Everything is good this week.

Deadpool & Wolverine

Deadpool and Wolverine is the best Marvel movie I’ve seen since Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is not to say it’s great but merely good. Still, in a cinematic year so lacking in quality and consistency as this year seems to be, that’s quite the achievement. After a series of lackluster or straight-up terrible efforts, Marvel is back giving the fanboys and fangirls and fannon-binaries what they want – a good freakin’ time and brief mental escape from the dumpster fire hellscape that is 2024.

Apparently, there were a bunch of movies and Marvel TV shows I needed to see to understand this movie, but I didn’t and I still understood the movie just fine. I haven’t even seen Deadpool 2, but sssh, don’t tell anyone. Deadpool and Wolverine sees Deadpool, the foul-mouthed, fourth-wall-breaking troll in a red suit, trying to recover and revive the body of Wolverine, who died at the end of 2017’s Logan. Wolverine needs to help him on a mission so Deadpool’s timeline doesn’t get destroyed and the people he loves don’t die. Succession‘s Matthew Macfadyen (Tom Wambsgans) is perfectly cast as some government stooge jerkoff who works for a time-traveling regulation agency. He hires Deadpool to help recover a Wolverine from some timeline or something? I don’t know, it doesn’t fucking matter, folks. Within no time at all, Deadpool snatches a Wolverine from the darkest and saddest Wolverine timeline, and together they go around making fun of people and brutally murdering them. But wait, Professor X’s androgynous twin sister played by The Crown‘s Emma Corrin, a great actor in a fairly dull role, stands in their way because she wants to do something with time that will kill everyone or something. She’s also very violent, doesn’t have a sense of humor, and can stick her fingers into people’s brains and sort through them like filing cabinets. Sounds more interesting than it is, unfortunately, Marvel is so fucking afraid to God Forbid, let a female character be funny, that she just comes off as sort of this roadblock between the audience and Deadpool’s jokes.

There’s a handful of great fight sequences throughout the movie, as well as a sheer impressive amount of both jokes and visual gags. I was surprised with how many actually hit, though, of course, there are a few clunkers – low-hanging fruit and the like. Perhaps the most amusing part of the movie is the giant catalog of cameos, some are downright hilarious. What ultimately holds Deadpool and Wolverine back from being in that rare category of great Marvel movies is that it starts to run out of steam in the third act. The rush to wrap everything up is a bit sloppy and we’ve been bombarded so hard with meta quips for the entire runtime that we start to get a bit exhausted. There’s also a bunch of obligatory “dramatic” scenes involving character sacrifice and stuff, and those never hit well. I love drama, but it’s hardly ever explored compellingly or honestly in Marvel movies. Based on Deadpool and Wolverine‘s incredible $211 Million opening weekend, Marvel isn’t going anywhere. Let’s pray they keep up this level of quality and don’t sink back into their Madame Web ways. Grade: B (In Theaters)

Abigail

The most disappointing aspect of Abigail is that a major plot twist is revealed in the movie trailer and all the other advertisements for the film from what I’ve seen. No, this twist isn’t just the inciting incident of the film or something that happens at the end of the first act. It’s revealed halfway through the film. That means for nearly an hour, you’re ahead of every character in the narrative. It’s almost the undoing of the whole movie. Anyway, before we can dive into that twist, let’s begin with the premise.

Abigail opens on a team of six criminals approaching a job in a wealthy, gated community. There’s the clever Joey (Scr5am‘s Melissa Barrera), the sociopathic Frank (The Guest‘s Dan Stevens), the lazy rich girl, Sammy (Freaky‘s Kathryn Newton), the composed Marine, Rickles (A Thousand and One’s Will Catlett), the stupid Peter (Lost‘s Kevin Durand), and the weird getaway driver, Dean (Euphoria‘s Angus Cloud). This line-up of vastly different criminals kidnap a little Russian girl, Abigail (Alisha Weir), after she arrives home from ballet practice. Why are they kidnapping this little girl? None of them know. She’s obviously the daughter of somebody important, but their employer, played by Giancarlo Esposito, won’t reveal who it is or why. They end up taking Abigail back to a safe house and then one by one, the kidnappers begin mysteriously dying, causing the rest of the group to panic and start turning against each other. But who is killing them?

The twist, of course, is that the little girl, Abigail, is a vampire. I guess they had no other idea of how to market the movie without revealing that. I can only imagine how much more exciting this viewing experience would have been had that been an actual surprise halfway through. As it stands, Abigail is a very watchable, sometimes fun, always base-level competent thriller that is better when it doesn’t focus on its two-dimensional characters having extended conversations with each other. There’s a movie to be made here that focuses primarily on the dynamic and tension between the kidnappers, while the vampire ballerina exists mostly to enhance their distrust of each other. Unfortunately, Abigail is not that movie. The script and the depth of its characters just aren’t up to that standard, even if the mostly fantastic cast does a lot of heavy lifting for the movie. Dan Stevens and Kathryn Newton stand out in particular amongst the kidnappers, but the movie ultimately belongs to Alisha Weir, who creates a charismatic horror slasher with serious franchise potential. She’s funny, precocious, strange, very serious about her dance career, she’s boldy herself, and she is 100% without a drop of empathy or mercy. I like this character a lot, I just wish she was in a better movie. Grade: B- (Peacock)

Blood, Sweat and Cheer

Perhaps the most fun I’ve had watching a movie recently was experiencing Traci Hay‘s Blood, Sweat and Cheer. A Tubi Original Movie from last year, Blood, Sweat and Cheer takes the concept of vicariously living through your child to a whole new level. Most Tubi movies don’t fail because they’re dumb and salacious. They fail because they’re not well-paced and take you through an hour-plus of cinematic torture for just a few scattered minutes of hilarious sound bites. This one is different if you don’t mind watching an outrageously stupid movie. It manages to fully engage you throughout its 95-minute runtime.

Sporting a Lifetime Original Movie vibe except hopped up on crank, Blood, Sweat and Cheer follows the ultimate cheer mom, Renee (Tammin Sursok), and her teenage daughter, Cherie (Monroe Cline). When Cherie announces she wants to quit cheer, Renee goes batshit crazy and starts breaking shit. She really goes off the deep end. So much so that Cherie calls her dad to come pick her up so she can live with him. Hating her life without her daughter, working a dumb remote job for a telemarketing company, Renee decides to pull a reverse Doubtfire and pretend to be her daughter. She enrolls at another public school where nobody questions why an obviously 40-year-old woman is dressed like a 16-year-old child. At her new school, her goal is to join the cheer squad and win State. Even if a few people stand in her way including a teacher who wants to fail her, a principal who finds her sus, and her own sister who thinks she’s a loser and a lunatic. She’ll stop at nothing to get that trophy though. NOTHING.

Blood, Sweat and Cheer would be unbearable if the movie took its premise seriously. However, it leans so hard into the camp of it all that it’s hard not to fall in love with it. It’s what you want every Lifetime or Tubi movie to be – something that’s just dumb fun for 90 minutes. It’s riddled with cliches and even at one point has Renee considering what colleges she may get scholarships to – you’re 40, girl! – but it’s careful not to go too far off the rails as to negate the stakes of her getting caught. As Renee, Tammin Sursok is fantastic. She manages to take such a dumb character and make her seem real. Juxtaposed with the movie’s reality that makes zero sense, it ends up being quite hilarious. Grade: B (Tubi)

Lowlifes

Never thought I’d live to see the day when a Tubi Original Movie is non-ironically good, but here we are. The free streaming app, which I dearly love, is most notably home to an endless catalog of cinematic crap with original content that is often tasteless, terrible, or a combination of the two. Two years ago they released a dramatized version of the Johnny Depp/Amanda Heard trial just four months after the trial ended. The movie is gross and salacious, not to mention incompetent and cheap-looking in every category of production. On the other hand, Lowlifes may be super low-budget, but it takes a really good concept and executes it fairly well. While certainly not perfect and a little rough around the edges, this is inspired filmmaking, a rare thing in 2024.

Lowlifes is a horror film about a family of cannibals terrorizing another family of what seem like good people. I’ll leave it at that. There are a couple of seriously good twists and turns, and while the movie doesn’t reinvent the cannibal/vampire/zombie wheel, it’s consistently engaging across its tight 90-minute runtime. It’s also very well cast without a single weak performance in the whole film. Matthew MacCaull is particularly good as the dad. Interestingly, Lowlifes was written by a composer/lyricist, Al Kaplan (Terrifier 2, Zombeavers) and directed by a writer, Tesh Guttikonda (Influencer), and a director, Mitch Oliver (The Druid’s Hand). Perhaps Hollywood should experiment with having crew members switch roles. Like Hans Zimmer writing a movie that will be directed by Stephen King and David Lynch. I can dig it. Grade: B (Tubi)