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mygif

I might shift the order of the odd one, and admittedly I’ve never seen any of the Punisher movies.

Trank pretty much deserves, for FF, to get wrapped up in weighted chains and dropped into the Marianas Trench.

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I can never forget the plot of Iron Man 2 due to the iconic song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoDZ6PhvF3E

Tony needs to get his act together.

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William O'Brien said on April 23rd, 2018 at 1:55 pm

Every time I’ve seen Spider-man 2 since 2008, it seems worse. I just can’t buy into Tobey MacGuire, and I think Raimi’s eccentricities lead to wild tonal swings that don’t really fit the material.

I think Black Panther falls just short of greatness. It was there up until the last act, but at that point a film built on the incredible philosophical differences between its hero and villain spends a bunch of time with faceless armies fighting it out and it feels far less personal. So much time is spent making sure each supporting character has their own action hero moment that T’Challa ends up feeling sidelined until he presses his “get off me” button and gets to do a bad CGI fight with Killmonger. After the fighting is over, the movie gets right back to being great. It just feels like the MCU house style demand for a big CGI action mess held the film back from its true potential.

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mygif

0. Avengers 4: AVENGERS VS HOT AIR BALLONS.

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I think you rank Guardians 2 waaaaaaay to low. It’s easily the best Marvel film, for me. And the Pac-Man thing was awesome.

I don’t have the wherewithal to rank them this definitively, but for me, the top ten MCU films…

1) Guardians 2
2) Guardians 1
3) Avengers
4) Captain America: The First Avenger
5) Thor
6) Captain America: The Winter Solider
7) Black Panther
8) Spider-Man: Homecoming
9) Iron Man
10) Captain America: Civil War

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Sidney O said on April 23rd, 2018 at 8:40 pm

Spider-Man 2 is on the wrong end of the list. It should be in the high 30s, what with the whiny Spider-Man, the boring Dr. Octopus, and the entire evelated train scene. I literally siad “That wasn’t a good movie” when I left the theatre.

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AlexanderHammil said on April 23rd, 2018 at 10:50 pm

yaaaaaay, but also: guardians didn’t make more money than ultron? at least not according to boxofficemojo, which has ultron in a clear lead both domestically and internationally?

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mygif

A SOLID list. I see things a bit differently, but you’ve thought it out carefully.

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mygif

This list stands head and shoulders above most other lists of this sort not because it gets everything right (there are some real misfires in there) but for the clarity of thought and the consistent rubric underlying it. Everything is well-reasoned and the authorial bias is front and center and thoroughly owned.

From a personal standpoint… you really put your finger on Thor: The Dark World and Ant-Man. Those movies shouldn’t work. They shouldn’t be entertaining. But the actors are just so damned charming and their interactions with each other are just so fun to watch that they manage to haul the rest of the movie along on their backs.

In particular Paul Rudd was a surprise. He basically single-handedly rescued that film, and then he topped it off by almost single-handedly rescuing the airport fight in Civil War, which would have been super fuckin’ dire without him.

I’m sad he isn’t apparently a part of IW. (He’s not in any trailers, at least.)

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mygif

I’d rate both the ASM movies as better than this. Caveats: I’d agree that the villains of each of them were weak. And about revenge, I’d agree it’s sad/boring/annoying how much Hollywood relies on that as a motivation. Other than that, though, they got basically everything right. The fights with the Lizard and Harry Osborn looked awesome, better than the equivalents in the first and third Raimi movie. Spidey quipped perfectly, which is impressive on the big screen.

About Gwen, I disagree completely that her death felt editorially mandated. For the first three-quarters of the movie I thought their relationship was too sappy, too melodramatic, pointless. The girlfriend was endangered but ultimately fine a dozen times in the previous four movies, and sure, her father had died but all the father figures die, so OF COURSE Gwen was going to be safe. It wasn’t until Spider-Man and the Green Goblin were fighting in the clock tower that I said, “Oh, shit, this is Gwen’s Achille’s heel!” Call me oblivious but I thought that was a well-earned, gut-wrenching twist.

As for revenge, I thought it was a much more organic way for a teen with guilt issues to get into vigilantism. It’s not like he’s the Punisher, he’s an angry teen for a few weeks/months, but it soon transforms into generalized do-gooding. It’s also a more natural reason for the authorities to be out to get him than an obsessive demagogue running a tabloid. Like I said, it’s overused, but I thought was well-handled here.

To be specific, I’d rate both of them somewhere between The Incredible Hulk and Age of Ultron.

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mygif

I genuinely don’t understand how you’re ranking Spider-Man 2 so highly. Aside from the incredibly bad writing around Doc Ock’s evil/good toggle switch (TOGGLE SWITCH) there’s this one fact. If your Spider-Man story makes me want to strangle Aunt May because she is evil and horrible, you have fucked up somewhere.

That said, I admire the level of analysis you’re bringing to this, and I agree with many of your rankings. Except that GotG 2 lost 100% of its points when they had Star-Lord and Ego playing catch with a ball of energy. Once fuckin’ Galavant has made fun of an overworn trope as being the most painfully obvious cliché, it’s worth negative points.

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mygif

Here’s an interesting question. How does the Incredibles, a Fantastic Four homage, get near-universal praise while none of the actual Fantastic Four movies seem capable of reaching that level of quality?

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mygif

Iron Man 2’s plot is basically “Even if Tony Stark is a publicly respected superhero, he’s still a self-absorbed asshole, and some bad stuff involving Whiplash will happen to him to make him get the slightest amount of introspection”. The pay off for Tony’s arc in Iron Man 2 is theoretically to justify his changes in the first Avengers movie.

I’d argue that Whiplash works well thematically; he’s fairly hyper-focused on revenge that he cares about basically nothing else. (In contrast, Justin Hammer is sort of bleh; I understand what role he’s supposed to play in the movie and he’s kind of funny, but in practice you couple replace him with generic faceless business type X and have the same movie.)

Also, the scene with the kid in the Iron Man costume is awesome, even if the rest of the movie is only OK.

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Jack-Pumpkinhead said on May 1st, 2018 at 11:54 am

Interesting list, I appreciate the analysis on these films.

My only arguments; Guardians 2 & Ragnarok tried too hard on the jokes, and I hated Korg. Apocalypse I felt the kids did a decent job playing Scott & Jean. Homecoming’s biggest flaws are it tries to merge Pete’s & Miles Morales’ supporting casts together with mixed results. Ant-Man’s heist buddy dragged the whole movie down for me. Everything else I can’t argue too much with.

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Brian T. said on May 4th, 2018 at 7:54 pm

I appreciate your thoughts on the movies I have seen, but I absolutely hated the first two Avengers movies and Guardians of the Galaxy… so I’m that guy.

Hawkeye is one of my favorite characters, but Jeremy Renner might as well be a different character because he just isn’t cool enough. In the first movie, I mostly just wondered how he managed to avoid getting killed while waiting for that motorized carousel thing to move his next arrow into position.

Black Widow must load her little handguns with special bullets. Otherwise, she would have been even more useless than the National Guard soldiers and cops during the fight to save New York. Anyway…

I liked just about everybody in the first Thor movie except Natalie Portman. I still didn’t really enjoy anything about it except the scene where Stellan Skarsgard has a beer with Thor and has the dad talk about treating Jane Foster right. I thought The Dark World was a lot more fun for basically the reasons you gave.

I vastly prefer Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man over the other two guys. It’s too bad he didn’t get to be in better movies.

I hated the first Raimi Spider-Man film, so I still haven’t seen the other Tobey Maguire flicks all the way through. The only reason why I know anything about the Doctor Octopus one is that it used to be on TBS all the time. Maguire was a lousy Spider-Man, I still don’t know why they gave him Spider-Man 2099’s powers, and I hated J.K. Simmons and Kirsten Dunst. I was cheering for Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin since I actually liked him.

Spider-Man: Homecoming was fun. I would have liked it more if they hadn’t decided to run with the idea of Spider-Man basically being Iron Man’s kid sidekick. And some of his gadgets strained plausibility for me. Michael Keaton was great as the Vulture.

Don’t get me started on Guardians of the Galaxy. It was more faithful to the comics than I realized, but I basically spent the whole time in fanboy rage over things like how Nebula had hair the last time I saw her so they didn’t need to shave Karen Gillan’s head or how none of the Nova Corps dorks flew under their own power or shot beams from their hands. And I wasn’t that crazy about Chris Pratt as Starlord. I was like, “So he’s basically just Andy Dwyer in space? I don’t like Andy Dwyer on earth all that much if I’m being honest. Why would I want to see a slightly less stupid version of that character?”

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mygif

Heya. You mention the Dolph Lungren version of The Punisher but you don’t place it in the rankings (which I admit would be pretty low). Is this an oversight?

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supergp said on May 8th, 2018 at 1:51 am

@PaulW: The Dolph Lundgren Punisher was released in 1989, 9 years before the start of this list.

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Thom H. said on May 18th, 2018 at 3:40 pm

Late to the party, but I want to participate, so:

— Great list. I had forgotten about some of these movies, so now I have something new to bring to Awful Superhero Movie Night with my friend. Thank you for that.

— I do not understand what redeeming qualities anyone sees in Guardians of the Galaxy 2. A bunch of manufactured drama, mountains of exposition, the aforementioned game of catch with the energy ball, and an over-reliance on the “you’re not just my friends, you’re my family” trope. I could go on. I hate that movie so much.

To each their own, of course. Thanks for the thoughtful list!

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mygif

Some thoughtful takes.

Personally I think you underrate Dr. Strange, for the visuals alone it puts Inception in the dust… and maybe overrate Ant-Man. I just recently watched it and… I dunno, it was good and funny mostly but nothing about it stood out or sticks with me now.

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mygif

Totally disagree on Spider-Man. ASM was one of the best superhero movies ever made, and should really be in the top two category.

In Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, becoming Spider-Man is just pure wish fulfillment: Peter is a flat, stereotypical nerd who gets buff overnight, wins the heart of the flat, stereotypical girl next door, and fights a well acting but equally flat villain. No one has any motivations. The Green Goblin gets revenge on his actual enemies in the first act then just decides “Time to ruin Spider-Man’s life for shits and giggles because the script said so.”

In ASM, Peter Parker is already an interesting character before the Spider bite. He’s clearly got a hero streak in him, but has no outlet for it. He wins Gwen over as Peter, which is believable with the chemistry between Garfield and Stone. The revenge thing actually works really well to expand the origin storyline from a single issue of a comic to a whole movie: the fact that he begins his career as more of a vigilante adds an interesting dynamic to the “Spider-Man is a menace” crowd: they kind of have a point, whereas in the Raimi’s version it was just a black and white case of slander. “With great power comes great responsibility” becomes something he learns on his own rather that something that’s clumsily spat out by his dying uncle. Good villians force the protagonist to grow, which makes Captain Stacy a much better secondary antagonist than J. Jonah Jameson: he forces Peter to confront his own hypocrisies and become a better hero over the course of the movie, rather than just being some asshole who is being mean to a perfect protagonist for no reason.

ASM has a lot of depth and far more three dimensional characters than Raimi’s version, and than most superhero movies in general.

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DragoMaster009 said on March 8th, 2024 at 9:58 pm

All I can say is, what do people have against animated comic book films?

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