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Billy gets grounded4/12/2024 When that idea fell apart, Collins was recast as Beckett's estranged son Brandon for the soft reboot Sniper: Reloaded. Collins was originally cast as a young Tom Beckett in Vietnam, while Berenger would have played the older Beckett in the present day. The actor was seemingly finished following the third movie, though the original plan for a fourth film was a dual-timeline story. The original had enough of a following to warrant additional movies, while Berenger himself was still a name. But when playing Maya as a brooding loner, she often seems merely impassive.Sniper 2 and 3 were produced during an era when studios were looking at their old IPs with the intent of making straight-to-DVD sequels. Cox, who had never acted before being cast in the part, is a commanding physical presence, and she acquits herself well in the show’s nicely choreographed fight scenes. Marvel’s vivid portrait of a contemporary Pakistani-American household did. (There’s even a nod to Tom Laughlin’s run of 1970s movies dramatizing the mistreatment of the Navajo Maya’s cousin’s dog is named Billy Jack.) But the show is missing the scenes that would connect that history to the present, the way Ms. That lineage is emphasized by casting Alaqua Cox opposite iconic Native American actors like Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal, as well as rising stars like Devery Jacobs. Wolverine doesn’t come from a long line of Wolverines, but Maya’s strength is her connection to her history, not something that isolates her from it. ![]() There’s a potent idea in here somewhere, especially as against the usual Marvel paradigm of characters gaining their superpowers by accident. How Does the New Mean Girls Stack Up Against the Original? We Graded Each One. The Wildest Ending in TV History? We May Have a New Winner. The Bananas Ending of Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal’s Sci-Fi Thriller, Explained In Japan, Naomi Osaka Is an Object of Adoration and Fascination. Does Hollywood Have Any Idea What to Replace Them With? Read More In the comics, Maya’s power is to perfectly copy another person’s movements, but on the show, it appears to be channeling the collective strength of her Choctaw predecessors, although by the end of the third episode, all we’ve seen is her getting a bit strong when her hands glow. (The caption reads “1200 A.D., Alabama”-a good gag.) And the third begins with a faux silent movie-yet more shades of Killers of the Flower Moon-about the tribal police, the Lighthorsemen. The second flashes back to the Middle Ages, showing one of Maya’s ancestors fighting a burly male warrior in a battle against exile. ![]() The first begins with a riff on the Choctaw creation myth, with ancient people rising out of miniature volcanoes under a glowing cavern roof, which collapses and then forces them into the outside world. Its most intriguing gambit is to open each installment with an episode in the history of Maya’s tribe, the Choctaw. With as many as seven writers credited on some episodes, Echo feels both overworked and unfinished, as if pieces were hacked out and rearranged at random. Instead of fleshing out its setting, Echo just dithers, haphazardly introducing plot points and then seeming to forget them for long stretches of time. ![]() As I watched Renner pull off his mask for a dramatic reveal, I spontaneously imagined a person sitting behind me, whispering to their date, “Which one is he?” It’s all by way of tying Echo to the end of the Hawkeye series from 2021, where Maya turns on Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), the crime lord for whom she’s been serving as an enforcer, and shoots him in the face. By the end of the first half-hour, we’ve been treated to a lengthy brawl between Alaqua Cox’s Maya Lopez and Charlie Cox’s Daredevil and a cameo by Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, with neither of the latter identified or introduced on screen for new viewers. And yet it takes only a few minutes for the show to utterly betray that promise. The first episode of Echo, which premieres this Tuesday, lingers on the Marvel Spotlight logo longer than it does the one for Marvel Studios, introducing the new banner with fanfare by Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino to underline the sense of occasion. Echo, the MCU’s latest TV series, would mark the debut of a new line called Marvel Spotlight, one that would allow them to “bring more grounded, character-driven stories to the screen … focusing on street-level stakes over large MCU continuity.” In other words, you wouldn’t need to be deeply versed in the now 16-year history to understand what the heck was going on, a welcome (and much-needed) departure from a long string of releases that have left fans yawning and Disney scrambling. In early November, less than a week before The Marvels opened to the worst box office in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the company announced it was time for a fresh start.
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