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“Hercules”

“Hercules”

by Sam Eifling

The myth of Hercules is one of those fantastic jellybeans of world literature, a nasty, brutish, savage story full of monsters and gods and heroes, a rival to any of the cracking yarns from the Bible but without any hint of moral nourishment to weigh it down.

In Greek tradition, the king of the gods, Zeus, had all the marital integrity of your average goat, fathering a slew of demigod tots with various human hotties. Hercules, legend tells, showed his first godly pluck when he strangled two asps that Zeus’s wife, Hera, sent to assassinate him in the cradle. After that he was basically the Bo Jackson of his day, stronger, faster, badder than every beast or task thrown at him.

That would’ve made a sweet movie, no doubt, but surprisingly, refreshingly, Brett Ratner’s “Hercules” picks up after the legend has grown and Hercules’ slayings of, for instance, the Nemean lion (with its unpierceable hide) and the Erymanthian boar (a rampaging monster of tanklike stature) have passed from rumor to lore. His reputation, it turns out, is the result of a concerted marketing push on the part of Hercules and his roving posse of mercenaries.

While they travel and fight as a group, they’re invested in propagating and even propping up the impression that their admittedly formidable leader (Dwayne Johnson, looking grunge-band shaggy) is truly the son of Zeus, rocking these missions solo. It’s intimidating, after all, and when you’re in the business of doing dirty work for hire, anything to justify the price is likely to stick.

This warped approach allows “Hercules” to take on a couple of nifty features that keep it from melting into the sort of self-important inadvertent campiness that can torpedo a good time at the movies. (Au contraire: “Hercules” is fully aware of its campiness.) The first is, the dialogue among the mercenaries — Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell, Ingrid Bolso Berdal, Aksel Hennie, Reece Ritchie — deflates most of the schlocky high concept of gods and warriors chasing noble deeds. They’re vulgar, occasionally funny sellswords. This fits because their fearless leader is played by a former pro wrestler perhaps best known for his hyperactive eyebrows. In case the tone of this escapade escapes you, the bombastic brass-heavy score screams Saturday matinee. Pay enough attention and you’ll notice a couple of relatively subtle ribaldries signaling adults not to take this trip to the movies too seriously.

Whether or not he’s truly the son of Zeus, or just a great set of shoulders with an equally great backstory, Hercules and his cronies are on the make when a desperate king (John Hurt) pleads for help fending off a marauding army that may or may not be centaur-based. Our heroes help to whip this poor king’s farmers into fighting shape (and there is better-than-average battlefield warfare here, with, yes, a strong dose of hokum) and then fall into a series of plot twists that don’t make a whole lot of sense but oh, well, by this time what do you expect?

For a movie named for a hero whose weapon of choice is a spiked club, this “Hercules” has enough nuance in its telling that it won’t really matter. Ratner knows this is bargain-concept cinema. Set the bar low enough and it’s amazing how good a below-average flick can seem.

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“The Purge 2: Anarchy”

“The Purge 2: Anarchy”

by Sam Eifling

The surprise 20-to-1 earnings-to-budget ratio of a little dystopian murderfest called “The Purge” last year made its spawn, “The Purge 2: Anarchy,” a foregone conclusion. What wasn’t inevitable was that the sequel would be a stronger movie than the original.

Rather than pinning us inside a single McMansion during America’s newest/worst holiday, the annual 12 hours of sanctioned lawlessness known as the Purge, “Anarchy” takes us through a gnarly overnight tour of anything-goes Los Angeles. It’s still a B-movie at heart — small budget, actors you’ve never heard of, occasionally bucket-footed dialogue — but with enough verve, and with a measure modesty around its own sadism, that it makes for a watchable summer diversion.

Not that it’s an easy road to travel. Here’s a partial tour of IMDB’s plot keywords: “revenge,” “hanged man,” “body in a dumpster,” “sororicide,” “shot in the forehead,” “person on fire,” “kidnapping,” “survival horror”… it goes on like this. Basically, yes, for one night a year America calls off the rule of law and lets everyone kill the living life out of one another with impunity.

To a waitress mother and her teenaged daughter in the projects (Carmen Ejogo and Zoë Soul) this is a night to bar the door, put a pistol on the table and try to keep their heads down. To a bickering young couple (Zach Gilford and Kiele Sanchez) it’s an occasion to put off preparations until perilously close to the beginning of the purge. To a mysterious, well-armed father (Frank Grillo) it’s a chance to visit a man who wronged him. To just about everyone else we meet, it’s an orgiastic bout of hunting people in the streets.

Circumstances conspire to pull these folks together in the open, where they’re likely to be perforated by recreational snipers or bludgeoned by random lunatics or run down by spooky motorcycle creeps. Director/writer James DeMonaco builds this world as a Halloween from hell, in which roving gangs hunt with dogs and flame-throwers and yeeeeesh. While the Purge itself is about as likely to happen as a unicorn cotillion, the behavior of people given the premise makes an unsettling amount of sense. Surely DeMonaco means here to evoke images of open-carry activists swinging AKs around Target parking lots and Chili’s foyers as if the O.K. Corral could break out any moment, anywhere.

In a too-real sense, Americans’ firearms fetish is the real subject of “Anarchy,” which tries, with limited success, to tie violence to consumer culture. In “Anarchy,” the Purge is credited with keeping overall crime and unemployment low, in large part because it thins out the ranks of the poor, who can’t afford protection. The rich are able to quarantine themselves through the chaos, giving them the luxury of fervent belief in the benefits of the Purge. DeMonaco notices, about America, that it’s a fine place to live until you’re caught out-of-doors. Then you’re largely on your own.

Even if it’s not always a convincing take, it’s oddly satisfying — there’s an eat-the-rich thread running through “Anarchy” that feels oddly original for an American movie. It also feels overdue, given how many people would accept the premise, even allegorically, that letting millionaires and billionaires dominate society poses serious threats to the survival of the hoi polloi.

Maybe DeMonaco overreaches, at times clumsily, in raising that point in a mainstream venue. And yet, wow, even for a movie called “Anarchy,” you gotta admire the straightforward gall.

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“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”

“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”

by Sam Eifling

The reaction in the past week to “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” has been equal parts encouraging and depressing. Happily, the movie’s actually pretty good, and audiences, apparently starved for anything that doesn’t salute their intelligence with both middle fingers, turned out in droves. The damn dirty apes blew it up at the box office, raking in more than $100 million worldwide. And much of that was deserved: In its effects, plot, tone and action, “Dawn” is a fine sci-fi flick. The quickest praise to offer might be it’s an epic with meaningful intimate moments, and it convincingly creates a world where the actions of one or two characters will determine the fate of multiple societies. Also, fun apes.

Yet none of these things should be extraordinary! There was a palpable sense in the theater where I saw “Dawn” that the movie had outstripped expectations. It was a Friday night show, one where people arrive early for decent seats and wind up gabbing and dinking around on their phones. Then, through the 130-minute feature, nary a peep. People didn’t leave in a post-traumatic daze, bludgeoned into mute submission by superheroes or Transformers or exploding alien ships.

This was hardly a perfect movie; some of the time elements just don’t make sense and, for a crafty band of survivors who endured an apocalyptic plague that wiped out 499 of every 500 people on the planet, the humans tend to make stupid decisions. Still, as a summer potboiler, this doesn’t feel like a waste of 10 bucks. Too often the same cannot be said for its competitors.

Andy Serkis, the biggest movie star no one ever sees, is back as Caesar, an ape made hyperintelligent by experimental dementia drugs in the previous film. (That was “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” confusingly synonymous with “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.”) He and his ape clan, a decade after the aforementioned epidemic, are situated nicely among some Ewok-grade treehouse digs in a forest north of San Francisco. All seems peachy till some stray humans stumble into their territory and, ‘murica, pop a cap into one of the juvenile apes. The apes, not amused, ride into town and tell the humans, from horseback, not to return to the apes’ zip code, under penalty of spearing.

But because the humans are running out of fuel and need to jimmy a hydroelectric plant near the apes, confrontation looms. Jason Clarke does a fine job as a levelheaded peacemaker who brokers permission to take his crew into the woods and give the dam plan a chance. Meanwhile, his fellow colony leader Gary Oldman has determined that the dam is so essential, it’s worth going to war over, if need be. A suspicious, bellicose ape named Koba (played by Toby Kebbell, like Serkis, fully obscured in seamless visual effects) finds the humans prepping for war, and palace intrigue ensues.

Matt Reeves (“Let Me In,” “Cloverfield”) directs with an eye for lighting and a keen sense of pacing. A presumable weakness of “Dawn” — that most of its characters, even the primary ones, communicate only in simple thoughts, and slowly at that — proves something of a strength. Unlike most political thrillers, there’s not a lot of yakkity-jabber going on here. The sentiments are straightforward, and the themes, basic. Trust. Family. Risk. Aggression. Apes.

This could easily have been a $170 million hangdog sequel. Instead, it gives the audience a modicum of credit and, because it’s an attempt at real cinema, arrives like a glass of cool water. It is a good movie that, in July, is destined to set the curve for blockbusters.

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“Tammy”

“Tammy”

by Sam Eifling

Rarely do we get the chance in mainstream multiplex fare to ask the question, so let’s do so here. What name would we give an inverted inverts Bechdel Test? That shorthand for the pervasive masculine default in most movies looks for three criteria. First, a movie must have at least two female characters. Second, they must talk to one another at some point. Third, they must talk about something other than a man. For such a modest bar to equal treatment, it proves damn hard for a lot of movies (or novellas or graphic novels or plays) to pass.

In “Tammy,” the new road-trip romp from romp-ready comedienne Melissa McCarthy, we have a script that almost inverts the formula. It includes a few male characters, so there’s that (a couple of them even introduce themselves with surnames!). Then, the only spoken interaction between two men, at least that I noticed, comes when a son (Mark Duplass) tries to roust his goat-horny father (Gary Cole, forever Lumbergh for “Office Space” fans) to leave the bar where the latter is pursuing Tammy’s grandmother (Susan Sarandon). The son argues that it wouldn’t be “fair to mom” for them to stay out late. You could make the case, then, if you take a wide berth, that the only time two men in “Tammy” talk to one another, it’s loosely about a woman, a real anomaly in big summer release fare.

This is enough in itself to make “Tammy” an unusual movie — it is in fact a story about women, and not a story about women while actually talking about men. McCarthy stars, with a surprising amount of the spotlight, given that she’s sharing the screen with the likes of Sarandon, who’s funny and arch as a substance-abusing matriarch with a genial low-grade criminality about her; and with Kathy Bates, a brusque, pyromaniacal cousin who knows how to throw a summer party. McCarthy also produces a script that she co-wrote with director Ben Falcone — her husband of nearly 10 years and, in “Tammy,” a putz fast-food manager who fires her in the first few minutes. The pair also split producing credits with the likes of “Funny or Die” founders Will Farrell and Adam McKay.

So what do we get for this lineup? Less than you’d probably hope, alas. “Tammy” is shaky, hurt largely by a slow start; the first belly laugh doesn’t arrive until about 20 minutes into the movie, by which point its main character has already been fired, had her car wrecked, found her husband carrying on with a neighbor and, in a bit of a meltdown, agreed to enlist her grandmother on a to-hell-with-it road trip from their tiny Illinois hometown. McCarthy in this brutal stretch plays beneath her talent, braying her lines and flailing her stout physique in what begins to feel like a bombastic, thinly written tantrum.

McCarthy and the story find a rhythm, in less preachy fashion than you might expect, when Tammy and her grandmother start bonding over drinks and conquests. When they treat each other shabbily, it’s played first for laughs and then treated with real emotional consequences. Sarandon’s great here, a graying but no less sexually aware throwback to her “Bull Durham” days a generation ago, who also treats her character’s alcoholism with a seriousness that gives the film a quiet acidic edge. In “Tammy,” unlike in most comedies, boozing is only funny until it spills into full-blown drunkenness, which gets ever harder to excuse.

“Tammy” makes some bold choices, and wanders into some genuinely funny moments. For some, it’ll be a pleasantly subversive, dude-friendly chick flick. For most, it’ll be a better than average comedy, once the lulls pass.

Be patient. You’ve seen better, but it likely wasn’t this original.

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“Transformers: Age of Extinction”

“Transformers: Age of Extinction”

by Sam Eifling

“Transformers: Age of Extinction” is not the title of a movie so much as the tag of a natural disaster we knew was coming, sort of like the schedule of names (Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal, Dolly, etc., in 2014) we prepare for hurricane season. The next cacophonous, disorienting, exhausting installment in this series will be the fifth, a development that children of the ’80s should have embraced with a fervor. Instead, what is there to say about these things other than to reach for aspirin?

Director Michael Bay has distilled his formula down to a lightly scripted series of flash grenade explosions set to the occasional dialogue of digital monster robots and their human buddies. It’s a 165-minute gantlet. Then you’re left to stagger back into the world, and if anyone asked you what the movie was about, you’d stammer a moment. What did happen?

Something something alien ships that destroy things, a steel dinosaur head in the arctic, and then we’re in Texas, right? Mark Wahlberg is a down-on-his-luck inventor single father who buys a beat-up truck that his teenaged daughter Nicola Peltz thinks is dumb. Then we learn it’s Optimus Prime and a bunch of U.S. black ops types, steered by Kelsey Grammer, show up to confiscate the Transformer because they’re on a nationwide Autobot hunt. There’s a big car chase when the daughter’s heretofore secret Irish professional rally car driver boyfriend (Jack Reynor) shows up just in the nick of time, and now the humans are on the lam.

Meanwhile power-driven billionaire inventor Stanley Tucci runs a defense contractor in Chicago where they’re melting down Autobot corpses for its constituent metal, an endlessly pliable substance they call Transformium. The scientists are using it to build their own Transformers, but because they’re also downloading the know-how from leftover Decepticon parts, they keep winding up with less control over the machines’ design (and, subsequently, behavior) than they were expecting.

Then, the aliens who want to take Optimus Prime prisoner. They’re working with the CIA. Chicago got the worst of it in the previous “Transformers” and the city doesn’t escape this film unscathed. Later everyone goes to China for some reason and there are Dinobots, who, to give the movie props wherein they are due, are fairly awesome. In fact, the visuals throughout are more or less mind-bending. In all, this is a highly ogleable bit of moviemaking. Were but there an Academy Award for mayhem.

But on the whole, this a disheartening slog of a movie. Used to be my parents would sniff that the cartoons I watched as a tyke were little more than toy commercials. Of course, when kids get the toys, a good cartoon vaults them toward scripting their own impromptu versions of stories. Movies like the “Transformers” franchise, done right, help kids propel their toys, these characters, through adventures and perils of their own imaginations.

These Transformers don’t get enough personality, don’t display enough thoughts, to evince much in the way of inner lives. They mostly just sprint, shoot, kill, hoot. What to make of Bay, other than to see an oversized child swinging action figures with both hands? He does the voices, makes up one-liners and smashes the figures together, clackity-smackity, again and again and again, as he trills laser sounds at himself. This is a lot of pew-pew-pew! you can just imagine for yourself.

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“22 Jump Street”

“22 Jump Street”

by Sam Eifling

It’s probably impossible for an English speaker between the ages of 4 and 87 to watch “22 Jump Street” without laughing at some damn thing or other. The sequel to the 2012 quasi-adaptation of late-’80s cop drama “21 Jump Street” sprays jokes across a wider range of tastes than maybe any comedy you’ve seen.

For every pratfall, or bodily fluid reference, or octopus attack, or gratuitous explosion, or druggie sequence, you might notice sly references to old BBC farces and gangsta rap, deadpan double entendre and some deft physical comedy by stars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. This movie begs to be loved, so you might as well indulge it.

The plot is a self-conscious reprise of “21,” so much so that the movie falls into one of its few overstretched jokes, a fourth-wall-cracking bit of banter about how similar the sequel seems. But here we go: Hill and Tatum, back as undercover cops who would rather rage at a kegger than use a notebook or probe a database, have to pose as undergrads to infiltrate a possible drug ring at a university. Tatum falls in with a Greek-lettered football crowd that embraces him with a frat-tastic fervor, while Hill stumbles through the nerd scene with an arts-major lady friend (Amber Stevens). The flagrantly evil Peter Stormare plays a villain. Ice Cube, whose seminal hip-hop group N.W.A. sang “F*** Tha Police,” again plays a boss cop.

Between these “Jump Street” installments, the directing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller pulled off an equally madcap gem with “The Lego Movie,” which, though almost fully animated, was scarcely more cartoonish than “22.” At times it hews to straight-laced police comedy formula before swerving gleefully into psychedelia, hall-of-mirrors self-referentialism, and whatever else might stick when thrown against the wall.

The sturdiest of these legs is the chemistry between the two leads, whose friendship is tested in ways that you’d predict by merely looking at them. Hill and Tatum apparently are buds in real life and, on-screen, they clearly get a kick out of working with one another. We spend money to see movies for many reasons, not least among them to watch interesting people who seem like friends say hilarious things to one another and to have adventures. ‘Cause maybe that could be us!

Hill’s a decorated talent, with a couple of Oscar nominations on his CV, and he gets some of the better lines in “22.” But Tatum owns more of the laughs. GQ cover notwithstanding, we still aren’t giving Tatum his due as a performer. His physique is straight out of a risqué Renaissance painting, so it’s easy to assume he’s only on the big screen because he looks the part. But he is also really funny. I’ve seen hundreds of movies in theaters and I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed louder in public than watching Tatum in “22” after he realizes (no spoilers) that his partner and his boss have an unlikely connection.

Tatum was solid in his semiautobiographical “Magic Mike” alongside a spectacular Matthew McConaughey, who, despite the low-brow sleaze of his role, absolutely went for the gold. McConaughey didn’t get an Oscar for “Magic Mike” but he did a year later, for “Dallas Buyers Club.” You gotta imagine Tatum noticed the progression. Lay out for the part, every part, no matter the role, and good things happen.

Acting chops are one thing, and it’s not clear that Tatum’s ever going to join that upper tier of talents. However, consistently being one of the best things about hilarious films is not at all a bad niche.

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“Edge of Tomorrow”

“Edge of Tomorrow”

by Sam Eifling

The life of a soldier named Cage in “Edge of Tomorrow” plays like a smudged CD, blatting the same note on repeat ad infinitum. An ad guy turned media spinmeister after an overwhelming alien invasion, the officer finds himself labeled a deserter and thrown into the infantry of a futuristic D-Day, clad in a tanklike exosuit. He, like the other humans in his unit, dies a horrible death fighting the thrashing mechanistic squid monsters that have taken over Europe. Then, in an instant, he awakes, as if to the strains of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” to replay the day.

Tom Cruise plays this perpetual Lazarus with his typical cockiness, fading into bewilderment, despair and determination. The mystery as to why he keeps Konami coding back into existence isn’t as interesting as you’d hope, but when he does figure it out he goes from being cannon fodder to the last hope for human civilization. And he dies over and over and over and over and over with nothing but new memories to show for it.

This is, as sci-fi action premises go, pretty decent. What pushes “Edge of Tomorrow” past the boundaries of genre and toward the more august realm of real cinema is its dedication to tone — this is an uncommonly cohesive, consistent and compelling. The action sequences rip across the screen and the plot moves spryly, even as it has to fold back upon itself like an origami accordion. The film builds by accretion, adding a smidge more in each successive day, twisting along the way. In a good way, it is extraordinarily stressful. Perhaps never before has one person died so many times in a single movie. A few dozen fatalities here, a handful there, and after a while you start to feel for the guy.

Director Doug Liman squeezes a couple of laughs out of the Sisyphean absurdity of this errand, and even a bit of romantic pathos. Cage’s unlikely guide on this mission of mayhem is an alpha soldier named Rita, played by a ferocious Emily Blunt, as if there were any other sort. She reveals to him that she once had the same looping power, and guides him anew each day, even when he has to reintroduce himself each time. This is the great burden of his recursive immortality: Watching her and everyone around him die over and over and over, even as he moves closer to solving his awful day.

Children of the videogame era will recognize this story structure: We’ve played it on a million late nights and rainy afternoons, on Nintendo and PC to PlayStation. Incremental progress followed by horrible death and revival is a staple of adventure shoot-’em-ups, where the only risk in wandering is the cost of your time. When life no longer is the currency of success — indeed, because his revival depends on a decisive death, Cage must avoid mere injury each day — then risk and creativity reign. Have we probed all possibilities? No sense in holding back if we have a guess to make, an avenue to explore.

Here, in action, “Edge of Tomorrow” illustrates a certain version of the entrepreneurship that supposedly drives the Millennial generation. No problem looms too big just so long as failure is always, always an option. Rather, after a spell, when failure becomes entwined with strategy, as Cage finds, a version of freedom results.

The adage that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger turns out to be deficient. Instead, whatever doesn’t kill us merely delays our return as a craftier, smarter version of ourselves. Hang that notion on a crackling spectacle like “Edge of Tomorrow” and call it a killer summer blockbuster.

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“A Million Ways to Die in the West”

“A Million Ways to Die in the West”

by Sam Eifling

When Seth MacFarlane decided to mash up a spaghetti western with an off-color comedy, he must’ve known the comparisons to “Blazing Saddles” would follow, as surely as his runaway animated smash “Family Guy” will forever be held up against “The Simpsons.” MacFarlane, like Mel Brooks, takes a strong hand in his movies — in “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” he directs, produces, writes and stars. Unlike Brooks, though, MacFarlane doesn’t know when to take a light touch.

“Million Ways” generates its share of laughs, through the occasionally well-crafted gag. Between those gems you’ll find lazy writing, indifferent editing, rote cinematography — heck, there ain’t even much of a plot. The score is big and fun and Western. Charlize Theron casually steals her every scene, as an ingénue carved from saddle leather. If that’s enough to warrant your $11.50, by all means, go west.

MacFarlane stars as Albert, a sheep farmer who sucks at sheep farming, which happens to be the thing he’s best at. He doesn’t belong in 1880s Arizona frontier any more than a dog belongs at a piano, and he knows it. He manages to talk himself out of getting plugged in a gun duel, then gets promptly dumped for general lack of manly creds by his girlfriend, the real-live Disney princess Amanda Seyfried. Albert whines to his best friend Giovanni Ribisi — himself beset by woman troubles, as a chaste Christian whose betrothed is a prolific prostitute played by Sarah Silverman — and mopes until he comes across Theron. She’s ostensibly an outlaw by way of a reluctant marriage to the baddest dude in the territory, Liam Neeson, and she’s in town to scope out a heist.

She and Albert bond over what a dump the West is, and she takes him on as a charity case as he tries to win back his hot ex, who in prompt fashion has taken up with the local dandy, Neil Patrick Harris, a moustachery owner and facile marksman. Albert proposes a duel; his mustachioed rival accepts. He is going to die.

Now, in a MacFarlane production, as any “Family Guy” fan could admit, the story as such is really just an excuse to hang nonsensical and/or profane jokes on the screen. In “Million Ways,” most of those riffs revolve around the multifold dangers and indignities of living in the frontier. Albert goes on versions of this tirade more than once, and sure enough, the west delivers. People die: in a freak ice-dropping accident; in a freak camera-exploding accident; getting shot for no reason (much like modern Arizona!); breaking deadly wind; getting gored by a rampaging bull; etc. All of this is not in itself bad comedic fodder, a canvas of gallows humor.

Yet the writing sags and MacFarlane’s delivery comes off as so an extended spitball session. You can see him ad-libbing versions of these lines at a pitch meeting over brunch somewhere, and, satisfied his riffing is worth the bazillion dollars he scrounged for this farce, resting on his laurels.

Much of the script works this way, treading the line between off-the-cuff and downright unrehearsed. The dialogue serves the tone — it’s jangly, abrupt, reflexively profane. It reminds us that Albert, who speaks and thinks like someone from 2014, doesn’t belong on the frontier of 130 years ago. MacFarlane, too, seems like he’d rather be somewhere else. A good director makes it look effortless. MacFarlane just seems not to have worked all that hard.

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“X-Men: Days of Future Past”

“X-Men: Days of Future Past”

by Sam Eifling

Alone among the major comic book film franchises, the X-Men flicks have been able to navigate seven films now without pressing the “reboot” button on any of its major characters. Think of the redundancy of the new Spider-Man films, the cringeworthy Bana-to-Norton-to-Ruffalo saga of the Hulk.

Meanwhile, you still have Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier, Halle Berry as Storm, Ian McKellen as Magneto. Somehow, too, Hugh Jackman has hung around long enough to appear in every one of the movies, including two standalone “Wolverine” titles. They’ve even pulled the same characters out of time with “X-Men: First Class,” exhuming the mutants’ backstories from the early ’60s and bringing in new faces with old names.

The question becomes, how long can they go without breaking down? The answer comes in the form of “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” which is a clunky name for an otherwise outstanding genre movie. It’s also, conspicuously, the point at which the franchise opens to any and all possibilities (except for Jackman leaving; at 200-odd-years-old, and impervious to aging, we’re stuck with him as Woverine as long as he’ll have the part). This is where we fold the old-guard mutants back onto their younger selves, allowing James McAvoy to claim Xavier as his own and, to a greater degree, giving Michael Fassbender the reins of Magneto and Jennifer Lawrence the definitive Mystique.

We open on a gnarly future in which awesomely powerful robots called Sentinels hunt and exterminate mutants, and pretty much anyone else they feel like wiping out or enslaving. They’re imbued with the chameleonic DNA of Mystique, allowing them to absorb mutant powers and retort with the same. Some of these fight sequences… gracious and good golly. They are ferocious and they are high-stakes. Bryan Singer, directing again, has mastered at least part of this comic-book movie thing. Kill a few heroes and everyone perks right up.

Ah, but here’s the twist. Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page, Juno-riffically) has the ability to do some kind of mental time-travel thing with Bishop (Omar Sy) and save everyone just in the nick o’, but eventually they figure the only way out of this hellhole of a 21st century is to do a proper “Back to the Future” time-swap and have Wolverine go slap some sense into Xavier, Magneto and Mystique back at the dawn of the Sentinel program… (cue wakka-wakka electric guitar)… in… NINETEEN SEVENTY-THREE… Three… three…

Wolverine gets the gang back together before there’s even a gang. Ten years after “First Class” Xavier is a veritable junkie on a serum that dulls his psychic powers but keeps his legs functional. Magneto is doing extraordinarily hard time a country mile beneath the Pentagon for his apparent role in whacking JFK. Also, Beast is hanging around. But Mystique is on a rampage and if she puts a bullet into a fellow named Trask, the military contractor behind the Sentinel program (Peter Dinklage, owning a role not written specifically for a little person) then everyone will hate mutants and fund Sentinels and the future will turn out like “Blade Runner” crossed with “The Matrix.”

Schlocky time travel, A-minus-list actors, true brutality by the Sentinels, a menacing turn by Fassbender and a general tone of high play make this probably the best film in the series, somewhat of a lesser spark than Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” masterpieces but nearly as satisfying. It also contains what might be the single most memorable scene among the “X-Men” installments to date: A whirlwind shoot-’em-out moment that a young Quicksilver (Evan Peters) owns with such casual aplomb, and Singer depicts with such moviemaking joie de vivre, that for an instant the whole venture crystallizes into a moment of Zen.

This should be dark fun, emphasis on the dark, emphasis on the fun. “Days of Future Past” balances both.

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“Godzilla”

“Godzilla”

by Sam Eifling

The last time we saw Godzilla, 16 years ago, he was a fleet, raptoresque creature arriving in New York for no real reason other than to re-enact “Jurassic Park” in Madison Square Garden. The movie was, in a word, gawdawful, a paint-by-numbers hack job that, if you get high enough on a rainy Sunday to actually watch, will remind you of all the patty cake silliness that used to go into action movies. Do not watch it, as it will force you to curse the entire 1990s in your heart.

Post-9/11 disaster movies shifted away from the cartoony, because there was no longer a question of obliterating a section of a major city looked like. It looks like the worst thing ever. And so when you got, ostensibly, a non-Godzilla movie that was really a Godzilla movie, i.e. “Cloverfield,” it was no longer enough to be merely exciting. It had to be terrifying, if it were going to attract sober adults.

The new “Godzilla,” delightfully, is everything its immediate predecessor wasn’t. Parts of it are twist-your-guts frightening. The big guy himself has never looked better, scaly and raw yet hydrodynamic. The humans are mostly disposable, alas, even if Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche team up for an impossibly fraught few moments early in the film.

But the monster has a reason for being here, sort of, other than as mutant fallout from nuclear tests in the Pacific. This “Godzilla” sets aside some of the environmental moralizing in favor of agnostic awesomeness. The monster’s here because nuclear tests woke up a couple of very old fellow kaiju (rough translation: nigh-invincible city-munching creatures). These big bugs feed on radiation, and are drawn to nuclear plants. They’re gonna make us all dead unless Godzilla can stop ’em.

Any Godzilla movie that requires more than a 20-word synopsis is already overthinking itself. We’ve moved past the discussion, as a planet, of whether we need to continue lighting off nukes; only North Korea, the scamp, has tested any this century. So moving past the nuclear themes, we find that Godzilla has some loose connection here to climate change. It’s not worth trying to wrap your head around. We’re told by a Godzilla-fearing scientist (Ken Watanabe) that the monster is nature’s way of restoring balance amid turmoil, and if that’s the case, then we could take this fire-spewing behemoth as a sign that nature will always overpower us, and that we best not piss her off, happy Earth Day to you too.

Of course the corollary to casting Godzilla as Mother Nature’s avatar is that we want to root for the monster — for who wants to see nature get trounced? Director Gareth Edwards and writer Max Borenstein give us a version of Godzilla here that still stomps mudholes through Honolulu and San Francisco, with a bit of smashy-smash around Japan and Las Vegas just for funsies, without any of the letdown that even proper monster movies usually entail. This way, we get to root for the military (Aaron Taylor-Johnson is your perfectly serviceable serviceman lead) in tandem with the title character.

Anyway, Kaiju fights are far and away more entertaining than watching yet another salvo of missiles and bullets plonk harmlessly off the beast’s hide. Guns are not terribly fun to watch. Bombs neither. They kill people, real people, all the time, and ask almost nothing of your imagination or of your capacity to wonder. Oh, but, now! Hulking monstrosities loosely representing the forever-tension between man’s race to master the universe’s most destructive possibilities (radiation, played here by wicked kaiju) and nature’s power to seek equilibrium, even if attained through violent means (embodied in Godzilla) is a damn fine afternoon at the movies. It’ll really make you stop and think. Or, even better, it won’t.

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