Saturday 28 May 2016

Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers (2015)


When you come to an Anthony Jeselnik show, you know what you’re going to get. He’s become famous as a shock comedian who’ll joke about everything from dead babies to national tragedies. That can be a problem. It's hard to surprise people into laughing if they're prepared for everything. He gets pigeonholed as someone with a shock-value gimmick, and if that was true, he'd have flamed out a long time ago. But there’s a lot more to his technique than getting laughs out of saying what you’re not “allowed” to say.

Here’s an example. He opens Thoughts and Prayers with this joke, after the usual region-specific spiel (here, it’s in San Francisco) about how he loves being in wherever-he-is.

“Got to walk around a little bit today. Saw a baby.”

Pause. The audience is laughing in anticipation. This is one layer – for someone else, seeing a baby might just be nice. But they’re anticipating the sick twist.

“Saw a baby locked inside the back of a hot car. So it’s been a great day. Love that.”

Pause. They’re cheering. This is what they expected: I saw a baby – the baby was dying, I enjoyed that. Is that the whole joke? But then:

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a monster. I tried to help the baby. Tried to throw a rock through the window.”

Pause. More laughter. This is the escalation of the original joke: I tried to help it, by probably killing it with a rock. He’s piling on. Is this the whole joke?

Wait:

“Window was down.”

They erupt. He set it up, hit the punchline – perfect delivery – then doubled down on the punchline, then added yet another twist. Epilogue:

“Ruined that baby’s whole weekend. It was worth it.”

That’s Jeselnik’s solution to an audience who thinks they know where you’re going. It’s not as simple as just extending the jokes. It’s about making the expected become unexpected, through framing. It’s about misdirection. Anthony Jeselnik is probably better at misdirection than any other comedian right now. That joke isn’t even in the top 10 jokes from that special. It’s just a warm-up, so I felt comfortable spoiling it because it demonstrates his technique. Regardless of your attitude to his material, you have to appreciate his craftsmanship. He keeps pulling the rug out from under the audience, in almost every joke, and it magnifies the impact.

There’s an inherent self-reflexivity to Jeselnik’s act that other comedians with more normal material don’t have, or need. Throughout Thoughts and Prayers, he comments on how the crowd is reacting to each joke. Right after the baby-in-the-car joke, he throws out another offensive one. Great delivery, great misdirection – everyone erupts. I won’t spoil it. Point is, after it, comes an aside:

“See, that joke, that joke is a test. To see if you guys are cool or not. That thing about the baby in the car, that’s just me clearing my throat. If you laugh at that joke, whole show goes great.”

Getting the audience into that cosy space of mutual acceptance is gratifying for them, but Jeselnik’s act has sharp edges and a constant need for surprise and a slight discomfort. So this isn’t a ceasefire. If most comedy acts are the performer and the audience laughing together, Jeselnik’s is the performer vs. the audience. He makes them laugh even when they’d rather not. People laugh while covering their eyes in amused shame, while shaking their heads in half-hearted negation. Which is why the next joke is immediately prefaced with: “This next joke is a test to see how cool you are”. And so it continues, Jeselnik letting them get comfortable before shocking them again. It’s a masterful, rhythmic manipulation of the audience.

Regardless of his technique, jokes which are getting laughs from violating established morality only work for as long as you’re still in a mental space where you’re clinging to that morality. So after about 15 minutes of the act, just when you’re getting used to it, the jokes change – less dead babies and rape, more subversion, more off-the-wall misdirection. From relatively short one-liners to stories. And then back again. The set concludes with 18 minutes of Jeselnik getting real, talking about his experiences as a ‘controversial’ comedian and how Comedy Central tried to control his show. That’s probably the best part – it’s just as funny as the rest, but the ironic distance he keeps from the audience has shrunk. He’s almost confiding. And what he has to say is honest and occasionally even profound. Plus, he ends on maybe the single best joke in the whole special, an act of misdirection which required a solid 5-6 minutes of setting-up. How real was he being? Who cares? 

Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers is on Netflix. 

Tuesday 24 May 2016

Thoughts on the Preacher pilot


AMC’s Preacher pilot has an impossible task. It’s trying to adapt one of the most profane, sexually transgressive, and violent comics of all time as a TV show. Putting it on basic cable raises the bar for what you’re allowed to show, but clearly nowhere near enough. Preacher (the comic) was more defined by its willingness to go there than almost any work of fiction I’ve ever seen – which isn’t to say it was nothing but shock value, just that the constant swearing, twisted sexuality, near-total hostility to religion, and graphic violence gave it an essential flavour. It was anarchic and hilarious, but it was also self-aware, dramatically compelling, and essentially idealistic in the way of a traditional Western. Plus, it had Odin Quincannon molesting a giant doll made of meat.

Watching the pilot gives you an idea of the precise restrictions under which the show’s operating. There’s plenty of gore, delivered with an early Peter Jackson splatter-film enthusiasm, as if it’s trying to compensate for something. A man bursts into a shower of blood and meat in the first five minutes. Jesse Custer breaks another man’s arm and bone peeks out. Cassidy (the immortal vampire) jumps out of a plane and lands with a splat that disgorges his intestines. It’s trying, in a way which makes the communal reluctance to swear amusing.

Less amusing and more irritating is the show’s sanitisation of Preacher’s full-throated contempt for religion. A running joke about people vandalising a church sign is all that remains. It’s been replaced with a dime-a-dozen story of a man who can’t hear God speak to him anymore and is losing his faith (Jesse Custer) deciding to renew his commitment to his calling. If you’ve read the source material, where Jesse was forced to become a preacher after over a decade of physical and psychological abuse, and it was never framed as anything other than a damaging choice, the show’s take on this storyline can’t be anything but a perversion. I can see why they’ve chosen to go this route – they’re likely afraid of alienating religious demographics or garnering bad press by faithfully adapting a story where a disillusioned preacher is trying to hunt down God to make him pay for the misery of his creation.

Setting aside its divergences from the comic, the show’s pilot has a bigger problem – it isn’t particularly good. There are a lot of imaginative stylistic flourishes (my favourite being a match cut from Cassidy jumping out of a plane to ketchup splatting on a plate) , but it’s long on style, short on content. Jesse is morose and depressed in an inert, dramatically uninteresting way. He was involved in some kind of criminal enterprise with Tulip, and she’s trying to bring him back for the age-old One Last Job. He’s become a preacher because he made a promise to his dad, just before his dad was shot. He mostly sits around, drinks, and once beats up an abusive husband. The town of Annville is fodder for achingly contemporary jokes about replacing politically incorrect sports mascots and the slippery slopes of Southern prejudice. It’s depressingly by-the-numbers.

Getting away from Jesse, the show’s versions of Cassidy and Tulip offer more entertainment, if not more originality. Cassidy being ambushed by a crusader cult suggests there’s going to be a larger mythology built around his vampirism than there was in the comic, which is a smart move. Tulip is so hyper-competent while MacGyver-ing an impromptu rocket launcher out of cans, moonshine, and fertiliser – recruiting a boy and a girl to help her and doling out nuggets of feminist wisdom – that it becomes funny. But at least she’s doing something, until she comes to Annville and is reduced to waiting around for Jesse to wise up and join her, while trying to persuade him with such original non-tautologies as ‘We did what we did. We are who we are, and that’s it, you know?’ The unengaging, morose faux-drama of their reunion is so far away from its precursor in the comic – which had an electric charge of resentment and latent desire – that it’s almost painful to watch. 

The occasional flashes of humour and creativity, and the competent action sequences mean that it’ll likely be well-received – I can see it already is – and it’s mildly entertaining. Still, when you’re adapting one of the most uproariously entertaining comics of all time, that’s a depressingly mediocre outcome. It's nowhere as awful either on its own, or for how it bastardises the source material, as NBC's Constantine or Fox's Lucifer (the ultimate example of a great Vertigo comic being turned into generic network fodder), and in that respect it represents an improvement on the trend. But my advice is, read the comic instead

Monday 23 May 2016

Green Room (2015)


When people wind up in violent situations, they don’t react with the steely competence of most Hollywood action movie protagonists. They freak out, they mess up, and they pay for it. Which isn’t to say that they can’t make the right choice – but sometimes you can make the smart plays and still wind up dead. That’s how it is in Green Room. A hardcore punk band playing a skinhead venue stumbles onto a murder scene, and the people who run the club can’t afford witnesses. Trapped and barricaded in the green room, the pressure-cooker situation gets worse and worse.

Jeremy Saulnier’s last film, Blue Ruin, subverted revenge-pulp movies by making the avenger a soft-spoken drifter unused to violence. His incompetence, combined with Saulnier’s immaculate sense of timing, lent every scene razor-edge suspense as he blundered through murder attempts – his own, and those made by others on him. Early on, the protagonist got a shave and got cleaned up – the inscrutable, wild-man drifter beard went, revealing Macon Blair’s mild features – and from then on we processed his actions not as the work of a crazed outsider, but as deliberate and premeditated violence being carried out by someone who looked like your accountant. A telling line from his sister reflected this shift: ‘I'd forgive you if you were crazy, but you're not. You're weak.’ It was his choice to enter the downward spiral of vengeance.

There is no such deeper goal in Green Room; its pleasures are entirely on the surface, but they are many. Visceral, horrifying gore mocks the clean, aestheticized wounds of typical action movies. The villains aren’t blustering or crazy, despite their Neo-Nazi leanings. They have their interests, and they go about protecting them with a chilling, deliberate efficiency – Patrick Stewart is underused, but excellent as the owner of the club and leader of the skinheads, marshalling his troops to flush out the band with all the resources at their disposal. There’s a surprising amount of procedural detail – ‘soldiers’ wear red laces, they run a dog-fighting ring so the dogs can be used as weapons here, police reports of a stabbing can be fobbed off by finding two willing skinheads and having one stab the other and go off with the police for it.

The painstaking details make the situation tangible and immediate. The green room has been built so that there’s nothing but solid brick past the ceiling and the four walls. How do they break out? How do they overpower the lumbering doorman who’s holding a gun on them? Following the changing calculus of the situation, weighing up their options for survival, and trying to figure out what they (and the skinheads) will do next is as much part of Green Room’s fun as the almost-unbearable suspense and gruesome violence, as well as the black comedy which arises from blunders and mishaps as each side does their best to kill the other.

The eventual shift from siege movie to slasher movie spoiled my enjoyment a little, bringing some of the old clichés into a movie which was enormously refreshing for its realism and internal coherence, but it’s still a superb genre piece – nasty, intense fun.


Son of Saul (2015)


How do you make an honest film about the Holocaust? You need to communicate the scale of the tragedy, depict the dehumanising machinery which carried it out, balance the banality and enormity of its evil, and – if you’re making a drama, not a documentary – do it all in one story. Your protagonist needs to stay alive. The victims of the Holocaust who stayed alive were the sonderkommando – conscripts who participated unwillingly, in the process of herding Jewish prisoners into the gas chambers and getting rid of all evidence of their existence, from their discarded clothes to their corpses to the bloodstains, so the next batch could be killed in the same way. They bore witness to all of it and lived – for a time.

Son of Saul follows two days in the life of Saul, a sonderkommando who discovers a boy in the gas chamber who isn’t quite dead. The boy is taken away and quietly strangled by a Nazi doctor. For the entirety of the long shot that begins the film, Saul has been in shallow focus, the background intentionally blurred, and the camera has doggedly followed him so we can absorb the zombie-like blankness of his creased, ash-covered face. His detachment is a necessity. But when the boy is strangled, he looks back and it slips. It was his son.

Saul tries to find a way to give him a decent burial. The film is largely consumed with his effort to secure his son’s body (the doctors want it for an autopsy), find a rabbi who can say the Kaddish, and find a burial place. It’s poignant and futile. Even those around him – Abraham, the sonderkommando rabbi – tell him to let it go, inured to brutal death and unceremonious cremation, but Saul will not be moved. All along, Abraham and others are organising a rebellion, which quietly goes on in the blurred background of the long shots of Saul moving feverishly through Auschwitz.

The film is pitched precisely in order to show the truth without exploiting or offering false redemption. Saul’s son is already dead. It’s understood what he wants to do will change nothing. Even in his newfound agitation, he retains the glassy blankness of shellshock, rather than beating his breast or sobbing. He never stops moving, and so the horrors of the camp become visible around him – the edges of the frame reveal corpses stacked like firewood, pools of blood being methodically mopped up to maintain the illusion that the gas chamber is a shower room. The camera does not move through the wall to watching people dying, although it could have mined horror from the sight – it sticks with Saul, who stands by the iron doors as the frenzied banging of the people inside gradually slows and stops. We all know what happened. The suggestion is as effective as depiction, and it offers some dignity. There is no manipulative orchestral soundtrack, only the diegetic sounds of a concentration camp.

The film is an unrelenting experience, owing to its subject matter, its spare presentation of long tracking shots focused on Saul’s hollowed face, the chaotic melees of prisoners unloading and firefights, and owing to the purpose which pushes it forward. Abraham, who needs Saul to do his part in the sonderkommando rebellion, tells him to stop – the boy wasn’t even his son. It might be the case, but what drives Saul has become about more than family ties – he is trying to do a kindness which is all the more meaningful because it’s futile, amidst endless death and desecration. The boy’s death should be recognised. It should affect someone. It should matter.

The narrow scope of Son of Saul suggests the enormity of the holocaust in the same way that the claustrophobic framing lets the atrocity seep in at the edges, sparing us the full sight without letting us ignore it. In the routine of Saul’s day – scrubbing away blood, digging mass graves, throwing crematorium ash into the river – we see the massive organisational effort behind the Nazi attempt to not only kill the Jewish people, but to erase them as if they had never existed. Against all that, Saul seems heartbreakingly quixotic, an impression at odds with the studied blankness of his demeanour. He is all the more poignant because he doesn’t seem capable of caring, and yet he does, to the exclusion of everything, including survival.  

The sonderkommando were not allowed to die. They had to facilitate the deaths of their kin instead. All they could do was bear witness. Son of Saul bears witness. It’s not only gripping, but deeply meaningful, expressing a unified purposed in its story, performances, and filmmaking – a stunning achievement from first-time director László Nemes. Not a film you’ll want to see, but perhaps one you should.


Thursday 19 May 2016

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)


I’ve always thought the X-Men are the most inherently compelling of the major comic book properties. They can be a metaphor for any persecuted minority - meaning you can automatically invest in a resonant narrative - and in Xavier and Magneto, they have the rare rivalry where both the hero and the villain are right. You can’t dismiss Magneto out of hand given what humans do to mutants, any more than you could pretend Malcolm X didn’t have a point. At their best – Days of Future Past – the film adaptations present their perspectives as equally valid and give their conflict a moral, philosophical, and emotional dimension. The plot arises from the problem of how humans and mutants can coexist.

In Apocalypse, Xavier and Magneto speak maybe three times, and the plot arises from an ancient mutant coming back to life because CIA agent Moira McTaggert is careless with a carpet (no, really) and trying to take over the world. It might seem unfair to leave out that En Sabah Nur is a kind of mutant messiah who wants his ‘children’ to inherit the earth, and so the movie’s about –as much as it is about anything – humans vs. mutants again, but this is really lip service.

Apocalypse is full of the increasingly groan-inducing superhero staples. Destruction of cities and familiar landmarks? Cairo and the Sydney Opera house, check. Posing as a team? Apocalypse’s four horsemen, check. Vague, faux-profound dialogue which skims over issues without really addressing them? Check, multiple times, and there’s an especially robotic, stilted script in this one – check out Jean Grey’s line about being afraid she’ll hurt someone with her powers. Sophie Turner gets some thankless dreck to deliver in this film, because she’s the one with the psychic visions of Apocalypse – it probably took more than a few takes for her to say the line about his “dark power” with a straight face. Then again, she has to come out with lines almost as bad in season 5 of Game of Thrones, so she’s probably used to it.

This film felt tired and obligatory whenever either Magneto or Quicksilver weren’t on-screen. Michael Fassbender is by some distance the best thing about these movies. There’s no line he can’t deliver with conviction, and he sells the hell out of Erik’s rage, grief, and sorrow when his new family are killed – the strongest scene in the movie – he’s a magnetic screen presence. Trying to wring the last bit of pathos out of his background as a holocaust survivor, the film takes him to Auschwitz, which he tears down, in the only scene featuring Apocalypse powering-up someone which doesn’t come off as slightly funny. Quicksilver’s entrance raised questions regarding timing and knowledge, and it felt like a very convenient way to ensure almost nobody died in a giant explosion, but the way his powers are represented is so inherently cool that he’s still a plus, even though (spoiler) by the end of the film, he still hasn’t told Magneto they’re related.

While Quicksilver’s set-up doesn’t pay off, the film is good at ensuring a lot of other things do, ranging from the foreshadowing of Jean Grey’s unrestrained power to the connection between Xavier and Apocalypse and Storm’s teenage idolisation of Mystique. But rather than making the film feel tight and well-written, these feel like franchise obligations. Jean’s power, for example, is setting up the Phoenix storyline for a future instalment. The fact that Storm was apparently comfortable with genocide of humans until she saw her hero, Mystique, fighting Apocalypse – even though Mystique became a hero by saving the life of humans – is baffling. Wolverine’s cameo, which (spoiler?) was nothing more interesting than him going on a mindless rampage in a Weapon X facility, felt like a ploy to placate fanboys.

The tiredness suffusing the film continued through the poorly-choreographed and boring action climax. Unlike the Russo Brothers, action isn’t Singer’s strong suit, and while DoFP made the wise choice to restrict out-and-out superhero fights in favour of striking visuals like Magneto casually mowing down sentinels and using a stadium to tactically isolate the White House, Apocalypse doesn’t know its limits. The stale brawling – often shot with an irritatingly shaky camera – and exchanges of fluorescent energy beams are tedious and unexciting. The visualisation of Apocalypse’s power - reducing earth and stone to huge washes of sand - and Magneto’s newly-amped power resulting in grainy metal particles boiling around him are a little impressive the first time, but soon make their action scenes look overly busy and distracting, while also being ugly, like a prequel Star Wars battle. And Apocalypse never stoops looking slightly goofy.

Apocalypse has just enough bright spots – almost any time Michael Fassbender is on-screen, Quicksilver, James McAvoy – to be a mildly entertaining experience, or at least to prevent the cons from outweighing the pros, but it’s little better than mediocre. A fact it seems to acknowledge when Jean and co. walk out of a showing of Return of the Jedi (1983 references abound) and she says the third movie’s always the worst. 


Monday 9 May 2016

Our Little Sister (2015)


Three sisters – Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika – live in their ancestral house in Japan. Their father left with another woman, and their mother left soon after, leaving them to fend for themselves – all adults now, they still live together, orphans in a girl’s dorm. They get on with life and don’t talk about the things that brought them to where they are. One day, news arrives – their father has passed away, and he left a fourth daughter behind; Suzu, their half-sister.

In Suzu, the eldest sister Sachi sees herself – someone forced to grow up much too quickly, in Suzu’s case so she could take after her ailing father in place of her negligent stepmother, as Sachi raised her little sisters. Perhaps the sisters should feel bitterly towards Suzu, whose mother stole their father – Suzu certainly expects resentment – but they don’t. They see in her see a kindred spirit, and ask her to come live with them. The lonely, deprived Suzu becomes the new baby sister – almost a daughter – and blossoms under their care and affection.

Our Little Sister has no plot to speak of beyond the galvanising event of their father’s death. While events occur – a family friend gets cancer, Sachi’s married lover asks her to come to America with him, the sisters’ mother comes for a memorial event – they occur as part of everyday life, not in service of a larger goal. The film is consummate slice-of-life, following the sisters about their days – Sachi is a nurse, Yoshino is a bank teller, and Chika works at a sports shop – and building a cast of tertiary characters from those they know and meet, like Chika’s mountaineer maybe-boyfriend –who wants to go back to Everest even though he lost six of his toes – or the café owner who has always been a little in love with the woman who runs the girls’ favourite seafood restaurant.

The film spans a year in the lives of the sisters, with shots of the changing seasons beautifully framing the vignettes of their everyday existence. There is an easy, comfortable rhythm to the film. Its understated vignettes hone in on the minutiae of life, like the simple pleasures of whitebait fishing and the beautiful sequence of Suzu cycling in summer under a tunnel of cherry-blossom trees.

This gentle patience contrasts an underlying tension – one created by the sisters’ abandoned, quasi-orphaned state, and Suzu being the child of the woman who broke up their family. It’s been there from the beginning but it lies, almost forgotten, until Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika’s mother comes to stir it up again. Till then, true to people’s wilful avoidance of what is unpleasant, Suzu and her sisters have rarely talked about their situation, the dialogue gently tiptoeing around acknowledgement even as they live in a house filled with memories of a broken family.

The director Hirokazu Koreeda uses silences, compositions and immaculate framing to full effect in communicating how the sisters are trying to keep their family together while the internal stresses threaten to push them apart – not just those of their past, but of their present, with three adult women living together, each itching for personal independence but reluctant to leave their family behind. Suzu’s homecoming gives them someone to care for and raise, uniting them.

Our Little Sister is a work of simple, eloquent beauty, both in subject, treatment, and visual flourish. It explores sisterhood, growing up, and moving on, with naturalism and sensitivity, conjuring a rich world and even expressing a sort of humanistic philosophy  - graceful acceptance of what you can’t change with a relish in the texture and joys of life. It may not aspire to grandness in scope, but it’s a great film nonetheless.   

The Witch (2015)



An exiled pioneer family travel from their New England plantation to uninhabited land near a foreboding wood to start their life anew. ‘We will conquer this wilderness – it will not consume us’, the father says. It consumes them.

The Witch is at least half a family drama. Thomasin, the oldest daughter, is put-upon with having to take care of her mischievous twin brother and sister; the stoic oldest son Caleb struggles with adolescent attraction towards Thomasin. The mother, Katherine, is broken early on by the loss of her baby Samuel – stolen by the witch – and she inevitably blames Thomasin, who was minding him. The father, William, stands in the middle of it all, trying to keep his family together as tragedy and lies pull them apart. Watching them turn on each other is sickening and sad – it’s an unusual and effective kind of horror.           

Conflicts which might otherwise lead merely to shouting matches acquire high stakes because of the presence of both the witch and God. Devout Christians, the family are constantly seen in prayer and concepts of grace, God’s mercy, the punishment visited on the prideful, and the Devil are completely real to them – after Samuel is taken, Caleb asks his father if Samuel is in hell because he was unbaptized. A day’s ride from the plantation, the loss of a horse can make the difference between life and death for the family, particularly once their crops begin failing. Poised so close to death, every conflict acquires extreme gravity.  The ambiguity of the witch’s influence and the Puritan emphasis on personal responsibility combine to make everyone suspect of evil – have they earned their suffering? Why is God punishing them? All the while, the wood encroaches on their farm, nature’s terrifying aspect comes to reclaim their attempts at a civilised existence.

The Witch is a masterpiece in building tension and dread. When their crops fail, the family goes into the wood for food, into the witch’s territory, giving her ways to influence them further and escalate the situation. Little domestic dramas revolving around William’s foolhardiness in taking Caleb hunting or Katherine’s missing silver cup inflate in significance as lies break trusts and invite God’s supposed wrath. The spiralling is punctuated by moments of indelible horror – Thomasin plays peekaboo with Samuel and opens her eyes to an empty cradle, a milking goat gives blood,  a raven pecking at a breast –as reality is distorted by the corrupting influence of the devil.

To make the 400 years-old setting credible and immediate, Robert Eggers painstakingly reconstructs the world of puritan New England, from accent and speech – dialogue in The Witch has the antiquated gloss of Jacobean drama - to costume and set design. Its characters may be credulous, but they engage with their faith responsively – Katherine’s speech about how she fears she’s become as Job’s wife, her heart hardened by the loss of her children, is deeply affecting, as is William’s self-recriminating breakdown. Eggers’ immaculate framing and his eye for what to leave unseen are a perfect match for The Witch’s slow-burn approach to horror. It’s a spectacular debut – functioning simultaneously as a family drama, a vividly-realised historical film, and an exercise in suffocating dread.


Sunday 1 May 2016

Captain America: Civil War (2016)


Marvel’s 2006 Civil War crossover was politicised – liberty vs. security, secret identities vs. transparency – with tie-ins featuring reporters and the general populace of the Marvel universe experiencing the effects of the conflict in Civil War: Frontline. With 70 years of published material about superheroes living among us, it had a rich context to draw from. The Marvel Cinematic Universe introduced Iron Man, the first ‘enhanced’ human, only 8 years ago, in its fictional timeline. There’s not enough context for Civil War, as it was.

So in Captain America: Civil War, the politics take a backseat to what has always been the strength of Marvel movies – the characters. After an operation in Lagos goes wrong, the UN demand that the Avengers accept their oversight, and Captain America and Iron Man’s friendship slowly unravels as they take opposite sides. ‘If I see a situation pointed south, I can’t ignore it. Sometimes I wish I could,’ muses Cap – ‘No, you don’t’, Tony counters knowingly, in one of the many significant character moments of the film.

Their conflict might have stayed ideological if not for Bucky, who gets framed for the bombing of the UN. Cap naturally tries to save Bucky, which puts him between the world and public enemy number one. Bucky is systematically used to drive a wedge between Cap and Tony, and personal loyalties and beliefs break the Avengers into two camps as the conflict escalates. The death of Wakandan relief workers during the operation in Lagos introduces a superb Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther, who combines royal dignity with implacable rage in his hunt for Bucky, the main suspect in the bombing death of his father.

Each fight, each inevitable political reaction and counter-reaction, drives the plot forward in an engrossing rhythm, as small character-exploring asides foreshadow later shifts in loyalties. Despite juggling a huge cast and including four or five major action set-pieces, the film never feels bloated at 2 hours and 27 minutes. Every scene has a purpose and every character has their spotlight, though Spider-Man’s is gratuitous. The studied craftsmanship in the screenplay and direction enables an extraordinarily difficult balancing act to come off without a hitch.

Thanks to dialing back on the shaky-cam approach which was the sole drawback of Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s excellent fight scenes, the Russo Brothers have made an action-movie masterpiece in Civil War. The choreography is intense, acrobatic, and inventive – one of the pleasures of the lacklustre Man of Steel was seeing the physics-defying aspect of superheroes captured for the first time, and Civil War offers the same sense of revelation in jaw-dropping chase scenes through Berlin and the climactic airport showdown. Black Panther is a highlight, his unrelenting savagery even briefly cowing Bucky and Cap. The film offers constant, brutal fulfilment.

Superhero films, especially Marvel’s, have settled into a cosy niche. There is a constant sense of their narrative limitations, of the risks which they’re not willing to take, because it’s become a reliable brand. Coming towards the climax of Civil War, I was appreciative, but I qualified my praise, thinking I knew what was coming. But then it did something I didn’t know Marvel films could still do – it surprised me with the best kind of climactic revelation, the kind that shocks you even as you realise it was telegraphed all along. In the last half-hour, the film elevates itself from a professionally accomplished action thriller to an emotionally resonant and deeply affecting superhero film, one that means something. That’s when Civil War joins X-Men: Days of Future Past and The Dark Knight as one of the greatest superhero films of all time.