This hardly deserves to call itself a tier. It’s more like a convenient catch-all featuring two movies that did enough right to deserve better than a dreary (B-) plus one (far, far) better effort that didn’t do quite enough to sneak its way into my top 10.
Dividing nineteen movies into five tiers is a ridiculous exercise, anyway, but how would dividing them into four tiers be any better? If one tier had to go, though, it would definitely be this one. Two movies would move down. The remaining film would move up (where it probably rightly belongs). Easy!
But easy’s no fun! Instead why not just have five tiers and cram one that has no internal consistency right in the middle? Doesn’t that sound more exciting? It did to me.
13.) The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (B/B-)
What I Liked:
I originally placed The Amazing Spider-Man 2 down near the bottom of Tier Four, but then I remembered the thrilling sequence showcasing Jamie Foxx’s Electro first awakening to his nightmarish new abilities while standing in the center of Times Square.
That visually resplendent and aurally hypnotic scene is an amazing piece of summer filmmaking and on its own easily elevates the entire movie a full letter grade.
Marc Webb is an intensely visual director, which makes him a natural fit for a film adapted from the panels of a comic book. Webb’s Spider-Man is very much of the moment. Peter Parker uses tons of twenty-first century tech. (I want to call it “tech of the teens,” but that seems to refer to Peter’s age group rather than the decade in which they live. Why doesn’t anybody ever call the past two decades the aughties and the teens? The radio uses the 2000s and today, which seems totally illogical since today is still the 2000s! I, for one, am going to be so relieved when 2021 rolls around! At the moment, it’s completely impossible to identify any decades past the 90s with one word!)
My point is, Webb’s Peter is plugged in to the present. He almost always has his ear buds in, and his own playlist quickly becomes the soundtrack of his life. Peter Parker has always been a photographer, so Webb makes him an amateur photographer of 2014, someone continuously editing digital photos and uploading short bursts of video using software on his phone and computer. In or out of the Spidey suit, Peter is all about working on the web.
The truly fascinating aspect of Webb’s vision of Spider-Man is that in his films, the individual parts mean more on their own than they do in sum. That’s highly antithetical to the goals of traditional filmmaking. Usually, directors want to tell a coherent story. They set up scenes that work together in sequence and build to a climax. But Webb clearly has the slightly different goal of weaving together a highly tensile narrative that can be easily broken apart into still resonant standalone scenes.
It’s easy to imagine a character like Peter quickly clicking through a highlight reel of his own adventures. You could easily take the best bits of his battles with baddies and upload them to YouTube or even pare them down further and go the vine route. And now that we stream most of our movies, and kids watch YouTube as readily as traditional TV, it’s easy to imagine that in the not distant at all future (like maybe even next year), we could re-watch Webb’s work on Spider-Man easily by picking and clicking the best parts of his films.
Aside from Webb’s fascinating approach to the project, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 also benefits from some great supporting work from Dane DeHaan and particularly Sally Field. They both do the kind of powerful, understated acting that requires no special effects.
Andrew Garfield makes a pretty cool Spider-Man, too. He’s particularly great with the glib banter and cocky insults, always full of fun for us even when he’s not feeling so great himself. And Emma Stone is phenomenal, eye-catching, and always impeccably dressed and superbly lit as Gwen Stacy. I think Emma Stone is great, and obviously so do all the people making this movie. They give her such fantastic lines, character development, costuming, lighting, and weather (I swear they’re following her around with her own personal wind machine), that she practically upstages Andrew Garfield and edges Spider-Man out of the center spotlight.
What I Didn’t Like:
This Spider-Man—like Webb’s first entry in the series—has undeniable pacing problems. The first half is slow. Until Electro shows up, the movie certainly isn’t bad, but it’s not quite good yet, and until it actually becomes good, the audience has no way of knowing that it will eventually get better. That lack of knowing makes the early parts of the movie seem even slower, unfortunately.
The visuals are always great, and the music is good, too. But sometimes the character-driven narrative elements suffer a bit. Both Emma Stone and Sally Field get fantastic parts, but Dane DeHaan as Harry Osbourne isn’t given nearly as much emotionally resonant material to work with as James Franco got back when he played the much closer friend of a much less confident Peter.
The mysterious “Roosevelt” stuff also doesn’t get the development it deserves.
Still I’m more than game for another Spider-Man movie by Webb (although I’m a little sad that one familiar element will not be included in Peter’s next adventure).
12.) Godzilla (B/B-)
What I Liked:
This is the best Godzilla movie I’ve ever seen.
Of course, I’m pretty sure that the only other Godzilla movie I’ve ever seen is the 1998 Godzilla starring Matthew Broderick, and I’m not even positive that I’ve seen that. I’m pretty sure that I did see it, though, because I remember it as not one of Roland Emmerich’s better films (a most unfortunate designation).
Surely I saw some old black-and-white Godzilla movies on TV as a child. I’m very familiar with the character and saw him referenced in a number of cartoons and television shows and children’s movies. Godzilla has been a legitimate pop culture phenomenon for a very long time. We’ve all heard of him. But until this movie, I had never seen a story about him done particularly well.
(Last year’s Pacific Rim was quite good, but it didn’t focus on Godzilla specifically.)
Unlike a lot of lazy projects that borrow Godzilla, this film actually has a very smart set up. Someone put actual thought into this screenplay. The chaos isn’t just random stuff that happens. The origin of these monsters is explained and has some gravity both literally and on more of a metaphorical level as well. Ken Watanabe in particular gets some profound, thought provoking lines, and the film offers us a (largely nonverbalized) examination of how war effects the human psyche and the world.
Bryan Cranston delivers an incredible (if brief) performance. Supporting players Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins get a fantastic (entirely visual) moment near the end. Godzilla himself unleashes some pretty awesome destructive force (once he actually deigns to appear).
Best of all, though, is the trippy, almost surreal first-person point of view shot of warriors parachuting through the air into the monster battle zone. That scene is by far the most memorable of the movie (though the final reaction shot of Hawkins and Watanabe is also great).
My husband would rate Godzilla higher, I know. Then again, it wasn’t his ear our five-year-old was whispering in throughout this entire movie, so maybe his cinematic experience was purer than my own.
What I Didn’t Like:
Godzilla is a well made movie that (for once) isn’t an embarrassing desecration of its source material, but the fact remains that I didn’t like it all that much. I mean, I liked it just fine. I have no legitimate complaints. But I had a lot more fun watching Jersey Boys. (In fact, in an earlier version of these rankings, I had each movie in the other’s place. But then I realized that this film has far fewer actual shortcomings than Jersey Boys.)
I guess Godzilla’s one colossal shortcoming is its failure to delight me. It’s well made and offers plenty of entertainment bang for your buck. But I’m not that excited by action, and I’ve never been a fan of cool, silent brooding unless it’s being done by me, and even then I don’t enjoy it.
Bryan Cranston gives such a riveting performance in the first part of the film that I felt his eventual absence with an aching sigh of dissatisfaction. Cranston’s Joe Brody is not only the type of guy who comes across as crazy to strangers, but he’s also insanely verbal, so obviously I could relate to him. I think talking is the best because a) You can vent your emotions b) You can figure out what you’re thinking and feeling c) You can tell others what is going on in your mind.
And then when other people talk, you can practice this mind-blowing skill called listening. Wow oh wow, a person can learn so much that way! Verbal communication is the bee’s knees in my book! (Should that be bee’s or bees’? How many knees are we talking about, all the knees of bees everywhere? Or is there this one particular standout bee with a great set of gams and the patellas to match? I’ll have to research the idiom later.)
Bees and their glorious gams aside, as Joe’s son Ford, the talented Aaron Taylor-Johnson gives a perfectly solid performance of his own. But the character is so frustratingly non-verbal that I just couldn’t get as excited about his scenes. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Ford’s wrong not to verbalize his every fleeting thought. (You’d never catch him wasting time ruminating about the knees of bees.) It’s just that the strong, silent type doesn’t much appeal to me. I like the strong, communicative type. And Cranston was so intense and so verbal and so intensely verbal! I just miss him after he leaves the movie. I can’t help it.
And you know who else ought to be in the movie more? Godzilla! When you call the movie Godzilla, I think the titular monster deserves more than a series of brief cameos. But maybe that’s just me. I guess he does get a pretty spectacular exit.
While I’m on the subject, I should mention that the movie’s also not very funny. Of course, I suppose Godzilla could easily read this review and snap back, “Oh yeah? Well, you’re not very funny either, lady! So there!” Then to soften the blow, he would probably eat me so that I didn’t have to dwell on my shortcomings for too long because—as anyone who has seen this film knows—he’s actually quite considerate and helpful (as giant, rampaging lizard monsters go).
11.) Edge of Tomorrow (B+/A-)
What I Liked:
I love Emily Blunt (but I do not always like her cinematic choices), and I practically hate Tom Cruise (as an actor, though over the years he has chosen to appear in some great movies). So I wasn’t sure what to expect from Edge of Tomorrow.
As we were watching, my husband dubbed this movie “Groundhog Day in Hell,” an apt description for a film about a soldier in a war against aliens who gains the frustrating power to restart the day as soon as he dies.
The concept must really have appealed to Tom Cruise, the idea of one man trying to convince the obstinate masses that he possesses arcane knowledge of the future that will affect the fate of humankind. Cage has seen the aliens’ plan. He knows what’s coming. He’s trying to tell everyone else the truth. But over and over again, the people he encounters refuse to believe him. Every day, Cage is reborn to live his truth, and every day he hears a constant refrain of, “You’re crazy!”
And then he meets super soldier Rita (played by Emily Blunt), and things really start to get interesting.
Like Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow keeps the movie fresh and the story moving forward, choosing well what it shows us, so that although the protagonist must relive the same day again and again, we experience mainly the moments of novelty, not the frustrating monotony.
Making the most of a strong cast (including Emily Blunt who is finally appearing as an awesome character in a good movie that will make money), Edge of Tomorrow also benefits from sharp writing, welcome humor, arresting visuals, superior sound mixing, and unusually engaging action scenes. I don’t even like action much (sometimes I hate it!), and I was actually extremely excited when I realized we would get to watch that cool part where they jump down onto the beach a second time.
Edge of Tomorrow is a great summer movie that gives Tom Cruise the strongest starring vehicle he’s had in quite a while.
What I Didn’t Like:
I wish Tom Cruise were a better actor. He’s a better actor than I am, but that’s not good enough. He carries the movie well enough with his likeable movie star charisma, but he can’t match Emily Blunt’s natural talent in the dramatic scenes. (I feel mean for being so direct, but Cruise can probably soothe himself with his vast fortune and the knowledge that my opinion counts for nothing.)
The movie also faces a natural limitation. It must be told exclusively from the point of view of Cage in order to work. What happens to the other characters each time Cage restarts? How does this power actually work? What exactly happened to result in the movie’s final scene?
Edge of Tomorrow never adequately explains these things, but because it keeps us so thoroughly entertained, we don’t start asking bothersome questions until after the movie has ended. I’m curious to watch it a second time on Blu-ray because I keep hoping that maybe the moment the movie ends, it will spontaneously restart and not make the same mistakes again the next time through.