April Showers: The Northman, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, The Secrets of Dumbledore

April is a fairly lackluster month for movie releases as evidenced by the three films I will review below. Enormous caveat - there is an audience for all three of these movies (I considered myself the target demographic since I went to see them all!). But ultimately, this is a post about movies that overwhelmed me with their weaknesses, and you will have to figure it out for yourself if our tastes are different enough that you should give these films a try.  Consider yourself warned.

The Northman: This was my first Robert Eggers film (he directed and also co-wrote the screenplay with Sjon, an Icelandic poet, novelist, and lyricist who frequently works with Bjork). I have always heard great things about Eggers' movies, how they are weird and unconventional, so I went in cautiously optimistic. Unfortunately, I found this movie to be much more conventional in its storytelling and far too unnecessary.

This film could be re-titled Vengeance: The Movie. For two hours, you will follow the saga of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard), a Viking prince who is seeking revenge on his uncle Fjolnir (Claes Bang), who murdered his father, Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), and married his mother, Gudrun (Nicole Kidman). If you're saying, hey, that sounds familiar, yes, this Scandinavian legend is the inspiration for Shakespeare's Hamlet. But this movie is less about introspective monologues and more about blood and gore as Amleth eviscerates everyone he can find in increasingly inventive ways as he closes in on Fjolnir. Along the way, he teams up with an enslaved sorceress, Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), who could be his salvation...but death and destruction take precedence.

This movie is gorgeously shot and will likely give you a hankering to visit Iceland. The actors offer up fine work, though only the Scandinavians (Skarsgard and Bang) won't make you giggle with their attempts at Nordic accents. But I found it so terribly hard to be invested in a story that is about war and vengeance and men whaling on each other while the women exist on the sidelines to be raped or sold into slavery. There has been a lot written about this movie's attention to detail and attempts to be historically accurate. Well, turns out I don't care about Viking history at all, and this film is already being used by right-wing white supremacists as propaganda. I can applaud its aesthetics and brief descents into weird creepiness and magical thinking. But overall, it ends up being a conventional story about war and the worst that humanity has to offer, and that is a narrative I am less and less interested in every day.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent: If you've seen the trailer, you've probably seen the best this movie has to offer. This is the movie where Nicolas Cage plays himself, except a fictionalized and self-obsessed version. His career is going nowhere, he is divorced and has a strained relationship with his daughter, and he is deeply in debt. So when his business manager says that he has been offered a million dollars to go to the island home of a billionaire named Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal) who is a fan and wants Cage at his birthday party, he agrees. What could go wrong?

Well turns out Javi is a bad guy that the CIA is watching and Cage gets recruited by  agents played by Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz to help them out. What follows is a twisty action movie with lots of meta interludes where Javi and Nick talk about a buddy movie they're going to make together that is basically the plot of this movie we're all watching, and it's all silly and precious and occasionally funny but mostly odd. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it ended up being more of an action thriller and less funny than I hoped. Haddish and Barinholtz were woefully underutilized, and while I fully appreciated Nic Cage's commitment to this role, it turns out I am not enough of a fan to derive enough enjoyment from all the in-jokes and movie references. If you're a fan, you will probably LOVE this movie, but if your Cage filmography knowledge is a bit hazy, this may not be the right film for you. 

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore: I am a huge Harry Potter fan and the books meant a great deal to me growing up. However, much like the Hobbit movies left me cold after the initial nostalgia for Lord of the Rings wore off, I have lost my passion for the Fantastic Beasts universe. I never reviewed the second movie because I watched it in a bit of a pandemic haze and couldn't follow most of the plot, so watching this third film was quite the challenge as I had managed to forget major plot points, almost all the characters, and generally couldn't care about anything happening on screen.

If you need to keep the Potter nostalgia going, obviously don't pay attention to a word I've said and indulge freely in these films. But no matter how charming and game Eddie Redmayne is as Newt Scamander, and how much all the other actors are giving their all, including Mads Mikkelsen as the new Grindelwald, it can't make up for the convoluted writing and self-indulgent editing. Yes, there are great special effects and new creatures, and it's nice to see Hogwarts and Hogsmeade again. But all of that isn't enough to make this a compelling story that keeps you invested in this bloated franchise.