The Critical Corner

You would think that a game that shares the license of what's currently the hottest thing in pop culture right now would be a sure fire win, but that's not the reality "Marvel's Avengers" enjoyed when it released back in 2020. The game by Square Enix and "Tomb Raider" developer Crystal Dynamics was a hodgepodge of a game that mixed the third person bonafides Crystal Dynamics was known for with a solid combat engine and well realized character kits, all to be massively undone by what was clearly an undercooked "live service/loot driven" element that cast a pall on what was a relatively well-made game. Whatever good merit the game could garner with its well realized cast of characters and surprisingly engaging story campaign, could easily be forgotten by the relative broken nature of its live service component. In other words, par for the course for any first time comers to this genre.  If you have ever played a game in the "live service/loo...

    I'm not going to mince words: 2016's "Suicide Squad" is bar none one of the worst movies I have ever seen based on a comic book property. Here was a film with so much potential (an interesting choice of director, a great premise for the comic book genre and a killer cast) completely, utterly wasted due to massive corporate mangling after the negative reception for "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice". To me, it massively damaged the idea of this ecclectic property from DC Comics ever resonating in film after such a high profile, confused disaster.  Enter James Gunn.  Fresh off the heels from his unfortunate ouster from Disney following the unearthing of some old, unsavory tweets, Warner Bros. absolutely struck gold by immediately bringing in James Gunn and giving him carte blance to do anything he wanted with any DC property. Considering Gunn absolutely cemented his reputation with handling a band of misfits with the "Guardians of the Galaxy" m...

In a TV landscape that has been massively filled up with so many shows based on comic book properties with all different kinds of quality, no other show makes me more sad with its current state like "The Flash". The original spin off of the now defunct "Arrow", once the beacon of hope of what a great superhero show on network TV could be, has truly fallen to new lows. Despite a sign of some hope with its sixth season finally reversing a downward trend that hit its nadir with the fourth and fifth season, nothing could have ever prepared us for the pile of awful that awaited us for the majority of Season 7, even as it tried to pick itself up at the end. Obviously, there will be a big desire to point fingers and for heads to roll as to why the recently finished Season 7 turned out the way it did. One can easily point a finger to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which most famously forced the improved sixth season to end prematurely, and make filming new seasons much more...

          The Marvel Cinematic Universe's Disney+ experiment has been interesting to say the least. With their first two forays with "WandaVision" and "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier", we saw the MCU willing to experiment with its format and add extra depth to characters that were at best the side focus to the main coarse. At the same time, the shows were plagued by obvious flaws, like a lot of side stuff that was left frustratingly underserved by the time the show's came to a close, and an inability to bring their respective series to both a satisfying close and a sense that what we just watched would feel entirely essential once we started diving back into the movie realm, particularly after their positioning in importance to the next few phases of the franchise. It was the big question hanging over the third MCU show this year, "Loki". Would it follow the same pattern established by the previous two series?      "Loki" is an interes...

When Marvel announced their initial slate for the MCU's Phase Four, the project I was looking forward to the most from the initial offerings was definitely "Falcon and the Winter Soldier". Even before the pandemic shuffled things around (this was going to come out after "Black Widow" and before "The Eternals" and "WandaVision"), I was looking forward to this simply because both "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and "Captain America: Civil War" are my top two favorite movies of the entire MCU. The later movies of the "Captain America" trilogy stood out to me not just because they were some fine action movies, but married their action to thrilling, thought provoking themes you don't see elsewhere in the MCU. Anchoring those movies obviously was Chris Evans' Steve Rogers who proved to be the heart and soul of this shared universe. With "Avengers: Endgame" essentially retiring the character seem...

  It's crazy to think 2020 was the first full year where the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't release a single piece of content since 2009. With the COVID-19 pandemic closing down theatre chains across the globe, and Marvel's production pipelines being halted mid production, the start of the MCU's Phase 4 didn't go according to the original plan. If things had gone differently, by now we would have already seen movies like "Black Widow" and "The Eternals", and we would have gotten the MCU's first TV show under the Marvel Studios umbrella, "Falcon and the Winter Soldier" with the fourth show in the schedule, "WandaVision" next in the pipeline. As we all know, the order of things ended up being way different. And to Marvel's credit, "WandaVision" works surprisingly well as the opening salvo for their new phase of content. If there is anything you can takeaway immediately from "WandaVision", is that th...