These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.
I saw this movie for the first time over fifteen years ago. It’s actually better than I remembered, but still not a spectacular movie. The sets are pretty nice and the production quality is good. It’s got Liam Neeson in it and failed to be ruined by him—and that’s not nothing.
We follow the story of two star-crossed lovers on a planet with medieval technology that is somehow also bound up in galactic struggle. Krull is the son of one of two monarchs who agree to bind their kingdoms through marriage. The “Beast”—an interstellar traveler with a ferocious army of “Slavers”—sends his troops to seize the bride for his own. Krull embarks on a mission with the “Old One” to find the “glave” (the five-pointed throwing disk) and get to the teleporting dark fortress where the Beast makes its home and where his bride-to-be is being held captive.
They encounter a band of robbers—among them is Neeson—that Krull convinces to join him in his quest. They have many predictable adventures, seeking one seer after another who can tell them how to find the dark fortress. The Beast sends minions and takes over bystanders to try to trick Krull into giving up his mission.
He doesn’t though and uses the glave to great effectiveness as a sort of extragalactic sawzall to knock the beast down. Down but not out. It turns out that the real weapon he needs was within him all along. Actually, he needs his bride to give him the fire that he then prolifically fires form his hand to solve all of his remaining problems. A good thing, too, because, like, can you imagine if she’d been the one to save everyone? Unthinkable.
Although the film self-referentially pokes fun at itself for even pretending to be a date movie, it really is the story of a young man and woman who fall in love only to have their paradise darkened by the cloud of an extremely aggressive cancer, the cure for which so horribly disfigures him that he decides not to return to her, letting her think him dead instead. The movie is the story of how he eventually does get the courage to return to her, only to realize that the only real problem he had was that he didn’t trust her to be big-hearted enough to see past his once-handsome-and-now-gruesome visage to the man beneath. He didn’t give her enough credit for having fallen in love with the man within rather than the stud-muffin without. So romantic, date-night fare, right?
There’s also a tremendous amount of violence—not necessarily gratuitous, but over-the-top choreographed, at any rate—a fuck-ton of swearing, some nudity (Ryan Reynolds’s booty, ladies and germs) and seriously adult themes. The story is also told in a series of looping flashbacks over the course of two years with a lot of asides that break the fourth wall (as in the comic books, actually). It’s a well-paced film. I liked how the taxi driver who takes Deadpool to the scenes of battle was a main character, I liked how we were introduced to two minor X-Men characters. I liked how they showed Wade and Vanessa’s relationship develop as a shared experience, rather than the classic trope of making the woman try to rescue the man from himself, because he’s obviously damaged. They were both damaged, but in the same way, so it worked for them.[1]
It took me a while to get used to Ajax’s and Angel’s powers because they were both just as indestructible and impervious to pain as DeadPool and Colossus. But that’s how superhero movies are, that’s how these battles have always been, drawn-out like professional wrestling matches, with the bad guy always almost but not quite turning the odds before the “hero” triumphs. The hero in this case is Deadpool and he goes against the trope by making damned sure that Ajax isn’t coming back.[2]
Ryan Reynolds carries the film well and T.J. Miller as the bartender at his favorite bar/hangout was the only other actor I recognized. I only realized that Ajax’s smirking face belonged to the same actor who’d first played Daario Neharis in Game of Thrones.
This season centers on the Punisher, weaving in the Yakuza, the Hand, Wilson Fisk (still in prison) as well as Elektra. The plot with the punisher is more down to Earth, with his spectactular denouement at the hands of Daredevil and eventual arrest near the beginning of the season. Murdock and Foggy are defending the case against the Punisher, sensing corruption in the DA’s office. Foggy is forced by Murdock’s lackadaisical attitude (his focus on being Daredevil) to handle the case alone and does a great job. Frank Castle himself torpedoes his own case with his own testimony and goes to jail. There he is a target—but no more than from Wilson Fisk, who wants to use him to eliminate his chief rival.
The other plot line is more fantastical, involving Elektra, who is far from a sympathetic character. I found Elektra to be terribly annoying, with one-dimensional motivations. It turns out that she is the reincarnation of an ancient living weapon that the Hand wants to get their … well … hands on. Lots of back and forth between Daredevil, Stick and Elektra, lots of fighting until they prevail in the end. Well, kinda. Elektra takes the fall, but she can’t die (not really) and the Hand collects her body and puts it into their sarcophagus. The end.