If you are at all a fan of the Rocky Franchise, you’re going to love Creed II

The “Sweet Science” (that’s boxing for you non-pugilistic types) is deceivingly complex – full of stratagem, complicated by opposing styles, and subjective in its measure and scoring. But, at its core, and as viewed by most casual spectators, its boils down to the landing of four basic punches – the jab, the cross, the hook, and the uppercut. These may be thrown in different combinations, with different speeds and from various angles, but they make up what the boxer does over and over again until it is done. When he or she is not defending against those four things, he or she is throwing those four things. The Rocky franchise has fought this way for three decades now, pivoting occasionally, rolling out left or right at times, but always throwing the same punches - hoping that enough land. Creed II is no exception – it is no less predictable than any other Rocky film, no more mysterious in its end game. And yet, it excels; like the champion fighter, it lands and lands often – to the body to the head to the body – until you can’t resist and you’re just rolling with the punches.

It’s hard to say why one Rocky movie (and we count the two Creed movies in this genealogy) is better than the other. Like a good boxing match, I suppose it depends on the combination of the ingredients in the ring – the skill and the heart and the story of the participants – Creed II succeeds in all areas. For the latter, the film reaches back into Rocky lore (Rocky IV) to the death of Apollo Creed in the ring at the hands of the evil Russian boxer Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). Now, Apollo’s son, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan), who came out of obscurity to challenge for a title under Rocky’s tutelage in the first Creed film, is a world champion experiencing all of the trappings of boxing greatness. On the other side of the world, Ivan Dragos (played again by Dolph Lundgren), having been forgotten by his country since losing to Balboa all those years ago, has been training his only son Vitor (Florian Munteanu) to one day redeem them in the ring. With Adonis Creed now a world champion and with his old nemesis Balboa his trainer, Drago knows that it is time to strike a deal for the fight of the century – a Creed/Drago repeat.

This soap-opera plot seemed ripe to produce some jump-the-shark story telling. I entered the film worried that I might see all the good that was done in Creed I turned to corn ball. My worries were unfounded. I’ll grant that the writing (Stallone returns as part of the team) and direction (new guy Steven Caple Jr. directs) in Creed II are not as deft as its predecessor’s, particularly in the mixing of the tough and the tender – a bright attribute of Creed I. But, Creed II, it turns out, doesn’t really need gracefulness. Oh, the film has its poignant pieces, but it’s the chemistry of its characters, the balance of new and nostalgic, and the adrenalin rush of its battles that intoxicate. Jordan and Stallone are just superb together in their struggle up the mountain. And training and fighting montages – a Rocky-film staple, moving between Adonis’ and Viktor’s camps - are as impressive as any from the parent films. Heck, there’s even some defense displayed by the young Creed – a fight component never shown by Balboa (Rocky never slipped a punch in his career). Creed II pushes all the right buttons and by the time the original Rocky theme music makes its appearance during that final battle, you are ready, yourself, to step into that ring, double roll as you pass through the ropes, pound your gloves together and rumble. Creed II gets an 8 out of 10.  

Sleepers Logan Lucky and Maudie are well worth catching at the dollar show

Let me recommend to you, as their inglorious runs at the box office come to an end, two quite-good, lower-profile films that I think you’ll find to be a good value at the dollar show or for home viewing.

Logan Lucky 

What would you do to turn around a long string of bad luck? I mean long string… generational… maybe curse-level. I know what you’re thinking… you’d rob a bank right? Of course, that’s the obvious answer. OK, maybe it’s not the obvious answer but it’s an interesting answer in spite of its nonsensicalness. Logan Lucky is not a tight, make-sense movie - it’s a bit uneven, its motivations for the oddness that ensues within it are dubious and loosely linked, its resolution predictably impossible. It’s not tight, but it is fun – a bit of sharp whimsy in a movie season of bombast.

Lucky’s director Steven Soderbergh (Oceans 11) assembles a quirky set of characters around the bumpkin-like West Virginian Jimmy Logan (played by a thicker-than-normal Channing Tatum). A once promising athlete, Jimmy is now a camouflage-wearing divorcee with a bum knee and a freshly-minted pink slip from his construction job. Commiseration with his one-armed, bartender brother Clyde (Adam Driver, The Force Awakens) reveals the sad history of the bedeviled Logan family including Clyde’s own injury suffered just before getting on a flight home from a tour in Iraq. It’s not clear that Jimmy believes in a Logan curse, that’s Clyde’s thing, but his depressive situation is enough for Jimmy to resort to planning, of all things, a grand crime to get off the mat.

It would be easy to just categorize Logan Lucky as a southern-fried Oceans 11 redo. But it would be just as easy to believe that Lucky was a Coen brother’s flick (think Raising Arizona) or even a Jared Hess (Nacho Libre) product. Yes, there’s a heist, but the perpetrators and surroundings are more important and more intriguing than the actual deed. There is not a dull piece in the ensemble: Daniel Craig (007) kills as safe-cracking Joe Bang, and his sleepy, drunk, and morally-motivated brothers and comrades in crime, Fish and Sam played by Jack Quaid (Hunger Games) and Brain Gleeson (Mother), are as equally out there as their bleached-haired, crew-cut older brother. Even Dwight Yokam as Bang’s jail warden connects – and they’re all obviously having a great time horsing it up during the romp. Granted, you may experience some periodic head scratching as the ridiculous caper unfolds. But the gusto of the gathered eccentrics more than make up for the lack of cohesiveness. 7 out of 10

Maudie

Muadie, a film inspired by the life of Nova Scotian folk artist Maud Lewis, is a simply-painted story of an unlikely life and a surprising rise. It is a subtle telling of a hard life given brightness and color beyond what it should have had. The film's poignancies, within an unlikely romance and a measured re-birth, are deftly communicated by director Aisling Walsh and a strong cast with small but powerful visuals; two fingers squeezing a drop of paint, a slow short stroke of a brush, the flight of a bird on a grey Canadian landscape, the swing of a screen door. The story that these scenes highlight is certainly sentimental, but Maudie turns out to be less about an underdog’s triumph and more about the multiple sides of humanity and the odd way it sometimes is achieved.

Maude Lewis, played marvelously by Sally Hawkins, is “crooked” as Maudie might say; challenged by rheumatoid arthritic (we presume) from her youth on. She understands her circumstances but believes she can live and independent life. Desperate to remove herself from an aunt’s demeaning oversight, she takes an offer from a local recluse, Everett Lewis played by Ethan Hawke, to house-keep his small shack. Everett is a hard-scrabble fisherman. He is coarse and crude, limited socially from growing up in the isolation and uncertainty of an orphanage and with little inkling of how to interact with his new live in. As Maudie finds a natural outlet to her loneliness through painting the walls, windows and furniture of Everett’s small home with flowers, birds, and people, Everett softens. The two mismatched, odd socks evolve something deeper than there should have been.

The color that Maudie Lewis added to her life in this story moved from the screen to me. Maudie is not a completely joyful story though. Hard lives - all lives I guess - have hard beginnings, or hard middles, or hard endings. These are all there in Maudie, but always alongside the color and persistence of her art and spirit – and it all seems better than it should be. 8 out of 10.

Dunkirk

Ever get that “something’s missing” feeling? You’re in a situation where everything appears in place but you still sense there’s a missing piece. That was me watching Dunkirk, the just-released World War II epic about the evacuation of Allied troops from that French city during the Nazi invasion of France. At some point during the film, I flashed briefly to a memory of my mother tasting her delicious spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove – manipulating a spoonful as if testing a fine wine but with a perplexed expression – “did I forget the oregano?” That’s what I was feeling. I was watching a fine film, an extremely well-built recreation – but if felt somehow incomplete.

 Notwithstanding my vague sense of a gap, there is certainly no denying the significant craftsmanship in Dunkirk, the movie. Christopher Nolan (writing and directing) has created and aligned an array of amazing images and brilliant set pieces to re-enact this critical event from the early stages of the war. He tells the story from three perspectives - the Ground, the Sea, and the Air. On the ground waits over 300,000 British, French, and Dutch soldiers having retreated from the Nazi invading offensive to the beaches of Dunkirk, a site well suited for evacuation across the English Channel. Their situation is desperate. German battalions are pressing hard – held back, precariously, by what remains of the French army. The evacuation must happen soon or, as Churchill described, "the whole root and core and brain of the British Army” will perish or be captured. On the sea sail pieces of the British Navy, ships too large to reach the men waiting in shallow water. They are trailed by hundreds of conscripted citizen craft – fishing boats, pleasure craft and yachts - scrambling to reach the beach and ferry men to the larger ships or back home. In the air, sparse teams of RAF fighter planes attempt to fend off German bombers and strafing Stukas working to prevent the evacuation.

Nolan, creator of some my favorite films – Momento, The Prestige, Batman Begins, Interstellar – seems to be using Dunkirk to stretch his considerable movie making talents into the large-scale action film arena. He goes old school in his detailed reenactment, employing thousands of extras to create a massive war landscape instead of relying on CGI; assembling boats that had participated in the real Dunkirk evacuation, and using genuine era-appropriate planes for aerial scenes. This all pays off in giving Dunkirk an amazingly authentic feel. Nolan is at his best in the air where a battle is waged between three spitfires and several sets of Luftwaffe bombers and fighter escorts. You are almost in the cockpit as the rat-tat-tat of the Spitfire’s guns is answered by the hard bangs ahead from the German bombers’ rear cannons. Combining these detailed images and sounds of battle with Hans Zimmer’s meager and haunting score, Nolan has created a rare and effective dark realism.

Dunkirk will certainly get high grades from the paid critics for its minimalistic approach – as Nolan leans heavily on his detailed images in place of dialog and sentiment. But that minimalism, including the film’s limited-scope focus on small chunks of the crisis, also kept me from feeling the gravity and grandness of the event. The intensity and desperation of those pinned down, the urgency of the rescuing naval force, the skill and the bravery of the air-borne warriors – are all adroitly illustrated; but the story was light on the humanity of it… the complete drama of the miracle rescue is somehow lacking. Nolan gives brief and late-coming glimpses of the heart in the event – the calling out of the places the tiny rescue ships had come from as they approached the peer to take on soldiers, the remembering of lost young heroes in home towns. But it seemed too little to harmonize Nolan’s minimalism with the massiveness of the event. Dunkirk has all the pieces – so well assembled and with such fine detail - the story is real and important. But for all its fine attributes Dunkirk lacks the emotional power to move it from good to great. 7 out of 10. 

Spider-Man: Homecoming rises above the swamp of summer super heroes

So how many are there now? Spider-Man movies I mean - 5, 7, 38?  No one really knows. I understand several grants have been given to Ivy-League academics to study the question. And that’s usually a problem for an action film series and particularly super hero franchises – version fatigue.  Unless you’re one of those bright young people, it gets hard to keep up with the iterations.  Add on having to track the superhero’s place in the evolving “Marvel Cinematic Universe” and on its chaotic super team The Avengers and it all gets very close to brain surgery. Although there’s been less turnover than in the flavor-of-the-month Batman franchise, we’ve still had three different Spider-Men since we got serious with Toby McGuire at the turn of the century. And it’s not just different actors – these are different types of Spider-Men with different back-stories, slightly different settings and super powers, and a broad range of aunts and uncles. So yeah, continually rebooting different versions of the same hero can be a problem – but it’s not a problem this time. Spider-Man: Homecoming is a good Spider-Man… quite good!

And who knew? We’d seen the dorky-high-schooler-to-Spider-Man story before. And there wasn’t much in the film’s creators’ pasts (Director Jon Watts (Cop Car) and writing team Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (Vacation)) that would hint at Homecoming being anything more than another very average link in the never-ending Marvel movie chain. But I’ll be darned if the new crew didn’t produce the most charming, funny, and clever Spidey film of the bunch – Go figure? Homecoming stands out from the current drone of super-hero films with strength in both story framework and delivery. Watts and his writing team do an excellent job balancing the interesting new with Spider-Man’s classic foundational story. In this new backstory, the very-young Spider-Man (Tom Holland… who?) has been sort of discovered (see Captain America: Civil War) by Iron Man and is being groomed under Tony Stark’s mentorship to be a future member of the Avengers. That’s new – as is all the cool Stark Industries gear built into Spidey’s shinny suit. This and other new vibes are injected into familiar and important scenes and ideas from the original Stan Lee comic book which include a fine mechanical bird villain – The Vulture (Michael Keaton), a girl friend from some of the first Spidey comics (at least in name), and, of course, Aunt May (significantly upgraded by Marisa Tomei). Watt’s keeps the kid-genius part of the Peter Parker story and the fresh-face and unknown Tom Holland pulls it off with flash and minimal awkwardness. Keaton is great as the bad guy and new-comer Jacob Batalon kills as Parker’s nerd, Lego-Death-Star-building buddy (and “chair guy”).

The new and the old come together in Homecoming to make a very entertaining and witty, as it turns out, summer film. But it’s not just chuckles and grins (although Captain America’s public address announcements and the built-in Spidey suit assistant are dead funny); there are some seriously tense scenes in Homecoming with well-utilized CGI for you crash-and-bash freaks. I like this new Spidey – I hope he comes back. And I hope he stays true to his comic book self and returns as a solo act. The real Spider-Man of comic-book lore was not a huge fan of the whole Avengers thing and had a rocky relationship with that group throughout my young comic book reading years. Here’s to the Marvel-movie-making powers not throwing him in with Iron Man and the rest of the Avengers too soon. If Holland and the gang are as good in future films as they all were in Homecoming, I think Spider-Man will sell a lot of tickets all by himself. 8 out of 10.