Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Slingshot

Marvel and ABC finally entered the digital realm with Slingshot a six episode web series set between Seasons 3 and 4 of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Slingshot is a snack-size portion of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Set between seasons 3 and 4 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Slingshot is a web series based around Yo-yo's unsettled score with Victor Ramon over the death of her cousin. She signs the Sokovia Accord contract, but then finds her hands immediately tied when the new Director refuses to hear her concerns. Aided by May she takes a Quinjet to Baltimore in pursuit of Ramon. She soon crosses paths with fugitive Daisy whose own mission has led her to Ramon. Each episode is about 5 minutes long, meaning the entire series is shorter than a single full episode of the TV series. While it's a nice way to consume a snack-sized portion of the show, one can't help feeling this is just an episode of the show that was cut from the regular season and slit up into 6 parts. Nevertheless, it's nice to see Yo-yo get some time in the spotlight. *** out of *****

Doctor Strange: Mystic Apprentice

Doctor Strange movie tie-in

Doctor Strange: Mystic Apprentice

Eminently skip-able origin elaboration may be worth it for those who've never read the Lee/Ditko original. (*** out of *****)

It's unclear why Marvel chose to release this one-off origin issue of Doctor Strange. Perhaps it was a pilot for a new series?

Whatever the case, they needn't have bothered. The original material here reads like deleted scenes from the Doctor Strange movie covering in unnecessary detail the time Strange spent trying to master the mystic arts in Kamar-Taj. Art and story are adequate, but nothing special.

The remainder of the issue reprints the Doctor's origin story from Strange Tales #110. For anyone who hasn't read the original Stan Lee / Steve Ditko story, this is the highlight, but c'mon, who hasn't?

Just as this comic reprints that story, we reprint here our review of that story from way back in March of 2013:

There were pretty much three big talents at Marvel in the early days - Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. In my opinion, Ditko was the least of the three, his writing/plotting was generally inferior to Stan's and his art was inferior to Jack's - I'd rank it below even some of the holdovers from Timely like Don Heck.

But Steve Ditko did have a few really high notes, and one of them was the early tales of Dr. Strange in Strange Tales. Ditko co-wrote and drew this character's stories from the very beginning - this story, "Dr. Strange Master of Black Magic!".

The story opens with a very well drawn, moody scene of a man waking from a nightmare on a rainy night. The next day he visits Dr. Strange, who agrees to help him. First Strange briefly visits his aged master halfway around the world via astral projection, then later that night he actually enters the man's dream where he confronts not only the dream-figure that has been tormenting the dreamer, but also an embodiment of nightmares themselves!

Even though Dr. Strange needs a little rescuing himself by his mystic mentor, what's amazing about this story is that it manages to do all of this in just 5 pages. And Ditko really seems much more appropriate as the artist of Dr. Strange than he does of Spider-Man.

Every Dr. Strange fan ought to have read this story by now.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

As you can surmise from the title,
there is nothing new here

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Unnecessary sequel adds nothing new

The 2007 Nic Cage vehicle (see what I did there?) Ghost Rider was a worthwhile, if low-rent Marvel Knights™ (licensed out by Marvel) film that fell well below the quality of the Marvel Studios™ in-house productions that began showing up the following year with the Iron Man, but was still far superior to the Marvel movies and made-for-TV movie of the week specials of the 70s and 80s. The 2011 sequel, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance however falls squarely around the quality level of the best of those lackluster early efforts such as the 1989 Dolph Lundgren film The Punisher.

While Nic Cage reprises his role as Johnny Cage, this film looks and feels quite different from its predecessor. The character design of Ghost Rider gets an upgrade - he no longer has a (comics accurate) white flaming skull, but now has a charcoal black skull, and similarly his shiny black leathers are replaced by what looks like charred black leather. Unfortunately that's the extent of the upgrades to this film.

The chain forked, pan head custom Harley-Davidson chopper of the first film is replaced here with some sort of Mad Max-ish Yamaha, and that right there symbolizes the kind of downgrade the whole movie gets. All classic American Western elements of that elevated the first film a bit are gone as the production was shot on location in the much more slashed budget friendly Romania and Turkey.

The film's biggest crime is a total lack of acknowledgement of it's predecessor. Instead of Mephistopheles played by Peter Fonda, we get a different demon played by a different actor (Ciaran Hinds) that somehow claims to be the one that Johnny Blaze sold his soul to, and flashback scenes were shot to retrofit him into the story. Also Blaze's motivation in this film is to get rid of his Ghost Rider curse, even though at the end of the last film he was offered just that by Mephistopheles, and his chose just the opposite - to remain Ghost Rider - and nothing in this film explains how or why he changed his mind.

Lacking any of the charm of the original Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is pretty much just moves from action sequence to CGI sequence and back for most of its hour and a half running time, making it a passable diversion at best.

**1/2 out of *****

Ghost Rider

Movie poster for Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider

Although it's only about a decade old, Ghost Rider was such a misfire for Marvel, that they pretty much like to pretend it never happened.

It's true critics slammed the film, but audiences liked it enough to justify a sequel, and there's a reason for that - slamming Ghost Rider is a little like picking on the special ed kid - it's an easy target.

Ghost Rider is based on the Marvel comic of the same name. In 1973 Marvel updated one of it's Golden Age properties, "Ghost Rider", a Western hero, hoping for the same success it had in updating other pre-Marvel legacy characters like The Human Torch, Ant-Man, and Sub-Mariner. The series had some cult success, lasting about a decade, but the comic itself was never as memorable as the incredible unique look of the titular anti-hero, Johnny Blaze, a motorcycle rider dressed in black leather with a flaming skull for a head.

Honestly, for most of it's life, the Ghost Rider comics were little more than forgettable diversions, with perhaps the most memorable issue coming near the end of the series when Roger Stern retold Ghost Rider's origin in issue #68 with a clever wraparound story with a twist ending set in a church.

So, right off the bat a movie adaptation was going to be... problematic. There's really no way you can make a two hour film where the protagonist is a talking, flaming skull not look cheesy, no matter how good the effects.

Then there's the casting. Nicolas Cage was chosen for Johnny Blaze, and though he's spent his entire career cultivating a motorcycle bad-boy pose, it's always seemed affected. His love interest is a similarly miscast Eva Mendes, who is way too much of a bombshell to play the middle-American girl next door type. Mendes probably regrets diving into comic films at all, as Ghost Rider and The Spirit were back-to-back flops that seem to have derailed her career.

So it would have been easy for Ghost Rider to be a complete disaster. But it wasn't. The film's saving grace comes from it's willingness to embrace it's own B movie-ness. By concentrating on action sequences, and giving Nic Cage cheesy one-liners and dialogue so cliche that it can't possibly be taken seriously, the film manages to save itself. And while the principal casting left a lot to be desired, the casting of supporting roles was spot on, including real cowboy cred in the form of Sam Elliot as the original Western Ghost Rider, and real biker cred in the form of Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles.

The film had a massive budget which was wisely sunk almost entirely into special effects, given that the acting wasn't going to carry this script. Yes, flaming skull head is cheesy, but it works. And the film is further dressed up with a great soundtrack, including a musical score by horror specialist Christopher Young, and songs by the likes of Ozzy and ZZ Top, and of course an updated version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky".

So while Ghost Rider pales in comparison to the high quality Marvel Studios films we've come to expect every summer since, it is at least as good - if not better - than most of it's fellow mid-2000s, special effects-driven, supernatural action thrillers like Underworld, Van Helsing, Constantine, etc.

*** out of *****

Iron Fist (season one)

Netflix "Iron Fist" may be the weakest Marvel series on Netflix...
but compared to Marvel's shows on networks like ABC and Hulu...
well, that's a different story

Iron Fist (season one)

Marvel's most underrated TV show

I was a bit apprehensive about this show going in, first because I'm a fan of most of the other Marvel superheroes, but I've never been a particular Iron Fist fan, and second because of the overwhelming number of bad reviews it's received.

The chief complaints seemed to be: 1) it's the weakest of the Marvel Netflix series, 2) Iron Fist (AKA Danny Rand) is unlikeable, 3) there is no awesome villain like Kingpin, Cottonmouth, or Killgrave, 4) it strays pretty far from the comic, and 5) the fight sequences aren't that good.

While all those things are technically true, I was pleasantly surprised to find the show was not only not bad, but actually quite good. How can the above criticisms be true and yet the series is still good? Well, let's break each of those criticisms down one by one.

1) It's the weakest of the Marvel Netflix series.
Yes. But talk about a high bar! Daredevil was so good that Netflix chose it as one of it's first original series. It and Jessica Jones are A+ shows - some of the best TV (let alone superhero) shows ever made in the 75 year history of the medium, and Luke Cage isn't far behind. So yeah, Iron Fist isn't that good, but it's at least a B+ if not better, which puts it well above most of the rest of the shows that have ever aired, and it's easily superior to the non-Netflix Marvel shows. In fact, although Luke Cage gets a lot of praise, I'd argue that it's strengths are primarily from the novelty of an all black cast, and the wonderful Harlem setting, nightclub singers, etc. but it's story line is pretty standard vigilante-vs.-crime boss, not terribly different from Daredevil, while Iron Fist has a far more nuanced plot.

2) Danny Rand is un-likeable
This is a matter of opinion, but I'll concede that he isn't the most heroic of superheroes. But this is one of the reasons I find the show so compelling. He's the youngest of all the Marvel TV heroes, and he spent his entire life living in a monastery, is it any wonder he's not relatable? Yes, he is incredibly naive. To portray him otherwise would be a disservice to the character. Yes, he does spend a majority of the series being a tool (literally) of the bad guys, but then so does fan-favorite Colleen Wing (whose inclusion is often cited as one of the points in the show's favor) and she wasn't raised in a monastery, so what's her excuse?

3) There is no awesome villain like Kingpin, Cottonmouth, or Killgrave

Again, this is true. Vincent D'Onofrio, Mahershala Ali, and David Tennant steal every scene they're in as the respective bosses of the other Marvel Netflix shows. But this again is the result of Iron Fist being structured different. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage all have vendettas against specific people. Danny Rand has a vendetta also, but he doesn't know against whom. There is no one crime boss here, but a number of shadowy figures and organizations exerting influence over him and the world in general. This show is less like The Adventures of Superman, and more like The X-Files when it comes to that. Which means while there are some organization leaders, there are no singular supervillains to dominate the storyline. And more importantly, there are a lot more shades of grey here. Just as nearly every "heroic" character is in some ways unsympathetic (qv #2 above), nearly every villain here is in some ways sympathetic. Instead of one likeable hero and one likeable villain, you get an array of characters that are all to some degree both likeable and un-likeable.

4) It strays pretty far from the comic.
The fans of the comic may have a legitimate beef here. I can't comment too much since, as stated before, I was never a huge fan of this particular comic. But it seems to me that all the Marvel TV shows depart from the comics to some degree. Perhaps someday fans of Power Man and Iron Fist will get the straight adaptation they've always wanted. Until then they may have to be satisfied that like other B-list Marvel anti-heroes like The Punisher and Ghost Rider, they're fortunate enough to make it to the screen at all. And even if it's not as faithful to the creator's original visions it beats seeing them given the Adam West Batman treatment.

5) The fight sequences aren't that good.
Hogwash. Yeah, compared to the amazing fight choreography of Daredevil the fight sequences aren't that good. But what other show is? Again we have a situation of falling short of a really high bar. Martial arts films have gotten so stylized that many were probably expecting that here. But if the fights alone were given The Raid type treatment, there wouldn't be nearly enough time to develop the plot. As it is, the series resolves itself a tad too quickly (one of my chief complaints). The decision to forego a lot of extended fight sequences is one of the more questionable ones made by the showrunners, but one only hopes that they take a cue from the masses and hire a Hong Kong action expert for next season. For most people, though, the fights are more than adequate to tell the tale.

**** out of *****