Posts Tagged ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.’

Short Take: A fun ride that makes up for the atrocious Iron Man 2, yet doesn’t live up to all its potential

Director: Shane Black

Screenwriters: Drew Pearce, Shane Black

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Guy Pearce, Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Kingsley, Rebecca Hall, William Sadler

Length: 2h 10m

The world is facing a grave new terrorist threat, and it goes by the name of The Mandarin (Kingsley). The precocious Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man (Downey Jr.), is at a loss in figuring out how the maniac has left no evidence of how his efforts have caused so much destruction. And after Tony is forced to take one attack personally, he invites The Mandarin to make him his next target – which he does.

In reeling from an explosive ambush at his home, Tony discovers that Aldrich Killian (Pearce) – a genius he once ignored – is in cahoots with The Mandarin, turning humans into living bombs. With the help of Col. James Rhodes, a.k.a. Iron Patriot (Cheadle), Tony must uncover The Mandarin’s master plan and thwart it, all the while dealing with unsettling anxieties left over from his adventure with The Avengers. Will Tony redeem himself for underestimating the evil potential of Aldrich Killian, and spare the world of any more terror from The Mandarin? There’s only one way to find out.

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Over the past four years, we’ve been witnesses to a pretty significant phenomenon. We’ve gotten to watch a studio endeavor to create several different films of a single universe in an effort to release a crossover film that collected these films’ main characters into a team. I’m of course referring to Marvel Studios and its efforts toward making The Avengers a reality.

The road to The Avengers has been anything but a smooth one. In the four years since Iron Man, the first film planned for this Marvel Movieverse amalgamation, its films have seen changes in cast and crew, which were often caused by internal power struggles, while they tried very hard to make the universe work as a whole. Did Marvel succeed in the end? In my opinion, the only way to really answer this is to break down Marvel’s efforts film by film.

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Short Take: Exciting, funny, and spectacular to behold. Like the team itself, it’s even greater than the sum of its parts

Director: Joss Whedon

Screenwriters: Joss Whedon and Zak Penn

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Renner

Length: 2h 23m

Synopsis: It’s all been leading up to this. Colonel Nick Fury (Jackson) of S.H.I.E.L.D. has begun to call into action the Avengers initiative after Asgardian god Loki (Hiddleston) teleports to Earth to steal a cosmic cube of unlimited power called the Tesseract. The adopted brother of Thor (Hemsworth) plans to use the cube to wield a celestial army afforded to him by the bloodthirsty alien order known as the Other so he can overtake our world, but naturally the likes of Iron Man (Downey Jr.), Captain America (Evans), Black Widow (Johansson), the Hulk (Ruffalo), Thor, and Hawkeye (Renner) have different plans. But our heroes are not very good at working together as it turns out, with their frictions causing them to battle each other before the gravity of Loki’s plot forces them to focus their attention. Will the suspension of their grievances come too late to win the day?

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