Jesse Hassenger

There’s some funny material with a gaggle of nefarious party girls preying on dumb bros; that ensuing slapstick brawl actually has some life to it. But any time 72 Hours threatens to launch into full-blown mayhem, Story and Hart throttle the momentum.

Even when Brand New Day seems to be kicking some of its material further down the road, though, it’s a road that actually looks worth traveling. In spite of its overstuffed plot, this is the first MCU movie in ages that actively invites a direct follow-up, rather than a grudging acceptance that we’ll see the characters again in some team-up or another, while nonetheless ending on a satisfying note.

There’s an inherent and refreshing novelty to simply revisiting this friend group having aged up another decade or so, and the theater-worthy animation provides any additional glow-up missing from the good-enough story.

Motor City pulls up with its engine rumbling and revving, ready to unleash pulp-opera action. Eventually the air just starts to fill with exhaust.

While much of the horror action proceeds at more of a dutiful march than a Raimi-esque sprint, Vaniček and cinematographer Philip Lozano pull off some clever technical moves, whether pivoting with the characters until they’re on the ceiling or pulling back for unbroken shots that invert Raimi’s pinballing-camera technique to observe knock-down, drag-out fights from a limited location, emphasizing the scope of mayhem.

It’s shocking how well the gambit of crowbarring the Minions into cinema history works. For the better part of 90 minutes, movie fans might actually feel like cackling kids, or at least boomers on Facebook.

Seeing a Jackass movie with a crowd is still a kick, and Knoxville’s still got it. And by “it”, I mean the willingness to get into the ring with a furious bull, and then go back when he doesn’t quite get the shot he wants.

The movie’s visual sensibility signals Supergirl’s broader success in threading the needle between a kid-friendly, hope-suffused superhero story and bleaker, grittier stuff—and in doing so, recognizing how those aspects of life are often interwoven, rather than diametrically opposed approaches to IP. That’s always been the push-pull of the Supergirl character, equally able to be portrayed as Superman’s gee-whiz kid-sister equivalent and his more jaded, literally alienated reflection. The joy of Supergirl is how it mixes the two without demoting its main gal to a sideshow.

Every movie the Wayans come across has essentially the same function: an easily recognizable bathroom wall where they can scrawl insults about who’s a slut, who’s secretly gay and who deserves to get abruptly hit by a car.

The new Masters Of The Universe does not represent the best-case scenario, though if the bar truly is the ’87 version, consider it cleared with room to spare.