The Big Problem with Superhero Ethics...and plots

Recently on a forum, I brought up my ire at the many, many superhero stories that preach Kantian ethics despite depicting events that imply that they just don't work.  I was asked to clarify what about this contradiction annoys me.

Another day, another politically-oriented post on my supposedly apolitical blog!  It seems like only yesterday I was blogging about what the message of The Incredibles was...or was not.  Here, as with there, I'm going to blog about something that touches a bit on politics, but I'm not going to express any specific opinion on the related controversy.  Rather, I'm going to explain why there's a big contradiction in these stories, explain why I think it's a problem for their expressed purposes, state my theory of why these stories keep doing this, and finally provide a number of alternative ideas.  First, though, a video from PBS explaining superhero ethics and a common alternative:

This video uses Batman as an example, but in fact, it applies to most superheroes.  They refuse to kill people, even villains, even when killing a villain appears the only way to prevent the killing of innocents, heroes who take a more utilitarian view of morality are set up just to be strawmen declared wrong, and then come the next time the unkilled villain escapes and kills more innocents, the strawman arguably seems proven right.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Expressing a comprehensible opinion on who is actually right is beyond the scope of this blog, but let's address one big elephant in the room: There are a lot of people who operate like the strawmen these stories frequently disparage, and aren't seen as monstrous for it.  I won't begrudge anyone for personally having a Kantian policy against killing, but it has been the case throughout history that military and often even police forces operate on the idea that if you don't kill some people, they're going to kill you or some other people you care about, which often means your civilians.  That is a consistent part of civil service, and again, many people see these civil servants as heroes.  Certainly, there are times when one's own police and the military go too far, but very few Americans would actually accuse their troops of being no better than the Nazis just because the US troops took up arms and were willing to shoot the Nazis dead.  American cops slip up at times, but they've shot dead a whole lot less civilians than other civilians have.  They try to find other solutions, but they're open to killing criminals if it seems the only way to stop a greater loss from occurring.

Expanding on the above, it is important to recall that cops are also present in many superhero stories.  Batman himself deals plenty with Commissioner Gordon.  These cops aren't exactly effective on their own, but as usual, they are willing to kill to halt criminals.  Batman almost always chews out his allies who don't share his ethics, but somehow he has no problem with the cops not sharing them! (I know what you're probably going to say to explain it, and keep reading; we'll get there.)

This contradiction is extended even further in the TV show, The Flash.  I used to like the show, but the more I watched, the more I was convinced that its writing process consisted largely of coming up with a new excuse to have Grant Gustin get emo, or failing that, picking out an old one they hoped enough time had passed for people to have forgotten it.  That, however, was not what made me drop the show; rather it was the aforementioned Kantian preaching despite a huge contradiction.  Barry "The Flash" Allen is one of the most preachy Kantian superheroes in recent memory, and yet he doesn't just work with the cops.  His stepfather is a cop, his wife is the daughter of that stepfather, and finally, he's a cop!  True; he only works in the forensics department, but it still is him working with an organization that sanctions the use of lethal force.  In real life, people who have a moral opposition to all killing, such as various religious sects, abstain from working in such organizations, and can obtain exemptions from military service; Barry's dual-role, meanwhile, makes him seem like a big hypocrite demanding of his fellow heroes a sort of morality that his own line of work doesn't abide by.  Thus, the show is full of all sorts of weird contradictory events like the Season 3 finale, where he sticks quiverlingly to his refusal to kill a villain, who then tries to kill him, only for his wife Iris to grab a gun and kill the villain.  Come Season 4, Flash still hasn't abandoned his policy--but he doesn't ever take his wife to task for that, either.  He'll shove his morality down other heroes' throats, but not his own wife's, for whatever reason.  I can name several reasons, but none really lessen my view that Barry is a hypocrite.

Now to get to the most likely explanation people would give for why superheroes can abide by Kantian morality, demand it of potential superhero allies, yet be fine with working with police forces who don't: As vigilantes, superheroes feel like they're on legal thin ice as it is, and thus need to exercise some restraint, deferring to the law to make the final judgement on the fate of the villains they help the law to apprehend.  This is a decent justification, but it's not usually the one superheroes give; instead going into a predictable speech about falling to the level of villains, without much quantification of what determines the level of villains and how, and of course, with no criticism of the police for being willing to kill.  Still, I have an answer to that legal explanation, but first let's talk a bit more about police.

As noted, many police have the right to kill in order to halt a crime, when there seems no other way to incapacitate the criminal.  This is quite different, however, from being allowed to kill someone who has been incapacitated and detained non-lethally.  After a criminal has already been stopped, the legal question is what can be done to punish the criminal for the crime.  The death penalty--often euphemistically referred to as capital punishment--is still around in much of the world, but is rather uncommon in democracies.  As is true with any real-world political controversies, I'm not going to take a side here, save for noting that states that don't have capital punishment haven't seen a collapse of law and order, as confinement is effective in those states.  Also, even in states that have capital punishment, it's still for the judicial part of law-enforcement to decide on it, not the people carrying guns in the field.

However, here we find the final issue plaguing superhero ethics: The legal system in their world does not work.  This holds true whether you favor the death penalty or incarceration; thanks to a combination of corruption and incompetence, police in these worlds fail to do either.  Villains keep escaping and keep killing innocents.  It would be possible for me to admire a superhero with a code against killing villains, if only the canon that hero was placed in didn't constantly imply that nothing else will really solve the problem, but since it's not, the heroes come off, at best, as not fully comprehending their situation, and at worst, as sanctimonious hypocrites who care more about their own self-esteem than the public good.  Quite an awkward position for writers to put their supposed moral exemplars in, but I think I know why, and it's possibly the most common one-word explanation for odd things ever: Money.

Before going on here, a characteristic personal disclaimer: I hate that the words "comic books" or "comics" are commonly used to describe any and all stories that are advanced by illustrated panels.  I hate it because it misrepresents every story done by that medium as akin to the humor-centric strips associated with newspapers, for which when the word "comic" was applied, had nothing to do with their pictorial medium and everything to do with their humorous genre.  Medium and genre are not the same thing and claiming such understates the variety of stories a medium can tell.  It would be one thing to use this term if, much like "villain", its original (quite politically-incorrect) meaning was now extinct, but as "comic" still implies humor in most other modern uses, such as with a person who performs humorous monologues on a stage, the ambiguity still troubles pictorial stories.  While "graphic novel" is commonly used as a substitute for longer stories of other genres, it seems more fitting for those works released in their entirety at once, such as V For Vendetta; therefor, for the purposes of this essay and the works specific to it, I will call them "Serial Epics", or SEs for short.

Why this obsessive drive to define a subset of literature?  It pertains much more to the financial problem plaguing these stories than any other term previously available.  The "epic" part simply refers to the superhero aspect, but it's the term "serial" that deserves a closer look; it implies that a story is told in a series of installments.  You may notice that the pictorial medium wasn't referenced in my new term for this genre, since as the aforementioned The Flash TV show attests, such is not the only medium to tell superhero stories; nevertheless, originating in the pictorial medium certainly helped establish tropes common to it.  These superheroes got their start in magazines that typically began episodic but eventually turned to telling ongoing stories, building up a cast of memorable characters and utilizing cliffhangers to prompt people to buy the next issue, or even subscribe to the series and get each new issue mailed to them.  When people kept reading and buying in order to learn what would happen next, presumably the creators of these things soon realized a dirty little secret: If the story never ends, then neither will the profits!  Thus the worst possible combination of superhero operations and legal operations to keep villains down and out once they're defeated, because so they suppose, we will never get tired of seeing Batman fight the Joker.

Lest people think I'm being presumptuous, blaming one trope on a devious business policy, rest assured there are many more tropes to blame on this, such as Comic Book [sic] Time, wherein many characters cannot age.  In order to facilitate this, among other things, their origin story will constantly be retconned to a more and more recent date; it is particularly noticeable with Iron Man, since this requires setting his origin story in a new war each time.  Then there's the pesky issue of death; while most superheroes don't kill, plenty of other people in their worlds do!  This should mean that soon enough, fan favorites will end up dead and mourned--not!  Myriad contrivances will instead be used to bring them back!

 Except when they can't be.  All of those people the Joker slaughters because nobody can manage to stop him permanently; they stay dead, but readers don't care about their lives, so to the crows with them!  Really, there's no apparent low these writers won't sink to in order to preserve their precious status quo; don't get daring and make a character step out of his iconic loserdom to marry his crush, become successful and reveal his identity, or soon by some contrivance a tragedy will happen and he'll make a deal with the devil to revert him back to formula!

If it isn't clear yet, I'm irritated by far more than just the codes of ethics these heroes abide by, which as noted above, wouldn't be a problem in other cases.  The formula running these sorts of stories, and the cliches it has spawned, are all obnoxious.  In a cruel twist of fate, these cliches are perfectly positioned to irritate the very audiences their cliffhangers are manufactured to keep on board.  Sleazy business produces low-quality literature, and I could tolerate this if only they limited their stories to entertaining pow-wham-kazow fluff, but all of the vacuous moral grandstanding makes it utterly intolerable to me.  If you're going to lecture us, expect some of us to raise our hands for questions or comments!

However, I don't want to make it sound as if I demand these stories become a specific thing; just that I want them to stop being the same thing they've been for far too long.  There's plenty wiggle-room to get us out of this rut in the realm of ethics alone, and here are just a few possibilities:
1) Superheroes resolve to kill villains in some cases.  Not just people like Deadpool and the Punisher, who get a rush out of doing it; people who greatly regret it but come to the unhappy conclusion that it's the only option, and that sleeping less soundly at night is their burden to bare for the sake of the innocents they saved by killing a killer.
2) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but instead the law enforcement becomes effective at keeping them permanently neutralized.  New villains arise if the plot needs to keep going.
3) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but they stop preaching about it.  No more strawmen to set up and attack with non-arguments, while events imply the strawmen right.
4) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but they come to the realization that incapacitating them and passing them on to the police isn't enough.  Maybe have Batman start to make an active effort to improve Gotham Police Department, or maybe he and his closer allies, of which he now has many, can start their own jail.  Superheroes, with their prodigious talents and abilities, should be able to make a good, permanent difference in the world, even if the devious status-quo-defending writers don't let them yet.

Of course, by now the "side" effect of such innovative writing should be obvious: The stories would probably have an ending.  This might sound depressing to people who still want experience more stories from these characters--every once in a while, they manage to turn out something mostly new!  However, don't forget that continuity itself is constantly changing, starting and stopping in these franchises.  Retcons get introduced all the time; effectively and sometimes officially swapping out an old canon for a new one.  Alternate universes are legion, both within the original magazine format of SEs and in the many other media that carry adaptations.  So here's a thought; if continuities aren't going to last anyway, why not give them a good ending before they go out?  The ending doesn't have to be Batman killing the Joker, but maybe it could be some other thing happening to finally neutralize the Joker, which lets Batman move on to other things.  Why not give the current Iron Man the chance to invent something great and world-changing before he's thrown out in favor of a new Iron Man who starts in whatever war is going on now?

I think I've made my case here: I like endings.  Maybe not final endings, but definitive places wherein at least one of a hero's stated goals is unambiguously accomplished.  How it's accomplished is a matter of great flexibility, but it should be accomplished, and I am confident superhero media can be better at that than it has been.  If I'm to support these characters, they have to have realistic mindsets about how to take up the cause of justice.

Meanwhile, there are other prominent bits of literature I can also attack for never reaching they tease, and those who know me well can guess what's next on that chopping block...

Debunking the Notion that The Incredibles is Right-Wing Propaganda

Not too long ago, I wrote a blog post explaining that although I also have a political blog, I felt I could put it here on Entertainment Examiner because it could address the intersection of politics and culture without taking a specific stand on any contentious issues.  I have decided that I can do the same with this post.  The movie The Incredibles has inspired some political discussion as to whether it sends a message that is, at best, controversial.  I am going to weigh in on that in this blog, but I'm not going to say whether I agree or disagree with that supposed message; simply whether I agree or disagree that it's even in this movie: Spoiler: I largely disagree.

Back when I first saw this movie, I didn't perceive any political undertones whatsoever.  I wasn't the most insightful person at the time, but I still noticed them in other films, such as Osmosis Jones and X-Men. With The Incredibles, it just felt like the whimsical story of a world where some humans have superpowers (such people will from here on be called "metahumans"; a common and more basically accurate term than "superheroes" since the latter also implies a moral position), have been banned from using them for vigilantism after one too many scandals, and must covertly come out of retirement to stop a mad scientist.  It was only upon reading some allegations online that I started to think about this movie having an unapologetically conservative message.  The super-powered individuals this film focuses on, said such allegations, were really metaphors for talented capitalists whose abilities enabled them to climb higher in society than anyone else, while the laws against them and the mad scientist who hated them were analogous to government regulations based on the resentment and suspicion of less talented people.  I forget where online I first encountered such an interpretation, but at some point a floodgate had burst and this film's alleged anti-egalitarian moral was being touted far and wide; both critically by left-leaning sites like Cracked and favorably by right-leaning sites like National Review.

Though one might conclude that when people on opposite political sides agree on something, it's probably true, I remained skeptical that this movie was, in essence, an homage to the ideals of Ayn Rand and similar champions of morally unrestrained capitalist ubermenschen.  Then last week, I finally got the chance to watch the movie again, and came away from it more convinced than ever that the common political analysis of it is indeed quite cherry-picked.  With The Incredibles now fresh in my memory, I am prepared to write a longer analysis that calls into question the common political claim about it, but spoiler alert, because I will be pointing at many key plot points chronologically--therefore I recommend you see the movie yourself first.

Assuming you have done so, you will know that this movie's conflict is primarily between the super-powered Mr. Incredible (real name Bob Parr), and the unpowered but resourceful Syndrome (real name Buddy Pine).  It starts fifteen-years before the rest of movie, back when Buddy is still a child and actually a fan of Mr. Incredible--and almost immediately, the theory of Mr. Incredible being analogous to the skilled capitalist who dominates others starts falling apart.  Initially, Bob is doing his thing, ready to save the world, with Buddy insisting he join in; styling himself as "Incrediboy".  Bob is hesitant, shunning Buddy out of fears that he will not fare well due to lack of powers, but also youthful naivete.  Undeterred, Buddy dawns a pair of flight-enabling skates and rushes back to his hero's side, not noticing that a villain has strapped him with a bomb, forcing Mr Incredible to let the villain escape while saving his over-eager fan; after which he rebukes Buddy the most sternly yet, and this leads to Buddy seeking revenge in the future.

Is there a message about capitalism yet?  It's true; Bob having superpowers can be likened to normal people having skills--but Buddy actually is a normal person with skills.  As an inventor of machines that enable people to do things they ordinarily can't, he may well have more ability to profit from his skills than do metahumans who can't sell their powers--we'll come back to that later.  Moreover, capitalism is characterized, even by its proponents, as entailing people using their skills for personal gain; on the theory that it will ultimately help everyone.  Whether this theory is true or not, Mr Incredible cannot be construed as seeking personal gain as his overriding concern in these backstory scenes is to help other people.  It's quite obviously the reason he rejects Buddy's assistance; he fears Buddy will die, or cause the death of others, and both of these things very nearly happen.  Buddy, meanwhile, doesn't show any concern for such hazards; seemingly valuing nothing more than the adrenaline rush of being powerful--again, more on this later.  These scenes also show Mr Incredible saving a man from committing suicide by jumping off a building, segueing into a montage of people beginning to resent the help of superheroes, laws being passed against them, and a flash-forward to fifteen-years later.

The next segment of the movie shows the metahumans, including Bob, his wife Helen, and their three children, dealing the best they can in the new superhero-free world.  Metahumans are forced to hide their powers, to the chagrin of the aptly named Dash Parr; Bob and Helen's super-fast son.  Helen insists he not compete in sports for fear of blowing his cover, while Bob disagrees.  Here is where we get introduced to a particular line of dialogue commonly cited as proof of this film's Randian agenda.  Dash points out that his father says he's special, Helen says everyone is special, and Dash retorts "Which is another way of saying no one is".  It's an interesting point to consider, for certain, but when considering what else is going on in this movie, its most obvious implications are far more canonical than allegorical.  Everyone involved has a valid point; simply in an argument they can't really win due to less-than-ideal circumstances.  Helen's "everyone is special" advice is really just a post-hoc rationalization of policies that help to hide what her son is; she isn't wrong to want to protect her children in a culture that hates people like them, while meanwhile Bob and Dash aren't wrong to hate having to hide.  True; Dash has an unfair advantage over other athletes, but it isn't his fault he was born with that advantage, nor that he was born in a world that gave him no useful legal ways to utilize his gift.

The aforementioned less-than-ideal circumstances that lead to such family squabbles (not to mention other troubles), may also be cited as a parable to Randian objectivism; after all, they result from a legal ban on these people using their powers to do extraordinary things.  The details revealed, however, show a more nuanced view of the government than such ideology portends.  The government didn't spontaneously crack down on metahumans; rather it was in response to overwhelming public backlash and majority rule.  Moreover, the said response was actually conciliatory towards metahumans; they got banned from being superheroes but the government assisted them in settling into everyday life and hiding them from those who hated them. (To a point; more on that later.) Again, it wasn't ideal, but it was a sincere and mostly successful attempt at keeping the peace.  The government's representative in the film, Agent Rick Dicker, is always very sympathetic towards Bob and his family, even when shocking events trouble his job of keeping them hidden.

So this movie doesn't really seem to vilify the government; contrary to what would be expected from its supposed Randian philosophy.  However, what about the sorts of people such philosophy actually venerates?  How does the movie regard entrepreneurs following their selfish interests and rising above others because, as such philosophy holds, they're just better and thus deserve it?  A series of scenes involving Bob Parr's job for the fictional company, Insuricare, provides some idea.  The hulking former Mr. Incredible is reduced to being a sedentary bureaucrat serving the diminutive Gilbert Huph. 

Probably the most punchable character Pixar has ever modeled.

Despite his small stature, Huph is a merciless businessman with a host of unfair insurance policies, but Mr. Parr does his best to help needy customers find loopholes.  Seeing his business model threatened, Mr. Huph calls Mr. Parr to his office, chewing him out for daring to have a conscience, and demanding he act more like a cog in a machine.  Meanwhile, Bop Parr notices a man outside the window getting mugged, and begs to intervene, but Mr. Huff demands he stays put, belittling the victim as the mugger runs off.  Bob snaps at that, and even though he's supposed to be hiding his powers, grabs Huff by the neck and throws him through several walls!  If this movie was supposed to be an allusion to ideology that holds selfishness to be a virtue, and Mr Incredible a metaphor for businessmen who most fully embody that virtue, then why would it show that he despises such selfish business policies and cares about the meek?

Needless to say, Bob loses his job, but is luckily recruited by Mirage, an agent from a shadowy organization promising to make use of his superpowers.  Facing poverty and alienation from his family, he accepts the offer and boards a plane to a mysterious island.  Various return trips to do various tasks prove lucrative, and the reborn Mr. Incredible gets back in the groove, mending his old costume and getting back into shape. Things are looking up for him, up until his new boss shows up.  It's his disenchanted former fan, Buddy Pine; now a wealthy arms dealer calling himself Syndrome, and he's on a quest for revenge, murdering metahumans, researching their powers, and planning a massive endgame.  Fortunately, Helen has gotten suspicious of what's going on with her husband, so she and the children suit up to go save him.

Their many battles against Syndrome and his minions don't require detailing in this post, and textual recap can't do them justice, but it is necessary to mention Syndrome's gloating speech to the Parr Family, as this is the last (and probably biggest) key point cited by those who allege this film to have a right-wing, anti-egalitarian bias.  Syndrome boasts of giving other people powers so they can be super too, and in an echo of Dash's line earlier in the film, adds that when everybody is super, nobody will be.  To some (the sort who dislike this movie), his cause actually seems just.  However, the quote has been taken out of context to quite an extreme degree, and a better look at more of his speech shows his true character and motives.

The face of a psychopath.

Syndrome has spent the last fifteen years selling weapons to fund his conspiracy, murdering people who did nothing wrong to him, and attempting to murder children.  During a showdown with Mr. Incredible threatening Mirage's life to blackmail Syndrome, Syndrome declares Mr. Incredible is bluffing and couldn't bring himself to kill her; when Syndrome proves correct, he calls Mr. Incredible weak, prompting Mirage to retort that valuing life isn't weakness (and ultimately, to switch sides).  His full plan, after eliminating the current metahumans, is to send a robot to attack a city, show up armed with advanced weapons to stop it and be hailed as a new superhero, and only later, upon getting too old to do it anymore, will he sell his inventions to people who can pay.

The connection of the two statements makes it clear that Syndrome has no more sincere commitment to equalizing society than he does to being a hero.  Far from a concerned socialist, he is in fact a brutally selfish capitalist whose actions bring immense suffering.  Those who deem Syndrome's goal a parable for welfare, and thus read the scene as an attempt to discredit welfare, would do well to remember that welfare normally consists of handouts of things that are unambiguously beneficial, such as housing, food, and healthcare.  Syndrome intends to sell what are, in essence, more weapons.  Certainly, more people would gain the equivalent of superpowers than had them before, but the effects wouldn't be egalitarian, as the richer people would be able to buy a dangerous edge against the poorer people--the effects of which could be understandably disastrous.  Syndrome, though, either doesn't understand or doesn't care.  As was the case fifteen years ago, Syndrome's motives entail no real aversion to the mere existence of superpowers; in fact he loves the rush of being powerful but has no regard for the dangers it brings.  So no; he should not be an admirable figure to anyone who values egalitarianism and worries about the privileged harming others, and is instead far more akin to the sorts of people that far too many accuse this film of lionizing.  Fortunately, The Incredibles defeat Syndrome, though it takes a while, and the movie ends with their type still illegal, but newly appealing to many onlookers. (Note, at the time of writing this, a sequel has come out and I have seen it, but I won't mention it yet.)

So if this movie isn't actually glorifying--and in fact, is villifying--the sorts of people who use their power to step over others, then what is its real message; assuming it has any?  I believe it's more about learning how to be a decent person in an inherently unfair world.  A constant theme in this movie is that power is multifaceted and inevitable; it may be a man who is genetically stronger than anyone else, it may be an unjust law, it may be a greedy businessman, it may be a mad scientist, or many other things, many of them not featured in this movie.  The good news, though, is that contrary to popular belief, power doesn't have to corrupt.  It can corrupt; the movie never claims otherwise, and there is thus ample reason for it to be externally checked, but the same suspicion of power can also lead to the powerful checking themselves, and this is important because as the film also establishes through the figure of Gilbert Huff, even people who seem meek and pathetic may well find themselves in positions of power over others.

On that last note, I will concede that I see a few problems with this film.  First, every character who abuses power in this film is a normal human, utilizing economic and scientific means to oppress others; normal and metahuman alike.  Meanwhile, no metahumans in the film use their powers to oppress normal people, which might send the unpleasant message that the more mighty ought also to be presumed more moral.  Then again, the metahumans do cause collateral damage, so the film doesn't pretend the law against them is totally unwarranted, and for as sympathetic as its metahuman protagonists are, it doesn't ultimately arrive at the conclusion that this law causes more problems than it solves.  When all of the villains are normal people, there's no real reason to believe that other normal people aren't able to stop them, so the film ends with the law still in place and the Parrs still in hiding.

Maybe that was intentional; people aren't supposed to learn an unambiguously correct lesson in a world full of injustice.  Even so, the film's sequel, which involves the family working to revoke the law, doesn't really correct that course; I'm not going to give it away, but the villains are still all normal people.  This franchise's world could really benefit from the existence of at least one villainous metahuman, as this would allow it more definitely to argue that laws against all metahumans aren't a good idea.  Villainous ones probably wouldn't follow such laws anyway; instead it might just make them more mendacious towards society, and if they prove too powerful for normal people to stop, it would benefit them to get on better terms with the more benign metahumans.  As of the second movie, this franchise still has that glaring hole in its ethics.

Still, that leaves me wanting more rather than wanting less.  A flawed epic isn't the same as an irreparable one, Director Brad Bird denies that he intended to deliver any right-wing message with these movies, and with so much more commendable than deplorable about them, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.  Hopefully, a third film can take the series further in that logical direction, and I invite them to try.

Throwback Thursday: I, Frankenstein Review

[Note: This was originally published circa October 2, 2014]

I'll say this for I, Frankenstein: It delivers what it promises.  This is DEFINITELY a movie about Frankenstein's monster (now known as Adam) battling demons alongside tepid gargoyle allies.  It even does that job reasonably well, with fluid fight choreography, artsy camera work, and a motif brimming with gothic...everything, basically.  It also makes the commendably bold choice of basing its anti-hero and plot specifically on Mary Shelly's original novel, rather than the more recognized and therefor marketable Universal Studios incarnation.  Unfortunately, by simple virtue (or is it sin?) of being a movie, it also makes IMPLIED promises of such things as plot, dialogue, characterization, and most-notably, PACING; that iconic bell-curve of story progression we learned in elementary school. (Setup, Conflict, Climax, Conclusion; if I remember correctly.)

Such subtleties are scarce here, and you miss them immediately.  Before the opening narration is even all the way done, Adam is attacked by demons and rescued by gargoyles [NOTE: They're also angels, basically; I forgot to mention that in the original review]; both out of the blue.  They offer him (not to mention us) the brief pleasure of a supporting cast, and then he leaves, narrates some more, fights some more demons, flashes forward, narrates some more, fights some more demons, revisits the angels, who do some demon fighting on their own, and once in a while there's a conversation, to remind you this isn't a video game...is the snark I would've made two decades ago (and other reviewers have already expressed such an opinion), but these days there are plenty of video games that have more dialogue than this film and are less linear to boot.

Once again, the problem isn’t even that anything that’s actually in this movie is necessarily bad.  It looks nice (read; it’s ugly as sin, but that’s appropriate in this case, and it’s detailed), almost all performances are competent (if none even remotely impressive), and as mentioned, the action scenes work fine of themselves.  The problem is that a lot of good things aren’t actually in this movie.  Without the elements that anchor the trailer-filling fight scenes together, it’s a disorganized mess that makes you wonder why you aren’t watching another action/horror movie; you never get a good feel for exactly what part the barely-existent story you’re seeing.  In fact, it’s arguable that the climax of this film feels less climatic than other scenes. (I won’t spoil it, but there wouldn’t be much love lost if I did.)

All of the above content would be sufficiently damning on its own, but I have a few more nitpicks to impart.  The first is that, due to the film’s constant kinetic pace, any ability to take seriously its backstory of a secret Heaven-Hell war raging under our noses for centuries, quickly flies out the window with a rain of shattered stain glass.  Somehow, despite both being able to transform into human form, neither the demons nor the gargoyles care a whiff for subtlety when they get down to their jobs, smashing things and vaulting through the sky in full-view throughout a European city (the film never specifies which one) that is somehow still intact and populous in spite.  All that might be a bit more forgivable had the film been even remotely self-aware and whimsical, but its humor is limited to a few dry situational snarks.

Which brings us to the second additional nitpick: Tragically, despite its unique concept, and despite applying a technically appropriate style to that concept, an action film has never felt so cliché.  The ugly characters, dark alleys, and halls are perfect for a franchise gothic from the start, and the Latin choir score and existential ramblings gel perfectly with the biblical theme.  Had it come out in some other time (and, it should go without saying, evaded at least some of the flaws I stated above), I, Frankenstein could have worn such distinctions well.  In the present era, though, thanks to the success of such films as The Matrix and Batman Begins, we’ve spent a decade full of action films abusing such morose tropes.  Onward through the 2010s, just when you think Marvel’s films have won their final heroic battle against that conformity, another black sheep comes along to add to the sludge of a long mostly-black flock.

All that being said, I can say one thing emphatically positive about this movie: It’s a blast to make fun of; like no other B movie in recent memory.  I’ve had some great laughs today, all the way from hearing my friends weigh in their thoughts, through reading critics’ reviews of this movie, to writing my own.  Describe it at any length, and jokes write themselves that I didn’t even know I had before I started it.  This dubious honor may well grant the film a twisted sort of immortality—much like a lightning bolt frying a corpse.