, &c., but I would also like to point out that Batman is a detective first and foremost, so he would have known better in the first place, rather than making the mistake that causes the sappy ending.

The fourth one, “In Darkness Dwells,” had a mediocre story, but the artwork was amazing.  Batman goes against Killer Croc at one point and it was like Croc had crawled straight out of a Mike Mignola comic.  Also it featured the first rendition of Scarecrow that I have ever found interesting or vaguely intimidating.  

The fifth one was another mediocre one, mitigated by a slightly interesting mingling of flashback.

The final one was a good chase story with a much better Wayne than the third story, and I was excited to see the appearance of DC mercenary mainstay Deadshot.  It was an interesting chase, and I would watch it again, but it did not blow my socks off.

One of the best parts about this movie, however was the fact that Kevin Conroy played Batman.  Conroy started playing Batman in 1992 for the Animated Series (one of the best animated shows of my time), having never read anything about Batman before.  The plot was explained to him and he, a Shakespearian actor, says “Oh, Hamlet,” and had no trouble playing the part.  They were going to cast a younger man for Wayne but he also convinced them to use his voice and the split between Batman and Wayne is amazing.  Conroy has been playing Batman continuously since 1992 and, for my generation, is the voice of Batman.  You can hear that he has aged since the heyday, but it is still a very good performance.

Do not believe the claim that this is the first animated Batman movie to get a PG-13 rating.  The Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker movie got a PG-13 rating until they re-edited it.  The PG-13 version was later released as a Director’s Cut (and it is pretty good, it’s the only Batman Beyond that I’ve seen and it reminded me a little of the story from Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns).

Please pardon the fact that I overly nerded out on this review.

Overall:  An interesting concept, better than the Animatrix, however I wasn’t blown away by it.  The first and last ones are probably the strongest and I hated the third one.  I am also slightly biased against anime.  Three out of five, I liked it.

 I have only watched one episode of Get Smart in my life.  I enjoyed it, but it is hard to not enjoy Don Adams.  I went into this movie not expecting anything and it more than delivered.

Steve Carell plays Maxwell Smart, an analyst of the American spy network C.O.N.T.R.O.L.  He is looking to get a promotion as a field agent, and work with the likes of Agent 23 (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson).  He gets passed up for promotion because he is such a good analyst, they need to keep his skills there.  There is a problem with a mission and the Base of Operations of C.O.N.T.R.O.L. and the identities of the field agents are compromised, so Smart has to be promoted.  He and Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) must infiltrate Russia and find the nuclear devices that have been stolen by Sigfried, an agent of K.A.O.S.

This movie was very funny.  I really enjoyed it, and when Mel Brooks’ name came up at the end credits, it became obvious why it was so good.  Carell and Hathaway have a very good chemistry and even though it is a comedy and a spoof, there is a definite plot. This is a movie that harkens back to the days of Naked Gun and Police Squad, however it is not as off the wall.

Why, you ask, is it only four out of five if it was so good.  Well, there are times where I would like to see Steve Carell in a role and not see Michael Scott come through at some point.  And while Maxwell Smart was a separate character, there were times where it seemed that YELLING was translated into comedy.  It was a good movie and it had a good plot, however I don’t think that it was as good as the Naked Gun movies.  I would have liked to see more gadgets along the lines of the shoe phone, because my understanding is that the TV show did a lot of that, and there wasn’t much like that.  The movie lacked something, but I don’t know what.  Perhaps I would know if I were a bigger fan of the TV show.

On a side note:  There is a moment of two men kissing and I was incredibly surprised at the audience reaction.  The disgust was abhorrent, I couldn’t believe that in these days people will, in a movie theater, during a male to male kiss in a comedy, say “That’s gross.”

Overall: 4/5, I really liked it.  Definitely go out and watch this movie, particularly if you like Mel Brooks, Steve Carell, or spoof movies in general. 

This will be brief.  It is exactly as bad as you expect.  I had to show this movie for a number of middle-schoolers and you know it is bad if they don’t laugh at even the fart jokes.  There are a few SNL alumni who think that they are great at doing multiple characters and should have movies based around them.  I want fewer Norbitts and more The Jerks.  Luckily, I think the producers, directors, and actors got tired of it halfway through so it is mercifully short.

Overall:  1/5, I hated it.  No reason to see it.  It is nice to see that girl from Spin City getting work, though.

This movie is not going to be given a fair rating.  There are a number of demographics that this movie is aimed at that I am not a member of.  However, I used to be a member of some of them, and it made the movie hard to watch.  I know someone who refuses to watch The Office (particularly the British version) because she used to work in offices like that and it dredged up bad feelings.  Ghost World did that for me.

Ghost World is a movie about two snarky, teenaged girls who have just graduated from high school and are on their way out into the world.  They have both eschewed the “normal” suburban choice of college and were going to get jobs and move into an apartment together.  Along the way they get a little side-tracked by a personal ad in the local paper.  A “bookish man in a green cardigan” is looking for a blonde woman he met on a bus.  They call him and ask him to meet this woman in 50’s diner and they watch as he waits and then they follow him home.  Their fascination with this man continues and when they see him selling some old records they buy one on his recommendation.  Enid, the darker, snarkier of the two listens to the record and loves it.  They continue to hang out with Seymour and he starts to replace Rebecca in Enid’s life.  Enid and Seymour become closer until the blonde woman, Dana, actually calls and he starts dating her.  

Meanwhile, Rebecca is working at a local coffee shop to save up money for the apartment and Enid is taking a summer art class that she needs to complete graduation.  

One of the most frustrating things about this movie was the unclear time setting.  It took me about half the movie to understand that it was set in the mid 90’s, but throughout the time seemed to waver between the 70’s and the current decade.  It wasn’t caused by the fact that Seymour kept antiques, but rather a series of vague design choices.  The cinematography and color choices suggested a certain Wonder Years quality that set me into the 70’s, as did the setting and the signage of the town, but the technology seemed like it was the 80’s.  

This movie was an interesting view into the high school world.  It was a world I inhabited, including the snarkiness and the disdain for the mainstream.  Thora Birch (Enid) and Scarlett Johansson (Rebecca) were both perfect portraits of the type and played the parts with precision, as did Steve Buscemi (Seymour).  Buscemi played his normal lovable loser, but he quite skillfully played to Enid and Rebecca creating a nice, believable relationship with Enid that Rebecca had cause to be jealous of.

The actors in here were very good, the story was interesting, and the ending was…appropriate.  However, this movie dredged up some times in my life that I did not want to go back to and people that I didn’t want to think about, so I did not like it.  I don’t know how other people will like it, but I think that it will not be a good watch for people who are past the college age.

This was an indie movie, based on an underground comic.  I have not read the comic and I don’t know that I have much desire to now.  Unlike “indie” movie Juno, this had a genuine touch, and the girls’ personalities were believable.  But at the same time, it had the earmarks of all the other indie movies.  Troubled teenagers who live in houses with weak or eccentric parents and have cluttered and unique bric-a-brac in their room.  They must befriend an older person and figure out how to be social and deal with hormones.  I want less formulas.  But it was better than Juno.

Overall:  2/5, I did not like it.  I think that had I watched it 6 years ago I would have really liked it, however, I have enough disdain for people that I don’t need to watch more of it on my off time.

One of the issues I have found that makes for a bad superhero movie is excessive backstory.  In order to create a fully fleshed out, nuanced character, a number of directors and writers decide that they need a long period of “origin story.”  Ghost Rider had a long backstory.  The Ang Lee Hulk was essentially nothing but origin story.  Iron Man had a lot of backstory, but it was okay because it was action packed and didn’t feel like backstory (though I think it did keep the final battle from being a real full-feeling battle).  

Generally comic book heroes can have their origins broken up into one or two lines.  Spider-Man:  Bitten by a radioactive spider which gave him spider powers, while adolescence gave him teenage angst powers.  He lost a father figure, so he is out looking for justice and rationality in the world.  Batman:  Lost his parents, wants justice.  Has a childhood fear of bats that he had to reconcile.  X-Men:  Outcasts looking for friends, led by a man who saw the atrocities of genocide and wants to stop it.  Captain America:  G.I. who was given a big break by the government, so he feels he owes his country a debt.  Superman:  Alien powers, guided by his naive country bumpkin adoptive parents who still have faith in justice.  Punisher:  Already a little nuts, mob killed his family.  Catwoman:  Already a little nuts, thrill-junkie, likes pretty things.  Jughead:  Already a little nuts, metabolic mutation combined with the funny hat allows him to convert hamburgers into pure radioactive energy.  The Incredible Hulk:  Radioactive experiment gone haywire (bomb, serum, it doesn’t matter).  Loses control when made angry, but he loves Betty Ross, however her father, his creator, wants to harness his power.

The Hulk is a hard character to get interested in, despite the fact that he is really interesting.  He is not so much a hero in his early incarnations.  He is just an angry beast who fights other gamma-irradiated angry beasts.  He doesn’t have the quality of villains as Spider-Man, X-Men, or the Fantastic Four.  Hell, he doesn’t even have the number of villains as Aquaman.  But as Marvel started to see that this character could fall into a rut, they started making him interesting.  In the early 90’s the Hulk was split into the angry, dumb, green Hulk, and the angry, smart, grey Hulk.  They were both parts of Banner and there were battles that raged in his head between the two.  After that they were synergized into one person and the Hulk remained powerful only as long as he was calm, when he got angry, he morphed into Banner.  One doesn’t expect to see this in the early movies, one just wants to see Hulk bust some stuff up and say “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” and “Hulk Smash!”  But the possibilities for interesting psychological future movies remains.

The Ang Lee movie has some brilliant moments.  Moments where you can see that there was a clear vision behind this and it was supposed to be a movie that would bring nerds out of the baseboards like roaches.  Unfortunately, that vision got lost somewhere and we ended up with Hulk (review pending).

The Incredible Hulk takes what was in the Hulk and improves upon it enormously.  Instead of an hour and a half of backstory that shows what a brooding, troubled person Bruce is, with Betty being the only bright spot in his life, we have a montage that shows, with no words, exactly the same thing in about seven minutes.  From there we see that Banner is living on his own and seems to have been doing that for a while.  There is a brief story point where we see he is a cautious, meticulous man, but enjoys his anonymity.  We also see that he cares for others and doesn’t want to see harm happen.  We see all of this in the first twenty to thirty minutes.  Then the action starts.  General Ross finds out where he is and sends in the troops, so we see the Banner on the run in an all day chase that ends with our first glimpse of the Hulk.

This movie had a number of things the first movie did not.  First and foremost, a villain.  I’m sorry, but General Thunderbolt Ross does not count as a villain, he counts as an irritation.  The army doesn’t work either, sorry.  The only reason Stane counted as a villain in Iron Man is because he got off his duff and did something about his aspirations.  He created something that allowed him to go toe to toe with the hero.  In the first movie, Ross just whines and sends in the troops.  The new movie has Abomination in it and Tim Roth plays the man who becomes Abomination very well.  He has a ruthlessness and a drive that is needed for someone who will undergo the process to get power.  The people I saw it with had a problem with his look, saying he was too short.  I grew up with Wolverine being really short, but tough as nails so I had no trouble with that, and I thought Roth’s face was fantastic.  It was hard and set, with teeth like little daggers.  I think he could play a werewolf very well.

Bruce Banner is a weedy man.  He needs to be thin and unassuming, but still have an iron in his eyes that shows the beast within.  Edward Norton was perfect.  He does soft-spoken, but he can still kick-ass when he needs to.  He and Liv Tyler showed real emotion and feeling for each other.  I believed that they were separated lovers, without question.

The Hulk character was, obviously, a CG character.  I am not a fan of the increasing amount of CG in movies, but there are times where it is necessary.  The Hulk was relatively believable, his interactions with others were realistic and his skin and musculature did not have me groaning.  The Hulk kept all of the scars on the face that Banner had (particularly the scar under his eye) and I thought that was a great touch.  The eyes however were the most unreal to me.  I don’t know that I have ever seen a realistic CG eye, and I think the reason is that the animators are trying to hard.  They are putting in too much light reflection in an effort to make them emote.  Usually a human eye will have one or two points of light, but Hulk and Abomination seemed to light themselves and then additionally it looked like they were looking at the explosion of the Death Star (in the remade ones, where Lucas thought that every explosion needed a damned ring around it).  Also, there is a point where the Hulk is walking through a creek and his feet make no splashes and no water clings to them.  It was like he was a ghost.  Other than these two points, though, the CG was pretty good, believable, even.  And at least he stayed a consistent size (about eight feet) the entire movie.

This movie had the standard cameos by Stan Lee and Lou Ferrigno, but also had the theme from the original Hulk TV series, which was really good to hear again, and it also had a cameo from Tony Stark, furthering the story of the Avengers movie.  We were also set up to see the origin of the Leader, but in a nice low-key way.  A foreshadowing that was unobtrusive, but fans would notice.

But what about the final battle, you ask?  It was good.  It did not feel rushed and it had some interesting combat.  Even the physics of the fight were not completely off the wall.  This movie was two hours but it had enough meat in it to keep me interested.  It felt like one hour.

Overall:  5/5, I loved it.  In fact, I think I liked this one better than Iron Man, however it is like comparing apples and oranges (and I bet I’ll be in the minority for liking this one better).