The film is told primarily through the lens of the main character who's filming his life to protect himself from his drunk, physically abusive father and to capture his mother's last few months of life. Here are there footage switches to a fellow student who's filming her life for her video blog or security camera or police cruiser footage as the boys pass by a store. This leads a strong cinéma vérité/ found footage vibe to the story making it seem a little grittier but allowing the surprisingly impressive special effects to stand out even more than if the film were glossier, prettier.
This isn't low budget in the ways that Clerks was with poor film quality being purely a product of the lack of filmmaker funds. This is low budget that doesn't feel low budget, that realism serves the story and draws us easily into the lives of these young men who suddenly find themselves with more power than they had ever imagined and than they know what to do with. It's a side of super heroism that is rarely handled in comic books. Heroes find their powers and suddenly do the right thing. Bad guys find their powers and do the wrong. These boys are granted powers - the mechanism is never explained with anything more than handwaving, it happens because it needs to happen for the story - and stumble their way along causing low-grade mischief, helping a few people, but mostly entertaining themselves.
The choices they make are made because they're teenage boys. They lash out when they're angry. They try to do noble things and come up with rules about their collective powers, but they don't think much through. These are teenagers without fully developed frontal cortexes. They are action often divorced from consideration of consequence, and that's why it doesn't always work out.
The plan to become popular doesn't work.
The plan to fly to Tibet and gain enlightenment doesn't work.
The solution to the abusive father and the dying mother doesn't work.
The movie does work.
Admittedly the ending is a bit predictable and a little too quick, but it's interesting and engaging to get there, particularly for anyone who works with teenagers or wondered why every superhero or villain was black and white, good or bad. These are greys and interesting ones at that.
Norton here plays an alter boy accused of killing an archbishop, found running from the scene with blood covering him. Richard Gere, prototypical smooth-talking, high-powered, ambulance-chasing lawyer, takes on the case pro bono because...well...because he needs to for the movie to exist. Gere's character searches for any way to prevent the alter boy from being given the death penalty, willing to do anything - even to further sully his far from pristine soul - to save the life of this one innocent.
In the course of Gere's investigation and defense, he finds that Norton's alter boy has a second person inside his head who protects himself from the world, a second personality that comes out in times of stress. The film builds, predictably enough, to a courtroom climax - unrealistic, of course, but thoroughly cinematic - allowing Gere to save his client's life.
Then comes the reveal, and I won't give away that revelation because to do so would change how you view the movie, and while the bulk of the film is straight forward enough and follows a fairly traditional movie plot arc, the performances by Gere and Norton are strong enough to redeem the plot and the too-tidy, too-on-the-nose twist.
Norton shines here as does Gere. The rest of the cast does admirable support with Laura Linney's prosecutor in over her head doing a yeoman's job allowing Gere to play off of and thoroughly outclass her played-straight character.
The value in here is in the performances of the two leads. They're excellent, and the rest of the film allows them to be so.
This film heads so easily and naturally toward every romantic comedy convention that it even mocks its natural inclinations with Steve Carell at one point deadpanning 'how cliche' when the skies open up with rain, drenching him when he's at one of his many emotional low points in this film. Luckily, the film turns away from every predictable destination into much more interesting territory and making for a surprisingly and pleasantly engaging film.
It helps, of course, that the cast is absolutely top notch and at the height of their powers here. Julianne Moore and Steve Carell play the married couple who have hit a rough patch, having forgotten how to cherish each other and dissolving into divorce when Moore dallies and surprises Carell's character with a request for divorce over dessert. Ryan Gosling is at his Ryan Gosling-est, getting to play the phenomenally charming, smooth, vapid lothario who can charm the cocktail dress off of any woman at the bar that he and Carell frequent, offering his teachings to Carell because he is tired of hearing Carell's sad sack story for two straight days at 'his' bar. Gosling, however, also gets to play the good man once he finds a woman he actually cares for, who he isn't willing to simply bed and forget, who throws him fully into the deep end of a world with which he is entirely unfamiliar but not, thankfully entirely unprepared. Emma Stone is brilliantly funny and charming as the predictably Gosling-turning role. Marisa Tomei makes the most of her bit part, returning twice to great comedic value after her initial introduction. Kevin Bacon, sadly, is largely wasted in a brief supporting role with which he makes a charming nothing, but that may be more a result of the fact that having any more interesting characters to develop would have sold the main four short.
Those main four, though, are the heart of the film and are thoroughly charismatic, engaging, and richly developed. They are anything but two-dimensional stereotypes, and they success and failures, confidence and hopelessness make for a pleasantly enjoyable romantic comedy that wears its heart on its sleeve the whole time and isn't ashamed of it or saccharine about it.
Worth seeing...
Be warned, however, that there's a bothersome flaw in the resolution of the tertiary love triangle involving the divorcing couple's babysitter. It doesn't ruin the film by any means, but it clearly needed to be given another once over from a good editor before it hit the big screen.
I rectified that by reading the six collected editions of the pre-new-52 Blue Beetle series: Shellshocked, Road Tip, Reach for the Stars, End Game, Boundaries, and Black and Blue so that I at least knew if the series should have been cancelled or not.
Turns out that this was a series that was a bit slow to start, struggling to introduce lots of characters and flitter around in the magic or science or space realms of the DC universe - all of which involve very different character sets and struggle when overlapped. As the initial story arc wrapped up with Jaime reaching a stalemate with La Dama and finding himself finally content with taking on the role of protector of El Paso, the series found itself on strong footing with a rich cast of supporting characters - especially Jaime's friends Paco and Brenda as well as his family and girlfriend, Traci Thirteen.
Then things went a bit off the rails with Jaime having to fight the aliens who created his power-granting scarab as they tried to take over the entire planet. The huge scope - and the subsequent change in writers to Matt Sturges - undid much of the work that initial writers, Giffen and Rogers, had done in creating a thoroughly but unstereotypically Hispanic hero. From there, things got worse with the series being cancelled (in spite of a satisfying series conclusion) and Beetle being shuffled off to a supporting feature at the back of Booster Gold's series.
The initial twenty-some issues (through Road Trip especially and all the way to End Game to a lesser extent) is worth reading. The last two collected volumes - Black and Blue and Boundaries - are of far lesser quality.
So, should Beetle have been cancelled? I can't say for certain. There were stories here to be told, and Jaime Reyes was a character who had enough good that his stories were worth telling. His value as a Hispanic hero - complete with an issue told almost entirely in Spanish - is certainly worth something in terms of DC's future and attempts to bring in new readers. In the end, however, I can't say for certain without seeing the sales figures for the Blue Beetle issues. A short-term loss might have been a long-term gain in DC's eyes, but if that short-term loss is too big, it might not be worth carrying on the books.
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