Category: Film Reviews by Amy

The animal-y Transformers Maximals make their appearance in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts — collect them all, on sale now at a store near you!

Once upon a time, the gorillabot Optimus Primal (voice of Ron Perlman) became leader of a group of other animal bots who escaped a world about to be eaten by Unicron (voice of Colman Domingo), a Death Starry-looking being who is a little bit Sauron and a little bit Galactus. Though he is able to eat the world the Maximals are living on, Unicron can’t move on to other worlds because his helper Scourge (voice of Peter Dinklage) failed to find the energy key thing that will allow him to wormhole throughout the universe. Optimus Primal and crew took the key while escaping the planet, eventually landing on Earth.

In the present day — which is 1994 New York City — Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is just a guy struggling to help his single mom, Breanna (Luna Lauren Velez), and his sick younger brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez), who is being denied medical care for his sickle cell anemia because his family is behind on his bills. Noah loses out on a security job and decides to turn to a buddy offering him some non-violent criminal work. It’s supposed to be an in-and-out job stealing a Porsche from a parking garage. But the car in question turns out to be Mirage (voice of Pete Davidson), an Autobot. And Noah slides into the car just as Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen) is calling all Autobots.

A troubling light beam — that only the Transformers can see — marks the location of a reawakened energy key and the possible calling of Scourge and Unicron.

The key was inadvertently reawakened by Elena (Dominique Fishback), an antiquities expert examining artifacts recently delivered to the museum where she works. She knows the hawk sculpture she’s been given isn’t Egyptian or Nubian as was claimed but she didn’t know the piece’s exterior was going to fall away and reveal a large glowstick crystal inside.

Thus do Autobots, Mirage and Noah and Elena all end up near the key, whose light has called Scourge and some other bad guys that are probably available as action figures and in multi-character sets. Eventually they all fight together to try to stop Scourge from taking the key. Noah thinks they should destroy it to prevent Unicron from eating Earth or any other world but Optimus Prime hopes to use it himself to help the Autobots go to their home world. The gang learns that there is another piece of the key they must find and a Maximal hawkbot called Airazor (voice of Michelle Yeoh) shows up to help them find it.

I was a little surprised to learn that Rise of the Beasts earned a PG-13 rating — it is perhaps the closest live-action analog to those many Transformer cartoons on Netflix that seem to transfix my kids despite seeming to me like a lot of exposition punctuated by very basic fight scenes. The “real” nature of the robots and people (and thus the “realness” of the violence they’re involved in) might put it out of reach for my younger elementary school kids but for interested tweens it’s probably fine. There’s no icky Michael Bay-ish male gaze stuff, and nothing jumps out at me as being super inappropriate for your average double-digit-age kid. Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback are both likable, capable people without having a whole lot of personality beyond that.

“This movie would be fine to take a nap to” is a thought I had while watching it, as was “the Transformer action figures this movie is advertising should be cheaper” (you can find some for $10-ish but $15 and up seems more common). This movie is benign enough that I don’t mind that I’m watching a two-hour-plus commercial for a Mirage action figure — particularly if they could price him at $9.99.

Perhaps the movie anticipated some parental grumpiness and thus to keep the elders amused it throws in a few 1990s hip-hop needle drops that have you thinking “aw, hey, that song” and then drifting off on nostalgia. So, if “benign OK-ness for much of the family” is what this movie was shooting for, it basically hits its mark. Maybe it climbs to a B- if your kids are old enough for this sort of thing and you’re just looking for tolerable family entertainment, a C+ for everybody else.

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Steven Caple Jr. with a screenplay by Joby Harold and Darnell Matayer & Josh Peters and Erich Hoeber & Jon Hoeber, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is two hours and seven minutes long and distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures.

Featured photo: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Re-enter the comic-bookily animated world of Miles Morales, a Spider-Man but not the only Spider-Man, in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, a beautiful and fun new adventure.

Miles (voice of Shameik Moore) is doing a shaky job at balancing his life as a promising student at a smart-kid school who is carrying his parents’ — Rio (voice of Luna Lauren Velez) and Jefferson (voice of Brian Tyree Henry) — big expectations for his future and his job as a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. This is perhaps why he’s a little too flip and dismissive when battling the “villain of the week” The Spot (voice of Jason Schwartzman), whom he ditches to rush to a parent-principal conference. The Spot was himself messing with multi-verses; one experiment brought a certain radioactive spider to the Miles Morales world. But then he was blown up in an explosion I sort of remember from the first movie and now he is partly made of wormhole. We first meet him trying to use his wormholes to break into an ATM at a bodega. But then he realizes he can wormhole into himself and then travel through various universes — such as a universe entirely of Lego, for example, or one where New York City is called Mumbattan and is a massive, Mumbai-like megalopolis (with its own Spider-Man, one Pavitr Prabhakar voiced by Karan Soni).

This multi-verse-hopping and the associated destruction bring the attention of an elite group of Spider-persons who go around fixing multiverse breaches. One of these Spiders is the Spider-Woman Gwen Stacy, known as Wanda (voice of Hailee Steinfeld) when Miles first met her in the last movie. He is delighted to see her and when he learns that her visit to his universe was part of a mission, he decides to follow her into the multi-verse. Thus does he meet other Spiders she works with: Jessica Drew (voice of Issa Rae), a motorcycle-riding bad-ass Spider-Woman who kicks bad-guy butt while being pregnant; Miguel O’Hara (voice of Oscar Isaac), the very intense leader of the Spider team; Hobie (voice of Daniel Kaluuya), a supercool Sex-Pistols-y British punk Spider-Man whose friendship with Wanda makes Miles all jelly, and returning Spider-Man Peter B. Parker (voice of Jake Johnson), who I thought of as the schlubby Spider-Man in the first movie and who now wears a BabyBjorn-type pouch to carry around his Spider-powers-having toddler Mayday.

At first, Miles is eager to be a part of this supercool team of Spider people. But then he starts to become uneasy with their philosophy of putting adherence to canon and the events that make a Spider-Man who they are in all timelines — the death of an uncle, the crushing of a police captain — even over the life of, say, Miles’ dad, a police officer on the brink of promotion to captain.

It’s a nice bit of business, toying with the whole “canon” thing. Do all Spider-Man stories need an Uncle Ben-type to die after telling that universe’s Spidey that with great power comes great responsibility? Can Miles make his own choices, be both the city’s Spider-Man and a loving son? This movie seems to be folding in some “thinking about fans thinking about franchises” in its story of a teenager finding his way. And it folds in cinematic Spiders-Man past, from a little nod to the tangential Venoms to a nice cameo from an iteration of the last live-action Spider-Man. It ‘s a lot, but it all works and comes together to make something that feels like a fun recognition of all the ways we’ve seen Spider-Man over the last two-plus decades while also being its own thing.

Of course, all of this, good though it is, is very secondary to this movie’s visuals, which are absolutely beautiful and would, if this movie did nothing else right (and it does lots of things right), make this movie a “year’s best” contender on their own. This movie looks great. It does such awesome things with illustration style and color and little touches with the build of this character or the style of that one to convey who they are. It also uses these visuals to augment the emotions in a very comic book/graphic novel way, playing with color when, for example, Wanda tries to talk to her police captain dad (voice by Shea Whigham) to show them either far apart or coming together. Or playing with scale or with the size of the characters in the frame. It’s such a joy to look at and it gives the movie a liveliness that makes it feel shorter than its over two-hour runtime.

I’ll spoil this much about how Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ends — it doesn’t. We get the words “to be continued” on the screen and while that sort of thing normally drives me nuts (focus on the movie we’re currently watching, not the sequel! — is my usual anguished cry) I don’t think it gets in the way of enjoyment of this movie. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is so enjoyable that I don’t mind having sat through a 140-minute Part 1 and am excited for March 2024 when, Wikipedia says, I’ll get to see Part 2. A

Rated PG for sequences of animated action violence, some language and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. I would definitely let a tween kid watch it but might hold off for younger elementary kids. Common Sense Media, which tends to be a decent judge, pegs it at 9+. Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson with a screenplay by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is two hours and 20 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Sony Animated Pictures.

You Hurt My Feelings (R)

Julia Louis-Dreyfus accidentally glimpses behind the veil of niceties that keeps marriage and society functional in You Hurt My Feelings, a smart if meandering comedy written and directed by Nicole Holofcener.

Beth (Louis-Dreyfus) is a moderately successful writer whose memoir did OK but whose latest book is not getting the interest she’d hoped for from her publisher. What do they know, your book is great, her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), assures Beth, always responding to her request to read drafts by telling her how much he likes it. But then, while Beth is shopping with her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins), Beth and Sarah overhear Don telling Sarah’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), how much he doesn’t like the book. Sarah is devastated — that her husband would lie to her, that he would dislike this book that she considers such a part of herself.

She doesn’t tell Don right away that she knows his true feelings, and thus he is bewildered with her anger at him. Of course all around this one untruth are a swarm of other things people say out of kindness and encouragement: Beth telling her college writing students that their pieces and ideas are good and interesting; Sarah always telling Mark what a great actor he is; Beth telling Don that he doesn’t look tired (Don is a therapist and one couple basically tells him he looks too tired for them to expect much out of him that day); both Beth and Don encouraging their definitely bright and talented son Eliot (Owen Teague), definitely too bright and talented to be working at a pot shop in Brooklyn, a-hem, they nudgingly say to him.

Even Beth seems to realize both that her hurt is real and that there really isn’t anything else Don could have said to her. They are a solid couple who love each other and love their son, who loves them back, even if all three of them annoy the poo out of each other at times. All four members of the central two couples dramatically state a desire to pitch their chosen career, which feels like a very normal reaction to having just enough success to feel like you should have more success and a general exhaustion with whatever the difficulties of said career are (other people, usually). There are few real problems here, just little pinpricks of annoyance at life, conveyed in familiar ways.

You Hurt My Feelings does feel longer than its 93 minutes but it is also at its best when giving its attention to one moment, one conversation and all the layers of things happening within it. This movie is very good at letting you see everyone’s discomfort and feel all the adjustments they’re making in the moment to try to keep on trucking through the conversation or the situation. This movie isn’t particularly buoyant but it is light and it never takes itself too seriously or tips into mockery of its characters.

Louis-Dreyfus is, naturally, the standout here. She just radiates genuine good-hearted imperfection. Like, yes she is this un-self-aware but also she’s not terrible. And, sure, she is the beautiful actress we’ve seen on TV for decades but she’s also able to access the goofy awkwardness of a real human. She helps make this solid if not brilliant movie enjoyably watchable. B

Rated R for language and for, like, who under the age of “I pay for my own health insurance” is watching this film?, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener (see also 2013’s Enough Said and 1996’s Walking and Talking), You Hurt My Feelings is an hour and 33 minutes long and distributed in theaters by A24.

Featured photo: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Halle Bailey is a mermaid who wants to be up where the people are in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, another one of these live-action “OK, sure, but why?” adaptations of a classic animated movie.

Yes, I know, “money, dummy” is the “why” of the existence of these live-action adaptations. I just think some additional motivation to revisit these stories would also be cool.

Mermaid Ariel (Bailey) likes collecting the human stuff she finds from shipwrecks in ye olde ocean and is generally curious about the human world. Humans and their world are garbage, stay away — is her father King Triton’s (Javier Bardem) point of view because humans killed your mother! Which feels like a thing the movie should really unpack more but that’s not the way it goes.

Ariel sees a Pirates of the Caribbean-y ship one evening and hangs out to watch the men shoot fireworks, carouse and just generally be human-y. But then a storm rolls in fast and tosses the boat around and stuff catches fire and it’s a big “abandon ship!” mess. Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), the cute human whom Ariel had been watching, gets everyone to safety, even his friendly dog, but then is tossed deep into the ocean. Ariel rescues him and takes him back to the shore, singing her mermaid siren song at him to wake him up. He falls in love with the music and the fuzzy image he gets of her as he wakes up; she takes off as soldiers show up to rescue him.

Eric gets a little more to him than I remember from the cartoon that, admittedly, I haven’t seen since forever. Here, he’s not so much a “to the manor born” guy but an adopted child of the Queen (Noma Dumezweni) and he is really intent on opening his country’s trade ports. Also he gets his own “I wish” song all about wanting to find the woman who saved him. It feels at first like the movie is setting up some kind of significant plot thing for Eric but it isn’t really — it’s just giving him an inch more dimension without really working that in to the way the story unfolds.

Back to Ariel. Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), who is the sister of Triton (but an octo-person rather than a merperson like him), slinks around the dark recesses of the ocean, still mad that her brother got the ocean crown rather than her. Again, seems like an interesting bit of story but the movie just sort of leaves it hanging out there. When she learns of Ariel’s new love for a human person in addition to her long-known desire to be in the land of whozits and whatzits and forks, Ursula has her eel buddies drag Ariel to her creepy lair and convinces her to make a trade — Ursula will give Ariel a three-day loaner pair of human legs if Ariel will leave her voice as collateral. Also, she has to get Eric to kiss her in those three days or Ariel will be Ursula’s, er, indentured servant? Unpaid intern? In the movie she says something like “you’ll be mine” and Ariel agrees. As we learn, Ursula just wants custody of Ariel so that she can bargain with Triton and this feels like a whole lotta business to go through just to get to that point, especially for a sea witch who can do magic.

Human Ariel makes it to the surface of the ocean and gets hauled into a boat by a fisherman who brings her to the palace. She is given food and clothes and introduced to the prince and they become buds, even though Ariel can’t talk and Eric is still looking for the mystery girl with the pretty singing voice. Along to provide chat to the audience when Ariel can’t are crab Sebastian (voice of Daveed Diggs), fish Flounder (voice of Jacob Tremblay) and bird Scuttle (voice of Awkwafina).

There is a moment when Eric sees Ariel and she’s all excited that It’s Happening, her plan to be a person and find her crush is working out, and then he doesn’t recognize her. He’s looking for the voice and she’s given that up. Her letdown is a nice emotional note — she understands in that moment that her decisions made in a fit of teenage-like anger and longing have consequences she hadn’t considered. It’s also maybe the only time that I felt like I was watching a person in a life and not a character on a set. A really well-costumed character on a very pretty set in a world that has been crafted as, like, a little bit Jamaica, a little bit Bridgerton. I mean, cool, but this is still largely a movie that feels like all the thinking really went in to the look of things and then the rest of the movie, including any emotional heart it might have, was just left to float along. The talking fish is impressive, the mermaids are eye-catching, the underwater scenes mostly look good and have a kind of logic to their physical nature. The characters, their emotions and even the songs are flat and feel like they have the volume turned down.

Which brings me back to the “why.” The movie seemed to have some thoughts on “why” to tell this story — there’s the “kid going into the world over parental objections” bit and some riffing on the idea of one’s voice, both literal and metaphoric. But it never picks a lane and gets specific — even about whose desires are driving the plot. I feel like the movie did a lot of laudable work to get everybody there, to find talented people and put them in the position to look credibly like sea creatures and olden-day people in a visually interesting physical space. Now it just needs to figure out why they are there and what story they are telling. C+

Rated PG for action/peril and some scary images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Rob Marshall with a screenplay by David Magee, The Little Mermaid is two hours and 15 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. If between now and when this movie inevitably hits Disney+ you need two hours and 15 minutes of air conditioning in a dark room where you (the adult) can relax and maybe snooze while the children in your care eat popcorn and are basically entertained, this is probably fine for that. Little kids might get freaked out by a brief shark chase at the beginning and some Ursula villainy by the end.

Featured photo: The Little Mermaid

Dominic Toretto family family family car vroom boom in Fast X, a scene-setting part-one situation.

Which I knew going in. I’ve read that Fast X is the second (or maybe third, according to Vulture) to last of the Fast & Furious central-storyline movies. The result, though, is that the characters largely spend the movies segregated off in their own locations and quests building toward a cliffhanger.

But first the movie goes back to Fast Five, the entry where the gang meets The Rock and eventually steals a vault by dragging it out of a building, to do a little retcon-ing. I don’t remember all the particulars of that movie but Fast X is all “what if Fast Five’s bad guy had a son and what if that son was Jason Momoa?” After Fast Five bad guy (played by Joaquim de Almeida) bites it, his son Dante (Momoa) is left to seek revenge.

Er, eventually.

Ten years later, Dom (Vin Diesel) and the gang are barbecuing it up in Los Angeles, listening to an underused Rita Moreno, playing Toretto grandma, yada yada about family. Later that night Cipher (Charlize Theron) appears at Dom and wife Letty’s (Michelle Rodriguez) door. Cipher, an annoying villain from a few of the previous movies, has been out-villianed by Dante and now she’s on the run from her own henchmen. Trouble’s a-coming, Cipher tells Dom before he calls “The Agency” (a law enforcement group of some kind?) on her. Also, it’s likely the mission Dom’s crew — Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridge), Han (Sung Kang) and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) — are on is not for The Agency, as they believe, but an elaborate trap. Somehow, Dom and Letty bend time to get to Rome like immediately (with a Dom muscle car — does he just have them stashed all over the world?) to try to warn the gang. The truck the gang steals is not full of some supercomputer thing as they’ve been told but a giant, hilarious-looking Acme-style bomb that eventually goes rolling through the streets of Rome, getting everyone involved labeled as terrorists. Letty ends up sent to a secret Agency prison, the Roman+ gang sorta wanders around Europe providing exposition and Dom heads to Rio (the setting of the Fast Five stuff) to look for Dante and provide the movie with a scene of street racing, which is the whole franchise’s origin.

Along the way, various members of the Fast family have cameo conversations with fun franchise regulars, like Helen Mirren as Queenie Shaw and her son Deckard (Jason Statham). We also get newbie Tess (Brie Larson), daughter of Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), and Isabel (Daniela Melchior), sister of the late mom of Dom’s son, little Brian (Leo Abelo Perry), who is now old enough to be kidnappable and participate in action scenes and stuff. B, as they call him, spends some of the movie with his aunt Mia (Jordana Brewster) and some of the movie with the latest Toretto, Dom’s brother Jakob (John Cena — who gets to be a little goofier than I remember him being in the last movie).

These cameos underline a central problem with these movies, which is that everybody has more of a personality than Dom. Diesel’s gravelly voice family talk is the whole character now. He doesn’t even have a lot of menace anymore. Letty and Mia, OG characters who have also had less and less to do as the movies have gone on, are not particularly lighting the screen on fire but Letty does get some fun scenes with Cipher — ones that made me appreciate Theron’s presence. Then you have Statham, whose straight-faced over-the-top tough guy shtick just, like, sparkles. Or the very nice Cena. Or Momoa, who absolutely understood the assignment. In the trailers, there’s a shot of Dante in a silky purple shirt with some kind of shark-tooth-y looking necklace, his hair in what I’m pretty sure is a scrunchy, his fingernails painted purple and his sunglasses sporting a chain of the “grandma librarian” variety. It is perfect. It really sums up his approach to Dante, which is, like, theatrically yet psychopathically bonkers with almost cutesy flair. It’s fun but it does highlight how little fun Dom has become.

But, look, Dom turns a couple of helicopters into nunchucks with his muscle car and sorta plays the Claw arcade game with a crane to knock that Wile. E. Coyote bomb into a river. How much can you really complain about lackluster acting and character development when it is so clearly Not The Point of this? I might not care about Dom’s family and his kid and all the forgettable dialogue about these things, and this movie might have no idea what to do with all its characters at this point, but when it’s on, doing ridiculous stuff with muscle cars and acting like “jumping” is basically the power of flight, it delivers a good time. B-

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action, language and some suggestive material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Louis Leterrier with a screenplay by Dan Mazeau and Justin Lin, Fast X is two hours and 21 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Fast X

Jennifer Lopez is, as the internet says, mother in The Mother, a line I’ll bet at least 60 percent of movie reviewers use when discussing this movie.

Partly because it’s true, partly because it’s right there and partly because Lopez’s character in this violent — but, aw, sweet! — Netflix movie is, as far as I can tell, just called Mother or maybe, as IMDb calls her, The Mother.

We first meet her when she is attempting to inform on some bad dudes to the FBI, who are doing a remarkably incompetent job of getting information out of this totally willing witness. Only Agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick) seems to be listening at all when she assures them that Adrian (Joseph Fiennes), bad dude No. 1, knows where they are and is on his way to kill him. No, he’s not, we’re perfectly safe, bluster bluster, says one of the other agents, right before he’s shot in the head.

But Lopez isn’t the sort of informant who just sits back and lets herself be assassinated. Despite being real pregnant, she saves Cruise when he is shot using, like, superglue and she manufactures an explosive from household products that seems to take out Adrian when he finally corners her. He stabs her in the belly before she blows him up but she makes it to the hospital and delivers a healthy baby girl.

Though Lopez is eager to hold her infant daughter, Edie Falco playing a no-nonsense FBI higher-up is all “not so fast, lady.” Because Adrian’s body was not recovered from the burning bathroom where Lopez left him and because Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal), bad dude No. 2, is also after her, the only way Lopez can keep her daughter safe is to give her up. Lopez gets the recovering Cruise to promise that he’ll make sure her daughter is adopted by good people, send her a photo of her daughter every year on her birthday and let Lopez know if her daughter is ever in trouble.

A dozen years later, Lopez’s character has made a Spartan life for herself on the outskirts of a small Alaskan town where the general store shop owner is a war buddy and where she spends her days hunting caribou for food and doing other survivalist off-the-grid activities. Then she gets a non-birthday bit of communication from Cruise, leading her to head to Ohio where her now 12-year-old daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez) lives with her adoptive mom (Yvonne Senat Jones), who gets to be an anguished protective mother as well, and a dad (Michael Karl Richards) whose face is I think always out of focus? Whatever, dads are not the point of The Mother, where either Hector or Adrian might be Zoe’s father but Lopez doesn’t want either anywhere near Zoe.

It seems the bad dudes have, however, found evidence of Zoe’s existence and whereabouts, which is why Cruise reached out. Quickly, Lopez kicks into protector mode, doing everything she can to fight the men who come to kidnap Zoe and to retrieve her when a surviving henchman manages to whisk Zoe away.

Eventually, Lopez takes the lead in hiding Zoe, even teaching her a little self-defense. What passes for humor and personality in this mostly laughs-free, character-minimalist movie comes as Zoe tweens about eating “Bambi’s mom” and hating Lopez —all with a very “gah [eyeroll], Mom” energy.

To lean further on dated slang for description, The Mother lands somewhere on the scale between “meh” and “cromulent.” This sure is a movie that exists — one might say of The Mother. It doesn’t have the Jennifer Lopez legit badassness of Out of Sight or the cheesy hysterics of Enough but it is, you know, a thing your eyes can watch. It’s fine, is I guess what I’m saying. It lacks the energy that would make it “heck yeah!” action fun but it has a whole subplot involving a Lopez and a mother wolf and the silly self-seriousness of that isn’t terrible. B-

Rated R for violence, some language and brief drug use, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Niki Caro with a screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig, The Mother is an hour and 55 minutes long and available on Netflix.

Featured photo: The Mother

Peter Quill and the gang return for one last? (probably not) hurrah in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 — not the worst Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, but not nearly as fun as the The Marvels trailer that preceded it.

This outing is largely Rocket’s (voice of Bradley Cooper) story, though he is often separated from the main group, so we don’t get a lot of his cranky raccoon personality or the group dynamic that was such a big part of the first outing. We meet up with the gang hanging out on Knowhere, doing Guardians work and trying to help a depressed and frequently drunk Peter/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), who still hasn’t gotten over the loss of his Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) back in Infinity War.

Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a powerful but stupid creation of the Sentinels (think “golden Elizabeth Debicki” from the second Guardians), shows up to steal away Rocket. The gang — Groot (voice of Vin Diesel), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillan) — manages to keep Rocket from being Warlock-napped but he’s grievously injured and attempts to heal him uncover that Rocket is, essentially, password protected. The crew sets off to find the lab where Rocket’s enhancements were engineered to get his system unlocked and make him capable of being healed. This puts them in the path of The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a powerful nutcase whose experiments have resulted in a variety of strange species, from the golden Sentinels (who were trying to steal Rocket for him) to animals like Rocket with tortuously applied extra limbs and abilities to a planet of humanoid animals that have, like, rabbit faces but otherwise mow the lawn and drive 1980s-model sedans and stuff.

The alternate-universe Gamora, who was stuck in the present after Endgame and who is now a professional thief with Sylvester Stallone and crew, joins up with the Guardians gang to head to the High Evolutionary’s base of operations to search for the Rocket password. She may not have the same emotional connection to Peter and the others but she also finds herself fighting to unlock Rocket’s password and protect him from the High Evolutionary henchmen trying to steal him. It seems that Rocket and his abilities to learn and think for himself represents the HE’s most promising technological achievement and he wants Rocket’s brain to help him engineer another super species.

I know that all sounds like a lot of plot, but somehow it isn’t. It’s like rice cakes — seems large but there’s not actually a lot to it when you dig in. This movie has a lot of ideas but not much in the way of fully developed story; it’s more like pieces of “oh, and maybe they could” glued together, kind of the way you do with a project where you don’t have a really clear focus and so you just keep adding “more” until it looks big enough.

I think the writers’ strike and the accompanying A.I. talk probably put this fear out into the ether, but what I felt very quickly while watching this movie was that this was the kind of movie we’re all afraid we’ll get if A.I. starts writing films. Like, it seems Marvel-ish, it has lines that feel like jokes, it has a line up of well known songs for the soundtrack, it has the general vibe of its creator having seen previous Guardians movies. But there is that Uncanny Valley, timing-not-quite-right feel to it — to the quips, to the physical humor, to the emotional beats, to the music. If this movie were a person it would be blinking both not enough and then suddenly too much.

James Gunn, human writer on all the previous Guardians movie (and the loveably goofy Christmas special), is the writer and director here. Why the movie feels like it was more lab grown than organically created, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s trying to do too much? It puts Rocket at the center but still tries to give us Peter’s story and his relationship woes and tell the story of the group and its development, and it seeks to establish this very bonkers villain who either needed to dial it back or just turn the knob all the way up. (As is, the HE is just kind of a forgettable nothing.) And there’s some character development for Mantis that gets worked in even though it feels like the movie doesn’t really have time for it.

What made the first Guardians movie and these characters a delight was the shagginess of them — generally, they’re not the best or the brightest and they are frequently jerks to each other, but they were scruffily likable and had their adventures in a more fantastical space setting than, like, the Iron Man/Captain America top-shelf part of the MCU. While Vol. 3 keeps us in a land of odd creatures and big colors, the charm and the low-fi fun are mostly gone and have been replaced with something too processed to let its characters have memorable moments or its story to really pop. C

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, strong language, suggestive/drug references and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by human person James Gunn, who is I guess bound for DC now, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is two hours and 29 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (PG-13)

A 12-year-old comes home to New York City from a happy summer at camp to learn that her family is moving to the New Jersey suburbs and all the horrors of sixth grade will be experienced with new kids at a new school in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, a very sweet, 1970s-set adaptation of Judy Blume’s classic novel.

Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson), only child of Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and Herb Simon (Benny Safdie), likes living in the city, near her beloved grandmother Sylvia (Kathy Bates). She’s nervous about what this new place and these new kids will be like. On arriving in New Jersey, she’s sort of claimed by neighbor girl Nancy (Elle Graham), also a sixth-grader, who will be in Margaret’s class. Nancy has queen-bee-ed herself to the leader position in a foursome of girls that now includes Margaret as well as Janie (Amari Alexis Price) and Gretchen (Katherine Mallen Kupferer). She demands that this club concern themselves with bras, periods and the boys they like, a list she insists begins and ends with Philip (Zachary Brooks), a boy in their class.

Margaret, though, is quickly charmed by Moose (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong), friend of Nancy’s slightly older brother Evan (Landon Baxter). And, informed by the lady in the department store that she doesn’t really need a bra, Margaret finds that she’s been talked into wearing a very uncomfortable “grow bra.” Please, she prays to/begs of God, please let her chest grow and let her get her period and be normal and regular like everybody else — except of course the only “everybody” who really seems to be in that boat is a girl named Laura (Isol Young), who is living out her own tween hell thanks to Nancy’s unfriendly comments.

Meanwhile, underneath all the “why, God, why?” of being 12, Margaret is dealing with something of a religious struggle after learning some difficult aspects of her family’s history. Barbara never talks with her strict Christian parents — and Margaret has never met them — because they cut Barbara off when she married Herb, who is Jewish. Neither Barbara nor Herb has ever imparted religion on Margaret, saying she can decide for herself when she grows up. But now Margaret has decided that she’d like to decide — trying out synagogue with her grandmother and church with some of her friends and hoping she’ll feel something that will let her know “what she is.” Along the way, she talks to God — pouring out fears and general anxieties about, you know, 12.

I don’t remember how much of this is in the book but in between elements of Margaret’s story we get these little peeks at Barbara’s story and her struggles and changes. She has gone from being a working mother in the city to a stay-at-home mother in the suburbs. She is also dealing with going from being a mother to a kid to being a mother to a tween girl who is gently trying out aspects of teenage-ness and looking for bits of independence. This might be one of those things you notice more depending on where you, the viewer, are personally, age- and life-circumstance-wise, but I enjoyed how the movie gave us Barbara’s struggles and her attempts to find her place in this new environment. McAdams fills in this character so nicely, giving us so much context to who Barbara is with just a facial expression.

To a smaller degree, we also get little glimpses of Sylvia’s life and her changes. With her family no longer nearby in the city, she’s sort of rearranging her identity. Margaret’s independence and her distance mean changes for Sylvia too — eventually leading to an extended trip to Florida — which is just a neat aspect to see examined, even just briefly.

But what this movie really does best, I think, is get to that “please let me be normal” desperation at an age when there really is no “normal.” Fortson is a winning Margaret — selling Margaret as a kid and Margaret as a teen, Margaret as a willing follower and Margaret as someone who knows how to stand up for herself. The character can take you right back to your tween self while the movie offers gentle character studies of multiple generations. B+

Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving sexual education (or really, the lack of sexual education by these girls who have to rely on a stolen anatomy book and a school health class) and some suggestive material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is an hour and 46 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Lionsgate.

Featured photo: Guardian of the Galaxy Vol. 3