D Gary Grady

As one expects from a comic book movie, most of this one is ridiculously over-the-top action, but there’s more to it than that, notably an underlying theme of the trade-offs between freedom and order. It doesn’t have anything too subtle or profound to say on the subject, though it comes down clearly on the side of freedom, but it’s still more thoughtful than you’ll get from the average TV pundit or politician, and ideally it might encourage some members of the audience to think about it and the associated question it brings up of dumping masses of top-secret files onto the Internet, as one of the good guys does in the movie.

The title character’s powers may be a little far-fetched, but as a person he comes across as believable, something in considerable part attributable to actor Chris Evans. I’m sure a few cynics would insist Captain America is too decent and courageous to be true, but in fact you would not have to search through very many fire departments to find someone just as heroic without the super powers.

(Granted, you might also encounter a villain who exclaims, “Hail Hydrant!” It takes all kinds.)

Another major character is Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow. Scarlett Johansson is another fine actor, though playing a woman who’s brilliant and hot is hardly a stretch for her. One of her best moments is in a deleted scene, and interestingly enough when she saw the rough cut she suggested dropping that scene to improve the pacing. The directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, observed that it’s pretty unusual for an actor to recommend cutting her own scene, especially a good one, and they expressed the opinion that she ought to be directing.

Anthony Mackie is Captain America’s other sidekick and is another believable hero, a military veteran whose day job is working at a VA hospital helping people deal with PTSD and the like. He turns out to have an unexpected useful skill that comes in very handy later in the movie.

The action scenes are well done (and admittedly they’re a major part of what most audiences want to see), but they take up so much of the running time that some other potentially interesting secondary characters get hardly any screen time, so we never get to know them. There is a nice little scene in which the hero (who was frozen and presumed dead for several decades) visits his World War II girlfriend, now in her 90s. Stan Lee, who’s 91 himself, has a nice cameo as a Smithsonian security guard. And of course Samuel L Jackson is around.

It’s not as good as the previous two films to feature Captain America (counting The Avengers (2012)), but I still mildly recommend it and have reasonable hopes for the next one.

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This is the third of a trio of comedies co-written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, with Wright directing and Pegg starring along with Nick Frost. In Shaun of the Dead (2004), a pretty funny and original romantic comedy with zombies (and some uncomfortable scenes of actual horror I could have done without), Pegg and Frost played a layabout and his even more useless friend. In Hot Fuzz (2007), a quite good anglicized version of an American cop buddy action comedy, Pegg played a dedicated London police officer transferred to a small village where Frost became his enthusiastic but not very capable partner. There’s some additional overlap in the casts and some repeated gags, but the films are unconnected in terms of characters or plots.

(Pegg and Frost also co-starred in 2001’s Paul (reviewed here), but that film’s script was co-written by Pegg and Frost rather than Pegg and Wright.)

This time Pegg is a man of about 40 who’s not happy with the way his life has turned out. Back in high school he’d been a popular guy, the de facto leader of a group of friends whose crowning achievement was an attempt to celebrate graduation by having a pint in each of the twelve pubs in their home town. They failed to reach all twelve, but Pegg recalls it as the happiest night of his life.

So in the hope of reliving, and maybe even topping, that one glorious event, he convinces his old friends to give it another try, this time making it all the way to the last pub on the list, The World’s End. They’re all reluctant, especially Nick Frost, the wealthiest and most successful of the bunch, who for good reason no longer considers Pegg a friend. (It’s good to see Frost play a competent character for a change.) But they all eventually go along for varying reasons.

Back in the town most of them haven’t seen for many years they run into a few people they remember, including a favorite teacher played by Pierce Brosnan and a town eccentric played by David Bradley (Hogwarts caretaker Argus Fitch in the Harry Potter movies).

Pegg is particularly delighted when they encounter Rosamund Pike, the sister of one of the friends (Martin Freeman, best known as Bilbo Baggins in the Hobbit movies). Of course, any guy would be happy to encounter Rosamund Pike, but Pegg especially, since the high point of the original pub crawl was a sexual encounter with her in pub restroom.

They also run into a trio of hot girls they’d lusted after in high school, two blondes and a red-head known to their male classmates as the Marmalade Sandwich. It turns out the young ladies are not only still in town, they even show up in a dance club in their school uniforms, seemingly not having aged and quite willing to fulfill the fantasies of three of at least three friends. That seems pretty unlikely, and there’s an science fictional explanation for it, one that ties into the title.

By this point the story has taken an abrupt turn for the bizarre and dangerous, and our heroes are fighting for their lives and their honor. On the latter front, Pegg remains determined to fulfill his quest for a pint at every pub.

The ending I found a bit disappointing, and some might be troubled by the considerable level of violence before that, though it’s mostly comically cartoonish. I enjoyed it well enough, but I’d give it only a mild recommendation.

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A number of films and plays have lately looked at classic fairytales from the viewpoint of a villain, including this live-action retelling of the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, released 55 years to the day after the animated original. It’s rather better than I’d expected, and it would have been better still had the impact of some ideas not been lessened by similarities to Disney’s Frozen.

Angelina Jolie has the title role and had a lot of influence on the film; her executive producer credit is not just honorary. She reportedly annoyed Disney marketing executives by insisting that her makeup preserve the angular features of the animated character, diminishing her own attractiveness. The principal screenwriter (Linda Woolverton), on the other hand, apparently appreciated Jolie’s input and her insistence that Maleficent not be softened. We can sympathize with her sorrows that made her a villain, but she still is a villain, and rather looks it.

There were a number of children on set from time to time during production, some as actors, some the family members of cast or crew. Jolie is of course well known for liking children (and adopting several), so she tried to be friendly to them, but they were pretty much all too scared by the sight of her in her makeup. One little girl pleaded, “Mommy, please get the mean witch to stop talking to me.”

The baby who plays the infant princess Aurora was supposed to smile and laugh even at the evil Maleficent, but the baby cast in the role would burst into tears at the sight of Jolie. Eventually she became upset and walked off saying, “I can’t do this anymore.” (I mean Jolie did this, not the baby.)

A later scene called for a slightly older Aurora to hug Maleficent, and this time the little girl was played by one of Jolie’s own daughters (Vivienne Jolie-Pitt) because she recognized her mother and wasn’t afraid.

Incidentally, we first see Maleficent as a kind and cheerful girl fairy (played by exotic-looking English actress Isobelle Molloy), but later a war launched by the neighboring human kingdom and a subsequent horrific betrayal transform her character into someone cruel, bitter, and full of hate, which culminates in her appearance at the christening of the next human king’s daughter (in a scene that deliberately echoes the original animated version) where she places a curse on the innocent baby.

As in the animated film, three good fairies become Aurora’s guardians, though they prove ridiculously bad as nannies. The actresses are familiar-looking but I couldn’t place them until I looked them up. Knotgrass is played by Imelda Staunton (Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter films), Flittle by Lesley Manville (who’s had a bunch of award-winning roles on stage and screen), and Thistlewit by Juno Temple (the cute environment-obsessed student in St Trinian’s). For my tastes, the fairies’ names in the animated version — Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather — were less annoyingly dumb.

The fairy stooges supply what passes for comic relief, and unfortunately I found the attempts at comedy to be the weakest part of the movie, with only a couple of bits that are actually amusing. In one of them Jolie pulls a practical joke on the fairies and when her pet crow fails to laugh she scolds him, “Oh come on! That’s funny!”

The animated Maleficent also had a crow or raven, but in this film he has a bigger role and spends a lot of time transformed by her into a human (Sam Riley), a wolf, a horse, or some other creature she finds of use, all of which have crow-like faces.

One annoyance: The song “Once Upon a Dream” from the original film is sung over part of the end credits in this one (with a few small changes in the words), but while the lyricists are credited, the composer for some reason is not. The melody is that of the “Sleeping Beauty Waltz” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky from his ballet.

The effects are excellent. The attempted human invasion of the Fairy domain looks like something out of a Peter Jackson film but less drawn-out. (The whole movie runs just 97 minutes.) Jolie performs most of her own stunts, some of which involved her being launched into the air on wires. She must be in amazing physical condition. Brad Pitt probably spends a lot of time in pain. Too bad.

If you saw the J.J. Abrams film Super 8 (2011) about a group of kids making amateur movies in 1979 you almost certainly remember the girl the boys persuaded to appear in the latest production and how she turned out to be such a good actress that it’s literally funny in the context of the film. That actress was Elle Fanning, Dakota Fanning’s 12-year-old sister. Here she plays the not-quite-yet-16 Princess Aurora, and is very likable, even though the role doesn’t give her much to do. (At least she’s a better realized character than in the animated original, which gave Princess Aurora hardly any lines outside of her two songs.)

There’s a lot about Maleficent that’s predictable, and most of its attempts at humor fall flat. But overall I liked it.

And as a bonus, here’s the first occurrence of the “Once Upon a Dream” from the original film, here seen in a sing-along version from a Disney DVD:

(Updated 2015-08-01 to add the clip from the original.)

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