Captain America: Civil War

#StokerScore 10/10 

Expectations..... having them means that sometimes we're happy when they're met and unhappy, even angry when they're not, but is it fair to have expectations in the first place? There's a classic quote from Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip where Calvin suggests that the lower he keeps peoples' expectations, the easier his life is. As cynical as that quote is and as funny as it sounds coming from the mouth of a 6 year old, the uncanny accuracydoes make you stop and think. 

In my younger days I had the chance to meet a hero. I just want you to imagine that for a minute, I met a genuine hero. Someone idolised by millions to the point that they even transcend normal conventions of the word "hero".

My hero was Henry Cooper and he was a British heavyweight boxer. A 1960's pugilist who actually fought Muhammad Ali twice, Henry was considered a genuine hope for World heavyweight champion.

Was he undone by Angelo Dundee cutting Ali's glove, allowing Dundee's fighter  time to recover from an 'Enry's Hammer' left hook? This seems to be a question for the ages but it didn't stop him from being a hero. 

Approaching my twentiethy birthday I was working as a trainee manager in a bingo hall in York and henry was due to make an appearance as the brand ambassador for Mecca Leisure. Up to this point I'd never really met anyone famous with the exception of a few Leeds United players so so say I was starstruck would have been an understatement. Henry, or Mr Cooper as I called him when I was introduced to him, met every single expectation I had of him, His way of carrying himself, at that time in his fifties, was exactly the regular, working-class-guy-made-good that he was, no need for PR people to manage any character flaws. He wasn't patronising to me as the kid whose job was to help him find whatever he needed on his promotional visit to our club, just the opposite in fact. 

Of course there are others who say "never meet your heroes", just in case your expectations are destroyed and they, whoever these people known as 'they' are, are sometimes right and the person you meet doesn't match your quite realistically irrelevant,expectations.

Expectations went with me to watch Captain America: Civil War. Expectations due to the trailer, the cast, and the story and because here would be a number of characters that I'd been introduced to by many of the preceding Marvel movies as well as from the comics that I'd read as a kid

This movie didn't just meet my expectations, it left them trailing in the dust and not because it was keeping my expectations low. This is Marvel's best movie to date. To say that takes nothing away from the rest of the great movies they've been making since 2008, rather it is just making a very simple statement of fact.

The story is clear even if characters motivations aren't obvious at first. Stark wants to make up for past mistakes and expects everyone to agree. Rogers doesn't trust any politician and never will. But how the other characters fall in line isn't as straight forward. So this mix of action and drama worked perfectly and the witty one-liners gave some real laugh out loud moments too.

It's a Captain America movie and he's the star of the show but the supporting cast weren't bit players. Often the problem is that there's not enough screen time to do so many people justice but because we know the characters so well by now it wasn't an issue. It was also very nearly stolen by up and coming Tom Holland with relatively little in the way of screen time but more than just a cameo.

What was most refreshing was that The Bad Guy wasn't wearing a costume and threatening to destroy the world. By the time we get to Infinity War the threat will be very much in everyone's face so it was a pleasure to watch a superhero movie that kept you guessing as to what happened, but what will happen going forward.

Get your popcorn and sit back for a perfectly crafted movie that will make everyone at DC/Warner Brothers cry over missed opportunities and hopefully rethink their own expectations.

Ant-Man

StokerScore 9/10

Picture the scene. A dark, cloud-filled sky seems to pour forth rainwater of biblical proportions. Sombre, foreboding music, coupled with our hero's facial expression, that depicts so much angst and inner turmoil, allows us an insight to impending DOOM for someone. 

This is not Ant-Man. 

The difference between Marvel and DC characters being portrayed on screen at the moment would appear to be the amount of fun that it s possible to have. I understand the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" thing, ironically a line from a Marvel character, but just imagine that you've been given superpowers, or at the very least tech that could lead people to believe that you have superpowers, what would you do? That question is somewhat answered in Ant-Man, Marvel's latest step down the road to bringing all of my childhood (and adult, I admit) comic purchases to life.

It's had a rough-ish ride towards the big screen, in comparison to the rest of the MCU movies. An earlier, much-publicised but never fully explained falling out with original director Edgar Wright was cause for some initial trepidation. That Wright's and Joe Cornish's names appear on the screenplay and story credits went a long way towards removing that, especially with Marvel's Kevin Feige assuring people that much of their initial story remained. It has also been saddled with being the film expected to burst Marvel's bubble in their run towards cinematic domination.

I mention these things for the simple reason that Peyton Reed, the film's final director, and Edgar Wright could not be more different in terms of their cinematic output to date. Maybe Reed was more manageable in delivering Marvel's vision of the character, who knows, but the outcome was, for me at least, a really fun superhero movie that allowed you to enjoy the characters, feel for them when things got tough, and ultimately leave the cinema with a smile on your face and with key images flooding your mind on some sort of loop. So as for the second concern, sure, it's no Avengers with action from the first minute, how could it be? We need to get to know the characters involved first and the film does that from the outset. I can only begin to imagine that the way to make Michael Douglas look as young as he did in The Streets of San Francisco was to have taken images from that show and cut them into the movie. But Karl Malden is no Howard Stark and the 1970's police procedural was never that bothered about technological advancements.

This movie was a lot of Fun with a capital 'F'. It contained no existential message other than the good vs evil thing, the action set pieces were excellent, especially when juxtaposing the size difference between regular Ant-Man and shrunken Ant-Man.The Indonesian audience with whom I saw the movie audibly appreciated the visual humour as well as the drama and I'm really looking forward to watching this again.