For better or for worse (mainly for worse), comic book movies came to dominate blockbuster season this decade. Well-known characters and a built-in audience made for ready cash. All the filmmakers had to do was not fuck things up completely and they’d be almost guaranteed a decent yield.

However, the transition from page to screen was rarely easy and so for every Dark Knight, there were a couple of Daredevils. There was even Catwoman and Ghost Rider, but thankfully my path has yet to cross with those (alleged) abominations.

Top Five Comic Book Films

5. Spider-Man 2


Before Sam Raimi fucked everything up with Spider-Man 3 (although quite perversely it’s almost more entertaining than the first two films, so ridiculous is everything in it), he had a good thing going with the Spider-Man series. And the second film betters the first by a fraction. This is partly because you avoid the always rather tedious origin story and because the action isn’t dominated by a man in a rubbish green suit.

4. Watchmen


A referential adaption of the source material. Therefore it suffers from the same strengths and weaknesses of the comic – on the plus side, the story is imaginative and it twists the superhero concept on its head, but on the negative, the story is incredibly episodic. It never really flows. But there’s a lot to admire in the film (the seriousness of the execution, the excellent visuals and some of the action scenes). Thankfully it also ditches the graphic novel’s ridiculous ending.

3. Hulk


Hulk unfairly receives a lot of criticism. People moan about the CGI and how humourless it is. But I appreciate the seriousness of the exercise and sometimes I think the CGI Hulk looks great - just take the fight with the tanks. I also love the multiple panels to make the movie look like a living, breathing comic book. Another plus is Nick Nolte. Yes the performance is incredibly OTT, but it’s the one bit of excess in an otherwise remarkably restrained film (Nolte’s fake screaming when talking to his son is hilarious). The only negative is the tedious monster mash at the end. One of the positives of the film is that there isn’t a supervillain for the Hulk to contend with – his biggest enemy is himself. So to see things degenerate into a bland, poorly lit CGI fight temporarily makes you forget how good the rest of the film is.

2. Batman Begins


The origin story is hard to contend with. You want to show where the character came from but you also know that the audience is actually there for the result. Tim Burton got around this by having Batman already formed. And I don’t have a problem with Burton’s version. But Nolan decided to give Batman’s origin story the space it needed. And as a result you have a very rare thing – a comic book movie with lots of layers and with characters who actually feel like living, breathing people. Burton’s movie had a beautiful surface but Nolan’s film has more things going on underneath. The action scenes are also considerably better (even if the fights are overly disjointed – Nolan goes for a Bourne vibe and fails somewhat); the car chase is amazing and demon Batman is one of the coolest visuals that CGI has conjured.

1. The Dark Knight


Hopes were high for The Dark Knight and Christopher Nolan didn’t disappoint. His sequel is darker, better acted and better written than the original. It also has one of the best villains in recent cinema, allowing the film to tap into the paranoia that clouds present society – the fear of fearless terror. How do you combat a force that doesn’t give a shit about itself? Nolan also improves his action direction and provides a couple of genuine surprises with the plot. However, the film is far from perfect. The final action sequence is confused and Two-Face isn’t fully realised. Plus, in the face of the Joker, Batman seems kind of impotent in comparison. But then that’s kind of the point and full credit goes to Nolan for making a film that is so relentlessly grim.

Five Worst Comic Book Movies

5. Superman Returns


For me, Superman has always been one of the least interesting superheroes. He’s far too perfect and he’s a goody two-shoes to boot. Despite this, the first couple of Christopher Reeve films managed to overcome these shortcomings through sheer spectacle alone. But in the age of CGI, where everything that can be imagined can be filmed (and poorly rendered), there’s nothing remarkable about Superman’s exploits. In lieu of this you need interesting characters and good writing, two things that are sorely lacking here. The film limps and plods along with only Kevin Spacey’s humping of old ladies and shouting of ‘WRONG!’ to occasionally break the tedium.

4. Hellboy


Guillermo del Toro is one of the most puzzling directors working today. Despite the fact that most of his films are shit or mediocre at best (Pan’s Labyrinth must rank as one of the most overrated films of the decade), he’s developed a cult following. Hellboy is a prime example. It’s dull and incoherent. It displays no storytelling skill whatsoever. It doesn’t even possess the ‘it’s so bad, it’s funny’ feel that pieces of crap like Daredevil have. I think I ended up clipping my toenails or something as I was watching it, so uninvolving was the whole enterprise.

3. V For Vendetta


‘Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.’ Bash my nuts with a mallet.

2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine


Fucking hilarious and excruciating in equal measure. Want to see a man attacking a Nazi gun emplacement on all fours like a panther? Want to see a child running at his father with sharp claws and killing him before screaming in mental anguish? Want to see shot after shot of Hugh Jackman’s luscious body? This movie has it all and much, much less.

1. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen


A huge mess of a film. It’s one of those movies where even though everything is explained in excruciating detail, it still doesn’t make any sense. Everything just seems to happen at random. It also features one of the most annoying performances in recent years – Stuart Townsend as Dorian Gray. His villain is like an even camper version of Roger Moore (yes, that is possible). He’s all raised eyebrows and crappy one-liners. Then you have Sean Connery picking up a paycheque. His heart isn’t in the film and it shows. Plus it’s blindingly obvious that all of his action is done by a much younger stunt double, making it resemble the skit in The Naked Gun where a stunt Frank Drebben enters a room with gymnastics and disappears behind a couch only for Leslie Nielsen to appear.

Baz Luhrmann is not a director I hold in high regard. All of his previous films have either annoyed the hell out of me or given me a blistering headache. He’s a director turned up to eleven, a director who believes more is more, a director who is the enemy of good taste. So colour me surprised when I found myself enjoying his latest offering.

Australia does not have a promising beginning. As is typical of Luhrmann, you’re bombarded with flashy visuals, quick editing and ridiculous acting. There’s a horrible sense of hysteria about the thing. Indeed, the exposition at the beginning is so rushed and so relentless that you feel like someone is shouting at you while slapping you in the face with a leather glove. Are you listening, the film is saying? Are you paying attention? Because I’ve got to get this tedious setting-up-the-story shit off my chest quick so that I can have some fun.

The hysterics extend to Nicole Kidman’s acting. She’s a talented actress but she has another side to her, a side that wants to paint with the broadest brush strokes. For the first hour or so this is the Kidman we get. The one with wild eyes, a shrill voice and exaggerated body movements. But then eventually she settles down and her performance improves considerably.

The problem with the beginning of the film is that it’s a broad comedy. Kidman enters the story as a prissy Englishwoman down under. And before you know it she’s getting hot under the collar about Hugh Jackman’s plan to mate horses and cooing like an idiot at kangaroos.

The kangaroo scene is a good example of just how awful the beginning is. Kidman’s character sees them out of the window of a van and dumbly admires their beauty. And then just as she’s cooing like a gibbering imbecile, one of Jackman’s pals shoots one and we’re confronted with a horrific close-up of Kidman’s grotesquely startled face. It’s exactly the kind of shit I expect from Luhrmann – childish, hysterical filmmaking.

The point at which I began to enjoy the film was when the characters entered the city of Darwin. Kidman’s acting had calmed down and there was little of the broad comedy that had tainted early scenes. Suddenly the film seemed almost comfortable in its own skin.

The first sequence in Darwin boasts some of the film’s best moments. There’s a lovely moment when Nullah, a mixed race child, watches The Wizard of Oz while wearing black face. He does this because it was the policy in Australia to separate mixed race children from their families so that the black could be ‘bred out of them’. This ingenious way of avoiding the authorities made me smile.

The sequence in Darwin is also where Kidman and Jackman fall in love. Previous to this, their relationship makes little impact whatsoever – Jackman is the typical Indiana Jones/Crocodile Dundee-style rogue with a heart of gold and Kidman is a boring toffee-nosed Limey. But in the sequence in Darwin, Jackman suddenly turns up all clean-shaven and looking every inch like James Bond. As a red-blooded, heterosexual male, even I’d be tempted by this hunk of a man.

The scenes in the rain where Jackman and Kidman first kiss are kind of reminiscent of David Lean. Sure Australia is nowhere near as good as a Lean film, but Jackman and Kidman have chemistry and the love scene is surprisingly sexy.

However, it seems to me that Luhrmann is far more enamored with Jackman than he is with his leading lady. Time after time we see lingering shots of Jackman’s toned physique. Indeed, in one of the opening scenes the director’s admiration is kind of ridiculous. As the characters camp in the Outback, there’s a slow-motion shot of a topless Jackman pouring water all over his chiseled body. No wonder Kidman gets so hot and bothered.

For me the film’s peak is a brief montage sequence after the events in Darwin where we see Fletcher feed his boss to the crocodiles. Previous to this Fletcher has been nothing more than a mealy-mouthed henchman to a ruthless cattle merchant. But in an instant Fletcher goes from being an annoying pissant to a cold-blooded psycho killer. And the sequence is perfectly filmed. There’s some wonderful voiceover from Nullah, there’s some great music and there are some fantastic visuals. It’s everything cinema should be – visually and aurally arresting without calling attention to itself.

My second favourite scene occurs after the Japanese attack Darwin. There’s a scene where Jackman wanders the devastated city and finds the bar where he first met Kidman. The music is perfect and there’s some echo-drenched voiceover from previous scenes. Again it’s surprisingly restrained cinema and subsequently has a pleasing emotional punch – Jackman thinks Kidman is dead and this is a nostalgia trip to stab himself in the heart with.

The scene at the bar also serves the film’s political point. At first the barman won’t serve Jackman’s friend, an aboriginal, but after some threats and some screaming, Jackman manages to get equal treatment for his friend. Jackman is a voice of reason in a society where racism and prejudice is always on the surface.

Nullah, the film’s narrator, is also a means for Luhrmann to assuage some of his country’s guilt. Here is a mixed race child who experiences the push/pull of wanting to be with his surrogate white family and with his aboriginal grandfather. The character says that he’s neither black nor white and therefore exists in some sort of no man’s land. But at the end of the film Luhrmann has the child choose his black grandfather over his white family. This seems to be an apology for the harm that the Australian authorities did and a way of illustrating how important it is to retain our cultures – the way that the authorities tried to breed the black out of children was cultural robbery pure and simple.

At the end King George (Nullah’s grandfather) says to his grandchild that this is their country. Yes Australia is their country but the way that he says it seems to be inclusive. Australia, for better or for worse, also belongs to the foreigners who settled there.

The ending notwithstanding, the final act of Australia is kind of a disappointment. It ends with a rather dull child rescue sequence. And the demise of Fletcher smacks of desperation (he gets speared by King George – it’s like Lurhmann doesn’t quite know how to get rid of his villain and so just decides to give him a soap opera death). But that being said, I was still pleasantly surprised by Australia. I found it highly entertaining.

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