Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Friday, June 26th, 2026
June 21, 1996
Today, as I try to catch up on my slightly lagging retrospective, I will take a look at two movies released on the same day a year and a week ago. One is a lavish Disney animated musical, the other a violent Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle, each of those art forms seemingly just a little past their peak. Both are about an unusual man trying to protect a woman from bad guys, and they were tied for the most expensive movie of 1996, having budgets of around $100 million.
Disney had experienced the wildly successful “new renaissance” streak of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ALADDIN and THE LION KING, followed by POCAHONTAS, which was a moneymaker, but not as much as its predecessors, and not as well reviewed (except by me). Now comes THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, from BEAUTY AND THE BEAST directors Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise. Like POCAHONTAS it’s very Broadway influenced and addresses surprisingly heavy topics for a fuckin G-rated cartoon. It had a bigger budget and the animation is more showy, but in my opinion not nearly as appealing. With the villain in particular it kinda looks like they’re trying to do PRINCE OF EGYPT era Dreamworks but don’t quite know the style.
I’m speaking of the cruel, sexually repressed, genocidal Judge Claude Frollo (Tony Jay, TWINS), who is engaged in a bigoted crusade against the Romani people in Paris. In the opening scene he kills a fleeing immigrant holding a deformed baby. The archdeacon (David Ogden Stiers, BETTER OFF DEAD…, DOC HOLLYWOOD) witnesses the whole thing and guilts him into not dumping the baby in a well, instead agreeing to raise him as his own, by which he means name him Quasimodo and lock him in the bell tower of the cathedral. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Kimbrough, Chuck Russell, Danny Nucci, Demi Moore, Gary Trousdale, James Caan, James Coburn, James Cromwell, Jason Alexander, Kevin Kline, Kirk Wise, Mary Wickes, Robert Pastorelli, Tom Hulce, Tony Jay, Vanessa L. Williams, Walon Green
Posted in Reviews, Action, Cartoons and Shit | 15 Comments »
Thursday, June 25th, 2026
SWITCHBLADE SISTERS is from 1975, but I’m considering it Slam Evil Summer, because it was re-released June 15, 1996, thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s fandom and his label Rolling Thunder Pictures. It’s directed by Jack Hill (SPIDER BABY, COFFY, FOXY BROWN), and it’s his penultimate movie as a director (the last being SORCERESS in 1982).
I did not see this in a theater, I had to wait to rent the VHS, but it must’ve been a great time with the right audience. It starts off so strong with the wah-wah infused theme song “Black Hearted Woman” playing over a documentary-style black and white photo montage of tough ladies in a world of boarded up houses covered in graffiti. Establishing the landscape.
And then it says “Music by MEDUSA”? What kind of badass group is that!? (Apparently it’s frequent Roger Corman composer and lounge music pioneer Les Baxter.) I’m not sure who took the photos, but the credited title designer is Bill Levey, director of BLACKENSTEIN and MONACO FEVER. His IMDb bio says he was childhood friends with James Dean, hung out with Elvis and discovered Patrick Swayze (who he directed in SKATETOWN U.S.A.).
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bob Minor, gangs, Jack Hill, Jeannie Epper, Kate Murtagh, Marlene Clark, Robbie Lee, Rolling Thunder Pictures
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 10th, 2026
The martial arts movie THE FURIOUS is coming to American theaters this week, and one of the most no-shit-Sherlock predictions you could make right now is that it will be the action movie of the year. It’s an undeniable banger. Everyone who sees it mentions THE RAID, an easy comparison to make not only because Joe Taslim is one of the two leads and Yayan “Mad Dog” Ruhian is one of the villains, but because it just has that same rare sense of relentless energy and unbridled, violent invention. The story has some of THE RAID’s elegant simplicity, but it’s not as contained, there’s much more variance in location and styles of action. It’s a huge feast of high level martial arts, and luckily I came in hungry.
It was one of my most anticipated films even before it started playing film festivals and igniting explosions of superlatives. That’s because it’s an international supergroup, an ensemble of greats from several countries doing top level work for Japan’s two best fight choreographers, who have a good claim to being the current world’s best. The director is Kenji Tanigaki, long time Donnie Yen collaborator and action director for the incredible RUROUNI KENSHIN series. Not too long ago he was the stunt coordinator for TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS: WALLED IN – if you saw that you know that’s a credit to brag about. Then the action director is Kensuke Sonomura, director of HYDRA, BAD CITY and GHOST KILLER and action director of my beloved BABY ASSASSINS movies and tv show. Each of these have a very distinct style – Tanigaki’s involves wires and cartoonish exaggeration, while Sonomura’s is more grounded and technical, quick slashing moves and handwork, but with spinning and sliding while firing guns in close quarters – and I love seeing them find a hybrid utilizing all of their powers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian Le, JeeJa Yanin, Joe Taslim, Joey Iwanaga, Kenji Tanigaki, Kensuke Sonomura, Xie Miao, Yang Enyou, Yayan Ruhian
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 16 Comments »
Monday, June 8th, 2026
I must confess that I was really excited for MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. My childhood had its share of dumb cartoons and toys, but those spring-loaded muscle dudes were the ones that power-punched deepest into my brain. I don’t have strong opinions about the Eternian canon or whatever, it’s not holy scripture. It’s more like an incredible mural that I invest my own meaning into. The character designs and concepts, and also the overall aesthetic of fantasy barbarian paintings mixed with cyborgs and colorful vehicles shaped like spiders and sharks and buzzsaws and shit… it just makes me happy to think about it. I mean, there’s a castle with a giant skull on the front of it, and they gave that to the good guy! Even though by all rights the bad guy should’ve had it because he is a skull!
My attachment to Masters of the Universe isn’t about childhood nostalgia – it’s about a very specific, timeless vibe that came out of Mattel artists brainstorming crazy toy gimmicks, and the studio that made Fat Albert reverse engineering a cartoon out of them, together stumbling across one of the most potent mixes of stupid and awesome ever formulated. So I’ve had many years of anticipation as one movie adaptation after another has been dunked in the Evil Horde Development Slime Pit. I didn’t expect the world. I just figured I would get a kick out of whatever they came up with because even if it was bad it would be a modern movie where, like, Trap Jaw fights Ram Man. It would make me chuckle, at least.
Then a dangerous thing happened: they actually made the movie, and with a director that seemed likely to do a good job. Travis Knight is the head of the stop motion studio Laika, director of KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, and he also did BUMBLEBEE, the one actually good Transformers movie, the one that opens by capturing the Cybertronian cartoon shit Michael Bay was never interested in, then turns into a new thing, a heartfelt ‘80s-set teen movie IRON GIANT with a very likable Hailee Steinfeld befriending the titular alien robot Volkswagen. We can get into Knight’s peculiar background later, but his movies so far have been really good.
I was concerned when I read a plot summary that sounded like a GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY rip off (this He-Man grew up on Earth), but the trailers made the concept look okay, gave me that excitement of seeing Mekaneck and shit in live action, and when there started being good buzz from people not invested like me I thought holy shit, what if this is really good?
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE has a great cast, an amazing theme song by Daniel Pemberton featuring Brian May on guitar, it’s well designed, has some big cool sets and colorful costumes, gives me the joy of putting these ridiculous characters in live action, giving them cool super-powered fights. It’s so much of what I wanted. But I think they fucked it up pretty badly.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, Alex Litvak, Alison Bree, barbarians, based on a fucking toy, Camila Mendes, Charlotte Riley, Chris Butler, Daniel Pemberton, Dave Callaham, Idris Elba, James Purefoy, Jared Leto, Mattel, Michael Finch, Morena Baccarin, Nicholas Galitzine, Travis Knight
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords | 55 Comments »
Thursday, May 28th, 2026
THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU is kind of a different approach to a Star Wars picture: a small, standalone adventure. The fate of the galaxy is not at stake, there is no chosen one, no prophecy. It’s not even a prequel or an origin story. Coming from the popular Disney+ series The Mandalorian has given people the impression that it requires homework, but I assure you there is nothing at all you need to know that’s not there in the movie. It’s just one story about the titular bounty hunters on a mission, and not the mission that changed it all. Just a mission. To misquote M. Bison, it’s not the most important day of your life. It’s just Tuesday.
So it’s in the same world I love visiting in that epic space opera, but truly it’s a western or a samurai movie. That’s what I like about the show too, and I was skeptical about turning it into a movie instead of doing another season, but it turns out it’s fun to see these guys in one contained story with movie level production values. It’s light on the force, but high on some of the other things I love in Star Wars: a bunch of fantastical settings, outlandish creatures and robots, lots of them animated, some puppets, even some stop motion by Phil Tippet Studios. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brendan Wayne, Dave Filoni, Hemky Madera, Jeremy Allen White, Jon Favreau, Lateef Crowder, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Pascal, Phil Tippet, Sigourney Weaver, space western, Star Wars
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 32 Comments »
Tuesday, May 26th, 2026
May 22, 1996
By my count, there are ten summer of ’96 movies that turned out to be the first of a series. Usually only a series of two, though. THE CRAFT, TWISTER, THE ARRIVAL, ERASER, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, INDEPENDENCE DAY, and TRAINSPOTTING each got one sequel. Five of those were decades later, three were direct-to-video. DRAGONHEART had surprising longevity, with its fourth DTV sequel released in 2020. But only MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, which reached its 30th anniversary last week, got seven theatrical sequels, all with Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames returning, all good in my opinion. Most of them very good. So it’s arguably the best summer of ’96 movie and the most consequential.
I have reviewed it before, eleven years ago, so consider this a companion review, because I stand by what I wrote then. I still think MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE is a prime example of a blockbuster done right, because yes, “it’s a big movie star vehicle, based on an existing ‘property,’ climaxes in a noisy special effects-laden action spectacle, did end up becoming a franchise,” but “it is a Brian De Palma movie, it doesn’t feel like he had to compromise anything. He got to take his style and his interests and experiment with them on a little larger canvas than usual.” It’s still something I get excited for when it happens – a visionary director getting a budget to put their stamp on some familiar piece of pop culture – but the franchise machinery has gotten so much stronger. They’re better at keeping somebody like that under control, plugging them into an existing thing, letting them kind of make it theirs, but not entirely. That would be reckless. They’d have to disavow them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian De Palma, David Koepp, Robert Towne, Tom Cruise
Posted in Reviews, Action, Thriller | 25 Comments »
Thursday, May 14th, 2026
I have not revisited MORTAL KOMBAT (2021) since at-home-viewing during pre-vaccine COVID times. My review opens by calling it “a perfectly okay movie,” and that’s my memory of it. Good cast, some fun fatalities, but it was a movie I’d anticipated for some time and it was sadly middle of the road. Its attempt to MCU-ify the Mortal Kombat mythology was not terrible, but not nearly as fun as the brazen, brain-damaged approach of Paul Wonder Stuff Anderson’s 1995 version.
MORTAL KOMBAT II comes from the same director (Simon McQuoid) but a different screenwriter (Jeremy Slater, FANTASTIC FOUR 2015, GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE), and it’s one of those sequels that’s being made with the understanding that nobody liked the first one very much and they gotta convince everyone this is gonna be different. (How many of those are there, even? Off the top of my head I’m only coming up with GI JOE: RETALIATION.)
They were pretty much required by law to center this one on the titular tournament that strangely didn’t get around to happening during part 1. They also made the two most popular game characters not featured last time into the leads, while the previous non-game audience identification dude becomes just a guy who’s on the team already when they get there. You’d never guess from this that part 1 was all about Cole Young (Lewis Tan, FISTFUL OF VENGEANCE) unless you pick up on the line that’s there to explain that his wife and kid won’t be in the movie. I like Tan and feel bad he got sidelined, but what they do to his character (SPOILER: squash his head with a giant hammer like he’s one of Gallagher’s watermelons) is really fuckin funny. He takes one for the team. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adeline Rudolph, CJ Bloomfield, Desmond Chiam, fighting tournament, Hiroyuki Sanada, Jeremy Slater, Jessica McNamee, Joe Taslim, Josh Lawson, Karl Urban, Lewis Tan, Ludi Lin, Martyn Ford, Max Huang, Mehcad Brooks, Simon McQuoid, Tadanobu Asano
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts, Videogame | 15 Comments »
Tuesday, May 12th, 2026
May 10, 1996
I don’t remember ORIGINAL GANGSTAS playing in a theater near me, but it apparently opened on 474 screens, enough to make it into the top 10 (at #9, below JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, which had been out a whole month already). I was excited for it because it was basically a Blaxploitation family reunion. It stars Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree and Ron O’Neal, it was back when you actually had to have them all on set together to make that work, and director Larry Cohen (BLACK CAESAR, HELL UP IN HARLEM) did manage to get a shot of them all in a row firing guns in front of an exploding car. In the dark, though. But I think it’s them.
Unfortunately the script by Aubrey K. Rattan (HIT LIST) doesn’t do anything beyond trudging through the most basic tropes you expect, and Cohen doesn’t manage to find much energy, momentum or style in it (much less humor). Unsurprisingly, but crucially, the score by Vladimir Horunzhy (ELVES) could not hold a candle to the worst and most generic of ‘70s studio musician jams, and the modern songs we hear bits of don’t do much even though they got Ice-T, Geto Boys and MC Ren to contribute. This movie has the most famous faces of the genre, but not a single drop of the juice. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aubrey K. Rattan, blaxploitation, Charles Napier, Dru Down, Eddie Bo Smith Jr., Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Larry Cohen, Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree, Robert Forster, Ron O'Neal, Shyheim, Wings Hauser
Posted in Reviews, Action | 5 Comments »
Monday, May 11th, 2026
May 10, 1996
They’re scientists, but they’re cowboys. And they follow the wind. When they get the call they strut and they smile at each other knowingly as they hop into their Jeeps and trucks, slam on the gas and hurtle toward the danger, thinking nothing of it except ha ha, what a fun time we’re having here. They playfully exchange lingo-filled banter over the CB as they look up to the sky or down to the dots on their computer screens. They each have their own quirks and their own styles of musical accompaniment and their own ways of yelling “WAHOO!” in the face of God’s mighty wrath.
They are the wildpeople of weather, the maniacs of meteorology, the tornado terrorists, the thunder jockeys, the Doppler demons, the Hell’s Angels of nerds. They are the storm chasers, and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until they deploy their new device designed to release hundreds of small floating sensors into a tornado to measure it from the inside and obtain data that could potentially help improve early storm warning systems in the future.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ruck, Alexa Vega, Anne-Marie Martin, Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes, disaster movies, Helen Hunt, Jami Gertz, Jeff Nathanson, Jeremy Davies, Joey Slotnick, Joss Whedon, Lois Smith, Michael Crichton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Scott Thomson, Sean Whalen, Steven Zaillian, Todd Field, Wendle Josepher
Posted in Reviews, Action | 24 Comments »
Thursday, May 7th, 2026
ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE, the new movie written and directed by The RZA, is a little bit deranged. I say that in a neutral way. I kind of like that it’s crazy, but I don’t overall think it’s a movie that works. When I describe what it’s about to you it’s going to sound like a pulpy exploitation movie, a ’70s style revenge thriller with a modern GET OUT type edge, something that could’ve been branded as part of a GRINDHOUSE double feature if those had become an ongoing concern like V*H*S. (In fact it has a “Quentin Tarantino Presents” credit and an appearance by Red Apple Cigarettes.) But most of the time the tone is very earnest, kinda dour, sometimes feeling like a PSA. And when the hero finally gets to fight the lead villain the score (by Tyler Bates and The RZA) chooses not to hype us up like it’s the big pay off, but just give us some synth textures, like it’s sad. It’s kind of a downer. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Blair Underwood, Cliff Weissman, Darin Heames, Emyri Crutchfield, Harry Goodwins, Isaiah R. Hill, James Lee Thomas, Jason Isbell, Michael Harney, Morgan Brown, Paris Jackson, Quentin Tarantino presents, RJ Cyler, RZA, Shameik Moore
Posted in Reviews, Action, Drama | 2 Comments »
