The Task of Amontillado

Is HBO back?  Now, I know what you’re saying, HBO has always done well at the Emmys and other award show, then I’ll say yes, that’s true, but I think a great deal of brand bias led some HBO series to be overrated and rewarded over shows that were better. But, let’s not forget, despite all those Emmys, HBO has been in trouble lately.  Pop in a CEO who doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing and appears to be anti-streaming in midst of the streaming zeitgeist (for better or worse, but least the binge model is slowly going away), drop the recognizable HBO branding from HBO Max, leaving it with the confusingly meaningless and generic Max branding.  When I hear “max”, I think immediately of TJ Maxx, Max from Stranger Things, Montana Max from Tiny Toons, or the max fill line on a cup of noodles.  The idea of it being an HBO streaming service is the last thing on my mind.  But now that the HBO is literally back in HBO Max, HBO’s programming is working its way into my good graces once again (although I still haven’t forgiven them for taking Infinity Train off).

As with last week’s The Chair Company, I’m here to talk to you again about a recently wrapped HBO series.  This time it’s Task, the follow-up to the lauded Mare of Easttown (which I didn’t care for—it’s hard for me to empathize with a dirty cop who plants drugs on family members and gets people who rely on her killed because of her lack of regard for good judgment and/or procedure).  And much like Breaking Bad birthed Better Call Saul, Task steps up in every way and absolutely blew me away from the very first episode.  I tore through this series in a way normally reserved for comedies or other light shows that are easy to consume in large quantities.  Task is anything but light.  It is seven, one hourish episodes of human darkness, deep misfortune, and gritty, irrevocable violence.  But it’s also one of the most touching and beautiful shows I’ve had the pleasure of viewing for some time.  Let’s get into it.

Task follows FBI agent Tom Brandis, played by the always excellent Mark Ruffalo (Collateral, The Avengers).  He’s currently doing the job fair circuit and is out of the field because of a family incident that left one member dead and another in prison.  But when his boss Kathleen McGinty, played by Martha Plimpton (Raising Hope, The Goonies) calls him back in to deal with a new crew in the area, he’s assigned to head up a task force of state and local police to deal with a very dangerous situation.  Turns out there’s been a trio of Halloween masked home invaders hitting up trap houses of area gangs.  One in particular, the biker gang called the Dark Hearts, has been hit the most, and is out for blood as a result.  Tom has to bring this crew’s reign of terror to an end to stem the tide of escalating gang violence.

Leading the crew is Robbie Prendergrast, which isn’t a typo, it really has that many Rs in it, played by Tom Pelphrey (Ozark), whom I’d only seen before in Iron Fist.  And if you have seen Iron Fist, you’d be in your rights to assume Pelphrey is going to be the weak link in this cast because, well, Iron Fist was pretty dismal, but as far as I can tell, Pelphrey puts in a career performance here.  Robbie is an immediately likable character and while he and Tom are not diametrically opposed characters, they play incredible foils to each other, both juggling a different set of problems.  Robbie’s brother Billy is missing in the way that means dead, but his body will never be found, so Robbie’s moved his family into Billy’s old house.  Ostensibly to take care of his young adult niece Maeve, Billy’s daughter, but more often than not it seems like she’s the one taking care of him and his two kids.  Maeve is played by Emilia Jones, and if you don’t know her name yet, you should.  She played Kinsey Locke in Locke & Key (the ending of that series wasn’t her fault, I’m sure, but she was great), she starred in the Oscar-winning CODA, and she’s just delivered an incredible performance here in Task.  While the main focus of the series remains on Robbie and Tom, Maeve quietly, but not too quietly, is the heart and soul of a show that has heart and soul to spare.  I have a feeling there will be Emmy talk over this show and while Ruffalo and Pelphrey especially deserve the buzz, I don’t want Jones to be left out.  She delivers a powerhouse performance in a linchpin role to the show.  She ties the entire narrative together and goes toe to toe with these seasoned actors and never once looks out of place.

The Dark Hearts are a particularly vicious group, keeping themselves on top of the suburban and rural areas outside of Philadelphia.  Yes, just like Mare of Easttown, Task brings you to the area near my fair city and with it, those accents.  Now, I don’t hear those DelCo accents too often since I rarely leave the concrete comforts of the city, but the ones in the show were pretty authentic when they showed up.  Sure, there are plenty of slip-ups and times when they’re just completely gone, but for the most part it’s convincing enough.  Accent work is fascinating to me; often it seems the best actors at doing these very specific American accents are English, Irish, or Australian, as is a large chunk of this cast.  In some cases, a DelCo accent will become full on Irish, but it’s forgivable enough and if they had never attempted such a specific local accent, I wouldn’t have given any thought to accents at all.  Still, I appreciate the effort at authenticity.  There’s a locally comical scene right at the beginning of the show when Tom is talking to his daughter and mentions scrapple, Acme, and water ice in basically one breath.  I’m surprised they didn’t find a way to work in cheesesteaks, hoagies, and free Dunkin after an Eagles win.  We are definitely in the Philly area, even if we aren’t in a Wawa.  But I digress.  The Dark Hearts self-police, so to speak, by killing problem members.  It’s an extreme solution, but local chapter leader Jayson Wilkes, played by Sam Keeley (The Siege of Jadotville), isn’t too worried about his position.  Not until Robbie, Cliff, and Peaches (best nickname) stumble upon a trap house with way too much product and something else that wasn’t supposed to be there and they take it all.  And leave some bodies behind in the process.  What follows is a race against time—Robbie put a ticking clock on his whole family, his crew, and even Jayson.  And through all this, Tom has to put an end to it, with the assistance of a team cobbled together from the people their departments were happy to give up.  Talk about an uphill battle.

As the walls start to close in on Robbie brick by brick, the stakes ramp up; people start dying and more and more the show feels like it’s barreling to a Shakespearean tragedy.  Of course I won’t spoil any details for you, but as I’ve said before, sticking the landing is as important or even more important than the rest of the show.  A bad ending can color your view of the entire journey you took to get there, right, Game of Thrones?  Luckily, Task has one of the most emotionally satisfying payoffs of a series in recent memory.  There are Episode 1 details I haven’t even mentioned so far because, again, you deserve to be as engrossed in this show as I was.  You deserve to feel every twist and turn and the weight of every decision and the catharsis of a well earned and well written ending.  But what I do want to talk about, however, are some of the things that elevate this from basic cop show into top tier crime drama and what I think is the spiritual successor to the first season of True Detective, which might be the best single season of television I’ve ever seen.  Task doesn’t quite reach that, but it hits heights I never expected.  It starts tense and builds more as it goes on, coming to a frenzied conclusion that left me on the edge of my seat for entire episodes.  It is, and I hate to say this again, masterfully crafted.  The pacing, which can seem a little baffling at first, ends up being perfect by the end.  There’s nothing here that doesn’t work.

One of the most interesting things about this show is that despite the relatively bleak subject matter, it approaches so many situations with warmth and compassion.  The Philadelphia area doesn’t get a lot of big shows set here and when we do, it’s often, well, not exactly a hoot.  The aforementioned Mare of Easttown, the really good Long Bright River (which I need to rewatch and then share with you), and even, in some ways, It’s Always Sunny are all kind of bleak shows with the rare flash of hope shining through.  Task, however, approaches everything with a measured hand.  The characters are thoughtful, deliberate, sometimes to the point of inaction, but they seem to really consider things in a real way as they are presented with different challenges.  And it makes the moments that they act on impulse or let their emotions get the better all the more impactful and genuine.  The characters have such depth to them and even the smallest of minor characters is written with complexity and care to feel like a real person.  No one is just a stock character.  There’s the strong one, there’s the dumb one, there’s the smart one, etc.  Not in Task.  They’ve got their moments, their character arcs, their troubles as well.  This is a deeply character driven show, despite having a full and rewarding plot, and those characters are what makes this show so special.  A good crime plot can easily turn into just another cop show.  But Tom’s manner, due to the tragedy that occurred in his family, is so different from what you’d expect.  He’s a tad bit downtrodden, he’s out of shape, he drinks himself to sleep and shocks himself awake with ice water every morning, but it has him considering things carefully and intelligently (for the most part).  And a good antagonist makes your show even better.  And this show has a great antagonist in Jayson and the Dark Hearts. 

Not Robbie.  No, I can’t quite call him that.  He’s not a villain, no, despite the fact he would do some villainous things.  What I thought was going to be a cat-and-mouse game between Tom and Robbie turned out to be a story of dual and dueling protagonists.  Thanks in part to the strength of Pelphrey’s immense performance, almost immediately you start to root for Robbie.  And you don’t want to see the two of them pitted against each other, even though their paths are destined to cross and blood is destined to stain the soil on which they stand, but you can’t help but want them both to win.  It sets you up for the best worst feeling of incredible tension as the show crescendoes to the end.  It sucks to know going into a confrontation between two characters you have come to love that the only narratively satisfying ending isn’t the two of them becoming best friends and opening a B&B together where they solve mysteries in their small town in between perfecting the ideal breakfast buffet.  I cannot really overstate Pelphrey’s performance here, I really don’t think I can even do it justice.  And Emilia Jones; her performance as Maeve, a 20 year old adult suddenly orphaned and thrust into the role of adoptive mother to her niece and nephew while Robbie lives in what is her house is unbelievable.  Maeve delivers a lot of the emotional punch in this show, which is saying something because so many of the characters are vying for the heartstrings as well.

Family is a big part of the show, including adoption.  Tom and his wife were foster parents who adopted two children and now his family has been torn apart, leaving them grasping desperately at the tattered fabric that once kept them together.  Maeve, on the other hand, didn’t have a choice in becoming an adoptive parent, and she doesn’t really have the tools to deal with that.  She, like Tom, is grieving, and unlike like Tom, has decades less life experience to help deal with it.  But she’s stuck with it and struggles with her duty, another big theme in the show.  Faith and duty play important roles in Task, with Tom being a former priest who then went into the FBI, Maeve’s duty to the family she didn’t want, and Robbie’s duty to Maeve and his own kids.  Task wants you to sit and think about our duty to ourselves and to each other.  And the writing here really pushes that.  Faith is important, but not faith in a system or a god or a religion or badge.  It’s faith in something else, something even more amorphous and disappointing than religion—faith in yourself and the people around you.  And let’s not forget the big F, the hardest F word to say, forgiveness. 

So many of these characters are grieving at the start of the show.  Tom and his family are in mourning, Robbie misses his brother, Maeve misses her father.  And there’s no coming back for them; the people they miss are graveyard dead and there is no resolution to that.  The show asks us to question where to draw the line of forgiveness and measure the consequences of where you draw it.  Tom’s old job was to forgive.  Robbie was never a man of faith and forgiveness is a much harder pill to swallow for him.  And what’s even harder than forgiving the people who wronged us (if they deserve it, I’m not one of those forgive and forget types myself) is forgiving ourselves.  There is no grief that exists without the regret of what could have been different.  Forgiving yourself for not having done things differently is really, really hard.  Linear time is the cruelest mechanic of our reality.  Task explores this really deeply and very well.  I know I’ve said before that I have a hard time connecting with shows where cops are the protagonists, but I think one of the things that makes Task compelling is that it doesn’t feel like a cop show.  Yeah, he’s a fed, but you know what I mean.  It feels like a fully realized action crime drama that just happens to have the FBI and drug dealing biker gangs in it.

With Task, HBO is officially on a roll.  The strength of this show makes it the best crime TV HBO has done since True Detective season one (season three was pretty good, but two and four…).  The Chair Company is a low or high stakes absurdist suburban conspiracy show that I can’t stop talking about.  Peacemaker had a second season that completely turned me around on the series and made me a believer in the Gunnmosphere.  Creature Commandos, the animated spin-off of Peacemaker, is excellent as well.  Beyond just HBO, so many cable networks and streamers are bringing excellent shows out with serious star power and I’m all for it; bring on the next golden age of television.  And this show is a worthy installment in that next golden age.  Task is a deeply rewarding, richly told narrative with some of the best character work you’re likely to see and that makes it a must watch.  The entire series (or perhaps first season, should it continue anthology-style like True Detective) is available to stream on HBO Max.

The Chaircase

I just watched the season finale of The Chair Company and I think I’m more confused by what I’ve seen than anything else I’ve ever seen.  But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  It all starts out very simple.  Ron Trosper is on the up.  He recently got promoted at work and he’s heading up a huge project, the design and construction of a new luxury shopping mall.  And after giving a rousing speech at one of those corporate hype up meetings office workers are often subjected to, he goes to sit back down in his chair.  And it breaks.  He falls to the floor, a little embarrassed, but very much none the worse for wear.  He even makes a little self-deprecating joke as he gets up and they move on.

It’s an embarrassing little moment of course, one I’m sure many of us have had.  I, for one, remember once getting off the bus on the way to a final exam in undergrad and wiping out as soon as I put my foot on the icy curb.  I got up, I made a little joke, and I limped to my exam.  That was the end of it.  Well, I did limp for a few days after that and I had come a day early for the exam, misreading the schedule, but overall, it was just a blip.  For any other person, it’s a bad day at work at the most.  These things happen, but life goes on.

Not for Ron Trosper, though.  For Ron, his chair breaking is the start of a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a chair company that does not exist.

Ron is played by creator and writer of the show Tim Robinson (Friendship, I Think You Should Leave), and while I don’t think I’ve always gelled with his comedic styling, I can’t imagine this role working with anyone else.  There is a level of commitment that it takes to play a character like Ron so well that can only come from the mind of the person who created him.  That’s my theory, anyway.  Because I don’t think there was a single moment in the series that I could point to where it felt like Tim Robinson was acting.  And that speaks both to the strength of his performance and the strength of the writing.

This is a hard one to talk about because I feel like trying to relay the story to you much further would not only rob you of experiencing it yourself, but also, it would feel a bit like I’m lying to you by pretending I understood everything I just witnessed over the 8 episode season of The Chair Company.  This was by far the wildest, weirdest, strangest, and most confounding show that I can remember watching.  This is the kind of thing that maybe I really appreciate because of the amount of media I consume, it gets harder and harder for things to stand out.  So when something does, I really become engrossed in it.  Even if I don’t strictly like it right away, I tend to stick with it because I enjoy being immersed in the fringes of creativity when we’re often in a sea of same feeling shows and movies.  Much like Pluribus, The Chair Company is unpredictable from scene to scene and I love it for that.  Every time I think I know where something is going, it takes me in a completely different direction.  And not just opposite to what I thought would happen, no, some wildly unforeseen option that keeps me completely on my toes.   

Nothing about this show is pretty.  Everything is unpleasant.  The people are unpleasant, the way they communicate is unpleasant, the abnormal amount of screaming is unpleasant—you get the idea.  Even the drab Ohio suburb that could exist in any place across the United States feels like it drains the color out of your life when you see it (Ohio is really having a moment; Columbus and its surrounding cities here and Toledo in The Paper).  I scarcely believe what I’m about to say about what is ostensibly a comedy, but it’s gritty.  People get into fights and it’s ungainly and that makes sense.  Why would Ron, who works in real estate development and has never shown any proclivity towards any sort of martial art, be an accomplished fighter?  His punches are floppy, his form is unbalanced, and he spits and drools in feral rage.  And when things start to get out of hand, no one is averse to just yelling loudly and nonsensically until the altercation simply stops.  It feels so uncomfortably realistic, but I also have to imagine that’s the point.

Of course, the people you meet along the way through this chair conspiracy rabbit hole are just as important as the plot itself because it’s the characters that sell this simultaneously mundane and fantastical premise.  Ron’s wife Barb, played by Lake Bell (Childrens Hospital, Bless This Mess), has quit her job to spearhead a new startup, which is a time-intensive project, so she has her nose to the grindstone as Ron spirals.  Ron’s son Seth, played by relative newcomer Will Price, is struggling with his own teenage dilemmas and, frankly, it’s not a child’s job to keep tabs on their parents anyway.  So a lot of this goes unnoticed except by the always excellent Sophia Lillis (Dungeons & Dragons, It), who plays Ron’s older daughter Natalie.  In the midst of planning her wedding to her girlfriend Tara, Natalie is pretty much the only one who starts to see that Ron is unraveling as he gets deeper into the conspiracy about the chair company.  Her role smaller than I expected for an actress of her caliber, but I get the feeling we’re going get more of her as the show continues.  Along the way, he meets Mike, played by journeyman Joseph Tudisco (he was definitely in one episode of a network show you might have seen), an unstable strongman who acts as a private eye and becomes Ron’s only confidant and ally in his hunt.  And then there’s Jeff Levjman, played by the always reliable Lou Diamond Phillips, who seems to pop up in shows like this more often now, later in his career (some memorable appearances for me include Psych, Search Party, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine).  Jeff is Ron’s obscenely wealthy, self-obsessed boss and CEO.  His role in the show grows as the season goes on and I’m so, so excited to see how it changes.

Like I said, this show is a little hard to explain.  Even Lake Bell struggled to explain the series to her own mother, sort of settling on a version of “it’s about a guy who sits on a chair that breaks and he tries to find out why it broke”.  And I think this is where much of the brilliance of the show lies.  Tim Robinson exhibits this mastery of the mundane being taken to the absolute breaking point of absurdity.  On the surface, it feels a lot like cringe comedy, especially as you see him at a family dinner at a restaurant arguing with the waitress about the continued existence of malls and how almost anything can be a mall, including that restaurant.  But what starts feeling like a dated cringe bit turns into a wildly escalating scenario that snowballs out of control almost every time.  Robinson subjects the audience to high levels of absurdity in almost every corner of the show—little things like the custodian at his office being highly protective of his wheelbarrow or a clerk at a shirt store pulling out all the stops to get people to sign up for their membership program.  I can’t wholeheartedly tell you that all this works because I’m not entirely sure it does, but it grabbed me in a way that really surprised me.

The conspiracy starts out as a pretty normal kind of thing in the facade-focused world in which we live.  He wants to reach out to the company that makes the chairs, Tecca, and lodge a formal complaint and get an apology over what happened to him.  But he gets the customer service runaround, even more so than normal, when he reaches out to Tecca, finding them to be incredibly circuitous and secretive.  I’ve had some bad customer service experiences in my time, including four hours on the phone over a TV installation that never happened, so it’s really relatable.  At first.  Before the spiral.  Oh, but the spiral.  The spiral is this show.  As he peers through the looking glass into the world of Tecca, we as the audience get to question so many things.  Has Ron stumbled upon a vast conspiracy?  Is something going on with the chair company?  Is he in danger?  Is his family in danger?  Or has he just gone down the Charlie Day cork board route and is blowing everything out of proportion?  Are the people staring at him menacingly really staring at him menacingly?  Or are they just having a bad day?  Are those people talking about Ron and tracking his every move?  Or are they just having a quiet chat?  Not only does the show string you along this journey of Ron’s as he goes through layer after artichoke layer through shell companies and whispers and lies, but it also puts you in Ron’s mindset.  The show itself is part of the conspiracy, I’ve stopped trusting what I see.  Are the reveals really reveals?  Are they happening?  Is Ron completely misreading everything?  Are we watching the show through the lens of an unreliable narrator?  I just don’t know.  And the show doesn’t want you to know.  And that’s what I find so captivating about The Chair Company.

Still, as much as I liked the first season of this show, it’s hard to recommend.  I would wager that if you’re a fan of Tim Robinson, you’ll like it a lot.  I haven’t seen that much of his work other than a few sketches here and there, and while it’s been a little hit or miss for me (as sketch comedy tends to be), this feels like a very Tim Robinson experience.  If you’re into that, you’re probably going to love it.  But as someone fairly lukewarm to Robinson, I found myself reaching for the remote every time I got the little notification on my phone that a new episode was available and watching it immediately.  So it very well could have wider appeal than just Tim Robinson fans.  I think the hardest part of this show is how you decide to engage with it.  As you know, I’m a huge whodunnit fan and I’m from the era of Lost conspiracy theories and the subsequent bevy of JJ Abrams-like mystery box shows that followed, so I’m always looking for a mystery to solve.   But I think the best way to experience this show is far more hands-off.  Let Ron do the detective work for you and just sit back and enjoy the spectacle of a relatively normal man thrust into what could be the highest stakes or lowest stakes thing in his life. 

It’s weird and unpleasant and strange and oddly wonderful.  There are some nice moments throughout the series, especially towards the end of the first season, where you get to see glimpses of Ron as a good father and good husband.  And while they seem a bit abrupt compared to the other moments of the show, they manage to not feel unearned; rather they seem a bit like a parting in the storm clouds of Ron’s fervor and they can be quite touching if you let your guard down for the rare genuine moments in the show.  Which can be hard to do because the show really puts you on edge.  As I said, it’s billed as a comedy, but it’s also called a thriller.  The blend of comedy and horror mechanics, often leveraging the score to put real tension and a sense of dread in some scenes.  It’s unsettling at times.  Because the nature of the show is so amorphous, it leaves you feeling that truly terrible things are on the table because you just don’t know where it’s going to go.  Again, the throughline here is unpleasantness and The Chair Company is as unpleasant as it is engaging and entrancing.  The entire first season is out on HBO Max now and it’s already been renewed for a second season, thank goodness.

The Beetle Has Landed

Growing up is hard, growing up in an immigrant family is harder.  You keep your head down, get through school, go to college, come home with six figures of debt and another three years of law school and a doubling of your debt on the docket.  And in the meantime, you work at a resort because your father had a heart attack and can’t work and your rent is being tripled because your neighborhood is being gentrified.  And then you get fired because you stuck up for a billionaire heiress who was being accosted by her billionaire aunt and the billionaire heiress tells you to come by the office the next day and then she gives you a beetle shaped alien artifact that bonds with you on a molecular level and the billionaire aunt wants to rip it out of you to turn it into a militarized exoskeleton.  Fairly universal experience, I know.  I certainly remember when I bonded with my alien exoskeleton.  But even something as mundane as that can be a superhero origin story.

Now, it might be a bit of an odd one to talk about Blue Beetle in 2025, considering it’s dead franchise after the fall of the Snyderverse and the rise of the Gunnmosphere.  But I still think there’s something worth talking about here and a movie worth watching.  Because while the story itself may no longer be canon to DC’s cinematic universe and it’s a fairly derivative story, it’s told with the heart and enough relevance that make this a worthy reference point for the character moving forward.

Let’s start with the good.  The eventual Blue Beetle is Jaime Reyes (that’s pronounced “hi me”, which will come up), played by Xolo Maridueña of Cobra Kai fame, and he’s surrounded by his family, most notably his sister Milagro, played by Belissa Escobedo (Happy’s Place, Hocus Pocus 2) and his crazy, conspiracy theorist uncle Rudy, played by George Lopez (George Lopez).  Maridueña is just so likable; he’s optimistic, naive, he’s Miguel Diaz, Johnny Lawrence’s star student.  You can’t not like him, so it doesn’t really matter that he’s wrapped up in all that Tom Holland Spider-Man energy.  Rudy provides a lot of the comedy, even though it does at times feel like George Lopez is doing a character written for Jack Black, he manages the right level of kook and quirk to make Rudy a good addition to this movie.  His conspiracy theories are off the wall and he does pipe in with lore dumps now and then, but it’s largely a pleasant experience.  And his sister Milagro brings the snark and the social commentary (which can be a little heavy handed, especially in the first act, but it’s still effective enough at getting its point across).  The rest of Jaime’s family is also great, but since they often act as a family unit, until the end of the movie they don’t really stand out from each other (but when they do, it’s pretty worth it).  They feel like a fairly typical family too, stepping on each other’s sentences and generally being just annoying enough for you to believe that they’re really related, but not so much that you can’t stand them.  It’s a tightrope walk, but Blue Beetle pulls it off pretty well, but just like real family members, sometimes you just want them to take a breath.  Just for a moment.  Maybe that’s just me? 

They get to be real people too; perhaps not fully realized because it’s too many characters to focus on in one movie, but they feel real and “lived-in” when you see them interact with each other.  The Reyes are a convincing family unit that shows off their generosity, even thought they’re in the middle of losing their home in the Edge Keys of the fictional Palmera City, Texas.  And they face real issues, like hesitating to call the police because they don’t know what could happen when they show up.  The characters are what drive this movie; if you don’t like them, then the flaws of this movie will easily overwhelm the things they did right.  But, I think a lot of people will see themselves in the Reyes family and it really was very nice to see this kind of representation in a film of this magnitude.  It didn’t just have a lot of Latin stars; the director, Angel Manuel Soto, is Puerto Rican and the writer, Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer is from Mexico.  That’s that level of vertical integration that makes a movie feel authentic and keeps it from feeling like it’s pandering to an audience.  You know, like the difference between BlacKkKlansman and Green Book.

It’s also refreshing to see a superhero who isn’t just another billionaire white dude.  Look, I love Batman and Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark made me care about Iron Man for the first time in my life, but there’s more to being a hero than not having any of the normal struggles that people whose bank accounts have fewer than nine zeroes go through.  It’s said that when Stan Lee was creating Spider-Man and Iron Man, he wanted to make the most relatable hero in our boy Pete and the least relatable hero in Stark, and, well, Iron Man’s still around so it’s proven to be a successful archetype.  Jaime Reyes is very much more like Peter Parker and I think that will resonate with a lot of people even if they’re not in that early-20s age range.  And, well, he’s just so damn likable, I mentioned that already.    

Maridueña is star material and it’s kind of a shame that he has the indignity of being in a movie that was the worst box office premiere in the DCEU for a decade before it released in 2023.  The movie was hit hard by superhero fatigue; people were already tired of the overstuffed genre and by the time the meant-for-streaming Blue Beetle came to theaters, no one really cared.  The reviews were mostly positive, garnering a 78% RT score.  It’s not a number that’s going to light the world on fire and I’ve mentioned the curse of the 70% range on Rotten Tomatoes before, but it also managed a 90% audience score.  And while I generally side more with critics, I think that speaks to the crowd-pleasing nature of the film.  So while the movie seriously underperformed, none of that was down to Maridueña’s performance.  He’s so good on screen; Jaime is charismatic, genuine, humble, everything you want in a protagonist and in a superhero.  The kind of traits a symbiotic alien exoskeleton would look for when choosing a host—I just wish the movie touched on why it chose him instead of just that it chose him.  The kid has qualities, that’s easy enough to see.  But the movie strangely has no curiosity about why Jaime gets to bond with the Blue Beetle scarab over anyone else the scarab didn’t choose including the original Blue Beetle hero.  It’s an odd choice to not even address it, to have no one even ask the question why.  So while Maridueña puts in an admirable performance, the character doesn’t stand out enough to make him truly memorable.  I have to imagine there’s a scene somewhere on the cutting room floor that for some reason just didn’t make it into the movie that would explain this a little.  I saw Blue Beetle when it first hit streamers a year or so ago, but even that recently I couldn’t remember many salient details of the film.  I had the tangible memory of having a fun time watching it, but no lines or scenes really embedded themselves into my brain the way, say, Captain America casually saying “On your left” to Sam Wilson in Winter Soldier or Michael Peña confirming with Paul Rudd that they’re the good guys in Ant-Man has.  And of course nothing here can touch the “I am Iron Man” moment, which took years of building to get to, so it’s not like I expected that; but not one of the fights comes close to Cap v. Batroc.  It’s actually a shame to have as physically gifted an actor as Maridueña and not let him show off some of those martial arts skills that makes the action in Cobra Kai so convincing.  It doesn’t help that CGI is heavily relied on and more than a bit suspect in places, making it sometimes look like a big budget movie done cheaply, which perhaps betrays its made-for-streaming origins.

And now we really get to the not so good of Blue Beetle.  Unfortunately, even more than most origin story films, there’s very, very little here that’s original.  The movie skates by on the strength of the characters because some much of this film is cribbed from other movies, mostly MCU films.  And I’m not just talking about story beats either, it’s full gags.  When the scarab first bonds with Jaime, he flies up into the atmosphere and then comes back down through the roof, just like in Iron Man.  The scarab itself bonds to Jaime very similarly to the Venom symbiote (except it also burns off all his clothes and shoes, making it the least practical suiting up I’ve ever seen; hard to pop out, do some life-saving, and then come back to work or whatever completely stark naked, not to mention the clothes budget skyrocketing).  Then it wants to kill and talks to Jaime the way the Stark suit talks to Peter in Spider-Man: Homeward Bound (whichever the first one was) and it even has the ability to take total control of Jaime’s body like in Upgrade.  Except this time it’s pop star Becky G (Power Rangers) as Khaji-da, the scarab, instead of Jennifer Connolly as Suit Lady Karen.  The evil CEO wants to build a more evil version of the good thing, just like in Iron Man and Ant-Man.  Almost scene to scene, you’ll recognize things you’ve seen in other superhero films.  And there’s such an insistence on family togetherness and family is mentioned so many times that I expected Dominic Toretto to pop up just for a cameo.  Like I said before, the fights aren’t all that memorable either; the scarab can create anything Jaime can imagine to fight with, like Green Lantern’s power ring. 

But a lot of that turns out to be blaster arms and a Buster Sword; this isn’t to say that the writer isn’t imaginative, but rather it feels like the studio isn’t.  I don’t mind that he conjured up a Buster Sword, I’d probably want one too because I spent all video game time as a kid trying to beat Sephiroth before homework time, but there’s nothing establishes Jaime as these interests.  In fact, as endearing as he is, there isn’t a lot of character development.  Jenny Kord, the good billionaire, played by Brazilian actress Bruna Marquezine, immediately trusts Jaime after one failed act of chivalry, entrusting him to secret away the scarab out of nowhere.  Her aunt, Victoria Kord, played by Oscar winner and five time nominee Susan Sarandon (Thelma and Louise, Dead Man Walking), is so cartoonishly evil it’s hardly believable and on top of that, she really goes out of her way to be slightly racist a lot.  I mean, we probably all know people like that, but it just feels like too much.  Yes, there are moments of unintended hilarity as an actress of her caliber says some of the lines she has to say, but that’s not enough to keep me from feeling like Victoria needs to be taken back to the drawing board.  She already wants to create an army of unstoppable killing machine super soldiers, but she’s also a racist?  And so is her receptionist?  What was that interview process like?  She’s so over the top, she’s one of the weakest parts of this film.  The pacing is also a bit of an issue; at 2 hours and 7 minutes, it’s hardly a short movie, but because of the pacing, just a few too many things felt rushed, like the scarab handoff or the burgeoning romance between Jaime and Jenny, while many things that needed to be developed weren’t.

So what we end up with is a seriously flawed movie that has enough redeeming qualities to be both good enough fun to watch and serve as a strong character foundation for the Blue Beetle going forward, should James Gunn and DC decide the revisit the character—which I believe they should.  With Gunn’s focus on heartfelt, joyful superheroing, Jaime Reyes and Xolo Maridueña deserve another shot.  His whole family does, really.  There are real characters here, real love being shown, real stories being told.  They just need more time to tell them and more time to develop these characters who are instantly endearing, but largely unexplored.  And there’s value here, both artistic and social; in 2025, the sight of a terrified Latin family being terrorized at gunpoint by masked paramilitary operatives with questionable legal authority and depraved morality isn’t just fiction anymore, it’s a reality all over the country.  Blue Beetle intentionally tells the story of immigrants in America, documented and undocumented, and their struggle, in a real way despite the absolutely fantastical setting of having an alien beetle fuse itself to your spine.  This kind of representation is getting harder to find and we need art that reflects society.  And that includes big budget family films like Blue Beetle.  James Gunn, Jake Schreier, and Matt Shakman proved with Superman, Thunderbolts, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps that just two years after superhero fatigue was at its peak, it’s not superheroes we were tired of.  No, certainly not; we need heroes now more than ever, on-screen and off.  We were tired of paint by numbers universe builders that didn’t differentiate themselves from what came before and only served to set up what comes next.  Blue Beetle was a start for DC, and now James Gunn has taken the ball and run with it in earnest.  But until we get to see Gunn’s take on the cerulean superhero, we can still go back and enjoy this flawed and fun film, streaming on Netflix and HBO Max.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate!  If you do like I do and use a movie to push through that turkey-borne post-meal malaise, Blue Beetle isn’t a bad choice for families with older kids, but I would once again remind you that The Paper Tigers, which I covered last week, is kind of a perfect family film.  And because I believe in the rule of threes and linking to you to previous blog posts, I will once again offer Superman for your viewing pleasure.  And remember, if you are celebrating this holiday, please do it safely.  And save me a piece of pie.

The Karate Midlife Crisis

We’ve had cozy mysteries, that’s a tried and true genre.  We’ve even had cozy horror now, in a way, with Little Evil.  And now I’d like to share with you a 2020 indie film on Netflix that may well be a truly cozy martial arts movie.  So let’s get into writer-director Quoc Bao Tran’s feature film debut, The Paper Tigers.

We open on an older man stumbling into an alley as a mysterious assailant fights him.  Poor old guy doesn’t stand a chance; he never makes it out of that alleyway.  It’s at this point we flashback to when that old guy was younger.  He was Master Cheung, a Sifu (also called Shifu), a teacher of Chinese gung fu (also known as kung fu, depending on what Romanization of the word you use), and he has only ever taken on three students.  Jim, Hing, and the best student, Danny, aka Danny Eight Hands because he was so good, it seemed like he had eight hands.  Together they called themselves the Three Tigers and they fought to defend their clan’s honor against other schools.  Honor was a big part of their training, but being kids growing into teenagers who have never lost a fight, it’s hard not to let arrogance creep in.  Over the years, though, a rift has driven them apart and the realities of middle age have set in.

Danny, played by Alain Uy (Helstrom), is a divorced dad, running late to pick up his kid.  And when he does have him, he’s so busy that he has to cancel their fun day together to go get work done.  On the way home, though, he’s jumped in front of his house—not to worry, it’s more of a vibe check than anything else.  It’s his old friend Hing, played by Ron Yuan (Mulan, The Accountant), in town because of their Sifu’s death.  He’s the one who has to break the news to Danny.  At the funeral, still without Jim, they run into Danny’s old nemesis Carter, played by Matthew Page (Enter the Dojo, Odd Thomas), who is in charge of a different school now.  There’s a lot of banter here between the Tigers and Carter, some of it quite juvenile, with a lot of cultural appropriation on the part of Carter.  It’s played for laughs and it mostly works, but there’s a deeper story behind that which we’ll touch on later.  But it’s Carter who drops the penny—the police believe that Sifu Cheung died of a heart attack, but Carter doesn’t buy it.  He believes, as the audience knows, that the Sifu was murdered.  This sets the three distant disciples on a path to reunite and find Sifu Cheung’s murderer.

Danny is skeptical, but Hing starts to go full Poirot, trying to connect the dots.  But 25 years changes a lot of things.  Hing walks with a limp now, permanently in knee brace, after getting injured on the job.  Danny’s trying to prove he can do 50/50 custody and he has become a total pacifist now; after years of proving himself in fight after fight, he hasn’t thrown a punch or made a fist in two and a half decades.  He tells his son never to fight, not even when being bullied.  The better man walks away, he tells him.  The better man finds a solution that isn’t fighting.  Danny Eight Hands now works in insurance and drives a minivan.  It’s not even one of the fancy new ones with all the gadgets I secretly enjoy getting as an Uber (I admit, I’m still a child, and remotely operated sliding doors makes me feel like I’m on the Enterprise) or even a Honda Odyssey, it’s an aging Toyota Sienna.  The only one of them who has kept up with martial arts in any form is Jim, played by Mykel Shannon Jenkins (The Gods, Undisputed 3), who now has integrated other disciplines, such as Brazilian jujitsu, into his life.  Gung fu is no longer a big part of it.

Three men, separated by 25 years and a rift that split them apart seemingly irrevocably, are brought back together to find justice for the man who taught them everything they knew.  When they were old enough, Sifu Cheung had them take an oath to honor their Sifu, to be loyal to their brothers, and to defend the weak.  Because that was always the point of any sort of violence to Sifu Cheung.  Gung fu without honor is just fighting, he taught them; a lesson they didn’t always take to heart as much as they should have.  But now as they find themselves reunited because of that man’s death, the idea of honor and defending the weak comes to the forefront of their minds.

The Paper Tigers has a lot going for it.  I mentioned that some of the banter could be juvenile at times, especially between Carter and Hing, with Carter body shaming Hing and Hing making allusions to the side effects of the steroids he is certain Carter took.  But where the comedy in this movie really works is the physicality.  I have rarely seen a film that marries excellent fight choreography with great physical comedy in the way that The Paper Tigers does.  Seeing these middle aged men try to go toe to toe with younger gung fu practitioners is full of funny moments injected into the very convincing fight scenes.  It adds a layer of levity to the situation that is crucial to making this a cozy film.  While it deals with serious subjects, the film always keeps just enough humor for things not to get too heavy.  Well, most of the time.  There were definitely moments that left me feeling very emotional, especially as the film draws to a close and they have to face the totality of their lives.  They reminisce and trade regrets, each of them feeling still the weight of decisions they made when they were teenagers and now with the loss of Sifu Cheung, some doors are simply closed to them for reconciliation.  Memory lane is a bittersweet road to drive down when you’re there because of someone who is no longer around.  You may not have heard of many of these actors (I know I haven’t, despite the fact that I have seen some of them in other projects, including the awful live action Mulan), but they are able to convey so much emotion through just their facial expressions alone that you’d expect them all to be stars.  Alain Uy especially does a great job as Danny, the clear star character of the film and Sifu Cheung’s senior student.

It’s hard sometimes to discuss films like this that are supposed to exist in the real world (there are some fantastical elements here, though, with ancient Chinese medicine and mythical moves; fairly standard martial arts movie tropes, but pulled off lovingly and with care) and yet advocate violence at times.  A lot of the fighting in The Paper Tigers happens in a world of rules; when you fight, you fight with honor, and at the end of the fight, you walk away respecting the other party.  Kind of like the secret assassin underworld of John Wick, people don’t break the rules without consequence.  And the movie really stresses the need for honor when fighting and the need to stick up for those who are unable to defend themselves.  Might isn’t right without a guiding hand; otherwise it’s just bullying.  And The Paper Tigers is very clear about that.  We live in a world where the defenseless are more than bullied, with extreme violence being used against them, and there aren’t enough people who are able to stand up to protect them.  These bullies are in positions of power and acting without consequence.  So to see a film like this, a film where three normal guys who have problems and have walked away from a life of discipline and honor find a way to stand back up and do the right thing really got me.  The film has a lot to say about bullying, toxic masculinity, racism, and cultural appropriation and it does it all quite well.  When Danny’s son confronts him about gung fu after defending a friend who was being bullied at school for who he is, Danny is forced to reconcile a life of pacifism with the life he used to lead, where his training was meant to defend the defenseless.  He struggles with what the right thing to do is, both as a father and as a disciple of the slain master.  I know I’m on record as being pretty down on fathers and, frankly, the only way Danny is getting a Father of the Year mug is if he buys one himself from Spencer’s Gifts, but seeing him try to be a better father to his son was truly touching.

As fun as this movie is, there’s proper depth to it, thanks to the excellent characters.  While Danny is the main protagonist, Hing and Jim both have emotional weight and character journeys to go through as well.  It’s them, their experiences, their genuine affection for each other and their Sifu, though strained at the time, that makes this movie more than just a fun action-comedy romp.  It’s not trying to be Rush Hour, which is a fun movie in its own right, because it chooses to do more by telling personal stories that are very real.  Regret is real.  We live with the weight of our choices and once done, our actions can’t be reversed.  We can do our best to make up for them, to atone, but there’s nothing that can actually undo the things you’ve done.  Time may be a flat circle after all, but as we experience it, time only flows one way.  Everything done is done forever.  And these characters have to come to terms with their pasts if they’re going to have a future and make recompense for their choices.  So it’s one part action-comedy, one part character drama and it comes together in a film that is likely to make you laugh and cry in equal, satisfying measure.    

Sometimes the story of a movie’s production is almost as interesting as the movie itself.  When trying to secure funding for the film, Quoc Bao Tran was told by studios that they wanted Bruce Willis to star and a role to be written for Nicolas Cage.  As much as it might have been humorous to watch his nouveau shamanic acting in a film like this, it would have been a completely different movie and lost a lot of authenticity that makes it so special.  Carter insists on being called Sifu now, a request that none of the Tigers will comply with, and he speaks in ancient Chinese proverbs when the Tigers have wait for him to repeat what he said in English.  Carter’s cultural appropriation feels like a response to the pressures from Hollywood studios to whitewash a movie written and directed by an Asian-American who drew upon his experiences as a child growing up loving martial arts.  Tran insisted on a minority cast, with all three leads being Asian or Black.  And that goes so far to make this film not a corny, campy, inauthentic martial arts film where big Hollywood names dominate, but rather a love letter to martial arts films like The Karate Kid (with a very fun cameo from an actor from the film series and Cobra Kai) and Enter the Dragon that addresses real life problems.  Tran turned to Kickstarter and eventually private investors to deliver the film as he wanted it to be.  And not only is that admirable, he pulled it off with great success.

Even though it’s just 1 hour and 48 minutes, The Paper Tigers isn’t exactly breezy, because it does take its time to sit with the characters and slow the action down, but without the scenes where these three men reminisce and try to figure out what it means to be good men the movie just wouldn’t have worked.  One of the most successful things about this PG-13 film is that it’s the kind of film that has a moral and is written in a way to accessible to people of all ages.  It’s not often I get to watch a movie that is truly a family film.  I cover kids’ media quite a bit and I love when they are able to get adults in on the fun as well, but this feels like a movie written for adults, but with kids in mind.  You could gather the family around the television this coming Thanksgiving and watch this one with people of all ages and it will entertain them and more.  The Paper Tigers is exactly the kind of film that I love to feature on this blog because it needs and deserves a bigger audience.  It’s a textbook, Attack the Block level of hidden gem that I absolutely adore bringing to you.  It’s not just a fun film that’s cozy; it has weight, it has meaning, and it’s the kind of movie that makes your life enriched for having watched it.  That’s what art is supposed to do; enrich your lives, not just studio executives.  With a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% audience score, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by opening up Netflix and joining the audience.  I love this film and I think you will too.