Reel Entropy

Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox

As Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) goes back in time from 2023 to 1973, Bryan Singer takes the audience back in time from 2014 to 2003 — a time when comic book movies were strange, unique affairs that were always successful and always really, really good.

X-Men: Days of Future Past, based on the highly popular comic book issue of the same name, sees the Wolverine from after X-Men: The Last Stand sent back to his body 10 years after X-Men: First Class, intent on stopping Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage).

In the future, Trask’s assassination and Mystique’s subsequent capture launched the Sentinel Program, which pitted artificially intelligent anti-mutant weapons who, using Mystique’s shapeshifting ability, are able to adapt perfectly to combat any mutant. These sentinels will cause a holocaust, killing mutants and enslaving humans. To stop the assassination, Wolverine must find younger versions of Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to turn Mystique off of killing Trask.

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Warner Bros. and Gareth Edwards made a perfectly serviceable movie about Aaron Taylor-Johnson and M.U.T.O, but the advertising campaign was all about Bryan Cranston. That means, somewhere down the line, someone pretty high up sat down and acknowledged “Bryan Cranston and Godzilla are what people want to see” and didn’t make a movie about it. This is very not cool. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Godzilla’s trailers are excellent. The feature is completely unrelated.

The film, which was supposed to be about nuclear physicist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and Godzilla, is actually about Navy Lieutenant Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Objects, weird giant bug things that eat nuclear radiation. According to Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), both Godzilla at the M.U.T.O are ancient beings from when the earth was young and radiation was rampant on its surface. They burrowed underground and underwater as the planet developed, only to rise again when awakened by nuclear submarines and power plants. There is literally no way for Serizawa to know this, but it’s a movie so just go with it, OK?

The first thing to understand about this movie is what a terrible bait-and-switch it is. The movie promises Bryan Cranston, but it does not deliver Bryan Cranston. Bryan Cranston’s character dies 20 minutes in. His character’s son, played by Taylor-Johnson, takes the lead role and while Taylor-Johnson is a fine actor, the One who Knocks he is not. People expecting to see Bryan Cranston in his first major role since the end of Breaking Bad, which should be anyone who’s been paying even basic levels of attention to their surroundings for the past few months, will go home feeling cheated.

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There’s also quite a lot of male nudity, for better or worse. Photo courtesy Universal Pictures.

With sterling performances and writing, Neighbors immediately becomes the most solid experience in theaters right now.

The film sets the Radner family (Seth Rogen, who also produces, and Rose Byrne), freshly moved into a house they’ve spent every dime on, against a frat house that moves in next door and that fraternity’s president, Teddy Sanders (Zac Efron). Initially, the Radners party with them as both groups try to gain each other’s respect and cooperation. But when the Radners phone the police, the frat begins to deliberately push the envelope with noise and trash. The situation quickly escalates out of control.

Neighbors is a deeply satisfying comedy, attacking with unexpected body humor and clever jokes but never descending into generic stupidity. Writers Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien have a winner with this script, one that is funny and subtly thought-provoking. Rogen is divisive as a comic actor because his bread and butter — saying things that aren’t funny in such a way that stoners will laugh anyway — is technically not very funny, but here he gets solid lines with which to use his delivery.

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