Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Thursday, November 5th, 2026
YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER is one of those titles that makes sense when you see the movie, but maybe it’s not the best one for getting people to come see it. That’s okay. It’s not really for everybody anyway. But it’s definitely my shit.
How’s this for a selling point: when Mahershala Ali (ROXANNE ROXANNE) finally gave up on ever making the BLADE movie he’d been developing for six years, he reunited with the first director who had been attached, Bassam Tariq (MOGUL MOWGLI), to make an indie movie that would take advantage of all the sword training Marvel had provided for him. You want to see that, right? I sure wanted to see that.
I do think his performance in this might be influenced by how he would’ve played Blade, but it’s really not a BLADE-like movie at all. It’s a totally different thing I also love: what I like to call arthouse badass, though “arthouse” might be overstating it. I’m just trying to describe movies about badasses that are channeling more LE SAMOURAI, POINT BLANK and GET CARTER than, say, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS; crime movies with elements of action, done with a dry, indie drama approach, but cool. Movies like THE AMERICAN, THE LIMEY, DRIVE, RUST AND BONE, REDBELT, DESTROYER, THE KILLER (2023), A VIGILANTE, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD, HAYWIRE, ONLY GOD FORGIVES, EASTERN PROMISES, THE BOUNCER, SPARTAN, HELL OR HIGH WATER, and the king of them is GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI, which is an obvious influence on this one.
But Ali’s character Latif is less extreme than Ghost Dog. He says he has a code, but it’s just to not use guns, despite a military past. Being a sword-wielding hitman is his sordid secret life, not his identity. His primary concern during the movie is to be a father.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abubakr Ali, arthouse badass, Bassam Tariq, Giancarlo Esposito, hitman, John Cho, Laith Nakli, Mahershala Ali, Muslim, swords, Tiffany Boone, Tramell Tillman
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime, Drama | 16 Comments »
Thursday, October 22nd, 2026
STREET FIGHTER (2026) is the new film based on the Street Fighter video game franchise. I have less of an affinity for Street Fighter than Mortal Kombat since it’s not one of the few games I’ve played, but come on. Larger-than-life characters who live to engage in martial arts competitions, sometimes with cartoonish powers? Obviously it piques my interest. Maybe I’m even the prime audience for this movie since I’m Interested In This Sort of Shit (IiTSoS) but with no preconceived notions of how these characters or concepts need to be adapted. And I have evidence to support this theory.
1. I thought STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI was kind of fun. It has a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes.
2. I went to see this with a friend who’s a games journalist and he had all kinds of complaints afterwards that I didn’t relate to.
3. When the first trailer came out that showed this version’s cartoonish approach, the buzz on the internet seemed to be “that looks like the absolute worst shit ever shat from a butt,” but when I saw it I thought, “Oh wow, I gotta see that!”
I was also intrigued to read that director/co-writer Kitao Sakurai was one of the main people behind The Eric André Show and also directed André’s very funny movie BAD TRIP. That’s just not who you would expect to do a video game movie, suggesting it could be something interesting. Had I known that Sakurai had, as a child actor, made his debut in BEST OF THE BEST 3: NO TURNING BACK, that would’ve also been a selling point too. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 50 Cent, Alexander Volkanovski, Andrew Koji, Andrew Schulz, Callina Liang, Capcom, Cody Rhodes, David Dastmalchian, Don Lee, Eric Andre, Hirooki Goto, Kitao Sakurai, Kyle Mooney, Mel Jarnson, Noah Centineo, Olivier Richters, Orville Peck, video games, Vidyut Jammwal
Posted in Reviews, Action, Videogame | 6 Comments »
Thursday, October 8th, 2026
The unanswerable question: is it called READY OR NOT: HERE I COME, or READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME? Depends if you ask the opening credits or the closing credits. I guess we get to pick.
Would you believe there was a seven year gap between this sequel and the first READY OR NOT? I was surprised it had been that long. But I suppose directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have since made SCREAM, SCREAM VI and ABIGAIL*, so the math does add up. The fact that I found all of those to be perfectly fine, not great, may have contributed to me not getting around to this one in theaters (even though I did get to the in-some-ways-similar THEY WILL KILL YOU). But it’s also why seeing it now I’m surprised at what a solid and enjoyable sequel it is. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood, Guy Busick, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, Maia Jae, Masa Lizdek, Matt Bett, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Olivia Cheng, R. Christopher Murphy, Radio Silence, Samara Weaving, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Tyler Gillett, Varun Saranga
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026
ONE LAST SHOT is an event movie within the world of indie action: director James Nunn (GREEN STREET 3: NEVER BACK DOWN), writer Jamie Russell and star Scott Adkins have successfully completed an ambitious trilogy. Like ONE SHOT (2021) and ONE MORE SHOT (2024), this is a military action thriller shot ROPE-style (simulating one unbroken take). To do this kind of action on a VOD budget and schedule is an astonishing technical achievement, but honestly the stories are engrossing enough that I don’t think about that too much while watching them.
As I said about ONE MORE SHOT, I think this new one would make enough sense if you hadn’t seen the others, but I recommend watching them first because they do happen one after the other. That’s also a unique thing about this as a part 3: Adkins’ character Jake Harris begins the movie with two full movies worth of injuries and exhaustion. One of the people transporting him to the location of this movie says that he should be in the ER, not getting new orders. But you know how it is. He’s the only man for the job. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dan Styles, Dolph Lundgren, Hannah Ware, James Nunn, Jill Winternitz, Kane Kosugi, long takes, Scott Adkins, Steven Cree, Tim Man
Posted in Reviews, Action | 7 Comments »
Thursday, September 17th, 2026
HOPE is the new movie from the great South Korean director Na Hong-jin, his first since the horror movie THE WAILING nine years ago. Before that he did two really excellent, bleak crime movies, THE CHASER (2008) and THE YELLOW SEA (2010). This shows some of the detail, personality and mastery of those films, but it’s Na’s version of going into blockbuster mode – a big, action-packed monster movie. And though it shares some of the matter-of-fact horrors of his previous movies (it’s not the anti-septic death and destruction we’re used to from PG-13 Hollywood), it’s pleasant by comparison, because it’s very funny, and even a little warm at times. (Other times it’s mean as hell.)
Oddly, a movie it kept reminding me of was TREMORS, because it’s about the quirky residents of this small, rural area called Hope Harbor gathering their resources to deal with some crazy shit involving a monster. The lead is the police chief, Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, THE WAILING), who in the opening scene pulls up to the spot where some guys found a dead cow with giant claw marks on her. His second cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung, HUMINT) has gathered some of the boys and their hunting rifles – there’s a great running joke that Bum-seok keeps being surprised by how many illegal guns everybody has – and they tell him about sightings of a tiger in the area. He’s incredulous until they insist and tell him detailed stories about it, but later we find out they were just fucking with him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alicia Vikander, Cameron Britton, Eum Moon-suk, Hoyeon, Hwang Jung-min, Im Hyun-sik, Lee Sang-hee, Michael Fassbender, Na Hong-jin, Taylor Russell, Zo In-sung
Posted in Reviews, Action, Monster, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, September 9th, 2026
August 23, 1996
SOLO is a sci-fi action movie starring Mario Van Peebles (EXTERMINATOR 2, DELIVERY BOYS, RAPPIN’, JAWS: THE REVENGE, POSSE, FULL ECLIPSE, GUNMEN, HIGHLANDER III, PANTHER) as an android super soldier. General Clyde Haynes (Barry Corbin, MY SCIENCE PROJECT) explains the idea upfront: “He’s proficient at all types of combat. He has no family, no friends, not even a Social Security number. If he’s wounded beyond repair, we throw him away. No guilt, no worries, no medical benefits. No one will cry when Solo is gone. We’ll simply build another one.” (Personally I think it’s rude that he says that right in front of him.)
One issue with this two billion dollar program comes out in the first mission we see, an attack on an airstrip being built for rebels in an unnamed South American country. (No, not Val Varde, I think I would recognize it.) When Solo sees that civilians are being forced to build the airstrip it clearly upsets him, and he overrides his commands to avoid blowing them up. (Also he takes home a tarantula as a pet.) There’s a great part where the humans detonating the bombs on the outskirts have given up on Solo and abandoned him, then there’s a thunk on their helicopter and he’s hanging from the bottom.
Afterwards his creator (?), the young hotshot scientist Dr. Bill Stewart (twentysomething Adrien Brody!) can sense his trepidation, and is impressed that a program somehow has emotions. (Disclaimer that I feel like I need to include in every other sci-fi review now: this is a completely not real sci-fi concept that has poetic meaning in fictional stories, but if someone today is telling you it will really happen they are a scammer, a mark, or a kook, in my opinion.)
The General and especially his asshole colonel Frank Madden (William Sadler, BILL & TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY) are pissed at Solo, who argues that he’s programmed to prevent harm to noncombatants. Madden, of course, claims the civilians count as combatants because they’re “working for” the rebels. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abraham Verduzo, Adrien Brody, Barry Corbin, Buddy Joe Hooker, David Corley, Demian Bichir, Mario Van Peebles, William Sadler
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 14 Comments »
Monday, September 7th, 2026
After spending nearly a decade making the literally gigantic FX extravaganzas GODZILLA VS. KONG and GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE, director Adam Wingard has returned to the territory of YOU’RE NEXT and THE GUEST – horror/action/thriller hybrids where he doesn’t have as much money but can kinda do what he wants. This time he’s armed with that blockbuster experience and a bigger small budget (three times as much as THE GUEST) courtesy of A24, so he and his long time writer Simon Barrett (FRANKENFISH) had a chance to really let ‘er rip. I thought. Maybe next time.
I hope other people will get more out of it than I did. It has many of the elements for a movie I could love. Adria Arjona (TRIPLE FRONTIER, 6 UNDERGROUND, MORBIUS, HIT MAN, but mainly Bix from Andor) is very charismatic as Celeste, a cynical war vet who purposely isolates herself in a desert town, living in and managing a trailer park, her only loves in the world the daughter she has partial custody of and the illegal stockpile of guns in the cabinet. She’s not ready when her more responsible ex (Jacob Scipio, WITHOUT REMORSE) drops off young Daisy (Blake Kennedy) on an unscheduled weekend. She missed the text about it because she was out shooting jack o’lanterns. So compared to everyone else she is pretty ready for the other unexpected guests, the rampaging super soldiers who escape from a nearby secret military site and start killing everybody. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Wingard, Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Drew Starkey, Eric Wareheim, Jacob Scipio, Michael Biehn, Rebecca Hall, Reginald VelJohnson, Simon Barrett, super soldiers
Posted in Reviews, Action, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 10 Comments »
Friday, September 4th, 2026
August 9, 1996
John Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM L.A. is a movie that I still like, but (kind of like THE FRIGHTENERS) not as much as I did at the time. Come to think of it maybe part of that was that Carpenter had been, up to that point, almost entirely a video experience for me. When I saw BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA in the theater I was too young to be aware of who the director was. ESCAPE FROM L.A. was the first time I was purposely watching a John Carpenter film on the big screen, excited to see Kurt Russell play Snake Plissken again, his theme music blasting through the then-state-of-the-art THX sound system.
But I remember people trashing it at the time. Carpenter hadn’t done a sequel before, they didn’t like seeing him rehash a previous story, they didn’t like seeing c.g. in one of his movies, at least not like this. In many cases, I have to say, they really didn’t get the joke. I was, and still am, a person that finds it funny to move the anti-hero from a classic ‘80s urban dystopia over to the west coast and make him surf with Peter Fonda. Not everyone feels that way. They’re missing out on some of life’s beauty, in my opinion.
Okay, the c.g. complaint, I still get that. There are shots that look bad for the time, and that was 30 years ago. On the other hand, I’d guess it’s around 30 seconds of screen time, and lit murkily enough that it doesn’t look as shiny and ridiculous as most of the similarly budgeted stuff from the same era. One of those shots is underwater at night. What I found interesting on this viewing was that as the movie ages it looks and feels much more like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK than it seemed to at the time, when it felt too current. The arc of time is starting to merge them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A.J. Langer, Bruce Campbell, Cliff Robertson, Debra Hill, Georges Corraface, James Lew, Jeff Imada, John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, Michelle Forbes, Pam Grier, Peter Fonda, Robert Carradine, Shirley Walker, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Valeria Golino
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 18 Comments »
Thursday, September 3rd, 2026
TOXIC: A FAIRY TALE FOR GROWN-UPS is a new Kannada-language Indian film that I went and saw at the multiplex on opening day last week. I’d been waiting for it since they played the trailer before RZA’s ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE and I felt like I’d seen God. I think it already left that theater, but maybe you can find it in your area, so I want to get the word out. I’m a TOXIC crusader.
I was already sold on the movie when I learned that American martial arts legend J.J. “Loco” Perry (competitor in BLOODSPORT III, choreographer of UNDISPUTED II) is one of the action directors. That makes it an event in my book. You might wonder why he’d want to go overseas to work behind the scenes after graduating to director with DAY SHIFT, THE KILLER’S GAME and AFTERBURN, but this was an opportunity he couldn’t turn down. In a Q&A at Big Bad Film Fest recently (as heard on Action for Everyone), he said that UNDISPUTED II was shot in 30 days, all the movies he’s directed were 42, Chad Stahelski’s upcoming HIGHLANDER was 125, but TOXIC was 225! It’s one of the most expensive movies ever made in India, and taking a whipping in their media for not making the money back. But ACAB includes armchair studio accountants, so I will break with those pigs and thank the producers for investing so much in my entertainment.
TOXIC is an operatic, ultra-maximalist gangster action movie co-written, produced and starring (in a dual role) a superstar called Yash, credited as “Rocking Star Yash.” That it’s directed and co-written by a woman, the former actress Geetu Mohandas, adds an interesting layer to its depiction of masculinity, which is so over the top there’s simply no chance we’ll ever be able to locate the top again. R.I.P. The Top. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Akshay Oberoi, Darrell D'Silva, Geetu Mohandas, Huma Qureshi, J.J. Perry, Kyle Paul, Rocking Star Yash
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026
August 2, 1996
Roald Dahl was my favorite author when I was a little kid, but I didn’t know his book Matilda because it didn’t come out until ’88. Watching the movie version again the story seems kinda sweet and wholesome by his standards, even though it envisions the world as a place full of cruel, crude idiots. Its warmth lies in its heroine, a smart girl who finds an angelically supportive teacher to help her through her difficulties. Similar idea, but a little more pure than a poor boy winning a chocolate factory. (I wasn’t that surprised when I read that an editor had to talk Dahl out of his initial version where Matilda uses her psychokinetic powers to torment innocent parents and help her teacher gamble.)
Director Danny DeVito (THROW MOMMA FROM THE TRAIN) must’ve still been concerned about MATILDA (adapted by Nicholas Kazan [MOBSTERS, DREAM LOVER] and Robin Swicord [SHAG]) being a little mean, because he cast himself as the kind-sounding narrator to balance out playing the asshole dad, Harry Wormwood. Harry and his wife Zinnia (Rhea Perlman, CLASS ACT) somehow raised their daughter Matilda (the precocious Mara Wilson, MRS. DOUBTFIRE) to the age of six without noticing – or at least not approving of – her brilliance. She loves to read, but has to sneak out to go to the library. Harry, an unethical used car salesman, forces her to watch TV junk and refuses to let her go to school, because “Who would sign for the packages?”
She’s delighted when he finally enrolls her at Crunchem Hall Elementary, but unfortunately it was just to help sell a car to principal Agatha Trunchbull (Pam Ferris, MEANTIME), an abusive monster who has a dartboard with pictures of students in her office and frequently locks kids in an iron maiden closet she calls “the Chokey.” A former shot putter, hammer and javelin thrower who competed in the 1972 Summer Olympics, she uses those skills to throw children long distances. Somebody should do something about this, but nobody’s up to it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Davis, Brian Cox, Danny DeVito, Embeth Davidtz, Fred Ward, J.F. Lawton, Josh Friedman, Keanu Reeves, Mara Wilson, Michael Shannon, Morgan Freeman, Nicholas Kazan, Pam Ferris, Paul Reubens, Rachel Weisz, Rhea Perlman, Roald Dahl, Robin Swicord, Tracey Walter, Tzi Ma
Posted in Action, Family | 11 Comments »
