Summer School: 'Rambo' (2008)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

When Sylvester Stallone returned to his other iconic movie character with 2006's Rocky Balboa, he took a more thoughtful approach to a character who had become a bit cartoonish, garnering positive reviews and positioning Rocky for a rejuvenation in commercial and critical success with the subsequent Creed movies. That seems to be Stallone's aim with Rambo, which brings back John Rambo after a 20-year absence, and is in some ways grittier and less cartoonish than the second and third Rambo films. But there's nothing thoughtful or sophisticated about this movie; it's a grim, shockingly violent B-movie with virtually no plot that barely runs 80 minutes before the final credits start to roll.

As the movie opens, Rambo is still living in Thailand, having traded underground stick fights for underground snake handling. He rents out his boat, helps the local handlers catch snakes and does various other odd jobs, living a seemingly quiet life. But that changes when a group of Christian missionaries from Colorado hire him to take them into Burma, where they want to bring medicine and food (and Jesus) to the persecuted Karen people. Stallone (who directed in addition to once again co-writing the screenplay) opens the movie with real-life footage of atrocities in Burma, setting the stage for movie's cheap exploitation, reducing the people of Burma (on both sides of the conflict) to faceless cannon fodder.

Like Afghanistan in Rambo III, Burma is just a convenient place for Rambo to go kill a bunch of people without feeling conflicted about what side he's on, so it's especially disingenuous for Stallone to pretend like he's doing some sort of humanitarian good deed by highlighting the paramilitary campaign against the Karen minority. The violence in this movie makes the second and third films look like G-rated Disney movies, and Stallone doesn't just rack up the body count; he also makes every kill as graphic and gory as something out of a Saw or Hostel movie, with limbs getting hacked off, heads exploding and blood and guts flying everywhere. At least the second movie humanized Rambo's Vietnamese love interest and the third movie had him bond with an Afghan kid. The Burmese characters in this movie (including the sadistic villain, played by Maung Maung Khin) have no personalities, and what little dialogue they get is often presented without subtitles, as if to further underline how unimportant they are.

The American missionaries aren't much more fully developed, and the connection between Rambo and compassionate missionary Sarah (Julie Benz) is little more than a plot device to get him in place to slaughter Burmese soldiers. Presumably Rambo's reputation has brought numerous people to him over the past two decades seeking help, so why after all this time is this the one plea he agrees to? There's no personal connection (Richard Crenna died in 2003, so Col. Trautman doesn't show up), and the missionaries' pitch is pretty weak. But Rambo helps them get into the country and then returns to save them when they inevitably get captured, leading a team of generic mercenaries that feel like the sketchy first draft of The Expendables.

As a character, Rambo is a bit more like the haunted, traumatized veteran of the first movie than the gung-ho warrior of the second and third, but that just makes his murder spree feel like drudgery, the resigned obligation of a man who's no longer fighting against the killing machine that the military turned him into. A single question from Sarah about life at home propels Rambo to the perfunctory epilogue, arriving back at the ranch apparently owned by his never-previously-mentioned father. But this movie is less a culmination of a pop-culture fixture's character arc than a tired, cynical exercise in brand extension.

Summer School: 'Rambo III' (1988)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

As absurd as Rambo: First Blood Part II was, at least it attempted to connect to John Rambo's history with the Vietnam War and his conflicted feelings about how it ended. Rambo III makes no such efforts, instead plugging its title character into a generic action story that could have been a vehicle for Chuck Norris or Dolph Lundgren just as easily as for Sylvester Stallone. After the events of the second movie, Rambo seems to have settled down in Thailand, living on the grounds of a monastery, where he helps the monks with maintenance jobs and probably meditates or something. He also, uh, participates in underground stick fights, which is where Col. Trautman (Richard Crenna) tracks him down.

Trautman and American government functionary Griggs (Kurtwood Smith) want to recruit Rambo for a mission to Afghanistan, where the Soviet army has been waging war against local rebels. Apparently there's one Soviet commander who's so ruthless and effective that Afghan forces can't make any progress against his forces. So Trautman is going on a covert mission to aid the rebels, and he wants Rambo to come along. There's some hand-waving about Rambo being the best soldier of all time or whatever, but otherwise the movie doesn't really care about why Rambo's being recruited for this particular mission. In the movie's only consistent character beat, Rambo declines the offer, but when Trautman goes in alone and is captured by the Soviets, Rambo decides he has to rescue his friend.

Up to that point, Rambo III is actually somewhat restrained compared to the previous movie, but once Rambo gets to Afghanistan, he just goes ballistic, mowing down every Russian in sight in his quest to rescue Trautman. At one time, Rambo III held the records for both the most expensive movie ever made (surpassed just a year later by Back to the Future Part II) and the most violent movie ever made (a dubious record, but certified by Guinness), and it's not hard to see that onscreen. The second half of the movie features near-constant explosions (which Rambo always easily escapes, of course) and the wholesale slaughter of enemy soldiers, along with most of the Afghan rebels who are foolish enough to offer to help Rambo.

Stallone once again co-wrote the screenplay, and he and co-writer Sheldon Lettich give Rambo some cheesy one-liners and a kid sidekick, making the character's transformation into a cartoon pretty much complete (Rambo had, of course, starred in an actual cartoon series for kids two years earlier). Crenna at least gets more to do here, even though it makes no sense that a senior officer like Trautman would be sent alone into a war zone. Marc de Jonge sneers as the Soviet villain but doesn't do much else, and Smith, who is great at playing callous government and corporate functionaries, disappears after his first couple of scenes, never turning into the kind of petty, power-tripping bureaucrat that Rambo took on in the first two movies.

Even more than the intensity and excess of its violence, Rambo III has become notorious for the way it positions the guerrilla fighters of the mujahideen (who would later form the Taliban) as the underdog heroes, with some uncomfortable political prescience when Trautman tells his Russian captor that Afghanistan will be their version of Vietnam. The movie doesn't really have any kind of political message beyond the same patriotic "might makes right" nonsense of the second installment, but its choice of the Afghan setting is telling. At this point, Rambo just needs somewhere he can go and slaughter dozens of people who can be dismissed as soulless enemy fighters, and in 1988, Afghanistan happened to be that place. The closing dedication to "the gallant people of Afghanistan" is just as hollow as all the onscreen ultraviolence that precedes it.

Summer School: 'Rambo: First Blood Part II' (1985)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

The second movie in the Rambo series (and the first to bear the character's name in the title) is the one that really cemented Rambo's place in the pop-culture consciousness. Pretty much any parody or rip-off of Rambo references this movie, which is every bit the excessive, reactionary ode to ultraviolence that First Blood was not. Much of Rambo: First Blood Part II plays like it was made by people who completely misunderstood the point of First Blood, although star Sylvester Stallone once again co-wrote the screenplay (this time with James Cameron). Maybe it was the lack of David Morrell's source novel to guide them, or maybe Stallone just wanted to bolster his career as a star of action blockbusters. Either way, Part II ends up as the epitome of '80s action cheese, pretty much ruining the character of John Rambo in the process.

The movie opens with Rambo breaking rocks as part of a prison labor gang like he's in a 1930s melodrama, and it seems like he's been living a quiet existence for the past three years. Col. Trautman (Richard Crenna) shows up to change all that, offering Rambo the chance to return to Vietnam for a covert U.S. mission investigating POW camps to see if any American soldiers are still being held prisoner. Everything that we learned about Rambo in the first movie indicates that he wouldn't return to Vietnam for anything, but he doesn't hesitate to agree to Trautman's mission, and he's immediately let out of prison, apparently no longer obligated to serve his sentence for destroying half a small town and assaulting dozens of law enforcement officers.

None of that matters, because Part II is an entirely different kind of movie, quickly putting Rambo in a position to essentially re-fight the Vietnam War. While his resentment of "not being allowed to win" was just a small part of his overall trauma in the first movie, here it's his reason for existing, and he enters the country with what seems like a vendetta against the Vietnamese. Stallone, Cameron and director George P. Cosmatos turn Rambo into the eager, trigger-happy killer that everyone in the first movie misconstrued him as, and he murders dozens of people starting almost immediately after he enters the country. Discovering that there are in fact American POWs still being held at a prison camp in Vietnam, Rambo guns down every Vietnamese soldier in sight, and then when he's abandoned by the craven bureaucrat (Charles Napier, suitably craven) running the mission, he guns down dozens more, along with some Russian soldiers for good measure.

Part II isn't just over the top in its characterization of Rambo; it's full of absurdly bombastic action sequences that obliterate the grounded sense of reality of the first movie. Rambo doesn't just shoot a bunch of people and save the POWs; he seems to be literally invulnerable to bullets fired directly at him, and he's able to trigger explosions seemingly on command. At one point he shoots an explosive-tipped arrow at a single Vietnamese soldier armed with a handgun, and the guy blows up like he's a shed full of dynamite. I saw Weird Al Yankovic's Rambo parody in UHF way before seeing this movie, and what struck me most about watching Part II is that Yankovic barely exaggerates its ridiculousness.

The movie half-heartedly suggests that the spineless American officials represented by Napier's pencil-pusher are the real enemy, but that's hard to buy when Rambo spends all his time killing the Vietnamese (except his offensively cartoonish love interest, who dies in his arms) and the Russians. His killing spree culminates in the murder of the typically massive '80s computer (with lots of flashing lights) that supposedly determines the viability of rescuing POWs. In First Blood, Rambo was unhinged and irrational, a victim of bullying and neglect. Here, he himself is the bully, the filmmakers turning his justified frustration into crowd-pleasing bloodlust.

Summer School: 'First Blood' (1982)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

The first movie in the Rambo series doesn't even have the character's name in the title, and bears little resemblance to the cheesy, over-the-top jingoistic violence that forms the franchise's pop-culture reputation. First Blood is actually quite critical of America and American policy, especially the way that veterans are discarded and mistreated. Far from an indestructible action hero, Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo is a broken man suffering from severe PTSD, abandoned by his government and without any friends or family. The Vietnam veteran literally wanders into a small town in Washington after discovering that the only other survivor from his unit has succumbed to cancer.

All Rambo wants is something to eat and maybe an honest day's work, but the intolerant sheriff (played to asshole perfection by Brian Dennehy) doesn't take kindly to long-haired drifters in his town (although Rambo's hair is barely long enough to qualify him for a .38 Special cover band), and he hassles Rambo the moment he sets foot inside the town limits. When Rambo exhibits quiet defiance to the unlawful order to leave town, the sheriff arrests him for vagrancy, taking him to a police station where the small-town cops take sadistic pleasure in their abusive power trip over a seemingly helpless vagrant.

Despite his fragile emotional state, though, Rambo is far from helpless, and when the cops' treatment triggers flashbacks to his experience being tortured by the Viet Cong, he snaps, attacking the officers and fleeing from the police station, eventually establishing a strategic position in the dense forest outside of town. He just wants them to leave him alone, but the sheriff is now consumed by vengeance, enlisting the help of the state police and the National Guard to flush Rambo out and capture him. The title refers to Rambo's assertion that the cops were the ones who drew "first blood," and throughout the movie he goes out of his way not to kill anyone, even when he's not afforded the same courtesy. The only law enforcement death is accidental, caused at least as much by overzealous bloodlust as by any of Rambo's actions.

Stallone (who also co-wrote the screenplay, based on David Morrell's novel) makes good use of his limited acting range as a taciturn, traumatized loner. Rambo barely speaks until an emotional monologue at the end, which could seem a little overwrought but works as an expression of all the pent-up emotions that this trained killer has been keeping inside for way too long. The middle stretch of the film, as Rambo hides out in the woods, taking out the ill-prepared men chasing him, is tense and stark and full of well-crafted action, with Dennehy and Richard Crenna (as the military officer who trained Rambo to be a deadly weapon) sparring sharply over what to do about the situation.

Even before the final monologue, the climax goes a little too broad, as Rambo comes into town and starts exploding and machine-gunning everything in sight (even while scrupulously avoiding endangering any civilians). But Stallone and director Ted Kotcheff keep the focus on Rambo's expression of mental trauma, and the violence is always an outgrowth of that. Rambo lashes out at both protesters and the law-enforcement establishment, showing how alienated he is from all sides of the political spectrum. First Blood isn't liberal or conservative; it's just about human frailty, something that anyone can understand and sympathize with, regardless of their political perspective.

Summer School: 'London Has Fallen' (2016)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

Nothing about Olympus Has Fallen called out for a sequel, and I'd be surprised if anyone involved in its production expected there to be a follow-up. But the movie was successful enough that three years later Gerard Butler returned as Secret Service superhero Mike Banning, once again forced to protect U.S. President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) by murdering as many terrorists as possible. London Has Fallen is even more hyper-violent than its predecessor, with more grossly xenophobic pandering, and Mike comes across less as a freakishly competent agent than as a psychopath who gets off on killing.

While the action in Olympus was pretty much confined the under-siege White House, London takes place across the city of London, as well as above it, allowing director Babak Najafi to stage more elaborate action sequences, although the shoddy effects (even shakier than in the last movie) hold him back from doing anything particularly impressive. There are car chases and helicopter crashes and lots of explosions, but none of it carries any weight. Late in the movie, there's a stitched-together single-take shot of Mike infiltrating a terrorist stronghold, and it looks just like gameplay footage from a video game, with Mike as the deliberately blank protagonist. That's representative of the movie as a whole, which has a sort of plug-and-play feel with characters thrown into a generic action-movie template.

That template involves some anonymous Middle Eastern terrorists staging an attack on world leaders who are in London for the funeral of the British Prime Minister. Olympus sacrificed the leader of South Korea as a plot catalyst; here the filmmakers raise the stakes by killing at least five heads of state within a few minutes. Of course Asher manages to escape thanks to Mike's projected invulnerability and unerring aim (he shoots multiple bad guys in the head before even getting Asher into their getaway car), and then the terrorists are focused solely on tracking him down so they can complete their revenge for an American drone strike on the head terrorist's family.

Although Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt return as the screenwriters (with additional writing from several others), London is more focused on snarky dialogue and mean-spirited jabs than Olympus was. People most remember the infamous "Go back to Fuckheadistan" line, but Mike spends the whole movie throwing out racist and dehumanizing insults that make him sound like he places no value on human life. It's a strange approach to a character who's meant to be a hero, someone with a stronger moral code than the bad guys. But Mike's really just the American flip side of the equally vengeance-driven Middle Eastern terrorists. It turns what should be a fun action movie into an angry rant about foreign policy, making it hard to enjoy even on the level of mindless trash.

Summer School: 'Olympus Has Fallen' (2013)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

When Olympus Has Fallen was released in 2013, most of the media attention was focused on it as the first of two very similar movies about terrorists attacking the White House, released just months apart. Yet somehow, while both Olympus and Roland Emmerich's White House Down (released three months later) were idiotic, loud, overblown action movies with nonsensical plotting and terrible dialogue, Olympus became a huge surprise hit, spawning an unlikely franchise for grim, single-minded Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler).

As a character, Mike is completely uninteresting, with barely any personality or back story in this movie, even with an opening prologue that provides him with motivation to seek redemption. As a conduit for violence, he's brutally efficient, plowing his way through dozens of faceless henchmen in his single-minded mission to rescue captive U.S. President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart). The movie opens with a car accident in a snowstorm as Asher and his family are on their way to a Christmas party, and Mike is following behind. Mike saves Asher from a car that's skidded off the road and is dangling from a bridge, but Asher's wife (Ashley Judd) plummets to her death, and Mike is tortured by his inability to save them both.

A year and a half later, Mike has been relegated to a desk job at the Treasury Department, but of course he manages to infiltrate the White House when it's taken over by a Korean terrorist organization. Mike is so absurdly competent that literally every other character, aside from Asher and his aides, is disposable cannon fodder. Either they're easily dispatched minions of terrorist mastermind Kang Yeonsak (Rick Yune), or they're fellow U.S. operatives who lack Mike's skills and apparent invulnerability (he makes it through the entire movie without so much as a humanizing flesh wound). Mike single-handedly takes down the bad guys, to the point where he's giving Speaker of the House (and acting president) Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) orders, as the country's top military officials sit dumbfounded in a control room.

Butler is one of Hollywood's most inexplicably successful actors, and his performance here is just as flat and one-dimensional as usual, complete with his typically terrible American accent. Poor Radha Mitchell is stuck in the suffering-spouse role as Mike's nurse wife in a handful of scenes, but Mike never comes off like a real person. The easy shorthand for this movie is "Die Hard in the White House," but John McClane had a genuine emotional life that made his heroism more meaningful (at least in the first movie). The filmmakers here (including director Antoine Fuqua in one of his worst efforts) are interested only in excessive violence and over-the-top patriotism, from the slow-motion unfurling of the American flag to Melissa Leo's secretary of defense literally reciting the Pledge of Allegiance as the bad guys drag her away. It's crass, disingenuous pandering that turned out be disgustingly effective.

Summer School: 'Toy Story 3' (2010)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

By the time Pixar got around to Toy Story 3, 11 years after the release of Toy Story 2, the property was deeply entrenched as a major part of people's childhoods -- and their adulthoods, too, thanks to the relatable themes of growing up and moving on. The third movie really leans into those themes, with a story that repeats a lot of the plot elements of the second movie, but with higher stakes, more intense emotions and more beautifully rendered computer animation. Often regarded as the best movie in the series, Toy Story 3 gets a little too emotionally manipulative for my tastes, but it's still wonderfully entertaining and emotionally rich, a perfect capper to the trilogy (even if a fourth movie is on the way this week).

Once again, the toys are worried about being discarded, this time because Andy is all grown up and headed to college. And once again, a mix-up leads to some of the toys being carted off to an unfamiliar place, in this case to the seemingly idyllic Sunnyside Daycare. While in Toy Story 2, it was just Woody (Tom Hanks) who'd been taken away, here it's Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and all the remaining supporting toys who get donated to Sunnyside, and Woody, who's been packed away to join Andy in his college dorm, must break in and save them from being demolished by reckless toddlers. So there's another rescue mission in another location where the toys meet a whole bunch of new characters, only this time the stakes are even higher (by the end, the toys are in imminent danger of being incinerated).

Still, the Sunnyside location is impressively envisioned, and the tyrannical Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear (Ned Beatty) is easily the series' best villain. Woody's fixation on staying with Andy at all costs is starting to get a little tiresome by this point, and the reversion of Buzz to an oblivious simpleton who thinks he's an actual Space Ranger seems like a step backward for the character, who's never been as fully developed as Woody in the later movies. All of the plot and character elements come together perfectly in the central prison-break sequence, though, which is far more elaborate than the breakout in Toy Story 2 and benefits from even further advances in computer animation. The new and returning characters fit together well to create an immersive world of toy-based conflict.

And then the movie kind of overplays its hand with the climax at the garbage dump, which puts the toys in actual mortal peril for the first time, and features multiple fake-outs that string the audience along (even though it's obvious that Disney/Pixar isn't going to kill off some of its most popular characters in a movie aimed at kids). The final scene between Andy and young Bonnie, as he passes his toys to a new generation, is equally manipulative in a different way, pressing way too hard on the feelings of nostalgia and regret that were more gently evoked in the second movie. Sure, it gets (mostly adult) viewers to cry, but it's a little cheap. That said, the overall sentiment is lovely, and it does find a satisfying way to end the story, while emphasizing the circle of life (to quote another Disney movie). If Pixar is getting corporate pressure to keep returning to this well, at least they do justice to it each time.

Summer School: 'Toy Story 2' (1999)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

Although the original Toy Story was a huge success and a major catalyst for the shift from hand-drawn to computer animation in feature films, 1999's Toy Story 2, released four years after the first movie, is really what cemented the series' reputation as Pixar's crown jewel and a wellspring of melancholy emotion. In the first movie, the toys were a little concerned about being usurped in Andy's favor by new arrivals, but it was a relatively minor issue that was mainly a plot device to generate conflict between Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen). The sequel is all about the fear of mortality and obsolescence, with Woody experiencing an existential crisis after his arm gets torn and he's accidentally put out at a garage sale.

Before Woody can get back to the other toys in Andy's room, he's snatched up by greedy toy collector Al (Wayne Knight) and placed in a display case in Al's apartment for imminent sale to a vintage toy museum in Japan. It turns out that Woody is based on an obscure children's TV character from the 1950s, and any toys of the characters from Woody's Roundup are now sought-after collector's items. While the first movie provided plenty of back story for the Buzz Lightyear character, the sequel does the same for Woody, including giving him a group of supporting characters. The toys for Woody's pals Jessie (Joan Cusack), Stinky Pete (Kelsey Grammer) and Bullseye the horse are already in Al's possession, just waiting for Woody to arrive so they can be a full set suitable for museum display.

Jessie has become an integral part of the Toy Story franchise, and she has lively chemistry with Woody, who of course just wants to get home to Andy. The other toys mount an extensive rescue mission to save Woody from Al's high-rise apartment, taking a detour to Al's Toy Barn, where they encounter new friends and foes. The rescue operation and the new toy-filled environment are the core elements of each movie in the series, but this movie offers probably the best versions of them, especially in the aisles of the toy store. What happens when kids leave their toys behind has emerged as the central theme of the franchise, and Woody's big decision here is whether to join the museum display or return to Andy's room and risk eventually being discarded.

Al and Stinky Pete are both worthy villains, especially since Pete's motives are not hard to understand (he wants the Roundup gang to stay together so they aren't put back into deep storage). The mission to infiltrate Al's apartment is fun and suspenseful, and the balance between humor and pathos is well-maintained. Even just four years after the original movie, techniques for computer animation have improved dramatically, and the opening Star Wars-style sequence of Buzz's adventures in space (as part of a video game) is still pretty awe-inspiring. Toy Story 2 has often been cited as the rare sequel that improves on its predecessor, but all of this movie's strengths come from the groundwork laid in the first installment. It's an expert expansion on an elegant, resonant concept.

Summer School: 'Toy Story' (1995)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

With the current proliferation of computer-animated movies, it's easy to forget how revolutionary Pixar's Toy Story was when it was released in 1995. The idea of a full-length feature created entirely via CGI that could rival the hand-drawn animated movies from Disney was unimaginable just a few years earlier, and probably still unimaginable to many when Toy Story was released. From the perspective of 2019, Toy Story looks a bit unsophisticated, with animation less detailed and elaborate than in much lower-profile current CG-animated movies (and the human characters are stuck in the uncanny valley). But even if Pixar's animators didn't have as many strands of hair or facial details to work with, they still make every character distinctive and appealing, and it's a testament to the creativity of this movie that even as CGI technology has improved drastically, the core design of all these characters has remained the same.

The cutting-edge visuals wouldn't mean much without great characters and an engaging narrative, though, and while Toy Story may seem a little thematically slight compared to later Pixar movies (and to its own sequels), it's still consistently entertaining, with a lively story, clever dialogue and well-drawn characters who've deservedly become part of the Disney pantheon (now that Disney owns Pixar). Tom Hanks' cowboy toy Woody and Tim Allen's space-ranger toy Buzz Lightyear have such great chemistry that I had forgotten that the first movie was about a rivalry between the two, with Buzz as the fancy new toy that young Andy (John Morris) gets for his birthday. Woody is insecure and jealous that Buzz may become Andy's new favorite toy, while Buzz is oblivious to his existence as an action figure and believes that he's a real space explorer.

It's a simple, straightforward story that allows for simple, straightforward lessons about believing in yourself and embracing differences, and celebrates the power of friendship (as expressed in Randy Newman's theme song "You've Got a Friend in Me," easily one of the best songs in Disney animated cinema). Woody and Buzz are both a bit self-centered and inconsiderate, which gets them into increasingly desperate situations as Andy's family prepares to move into a new house and the toys need to ensure that they aren't left behind. But the main characters are never unpleasant or irritating, and their screw-ups come from places of wanting to do better and be better, so they are always likable. The supporting characters are charming and funny, with great voice work all around (it's no wonder that Toy Story 4 plans to use archival recordings of Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head, since he seems irreplaceable).

The idea of toys that come to life when kids aren't around is such a strong hook that this movie doesn't need much else. Woody and Buzz's odyssey away from Andy's house drags at times, and its outcome is of course predetermined, but exploring the secret world of toys is the real appeal here. There's genuine creepiness among the cobbled-together toys of neighborhood bully Sid, and there's a sense of wonder to the whole new universe of toys at the kid-friendly arcade Pizza Planet. Toy Story only scratches the surface of a world with endless possibilities. It's a sweet, low-key beginning to a sweeping saga.

Summer School: 'Shaft' (2000)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

When John Singleton died a few months ago, not many tributes mentioned his 2000 reboot of the Shaft series starring Samuel L. Jackson as the title character. And it's not hard to see why, since Singleton's Shaft doesn't have the social conscience or personal vision of movies like Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice or Baby Boy, and it's not a big blockbuster product like 2 Fast 2 Furious. It's sort of a transitional piece for Singleton, mixing in the social realism and political commentary of his early work with the glossy action he shifted to later in his career. Those two elements don't always fit together neatly, but in that sense, this movie is just carrying on the Shaft tradition.

Although he's only six years younger than Richard Roundtree, Jackson plays the nephew of  Roundtree's original John Shaft, who shows up briefly in a handful of scenes but doesn't have any role in the plot. Jackson's Shaft is an NYPD detective who still believes that the system works, but he loses his faith when spoiled rich white scion Walter Wade Jr. (Christian Bale, basically playing Donald Trump Jr.) is granted bail on a murder charge against an innocent black man, and then flees the country. Shaft dedicates the next two years of his life to building a case against Wade, which mainly involves tracking down a bartender (Toni Collette) who witnessed the murder but is afraid to testify. Once Wade returns to NYC, he crosses paths with ambitious Dominican drug dealer Peoples Hernandez (Jeffrey Wright), and the two form an uneasy alliance of convenience against Shaft.

The movie is a bit ahead of its time with its focus on systemic racism and double standards in the justice system, and Bale's performance feels more relevant than ever. Wade is an over-the-top racist, but he's also sadly believable, and Bale is a more restrained villain than Wright, who puts on such a broad, cartoonish accent that I kept expecting him to ask people to say hello to his little friend. So certain aspects of this movie have aged better than others, and the details of the plot are not all that exciting (which, really, is standard for this franchise). Jackson is a good choice to take up the Shaft mantle, but his performance here is really more about playing his typical badass, wise-cracking Samuel L. Jackson character than it is about embodying the suave, righteous Shaft.

This Shaft is still committed to justice, though, even if he has to mow down a bunch of faceless henchmen in order to get it. The most iconic moments in this movie connect to Shaft's fury at injustice (when he hurls his police badge into a courtroom wall like a ninja star) and his way with the ladies (when he tells a lover "It's my duty to please that booty"), and those two elements are really what define the character, whatever generation he comes from. Singleton's movie is uneven, and it ends with a bit of a whimper, but he mostly proves himself worthy of picking up where Gordon Parks and Ernest Tidyman left off.

Summer School: 'Men in Black 3' (2012)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

Despite the box-office success of Men in Black II in 2002 and Will Smith's continued dominance as a blockbuster action star, it took a decade for the creative team to return with Men in Black 3, and the time off seems to have been well spent. MIB3 doesn't have the same spark and excitement of the original movie, but it's definite improvement on MIB2, in terms of plotting, character development and visuals, and it makes a better case for the continued exploration of the MIB world (as is coming in this week's sequel/spin-off Men in Black: International). The dynamic between MIB agents Jay (Smith) and Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) that was subdued in the second movie returns to the central focus here, albeit with an entertaining twist, and the special effects are much stronger, showcasing a new range of weird alien creations.

Jay and Kay spend the whole movie bantering and bickering, but Jones is only in about 30 minutes of the 106-minute movie, because the plot involves Jay traveling back in time to 1969 and teaming up with the younger Kay (Josh Brolin). Whether Jones wanted a reduced role or the story just called for him to be sidelined, the casting of Brolin turns out to be a genius move, and he riffs alongside Smith just as well as Jones did in the first movie. The villain here is more menacing than Lara Flynn Boyle was in MIB2, although nothing quite compares to Vincent D'Onofrio's turn in the first movie. Jemaine Clement plays Boris the Animal, a dangerous alien assassin who breaks out of a prison on the moon and travels back in time to kill Kay before Kay can capture him and lock him up.

Of course, the fate of Earth is also on the line, and Jay has to keep young Kay from being killed (and thus erased from the timeline) as well as make sure that Boris doesn't pave the way for a full-on alien invasion. As in most time travel movies, the rules are pretty inconsistent, and the franchise continuity doesn't entirely track, but as long as the story is entertaining, it doesn't really matter. For the third time in a row, Kay's character arc hinges on his longtime unrequited love for a woman (here, it's fellow MIB agent O, played in the present by Emma Thompson and in the past by Alice Eve), and that device has lost its impact from overuse. But the MIB movies are best when they focus on snappy banter and goofy aliens, and the worst elements of MIB3 are its attempts to wring emotional resonance from the relationship between Jay and Kay (including a particularly egregious retcon during the overly sentimental ending).

Clement doesn't really get to use his comedic skills as the humorless Boris, and MIB3 overall is more serious and action-oriented than the previous movies. But returning director Barry Sonnenfeld gets plenty of entertainment value out of the period setting, even if the movie's depiction of 1969 is about as realistic as Austin Powers. Brolin does a great approximation of Jones' gruff drawl, and Smith remains charismatic and likable. Thompson provides a suitable replacement for Rip Torn (whose character's funeral opens the movie) as the head of MIB, and at least the Burger King and Sprint store inside MIB headquarters are gone. Nothing has quite lived up to the potential that the first MIB offered, but at least MIB3 comes close.

Summer School: 'Shaft in Africa' (1973)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

If Shaft's Big Score! turned Richard Roundtree's Harlem private eye John Shaft into a typical action hero, Shaft in Africa attempts to turn him into James Bond, a misguided effort that put an end to the Shaft franchise on the big screen for nearly 30 years (the character made it seven episodes into a CBS TV series the following year). It's one thing to add more action to a story of corruption and gang warfare in New York City, with Shaft caught in the middle. But taking the detective out of NYC (and out of the U.S. entirely) and turning him into some sort of globe-trotting superspy loses everything that was interesting and unique about Shaft in the first place.

Sure, he still sleeps with every beautiful woman he encounters (no matter which side she's on), and he occasionally makes a comment about contemporary race relations. But most of this movie is about Shaft using ridiculous weapons and affecting silly accents and fighting a series of interchangeable henchmen en route to a cartoonish big boss. He even ends up in a Bond-style elaborate death trap early in the movie, although it's just an effort by an African tribal leader to test Shaft's worthiness for a mission to infiltrate the human trafficking route bringing unwitting Africans to work in Europe for slave-labor wages.

That's a socially conscious (and unfortunately still timely) theme for a Shaft movie to explore, but the filmmakers are far more interested in fisticuffs and explosions than they are in taking on serious issues. Both original director Gordon Parks and original writer Ernest Tidyman are gone, replaced by journeyman director John Guillerman and veteran screenwriter Stirling Silliphant (who won an Oscar for socially conscious detective story In the Heat of the Night), and even the music sounds more like a typical action-adventure score rather than the funk and jazz that Parks and Isaac Hayes brought to the first two movies. At one point when he's being presented with a bunch of Q-style gadgets, Shaft protests that he's not James Bond (he prefers to compare himself to Sam Spade), but the movie clearly lacks that perspective.

None of the other characters from the previous movies return, and the villain this time is even more of a Bond-style evil industrialist, complete with English accent, sprawling estate headquarters, seemingly endless supply of henchmen, and ridiculously gorgeous arm-candy girlfriend whom he treats with contempt. Refreshingly, the villain's girlfriend is hornier than Shaft himself, and she's the one who seduces Shaft when she's sent to help with the mission to take him out. (Of course, she then gets killed by a knife meant for Shaft, which is a very James Bond move.) Shaft's main love interest is the tribal leader's daughter, who talks casually about her clitorectemy, which is treated as a lighthearted plot point and not as evidence of barbaric misogyny. Between that tone-deaf subplot and the backward depiction of Africans, Shaft in Africa is much less progressive than its predecessors. By trying to broaden its hero's appeal, it killed anything unique and compelling about him.