At the same time I gotta admit I don’t understand the whole phenomenon. It seems like these stories are popular with the same people who love John Grisham books and Ron Howard movies, so it seems weird that the pivotal character-establishing part of the story is a graphic rape revenge tale (”a mini I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE” I think I called it in my original review) and the beloved heroine is a bisexual punk psychopath. David Fincher’s English language re-cinematization of the first book is not turning out to be a box office sensation, but watching it still puzzled me how it passes for mainstream entertainment. Not just ’cause of the brutal rape, but because of the attention span it requires. It almost feels like watching a whole season of a TV show, or a couple of movies in a row. First it’s the origin story of Lisbeth and Mikael, then it’s their first mystery (which is pretty involved and less interesting than the characters themselves), and just when you think it’s all wrapped up there’s a little mini-sode that makes you wonder if they accidentally cued up part 2 early. (One of those “multiple-endings” deals that people used to praise in James Cameron’s movies but then started complaining about in Peter Jackson’s.)

Let me put this another way. We live in a world where, in order to get the movies he wants made, Fincher has to sell out… by making a dense, almost-3-hour-long movie about a Swedish activist journalist and a sexually abused punk computer savant studying old photos and records to try to solve a 40 year old Nazi murder case in exchange for information to help fight a libel suit. And it’s not even based on a video game.

I don’t mean any of this in a negative way. I liked the movie, and like it more the more it sits with me. I’m just a little surprised that other people are expected to like it too. Interesting times we live in.

Besides everybody speaking in accented English as a metaphor for Swedish, the most obvious difference from the previous version is in the casting of the leads. The reporter is played by Daniel Craig, and even though he’s not showing off his abs or anything he can’t hide being more suave and manly than Michael Nyqvist in the other version. It’s James Bond vs. the bad guy from GHOST PROTOCOL. Big difference. But also clever casting, because you get to see that dude scared and helpless and rescued by a weird little chick. She drives the motorcycle more in this than I remember in the other one, and he has to ride bitch.

For Lisbeth they’ve got Rooney Mara, a strong young actress who heroically dumped whatsisdick in the opening of THE SOCIAL NETWORK and was squandered as Nancy in the ELM STREET remake. She’s only 6 years younger than the Swedish Girl, Noomi Rapace, but it’s a noticeable difference, and she’s much daintier. I thought it was weird in Swedish part 3 when some character said Lisbeth looked like a little girl, because I didn’t notice her being small and she looked to me like she could handle herself. They also made Mara look alot scarier and more offputting: bleached eyebrows, ever-evolving fucked up haircuts, infected-looking piercings, twiggy, asexual body. I’m not sure if Mara’s interpretation is better than Rapace’s, but it’s different. Being so short and skinny makes her look more vulnerable, and makes her sexual relationship with Mikael seem more inappropriate. And in this version he has a daughter that can’t be much younger than her.

The structure of the movie is unusual. I know they trimmed it down into movie form (because there was alot more about the libel case in the Swedish version, I’m not sure I would’ve understood it here without having seen that), but it doesn’t feel like it when you’re watching it. Lisbeth and Mikael have their own separate movies going on. They don’t seem to have any connection, and whenever something really horrifying is about to happen with Lisbeth it’ll cut away to Mikael interviewing somebody or something and you gotta hang on to find out what happens back in the other movie. It’s a long time before it finally becomes Mystery on the Island of Rich Nazi Assholes.

What’s interesting though is that while the story as a whole is punishingly long, the individual elements of it are very fast-paced. It’s the good kind of fast edits where it pops from one location to the next to quickly tell you through visuals the steps he’s going through in his investigation. You know, as soon as he turns it cuts to him at his destination, instead of showing him walking across the room, opening the door and walking through, getting into his car…

There are small things that I think made the story work a little better in the other one, like in that one he was gonna get locked up as punishment for the libel, and was doing this little mystery-solving-adventure to keep his mind off it. It’s like THE 25TH HOUR. Also I seem to remember the whole thing with the framed flowers being sent to him on his birthday being a bigger deal, it’s kind of brushed over in this one and seems kinda silly. Not that they need to add anything more into this thing, I don’t want it to be any longer, but those worked well before.

A major change that must’ve been a departure from the book to make it more cinematic: in the Swedish movie Lisbeth didn’t just do a background check on him, she was actually hired to surveil him, so before they meet she’s looking at the files on his laptop and figuring out things he hasn’t yet about the mystery. Maybe that’s why it didn’t seem like two separate movies for the first hour plus like this one did. But I sort of like the ballsiness of Fincher’s structure. It seems like they’re never gonna meet. Then when Mikael finally hires her she’s like “shit, this is easy” and pushes his detective work several chapters ahead in like 5 minutes of Googling.

Same as the Swedish version, it’s more the character of Lisbeth and her relationship with this dude and with the history of gender in standard thriller tropes that makes the movie interesting than it is the mystery itself. But that’s not to say that story is a total wash, and Fincher being Fincher he squeezes some great atmosphere and suspense out of it. To be honest I don’t have any memory of the climax in the Swedish version, but the setting of this one has stuck with me, maybe because it’s so beautifully opposite of the dilapidated holes where the evil was going on in SEVEN. (Confidential to those who have seen it: why does he have Enya recorded onto reel-to-reel? That’s how you know he’s a total sicko. Even Leatherface wouldn’t make that effort. Maybe he’d have a tape or CD but not a reel-to-reel. That’s fucked!)

Credit is also due to Fincher’s pals Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their unusual score. What I like about it is how the sound effects and the music sort of bleed into each other and infect each other. When Lisbeth is undergoing horrific abuse in her parole officer or whatever’s office you can hear what sounds like a muffled vacuum. It’s like that truck driving by at the end of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, it’s a reminder that holy shit, there are people going about their usual business nearby, they got no clue. It was creeping me out but then I thought wait, maybe it’s not a vacuum, maybe it’s just the score. Then when she leaves the office you see that in fact there is somebody vacuuming in the other room, but the sound seems to merge with the music and continue in the next scene somewhere else.

Same type of thing happens in Lisbeth’s greatest moment, the early act of revenge that establishes her as being in the company of Wu-Tang Clan and other entities that Ain’t Nothin To Fuck With. If you’re familiar with the story you will remember what she does with the tattoo gun. Reznor and Ross pull the buzz of the gun into their score and it continues into the next scene. Its sound lingers just like the memory of what she did with it.

Oh shit, the SOCIAL NETWORK guy better be glad it wasn’t Lisbeth he got dumped by. She would’ve made sure he never invented Facebook.

NOTES ON AMERICAN TRANSLATION:

In this one, Henrik mentions right off that some of his relatives are Nazis. I thought that was funny because in the Swedish one it just comes up later when the guy has pictures of him in Nazi uniforms openly displayed in his house. I was so confused, trying to figure out if that was actually normal in Sweden.

I think maybe that’s why he’s not on his way to jail, too. It seems weird to an American that a dude could be locked up for libel. They must’ve thought that would confuse us.

While everybody speaks English (and many don’t fake Swedish accents), signs and headlines and stuff are in Swedish. But the rapist tattoo is in English. Does that mean she made it in English, as an artistic choice, or should we imagine it’s actually in Swedish? That seems like it would serve the intended purpose better.

I wonder if Lisbeth knows any of the hackers from THE MATRIX? And what would she do to the machines to avenge them for what they did to us?

* * *

I figure this isn’t up there with Fincher’s best movies, but I like seeing him do one like this every once in a while. Sometimes it’s a cool exercise for a highly skilled director take a break from the visionary shit and try to elevate something that could’ve been cookie cutter in somebody else’s hands. Kinda like when he did PANIC ROOM, but this is more challenging. It’s funny ’cause it’s got lots of computers like SOCIAL NETWORK, obsessive research of a serial killer like ZODIAC, even fucked up Biblically-themed murders like in SEVEN. I didn’t notice any backwards aging or prison planets, sadly.

Alot of people have talked about the crazy opening credits, which aren’t very similar to the ones in SEVEN except that they’re visually and thematically dark and kind of grab you by the hair and slam you face-first into the muck. Hello, welcome to THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, fuck you. It could use a little Shirley Bassey but it’s clearly an evil version of a James Bond opening credits sequence, which is perfect. The actual James Bond is in this movie, but he’s not gonna save anybody. He’s tied up and the villain is making a speech but not because of hubris – he’s doing it because he’s only murdered women before, and he’s not sure how to do this. Meanwhile, Bond is not planning his escape – a girl is gonna rescue him.

James Bond in this movie does not seduce any women – the woman tells him when to fuck, and he goes along with it. He doesn’t have any fancy gadgets, and doesn’t know how to keep Lisbeth from breaking into the files on his laptop.

I was talking to a buddy who didn’t like the movie because he couldn’t get past the heroine getting raped. I get it, this is supposed to be entertainment, and rape is always a bummer. But I also see kind of a double standard there. In DEATH WISH 1 and 2, which most of us acknowledge as entertainment, there are horrible rapes, but it’s Kersey’s wife and daughter and etc. Afterwards we enjoy seeing him go a little mad getting savage revenge on the rapist/killers and their peers.

It’s awesome, but it’s a little paternalistic or something, isn’t it? The women get raped and killed, their old man gets to be the hero. Maybe if Lisbeth had Charles Bronson for a dad or a husband it would be different, but she’s got nobody. So she takes care of the revenge herself, and she does it quicker, more precise and more savage than Kersey, and uses it to get what she wants. She’s so good at revenge that she takes care of it halfway through the movie and has to have something else to deal with as the main plot. That’s badass.

I’ve noticed that Lisbeth Salander is not a well liked character among the internet movie people that I read, the same guys that love Hit Girl from KICKASS so much. I know they’re totally different movies, it’s not a fair comparison, but I still wonder about it. The little girl running around murdering everybody because her dad brainwashed her, that’s a fun time at the movies. But the one that kicks a dildo up her abuser’s ass? It’s not cute when she’s angry. She makes guys nervous even though we know we didn’t do anything. That reaction kinda makes me think Lisbeth is legit, not just another fetish in feminist clothing. I mean, I think she’s cool, but I don’t think she’s hot. You don’t usually get that in a female cinematic asskicker (at least the adult ones – I hope they’re not getting that from Hit Girl).

Then again, I gotta acknowledge that I am a dude, these books were written by a dude, and this movie was directed and written by dudes (adapted by Steve Zaillian of SCHINDLER’S LIST). I definitely see some male fantasy on Stieg Larsson’s part. Mikael is an investigative reporter for a magazine going after white supremacists and other abusers of power, just like Larsson was. And he gets to fuck the girl. I mean, I got a strong feeling that Larsson was enjoying some suicidegirls.com while writing these books. So if some women don’t want to consider Lisbeth a feminist icon then I get it.

But I made an argument for I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE’s Jennifer Hills as a legitimate feminist statement, and Lisbeth  is definitely a stronger character. Just as I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE was supposed to be called DAY OF THE WOMAN, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was called MEN WHO HATE WOMEN in Swedish. It takes place in a world stained with the after effects of past atrocities: the disappearance of Harriet that haunts Henrik to this day, the other Vangers’ past in the Nazi party, the abusive father that obviously still affects Lisbeth, what she did about him that she still answers for. Even decades ago when the murders happened they were the result of archaic attitudes, based as they were on Bible verses about witches and shit like that. The serial killer, the rapist guardian… these are men who hate women, and abuse the male-dominated system to take out their sickness on them.

Lisbeth, pummeled down by that system, made a prisoner by it, doesn’t run away. She spits on its grave, but she does more. Jennifer Hills raged back with sadistic executions of her abusers. Lisbeth would be capable of that, she certainly has the stomach for it, but she’s smarter. She gives her guardian the physical punishment she wants to give him but also systematically locks him in the way he did to her. Forces him to give her what she wants, out of fear.

And then she takes the next step… she tries to learn to have relationships with men again. But that’s a work in progress.

There’s an obvious attempt at putting some kind of real psychology into the character, but no, she’s not a realistic portrait. She’s kind of a super hero. She’s a computer genius, has a photographic memory, can kick a man’s ass, handle a weapon and hold her own in a high speed motorcycle chase. At the end she puts on a disguise and travels around the world to pull a major swindle. That’s what I like about her. She’s a James Bond for a segment of society that never got a James Bond before. Take it as a tiny bit of social progress, or just a novelty, it’s good either way.

* * *

I like this better than the Swedish version, which I also liked. Re-reading my review of the older one I remember things that were different that probly worked better. I think their sexual relationship made more sense in that version. It seemed like something she would do, even if it was a bad idea. And he’s decent enough to question it and weak enough to do it anyway. Then she fucks with his mind by pushing him away both physically and emotionally. Craig and Mara have a great chemistry. I love the moment when she tells him that she likes working with him. You’ve never seen her so happy, and you believe it. But I think maybe the relationship has more dimension in the other version.

On the other hand the way Fincher does it is cool because it takes the man to task more. The Swedish one lets Mikael be the surrogate for us dudes watching, we got to have a wild weekend fucking the crazy punk girl, but she won’t have us now, boo hoo, we go back to our old life with the other gal, secretly pining for our maniac pixie dream girl. She won’t let us in. Treats us like a dumb ho. But we understand. She’s been through alot. Oh well, it’s out of our hands now.

Fincher’s version leaves us sympathizing with Lisbeth instead, feeling screwed over by the one nice man in her life besides her speechless old man or her hairy hacker friends. She was gonna put it all on the line for this dude, show him all her cards, but just then she sees him back in his old life with his old girlfriend. Looks like she was just an indiscretion to him. A Bond girl. Fuck.

Is he another man who hates women? He seemed like a nice guy. This sucks, and it’s not the kind of thing you can avenge with a dildo and a tattoo gun.

It’s a hitwoman movie, but not the post-Tarantino type where you see they’re just like us and watch TV and stuff. It’s the opposite. The one where she’s so driven that she has no real life. Her man friend (Michael Vartan from ROGUE) has to quiz her just to try to get her to say where she’s from. And she won’t say. All we really see about this Cataleya lady outside of her job is that she enjoys dancing by herself and sucking on lollipops. Those are her hobbies. By sheer coincidence those are also the type of things Luc Besson would like to see an attractive actress doing.

But it starts when she’s a ten year old girl (played by rookie child actress Amandla Stenberg) in Colombia and her parents are killed in front of her by drug lords. Normally this would horribly traumatize the kid and years later she’d be a trained fighter. A nice touch here is that she’s already a little badass when it happens. She doesn’t cry, she sits calmly with her father’s betrayer, then stabs him, climbs out the window, does a bunch of acrobatics on the side of the building, and leads the henchmen on a chase across town. There’s a motorcycle involved, a sewer, and of course parkour – remember how in 1992 Colombian druglords always had two parkour guys on the payroll, just in case? It’s not a DISTRICT B13 level of chase scene, but you gotta respect a movie where a little girl leaps over a person while running through a crowded market. Not sure how they did that stunt.

There’s no explanation for how she became so awesome, unless you count that they show her reading a Xena comic book. After making her way to the States she tells her soon to be parental figure/murder mentor (Cliff Curtis from LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD) “I used to want to be like Xena, the warrior princess.”

“Not anymore?” he asks.

“Now I want to be a killer. Can you help?”

“Sure.”

I mean, this is not good that she’s doing this, but more 10 year olds should have this kind of initiative. She knows what she wants to do with her life and she goes after it.

Half an hour into the movie it skips ahead 15 years to when she’s a professional, then it takes its time parseling out information about how her operations works and what she’s been up to.

The first hit we see is the one that gets the FBI on her ass. It’s a good sequence although her plan requires two specific jail cells to be connected by vents large enough for her to crawl through. That seems unlikely, in my opinion. I wonder if she knew the ventilation setup in advance, or if she just went in sure she was so awesome she could pull it off no matter what. She’s definitely confident. That’s proven later when she enters the mansion of a Ponzi scheme crook through his shark tank.

Adult Cataleya is played by Zoe Saldana, that crazy blue bitch from AVATAR. She’s very graceful and precise in her movements. She’s also beautiful, and that’s obviously central to the appeal of the movie, so it’s too bad she has the body of a ballet dancer. I’m not saying I disliked the part where she runs around in booty shorts and a tank top trying to escape a SWAT team, but it could’ve used at least 25% more va-va-voom. In fact, I think this character has an eating disorder. She never brags about eating drug kingpins for breakfast, because she doesn’t eat breakfast. She actually tells Vartan that. He also has trouble getting her to eat dinner, she always wants to go right into the sex. When he makes her lunch she leaves. When she’s a kid she knows how to induce vomiting. These are all signs. This girl needs help.

Seriously ladies, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Director Olivier Megaton hasn’t really lived up to his awesome name yet, but I think this is alot more enjoyable than his TRANSPORTER 3. I just think he lacks the sense of fun of a TRANSPORTER 2. This is all very serious like the earlier Besson movies. But it has some good parts and the action is at least readable. I like when the villain is making a Just How Badass Is She? speech and uses the cliche that “she’s like mist,” and right then a fuckin missile flies into the house. Looks like she’s not gonna bothering being a ghost or an invisible ninja this time out, she’s just gonna get right to it PUNISHER WAR ZONE style.

I also gotta give praise to the fight in the bathroom – a home one, not a public one. She utilizes the tub, hand towels, toothbrushes, even the glass he probly uses to rinse out his mouth. No, she doesn’t wash her hands afterwards. So she doesn’t succeed in the hygiene department but she does use the location well.

One criticism of the detective work in this movie: I think maybe you guys took too long to figure out that the rare flower drawn on the victims is THE FUCKING KILLER’S NAME. And that she wears a necklace of it at all times for extra identification. That was not that cryptic of a clue, she’s not the fuckin Zodiac.

I’m not sure about the title of the movie. Is “Colombiana” like “Americana”? Is this saying that vicious drug lords and cold-blooded assassins are a little piece of Colombian culture for us to enjoy? That doesn’t seem right.

Another thing I’m not sure about: there was this rumor that this was re-written from a script that would’ve been a sequel to LEON THE PROFESSIONAL but Besson couldn’t get the rights to it. I don’t know, if they made a sequel and it was just about her getting revenge for Leon’s death that might be fun to watch but I’m not sure it would be worth doing. That story might’ve been made up. Anyway it would’ve been totally different because the villain is pretty standard issue foreign-criminal-who-lives-in-mansion, he has nothing in common with Gary Oldman’s reptilian mega acting pill popper and classic music afficianado.

A buddy of mine that enjoyed this movie okay had a big problem with the ending, so this paragraph is a SPOILER about that. When she gets to the last guy, the big drug lord guy, she doesn’t kill him with her own hands, or even see it with her own eyes. After all that she’s content to trick him into getting into a van where he’ll be eaten by her dogs. My buddy thought that was too impersonal, it was unsatisfying to him and didn’t make sense. But I don’t know, I think it’s kind of fitting. That guy didn’t personally kill her parents, he was responsible but did it from a distance. She treats him the same way. Don’t even give him the satisfaction of being there in person. She misses his death like a movie dad misses his son’s little league game. Sorry, champ. I swear I’ll be there next time.

I don’t know man, I’ll probly forget all about this movie soon, but I enjoyed watching Saldana as Cataleya and at the end of it I was happy for her. I hope now that she straightened that revenge shit out she’ll start eating more healthy. And maybe she can go back to following that dream of being like Xena.

The titular Santa who gets the also titular revenge is played by an actor I really like, Ken Foree. Of course I always knew him as Peter from DAWN OF THE DEAD. Through the ’80s he mainly did TV guest star gigs on Knight Rider and Scarecrow and Mrs. King and shit like that, with only the occasional movie appearance like JOJO DANCER YOUR LIFE IS CALLING or FROM BEYOND to fulfill any of his potential. I was real excited when I recognized him in LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III (his Good Samaritan survivalist character is an enjoyable part of a not-great movie) and like alot of horror fans I always wished he would show up more.

That seemed to sort of happen after 2005 when he played the Lando Calrissian type character in THE DEVIL’S REJECTS that welcomes Captain Spaulding to the safety of his brothel. Now he’s one of the Rob Zombie players, showing up in all the Zombie pictures, and like Sid Haig that means he also gets a bunch of side-work in movies so low-rent even I wouldn’t think about watching them. I could be wrong, so please let me know if you know of a good one, but I got no faith in most of ‘em. I made the mistake of trying to watch that NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 3D with Haig and it made the DAY OF THE DEAD remake seem pretty good by comparison.

Anyway BLACK SANTA’S REVENGE is pretty much what the title says it is. It’s a violent revenge tale about a guy who dresses as Santa for poor kids at a community center that takes toy donations that they’re actually gonna give to the kids that asked for them. Then some assholes steal all the toys at gunpoint and say they hate Christmas.

Now Santa has a headwound and he’s depressed as shit, fantasizing about a kid calling him “nothin but a punk ass beeyitch” for not following through with the presents, having a drink at a titty bar. Suddenly he notices one of the toy-thieves, follows him to a warehouse and murders everybody involved in the toy-donation-thieving ring. There is a little bit of Santa-themed dialogue, for example he yells “Ho ho ho, you naughty motherfuckers!” as he opens his attack, and a thug bangs his head against the ground while grunting “Milk drinkin… cookie eatin… mother… fucker!”

There are little references that you’d expect from Badazz Mofo – a Jim Kelly line from ENTER THE DRAGON, a Dolemite phrase (”rat soup eating motherfucker” of course), a song listed on the credits as “Sounds Like John Carpenter Theme.” But thankfully it treats it more seriously than as a joke, despite the obvious absurdity. I do think it would work alot better if it made a little more sense – like, what charity has a Santa that promises specific toys to kids planning to really give it to them from donations? And how are we supposed to believe that some guy is gonna get money from selling shitty used teddy bears? He’d have trouble moving them at a garage sale.

I guess I don’t believe it, but if it was gonna be phony anyway it could’ve had some ridiculous explanation, like somebody accidentally donated a doll full of a superdrug or something, I don’t know.

Also, why is he Black Santa? Is it because white Santas don’t volunteer at the community center, even though most of the kids there are white? It doesn’t seem to make a difference in the story at all. Does anybody ever give him shit about not fitting the common image of whitey Santa? They don’t really deal with it. I guess I like my blaxploitation to have some kind of racial conflict, like the racist white sheriff who loses his wife to Dolemite, or Mamuwalde refusing to deal with Dracula because he’s a slave trader. But I guess that wouldn’t be in the spirit of Christmas to have that kind of divisiveness in here. Instead Walker chooses to honor the spirit of the holiday by emphasizing the importance of charity, and by delivering savage vengeance upon those who fuck with charity.

I can’t really say you need to seek this out. It seems like probly exactly what it is – some film fans who decided to have fun trying to make one. They probly regret a few things and they probly learned things they would use if they tried again. I would be happy to regret a couple of bad green screen shots on their behalf (like the shot where a door opens onto what appears to be a stretched jpeg of some toys).

It’s not great. But I like that it’s not as smart-assed as I expected. It’s not really Troma-esque in tone. It even ends on a sentimental note. Best of all, Foree treats it as a dramatic role and not acting like he’s trying to be funny. And he doesn’t get that many leads so it’s nice to see even a 20 minute short that centers on him. I’d watch a feature version if they made one.

“What do you get if you cross ‘Animal House’ with ‘Death Wish’? Young Warriors– a unique combination of fraternity hijinks, high-speed action, wildly imaginative animation, and hard-drivin’ rock!”

Obviously that’s what got me to watch the movie. I couldn’t really imagine a movie that fit that description – can you? Put the tape in and it’s even more confounding because it starts with this dedication:

THIS FILM IS DEDICATED TO
KING VIDOR
WITH DEEPEST APPRECIATION
FOR HIS INVALUABLE
CREATIVE ASSISTANCE.

King Vidor started directing with THE GRAND MILITARY PARADE in 1913. He has 77 directing credits on IMDb. He did the black and white parts of THE WIZARD OF OZ. He did DUEL IN THE SUN and WAR AND PEACE. He died in 1982, so this might’ve been the last movie he gave his invaluable creative assistance to. So he gets this dedication.

Then, the opening scene. Closeups on the bodies of a man and a woman on a beach who have just come from skinny dipping, now taking part in a RAMBO-suiting-up-style sequence of putting on their graduation gowns. The man puts on some giant headphones with a built-in radio, they get on a motorcycle and drive to their graduation ceremony where they show up just in time to drive up (scaring the shit out of everybody) and grab the guy’s diploma. He pulls up to his friends and yells “We are free! WHOOO HOOOO!!!” A slow motion overhead shot shows them throwing their hats (and headphones) in the air. It freezes on their smiles, happy music playing, and says:

THESE ARE
THE GRADUATES OF MALIBU HIGH
AND THIS IS THEIR STORY…

then some ominous keyboards and militaristic drums begin as the splattery YOUNG WARRIORS logo splashes across them.

It’s kinda too bad the cover gives it away, because the weirdest thing about this movie is the slide from wacky fraternity hijinks to violence and nihilism. The first part is about some dudes who live in an attic together at Pacific Coast College drinking beer, hazing new pledges, setting a herd of hogs loose at a party, etc. Then one character’s sister gets gang raped to death, they steal a bunch of weapons from the military and go around shooting criminals. At the end they all die. (SPOILER)

The main kid is Kevin (James Van Patten), who’s shown animating shirtless one morning in the frat house, which is decorated with bikini posters, a dart board, and a skeleton. There is a dispute involving a baseball bat and a clock radio. A dude says “Everyone, I’d like you to meet Ginger” and produces a naked woman in his bed. One of the other dudes is a medical student so he puts his stethoscope on her tits, says “she’s a 34 C”, chases her away naked, and they all laugh.

“How the hell is anybody supposed to get any work around this madhouse?” Kevin complains. One guy throws a beer to other guy, both of them wearing nothing but towels. So that’s the sort of vibe we got here, a bunch of dudes who get drunk and smarmily joke about getting laid and share women like they’re joints. But Kevin is emotionally troubled. As he explains to his animation professor who hates his trippy experimental piece, “Well, I guess the only thing I can really say is that I got alot of things going on inside me, and uh, it seems that the only way I can really express my true feelings is through my animation.”

“But Kevin,” the teacher says, “art is a creative endeavor, and that also has restrictions and end points and a reason to be. It’s just like life. If you haven’t got a direction you’re just playing with yourself. You have to make up your mind and take a stand.”

“But sir, I don’t know where I stand.”

The director and co-writer of the movie is Lawrence D. Foldes (DON’T GO NEAR THE PARK), and I think it’s fair to assume he was trying to take some kind of a stand with this movie. And he might not have known where to stand either. What’s interesting about the movie, even if I don’t know what it means, is the way it draws parallels between PORKY’S type horny-dude hijinks and straight up gang rape.

The first section is all about aggressive sex:  A guy goes to the library, says he’s looking for “The Joy of Sex,” ends up fucking a young librarian in the stacks while a nerd nearby says “Oh, good heavens!” The guys hit each other in the crotch, talk about “nympho nurses” and cowgirls for their party, joke about each other’s sex lives.

At home Kevin wants to come into the bathroom while his sister Tiffany (April Dawn) is naked in there. She comes out wrapped in a towel and he pins her up against the wall to joke around with her, then acts protective of her about the guy she’s going to the prom with.

While she’s out they have their frat party. A guy gets pantsed. There are shots of shaking butts on the dance floor. The guys force a pledge to drop his pants, cut a hole in his boxers, shave his butthole, make him sit on an olive and drop it into a martini, then drink it. They tie bricks to two guy’s dicks and make them throw them out the window. You know, just boys being boys, fun kind of Abu Ghraib type stuff.

But while that’s going on Tiffany and her prom date get run off the road and attacked. Her terrifying car crash is intercut with a wacky drunken car crash on the frathouse lawn. Shots of the laughing rapists cut to party-goers cheering on the JACKASS antics.

Tiffany’s ordeal is so traumatic she reverts to a little girl, screaming “Mommy! Mommy!” over and over again. Later, when Kevin finds out his sister is dead, he reacts differently to feeling helpless. He rages at his police officer dad (Ernest Borgnine) and partner (Richard Roundtree), thinking they’re too cowardly to solve the case or something. He rages at his professor (comedian Dick Shawn in a serious role), who’s one of those ’80s movie smarmy heartless upper class liberal prick professors: “Are you implying that things like rape and murder are no longer immoral?” And before long it’s “Oh, you think I’m crazy? I’ll show you what crazy is!” and he throws a chair out the window. He even rages at his buddies, who try to be supportive about his animation project (”Well, it’s still good. It’s just… a little unusual”) and cheer him up by talking about dicks and drinking beer. But Kevin yells “Screw the whole bunch of you!” and storms off.

That goes right into one of those romantic sex scenes with tons of candles but after that he’s in a really dark place and it’s time to go track down the rapists and get revenge. They investigate the crime scene and, let me just say, movie criminals need to learn not to always carry around matchbooks with the logos of the places that they spend most of their time, or at least not to drop those matchbooks at the scenes of their crimes. That would be one way for them to get away with alot more, in my opinion. Anyway, they go to this bar and start asking around trying to find some guys driving a black van (that really narrows it down).

The investigation is going slow (no shit, the professionals haven’t found the killers yet either) so they decide they should also just go after criminals in general, and they get a bunch of guns and hand grenades. You know how it is in a movie when somebody wants to be either a vigilante or a super hero, they just go around at night and spot people openly committing crimes all over the place. So our boys find some black guys stealing the wheels off a car, etc. They get more into it, they go too far, they kill some big time drug guys in a rickety van. They dump out their huge stash of coke but steal their arsenal of guns and grenades. (This is weird because they already explained that a frat brother who’s in the military stole their weapons from a base. It seems like they could use the military base excuse or the found-in-drug-dealer’s-van excuse, but they don’t really need both in one movie.)

The characters are kind of hard to tell apart because they’re all handsome jock dudes with similar early ’80s hair. The one character that stands out is Butch, because he’s a dog that’s always wearing sunglasses, a hat and a handkerchief. It will just randomly cut to him all the time to be, you know, funny. Even after the movie has turned serious it cuts from a dramatic scene where he breaks up with his girlfriend directly to the sunglasses-dog holding a beer in his mouth.

The weirdest part tonally is when the boys go out on patrol and bring Butch with them. In context it just does not seem possible that they’re trying to make a joke out of this scene. His sister has been raped and killed, he’s lost faith in his father and the system, he’s acting out in school and broken off his relationship with his girlfriend, he’s gotten one friend killed and dragged his others into a dangerous and illegal activity, he’s zeroing in on the rapists, the keyboard music is very dark and serious, they’re in a Jeep wearing camo and holding guns… and there’s a fuckin dog wearing sunglasses in the car with them. And (SPOILER) the dog gets killed in a shootout with drug dealers, and then shit gets even more personal.

During all this Kevin still has time for animation. They don’t show him working on it but he keeps debuting new pieces in his class. It’s weird spacescapes and killer snakes and shit. Simple but it would take a while to do, especially in those days. So I hope he got a good grade in that class, he must’ve been working his ass off.

How the fuck did this movie happen? Well, apparently it’s kind of a sequel to one from 1979 called MALIBU HIGH about a high school girl who becomes a prostitute. Foldes wrote that one and got his UCLA Low Budget Film Production teacher Irwin Berwick to direct it. When he made YOUNG WARRIORS it was originally released as THE GRADUATES OF MALIBU HIGH. There aren’t any connecting characters or anything but that high school graduation opening doesn’t seem to serve much purpose except to say “and then after Malibu High this is what those type of kids got up to.”

I went ahead and watched MALIBU HIGH to see how it compared. It’s kind of like a ’70s porn movie with the good parts cut out. This teenage girl gets dumped by her boyfriend and doesn’t get along with her mom, so she decides to ask her drug connection to pimp her out. From there she moves up to a higher class prostitute and then to a hit woman. When she leaves her first pimp she calls him and says “Hey Tony, this is Kim. Yeah, I got a message for you, pal. GET FUCKED.”

Of course, she’s not putting as much effort into her courses as she ought to so she tries to seduce her teachers.

My favorite aspect of the movie is the funky library music. There’s alot of music that comes on with hilarious timing, like the upbeat tune that that plays right after the line “And maybe daddy wouldn’t have had to kill himself because he couldn’t get it up anymore!” and the “dun dun DUHHHHN” type dramatic cue that follows her giving her ex-boyfriend a double flip-off at his locker. It also uses what we now know as The People’s Court theme during the climactic slow foot chase down some stairs to a beach.

Unfortunately MALIBU HIGH isn’t nearly as interesting or weird as YOUNG WARRIORS. But if you insist on seeing it it’s on one of those “Welcome to the Grindhouse” drive-in double feature DVDs along with one called TRIP WITH THE TEACHER.

further reading:

Janet Maslin’s forgiving New York Times review of YOUNG WARRIORS

So through his connections he gets the police files on the four suspects the cops have, and he gets a high tech device or two, and he goes after them. He basically torments the four guys, quickly figures out which one did it, and exacts a complicated method of torture/revenge (torvenge).

Filmatistically this director is a master. His shots are beautiful, his action is clean, his rhythm is perfect. Somehow he knows how to linger on shots and not be in such a hurry, but also knows how to move quickly from scene to scene and skip over unnecessary information to keep an exciting pace.

Soo-hyun is a ridiculously smooth and capable badass just like the character in BITTERSWEET LIFE, only this time he’s on the right side of the law. At least occupationally speaking, not really in his activities here. At a glance he just looks like a handsome, well-dressed young man, but he moves like a ninja. He can quickly climb onto a roof, he can knife fight, knows some kind of martial art, all very quick. He doesn’t talk very much. He means business and has many classic badass moments. One favorite is a shot from inside his car as he pulls up behind one of the suspects, who’s on a motorcycle. I figure he’s gonna follow the guy, find out where he goes. But before I can process it he just rams him from behind and knocks him off the bike.

This movie messed with my head in an unusual way. After a gut-wrenchingly grim opening it turns into such an awesome action/revenge movie for a while that I almost felt guilty how much I was enjoying it. It seems like too much fun for the subject matter. I always enjoy seeing a guy like this go after some sicko bastard, but after what we’ve seen the poor girl go through, and the horror it’s brought to her family and the whole community, it’s a weird fit. Like if ZODIAC turned into COMMANDO.

But like at least half of all revenge movies this is actually a public service announcement for the anti-revenge lobby. As his would’ve-been-sister-in-law tells him, “Revenge is for movies.” The girl’s dad, a retired police chief or something, sort of puts him up to it, and even he starts to think it’s time to cool it.

But our boy is not gonna stop and let the police catch up. He doesn’t care what it does to his soul, he’s on a mission. By “I saw the devil” I think the title means “when you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back into you, and then you’re like what the fuck are you looking at, and the abyss is like sorry sir, I didn’t mean any offense and you’re like you better fucking apologize, abyss, and the abyss is all nervous and it goes yeah, sorry and you shake your head condescendingly as you walk away and in retrospect you were being a real dick to the abyss but the point is you both totally stared each other down it wasn’t a one-way type deal in my opinion.” (That’s an exact quote from Machiavelli or somebody.)

There’s a delicate balance in a revenge movie. It’s fun to watch somebody get revenge on a horrible person, but not if you become conscious of your own sadism and bloodlust while you’re watching and you feel like the movie doesn’t have that same awareness. When that happens you feel dirty. But I don’t know, if anybody comes out of this one feeling satisfied about the level he goes to and what it accomplishes then I would say it is possible they missed the point. And I don’t know what more the movie can be expected to do to get it through your thick skull. I think the movie is off the hook on that one.

Part of the fun is knowing how much he’s lost it, even before worse comes to worstest. He catches Kyung-chul, the maniac who decapitated his fiancee, and he doesn’t kill him at first. He lets him go. Then he follows him around like a wild animal with a tracking tag. Even Kyung-chul (a great sleazy performance by Choi Min-sik) can’t believe it when he wakes up in a hole, left alive, and with a pack of money. He says, “What the hell? The bastard’s a complete psycho.”

Alot of people complain about CGI blood and gore, but in the case of this movie there are at least four absolutely horrifying acts of digital violence. One is a quick knife fight in an enclosed space, one involves the hammering of a face and the third one is more drastic. These are not cool but they are upsetting and disturbingly realistic. It’s over-the-top gore that’s never funny, unless you laugh at just how awful it all is.

But despite all the horrible, graphic shit depicted in this movie I think one of the most unpleasant scenes is the one where the killer is alone with a nurse in a doctor’s office, not even doing anything yet. What makes it so uncomfortable is that you know Soo-hyun has put this innocent nurse in this position by letting his maniac go loose. And you don’t know where our guy is, how much he understands what danger he’s causing, how soon he’s going to intervene.

And the actress playing the nurse is so convincingly young and vulnerable. She’s helpless against this asshole, not just physically but mentally. It’s painful.

These Koreans are getting really good at making movies, but it looks like they need to work on their law enforcement. I mean what the hell, they really got four different guys in the area who might be the murderer because “they’ve done things like this before,” and you haven’t busted them yet? And our guy is able to go find them and you guys haven’t? Are you even working on this case?

And there’s even a fifth and sixth maniac in the area, because Kyung-chul goes to visit his friends, a cannibal couple. No wonder Jee-woon Kim is coming here to do an English language movie next. He’s gotta get the fuck out of Korea. That place is dangerous.

I doubt Schwarzenegger will really end up starring in Kim’s next one like they’re saying, but I sure hope he does. Kim is so good at making Byung-hun Lee seem badass with quick movements and few words. I think he could do wonders with Scharzenegger and bring to our shores the type of clean filmatism modern action movies are sorely lacking.

I don’t think I SAW THE DEVIL has anything new to say about the serial killers or the violent revenge. These are topics that have been covered pretty well in movies, in my opinion. But you know, a sermon doesn’t gotta be brand new material for a great preacher to make it sound good. I really enjoyed — or whatever you call it when a movie like this really works on you — being dragged around and shaken up by this one. Exceptionally well made, unsettling, fucked up, fun, sad. God damn ugly devil. Never shoulda shown his face around here.

In my opinion some movies present an unrealistic body image for men to live up to

FASTER starts out with The Rock just itching for some revenge. It’s the last day of a ten year bid for armed robbery and he’s anxious to get started, pacing frantically in his cell. When they let him out he storms through the gate, takes a look at the desert, and just starts running. After an unspecified amount of travel he arrives at the badass Chevelle that has been prepared for him, stocked with a gun, ammo, leather jacket, hit list and driving instructions (the convenience of GoogleMaps is something that hasn’t been properly addressed in a revenge movie before).

He doesn’t take time to find a girl or eat a steak, he goes straight to some guy’s office, storms past the receptionist, straight to his cubicle and shoots him in the forehead. Doesn’t even slow down to say anything about “This is for betraying us after the robbery and killing my brother.”

Directed by George Tillman, Jr. (NOTORIOUS [not the one by Hitchcock, the one by George Tillman Jr.]), the movie shows the obvious influence of POINT BLANK, THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, and KILL BILL. But not in the sense of being a bunch of references (other than a Morricone ringtone). I like that it takes it all seriously, it’s not a bunch of smart alecky shit.

The Rock’s character is just called “DRIVER.” We learn the backstory and some of his relationships as he goes on his killing spree and meets with people, but it’s a pretty minimalistic character, low on words and quirks. The story alternates between him and two other lead characters: Billy Bob Thornton as “COP” and Oliver Jackson-Cohen as “KILLER.”

It’s also a very visual movie, especially in the way it establishes this Killer guy. The camera pans across his wall of photos as he does an impossibly difficult yoga workout (he later tells his girlfriend, the daughter from TAKEN, that he “beat yoga.”) From the photos we learn that he was some kind of young investment hotshot, he climbs mountains, he was a kickboxer (sadly another unfulfilled promise of climactic martial arts duel – somebody’s gotta teach some action movie manners to these modern filmatists).

Killer is like a less creepy Patrick Bateman. He lives in a mansion, drives a Ferrari, is impossibly toned, has a pretty girlfriend who spends her time lounging by their pool. And he’s all the more hatable because he’s not as evil or sadistic as you’d think. He’s just an overachiever that likes a good challenge. And of course that’s what he gets when somebody hires him to kill this Driver. It’s gonna be difficult.

Cop is actually the most interesting character. He’s introduced making a desperate drug buy in a restroom before we see his badge. I expected an over-the-top sleazy dirty cop villain. Obviously Billy Bob could go to town on a role like that. But after we see he’s a junkie and a fuckup and hated by the other cops including chief-expositionist Carla Gugino (who can explain the plot to me any time, in my opinion) we see him in his fucked up home life. You know the drill: he’s late picking up his son, his ex bitches at him, then while he’s driving his son to the baseball game he’s right in the middle of making some promise and gets a call about another shooting he has to investigate immediately…

…but he decides his son is more important, goes to the game and shows up at the crime scene two hours late! No shit! So after that, no matter what he did, I still kind of liked him. ‘Cause he went to the baseball game.

That’s the clever thing about the movie. It starts out with these exaggerated, larger than life archetype-type characters, but as it goes on we realize they aren’t really good guys and bad guys. Actually they’re all bad, but with a soft spot.

Driver is the most cartoonish. The Rock looks pumped-up to wrestler size again. Honestly I think his muscles are too big for this one. It’s kind of hard to take him seriously, he’s such a monster. I mean, what guy looks like that and then his specialty is driving? I got a hunch he would be better at other things. It’s to the point where it could be a detriment ’cause he’s gonna have a hard time fitting in the car. His arms are gonna bump against the inside of the door and mess up his steering.

And while I appreciate his fearlessness, killing in front of witnesses and staring straight into the security camera, I feel like there’s gotta be some serious incompetence in the police force for him to be getting away with all this for so long. How the fuck are they not finding a giant muscleman who’s making no effort to hide himself, who’s wearing a sleeveless shirt to show his huge, distinctive tattoos, and is driving a badass early ’70s Chevelle with a show-offy racing stripe? In my opinion this should be an easy suspect to locate.

In a flashback we learn that Driver wasn’t always a killing machine, or even a getaway driver. His brother was the criminal, he only went on the job to help him out because his brother was in debt to some dangerous people. (And by the way, hat’s off to this guy Matt Gerald for being able to play The Rock’s big brother.) The flashback is a little goofy because Rock has to act scared to show his earlier innocence, but he looks like he could kill most of these guys just by banging their heads against his biceps. Also because in the post-robbery chase scene he’s mostly driving in reverse. I didn’t really understand why unless it was his audition for the FAST AND FURIOUS movie.

But there are lots of subtle things that make this movie better than I expected. Usually in a movie like this everybody would be hostile to him until he humiliated them. He’d have to show them who’s boss. Think of the scene in PAYBACK where Porter’s trying to get past security to talk to Stegman and this huge dude looks like he’s gonna crush him, but then it cuts to the embarrassed thug walking into the other room with blood dripping down the side of his head. In FASTER he goes to a strip club to kill a guy, nobody knows he’s trouble. The bouncers are nice to him, they joke around with him like he’s their buddy.

Inside the club he ends up with a duel in the restroom, and his opponent tells Joe, the elderly bathroom attendant, to go outside and guard the door. And to not tell anybody what happened here. I love that type of shit.

It doesn’t seem like any type of a Tarantino rip-off, but I bet it was KILL BILL that inspired some of this circle-of-vengeance-melodrama, like the one guy’s son swearing revenge on Driver for getting revenge on his dad, and the multiple characters who seem to welcome their deaths as inevitable justice sort of like Budd did (”That woman deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die.”) But I don’t mind if that’s where they got it from. It’s good shit.

The one artistic choice that seems a little cheap to me is the Cop’s slow-motion walk set to “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. It’s a great song but come on man, THE BIG LEBOWSKI owns that one. You can’t use that anymore. Again, you gotta learn your manners.

I enjoyed this movie, and it’s exciting to see The Rock in an R-rated action movie. But to be honest this is not the best role for him at this point, it seems more like an early-in-the-career character before he had proven himself as an actor. I mean he’s pretty much playing a Terminator. When I first saw The Rock in THE RUNDOWN I thought holy shit, this guy is a cartoon superhuman but he’s completely charming. This one just stays at cartoon superhuman, no charisma necessary. He can do that, but it’s not what makes him a great action hero. It’s missing one of his dimensions. There are any number of wrestlers that could’ve done this role pretty much the same.

Also, this is weird but it’s not much of a driving movie. I’m not sure why it’s called FASTER. He does drive from destination to destination, but most of the action is on foot, with guns and a little bit of the 52 style close-quarters combat.

Despite these misgivings I think FASTER is a solid modern action movie with an admirable balance of respecting-the-classics and putting-a-new-spin-on-it. Admittedly I had low expectations based on what people told me about it, but it was better than I expected.

We never did find out what happened with the kid’s baseball team though.

There’s been some hype about the action scenes, inevitably a little exaggerated because of the embarrassing state of filmatism in theatrically released Hollywood action films. The chases are effective, but be warned that when Hanna fights it’s mostly in shaky closeup like they do now. But it’s fine. The good news is that Bana has two long take fights, the standout actually done in one continuous shot. Filmatically (though not in fighting style) it’s similar to the one in THE MARINE 2 because the camera rotates around him the whole time.

The stunt coordinator is Jeff Imada, who’s now known for the BOURNE movies but has also done traditionally decipherable stuff including most of John Carpenter’s movies, RAPID FIRE, THE CROW and some of BLADE. Recently he did BOOK OF ELI which also made a good if not earth-shattering attempt to use longer takes in the fight scenes. Imada also studied Jeet Kune Do under Dan Inosanto – studied in the traditional sense, not in the living out in the snow bowhunting caribou sense. But it’s still a credit worth mentioning.

The director is Joe Wright, whose previous work I haven’t seen but it’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, ATONEMENT and THE SOLOIST. Regardless of the quality of those movies they’re definitely in the neighborhood of Oscar-bait, so it’s cool that he’s decided to follow them up with an action and revenge picture. Good for you, mister.

For the musical score he hired the Chemical Brothers (Teddy and Kevin Chemical I believe are their Christian names) so every once in a while you get some thumping computery rhythms going, but it’s not one of those annoying wall-to-wall dance music type of action movies, it has to work its way up to it. Actually it seemed to me like most of the movie was music-free and quiet like THE AMERICAN.

To me an asskicking little girl is more interesting treated seriously like this than funny like in KICK-ASS. She’s a little palefaced ninja running around in the snow, she knows how to snap a neck or ride the undercarriage of a car but she only knows what “music” is by what she read in a book. She’s taught every detail about how to pretend to be a normal girl… everything except everything that makes it believable. When it comes down to it all she’s doing is spewing out a list of made up facts. She just wants to be a girl and have her first friend but it’s hard to do with her background, not to mention her situation of being on a savage mission of revenge and being hunted and all that. So it’s both cool and tragic (I believe the youths would call it coolgic if they had room in their vocabulary for such nuanced emotions).

What I like best about the movie is the way it contrasts Hanna with this other girl Sophie (Jessica Barden) who she meets on the side of a road and spends some time with. It’s a funny comparison because Sophie’s folks talk alot about how to be good and open-minded parents, but their daughter is always disrespectful to them and embarrassed of them. Meanwhile Hanna’s had about the worst childhood she could, but she’s incredibly close to her dad and turned out very polite and smart. Sophie talks non-stop about pop culture and gossip and shit, Hanna is mostly quiet but can launch into memorized facts from her encyclopedia. Sophie’s parents are maybe too open about adult subjects in her presence, Hanna knows so little about it that when a boy she likes tries to kiss her she flips him and just about chokes him out.

Other than the tragic past and the cold-blooded murdering Hanna seems like an ideal child and great role model for all the other brats. Sophie luckily doesn’t have one of those god damn smart phones to twiddle away with, but she definitely seems like one of today’s little knuckleheads with their brains twisted in 76 thousand directions per second by all the twittering and facebooking and information overload. Hanna was raised so far away from all that that she’s actually terrorized by the sounds and stimuli of a sparse Moroccan hotel room.

And yet these kids really like each other. They get along well. It’s sweet.

This is one of the better movies I’ve seen this year, I really liked it. But I don’t want to hype it up too much. Its pleasures are simple. It’s a pretty basic story and not too original in its general concept, but that’s part of what I like about it. A simple action plot with some care, some heart and a little artiness going into the filmatism. Not too much explaining or spoonfeeding of backstory. I like a movie that’s not overly complicated but leaves room for you to read plenty of depth into it if you care to. Also I like bows and arrows.

When I mention that somehow it made that much money everybody says “Well, because the 3D tickets cost more.” I’m sure that was part of it. But it’s not like every 3D movie makes a ton of money.

Case in point: DRIVE ANGRY 3D, which debuted at #9 at the box office this weekend, and made it in the record books as the lowest moneymaker for a wide release 3D movie ever. Even with the extra 3 bucks or whatever per ticket it made less than JONAH HEX did in its first weekend, and less than half what Nic Cage’s last movie, SEASON OF THE WITCH did. And those were kind of dumped off without much of a push. DRIVE ANGRY had a release date and ads and everything.

I bring all this up only to illustrate that I do not have my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. Even if I had a stethoscope I’d have no clue how to find its heartbeat, ’cause DRIVE ANGRY was one of my high priority most anticipated movies of the year. I made sure to fit it into my weekend in between three best picture nominees. I honestly don’t understand why it wouldn’t open big. Why wouldn’t you want to see this?

Here are the ingredients that got me excited:

1. Nic Cage. Okay, so this can go either way, but combine him with…

2. a plot about a guy who escaped from Hell and has a muscle car and is chasing a satanic cult that kidnapped his baby granddaughter. Originally I heard he escaped from prison which to be honest I like better, but I can get with this Hell bullshit too.

3. this team of director Patrick Lussier (former Wes Craven editor) and writer Todd Farmer (JASON X) also did MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D, which had some funny shit in it, was shot with actual high quality 3D cameras and followed my preferred FRIDAY THE 13TH 3D philosophy of gimmicky as Hell 3D. I had alot of fun with that one and it didn’t even have Nic Cage or a cool car.

4. I thought Cage would take the opportunites of 3Dness seriously and do some weirdo VAMPIRE’S KISS type shit, based on this quote from Fred Topel’s interview:

“Yeah, I wanted to find ways to go into the audience. I even tried to get my tongue into the audience but I don’t know if that made it into the movie. That would’ve been an extreme moment but I’m not sure that it’s still in there or not. Yeah, trying to find ways to dance with the 3D cameras so that I could get into the fourth row of the audience or more.”

So, was I right, or was the world right? Well, we were both right. There is room for grey in this life, room for nuance. DRIVE ANGRY 3D is not as jawdroppingly awesome as I was hoping, but it was definitely worth my time. Maybe not yours. We all have different priorities.

First the bad news: Cage is relatively restrained in this movie, he’s playing it pretty normal. I noticed no mega-acting, no WICKER MAN style freakouts, no spontaneous Mick Jagger poses like in DEADFALL or VAMPIRE’S KISS, no tongue coming into the fourth row or dancing with the camera. His most animated scene is the one where he’s in a hotel room fucking Charlotte Ross from Days of Our Lives and he says “I never disrobe before a gunfight” and without dislodging his johnson kills a bunch of gunmen who burst into the room. In that scene he’s got a touch of Elvis, but the rest of it he pretty much plays as a normal leather jacket-wearing tough guy hero.

(And yes, that scene would be funnier if I hadn’t seen SHOOT ‘EM UP, where Clive Owen did almost the exact same thing with Monica Belluci. Clive was able to satisfy his lover, though, while Nic’s ends up in tears of horror, even with the added pleasure of second-hand taser tingling.)

Also, it turns out all the information that was coming out about the plot was building us up too much, it sounds alot more nuts than it comes across in the actual movie. So I apologize for my part in spreading that information – I didn’t know. Cage’s character is kind of like Michael Biehn in THE TERMINATOR or Joe Morton in BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET – all that shit about Hell is a backstory that you hear about throughout the movie, you don’t get to see a crazy demonic prison escape or anything like that. Kinda minimalistic.

So the ideal way of seeing this movie is something very few people will get the chance to experience: on a whim, without knowing much about it, but in 3D.

Now the good news:

As far as a low key studio b-movie in three-dee, DRIVE ANGRY has plenty to offer. It’s produced by Millennium Films (with a snazzy new logo) and especially for one of their movies it’s surprisingly low in shittiness. It opens with a car showdown where Cage as John Milton (either a reference to the author of the epic poem about the Fall of Man or to the guy R. Kelly wants to pack his things for him at the end of “Real Talk”) chases down a couple of dudes and blows them to shit. It establishes right away that this is gonna be a movie with some cartoonish gruesomeness, because Milton shoots a chunk out of a guy’s leg, the leg can no longer support the guy and it snaps. I approve. This scene also has what I believe may be the first 3D Guy-Walking-Slow-Motion-In-Front-Of-Explosion, and that’s a good sign that the movie is on my wavelength.

Milton needs a new car, but luckily he finds a smokin hot waitress (Amber Heard) in a troubled relationship who’s driving a badass ‘69 Charger, and he’s not only able to hitch a ride with her but to save her from her cheating abusive boyfriend (writer Todd Farmer, playing a similar character to the one he played in MY BLOODY VALENTINE, with another 3D-naked-woman-in-parking-lot scene) and take off with her and the Charger.

We learn that Milton is on an unauthorized furlough from Hell, with the righteous mission of stopping this satanic cult leader Jonah King (Billy Burke) from sacrificing a baby. This is personal for both parties. For Milton, not only is the baby his granddaughter, but this guy murdered his daughter. For Jonah not only does he want to sacrifice this baby to unleash Hell on earth or some shit like that, but he hates the baby because (SPOILER) her mama cut his dick off.

The movie would be alot better if a more interesting actor was playing the cult leader. I guess this guy is from the TWILIGHT movies, but he seems like some kind of third rate Jon Bon Jovi. He’s the kind of villain that you don’t really love to hate, you just kind of hate him. There really needs to be a magnetic presence for this guy that Milton is chasing. Luckily there’s a much more interesting character that’s chasing Milton: William Fichtner as “The Accountant.”

The Accountant is a suit-wearing agent of Hell who passes for a fed because he has a magic coin that he throws high up in the air (one of the more show-offy 3D shots – in fact, two of them, since they use the same trick twice) and it turns into a wallet with a badge. He’s an unstoppable killing machine like a Terminator who tricks real cops into working with him and interrogates and impales people as he tries to track down his fugitive.

As always Fichtner is funny and mischievous in the role, and the character is interesting because he’s not exactly evil, he’s just a demonic being doing his job. He doesn’t hate Milton, in fact he enjoys the game he has with him, like Tom Waits’s devil in THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS.

There are a couple other kind-of-cool smaller characters. David Morse is in it and not as his usual gum-chewing-asshole character, but as Milton’s old partner-in-crime-who-has-now-gone-straight. Not only does he seem really nice and honorable, but he has 2 (two) badass cars prepared for Milton’s use. There’s also a small appearance by the great Tom Atkins as an eccentric sheriff. I think he’s one of the Lussier players now, since he was in MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D. I doubt Lussier will still get to do the HALLOWEEN 3D he’s been attached to for a while, but that would be so great if he had Tom Atkins in it and it’s only a coincidence that he starred in the original HALLOWEEN 3.

Heard has gotten poor reviews, but I thought she was pretty good as far as these actresses-who-look-like-models-playing-southern-girls-who-wear-Daisy-Dukes-and-throw-punches go. I’m not predicting a great career or nothin but she’s not one of those female leads that might as well be a sex dummy. She has some presence and can say her lines like she knows what the words mean. The character is also kind of interesting as far as gender roles go because she’s openly promiscuous but never gets punished for it, and at the end Milton trusts her to raise his granddaughter. Usually a character like that would be looked down on by the movie. You can only be a hooker with a heart of gold if you get paid.

Like the poster says, this was shot in 3D, and I dig that. My friend said it looked blurry but in my experience it was pretty much flawless 3D, with nice smooth camera moves to show off the layers without sacrificing geography. Filmatically the car scenes aren’t DEATH PROOF awesome or anything but they’re solid and comprehensible and look cool popping out of the screen.

There’s at least one spinning ax tossed toward the audience, possibly as a nod to the ridiculous number of flying pickaxes in BLOODY VALENTINE. I don’t think there are quite as many projectiles as in that one, but there are a respectable amount. There’s exploding debris, an occasional body part, a jaw bone, some supernatural CGI shit, some cars going off jumps. There’s some matrixy rotating around digital projectiles, and I don’t mean that as a bad thing. If you don’t want to see silly shit like that then you don’t want to see this movie.

I’m not sure why Nic chose to stay so caged on this one. I suspect an epic megablast of weirdo would’ve filled the hollow center and made the weaknesses harder to notice or totally irrelevant. It wouldn’t be BAD LIEUTENANT good but it could still be legendary. If he’s gonna be in the fourth row I want him to be eating roaches and shouting out the alphabet, not just standing there.

I’m sure this will surprise people a little on cable, it’ll give people a few laughs, but they’ll be missing out on the 3D. Since it’s not a great movie I can’t get too choked up about it dying a lonely death, but the shame of it is this would probly play good with an enthusiastic, possibly drunk audience. It has a knowing-but-not-too-winky tone that reminds me of some of the legit drive-in movies I’ve enjoyed at late night horror marathons. And at the very end it has the type of truly great moment I will always cherish.

SPOILER OF THE BEST THING IN THE MOVIE – DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU’VE SEEN IT OR EXPECT TO DIE BEFORE YOU GET A CHANCE TO

At one point Milton has a wise ass line where this villain Jonah offers him he’s offered a beer and he says he only wants it if he can drink it out of Jonah King’s skull. It’s the kind of promise you always want an action hero to actually deliver on, but know they never will. Unless they are Nicolas Cage. In DRIVE ANGRY Cage actually does get to enjoy drinking a cold one out of the skull of his slaughtered enemy. And not in a macho way, like MacGruber pissing on Val Kilmer’s corpse. He does it real casual during a conversation, and kind of awkward, like drinking soup out of a bowl filled to the brim, trying not to spill any.

This is that genius Nic Cage touch you want to see whenever he’s in a movie. He shows us that drinking out of skulls sounds great on paper, but doesn’t really work that well in reality. And that it’s still totally worth doing.

The weird detail in this one is that for some reason they keep making references to horses and making her show them her teeth. They must’ve seen ZOO I guess. That movie’s like SCARFACE to a redneck rapist.

One of the other rapists, the guy who plays a harmonica, I didn’t realize was Rodney Eastman, the nice mute kid Joey from NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREETs 3-4. I noticed he gets a songwriting credit for the harmonica playing. I hope that gets him some extra bucks, not because of this movie, but because he’s Joey. He had so much trouble with naked ladies that turn into Freddy that you just want him to do well in life, you know?

I wouldn’t say Butler is terrible, but she’s much better as a spooky avenger than a normal person. Some of it’s not her fault – she’s got some awkward moments, some of them due to weird staging and timing. I think Camille Keaton benefited from a strange type of long-necked, aristocratic beauty that made her interesting to look at, this girl is more normal Hollywood good looking. And in order to get some of the plot going she has to be a total klutz. She knocks over a bucket of water at the gas station, spills wine all over her clothes, drops her cell phone in the toilet, breaks a glass when scared by a bird. With some actresses that might make her seem like a lovable relatable person, but here it just makes her seem like an idiot.

This new version is modernized in a clever way, but not in the way I wish it was. They chose to do it by making the I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE for this horror era: instead of a slasher movie it’s a torture movie. Instead of getting her revenge through gruesome kills it’s through sicko torture devices. Instead of luring them in by acting the way their misogynistic minds wish she would and then, say, castrating them with shears, she abducts them, torments them for a while, and then castrates them. Unlike the SAW movies though it’s pretty open about asking you to enjoy the sadism. There’s no question about whether or not they deserve it. In SAW it’s sanctimonious moralizing through torture, in I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE it’s punishment.

The only major change I noticed in the structure is that she disappears for a month after the attack. The rapists assume she’s dead, and the movie switches to their perspective, so we don’t know what happened either. Is she gonna come back as a ghost in this one? You don’t really know.

What’s not really updated though is the gender politics or the subtlety of the characterization. The original dealt in broad stereotypes – redneck rapists vs. feminist writer. Feminism was still a pretty new concept to some people in 1978, Zarchi must’ve felt he had to make his points bluntly. The new one doesn’t try to find a modern equivalent to say something about the state of gender relations in 2010. She’s just a writer (not for Bust Magazine or anything) and they’re just yahoos.

Their acting isn’t as over-the-top as in the first one (especially the retarded guy), but not subtle enough to be much more believable. To make this real insidious it’s gotta seem like real guys, assholes who don’t believe they’re assholes, who maybe even hold back their more deviant behavior in front of their friends until they can’t restrain themselves anymore. If this is gonna make a point it’s gotta seem like alot of men have the potential to do this type of shit, not that this is the anomaly that becomes a horror movie.

But these characters pretty much know they’re the bad guys, and even delight a little bit in being evil. I think it throws things off that he has to murder a man to hide the crime. And it seemed to me like they cut out or played down all the sexist excuses, where they try to blame it on her. Instead they try to cover their tracks like serial killers. This should be just assholes who mistakenly think they can get away with victimizing a woman. This shouldn’t be a horror movie massacre, it should be the misogynistic underbelly of America.

And they’re those fake movie rednecks with the unnatural dialogue calling everybody “boy” all the time. I don’t believe them, they don’t sound natural. I’m a fan of class tension in a horror movie, and the anti-tourism sentiment in the maniac community. It works in everything from TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE to WOLF CREEK to STORM WARNING, but here it just seems forced. I don’t believe them bitterly calling her “that city girl” and “stuck up city bitch.” If these guys were real they wouldn’t hate the city. They’d dream of the girls at the Mardis Gras parade. They’d drive into Baton Rouge or New Orleans to see a WWE Raw or a UFC Fight Night, or maybe the Foo Fighters or somebody. I just checked, Ice Cube is playing Baton Rouge in March. If they were still alive (SPOILER) maybe they’d go to that show. They’d probly think about moving there too. They’re too young to want to spend their lives working at that gas station out in the middle of nowhere. This just doesn’t ring true to me.

And now that I think about it the whole idea of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is a little quaint in the age of Lisbeth Salander. In THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO she got her violent revenge in the first act of the movie. And she’s a computer genius and mystery solver. Jennifer Hills doesn’t really compare.

But you know, it’s not garbage. Considering director Steven R. Monroe’s previous works include SASQUATCH MOUNTAIN and ICE TWISTERS it’s alot better than I thought it would be.

I like how you see all the tools and chemicals and things she’s gonna use later when she’s checking out the storage shed on the property. Like, you see a pair of shears covered in cobwebs. It almost had a double meaning for me. It works as setup but also made me wonder if these are the shears she used in the original, and now a new visitor is sort of echoing horrible events from the past. I think the original took place in Connecticut, so that wouldn’t make sense. But I think in the original her name was Jennifer Hill and in this one Jennifer Hills. It’s plural, like ALIENS to ALIEN. It could be a sequel, right? I guess not.

Anyway, it has its moments. She certainly finds a novel way to assrape a guy. But there are subtle things I like about it too. Like when they show up to intimidate her and make her show them her breasts she says, “We’re even now, right?” The one guy is mad that she embarrassed him, now he’s embarrassed her (by molesting her, basically) and she’s willing to call that even. But he chooses not to accept that as even. He will regret it.

The best thing about the movie is the added layer of irony with this sheriff having a nice pregnant wife and a daughter he calls his “little angel” who just got into a gifted program. Her name is Chastity, which fits in with his hatred of alleged “whores.” But I appreciate the disturbing observation that people like this want to do shit to adult women that they would stay up at night worrying would happen to their own daughter. And his family has no idea there’s anything wrong with him.

Also, while being tormented, he starts yelling things like “Help me Jesus!” and “I’m a God fearin’ person!” Ain’t that rich? And he keeps calling her “ma’am,” as opposed to his earlier preference of “big city whore.”

Meir Zarchi, writer/director of the original, is credited as producer on this one, and he went and supported it at some film festivals and stuff. I noticed that on the credits they say it’s based on DAY OF THE WOMAN, his original title. It’s funny, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is one of the greatest exploitation titles ever, you’d think a guy would be happy to be associated with something so legendary. But at the same time the movie is so notorious he has to use his original title just because it gives more of a hint that he was on the woman’s side.  No, seriously guys. “I” is Jennifer, she’s the one spitting on graves, that’s the part you’re supposed to enjoy.

Well, I wish the new movie itself was good enough to help him rehabilitate his image there, but oh well. I’ve definitely seen alot worse. In my opinion I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE 2010 does not spit on the grave of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE 1978. It has a healthy respect for its grave but does not go out of its way to deliver flowers or perform any maintenance such as cleaning the grave or pulling weeds around it.
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note: I can’t vouch for the new blu-ray and dvd of the 1978 version (and can’t say I’m planning to find out how it plays in HD) but I’m happy to see they included Joe Bob Briggs’s excellent commentary track from the earlier release

In the opening scene a family is gunned down by three hitmen. Only the mother survives, and just barely. Her father, just known as Costello (Johnny Hallyday), comes to the hospital, vows to avenge her and gets minor details about the attackers by having her point at words in a newspaper.

This Costello is amazing. Everybody calls him “the white guy,” but his features are so unusual I didn’t notice at first that his race was out of place in Macau. He looks like a detailed anime drawing of Edward James Olmos. He never smiles, barely talks, his eyes are eerily light, his face covered in valleys and streams, always wearing a tie and a trenchcoat. And at first we know nothing about him. But the implication is that she won’t be surprised he intends to avenge her. Is he a killer? A cop? A soldier? Or just a real spiteful civilian? How does he intend to find these assholes?

First he finds help in the form of a different three hitman team (Anthony Wong, Lam Suet and Lam Ka-Tung). He hears their silenced bullets going into a gangster’s cheating girl while he’s in the hotel hallway. He stands and stares down the three killers as they leave. He’s so intense they don’t kill him – and this probly earns his respect. The guys he’s after wouldn’t even let little kid witnesses go. These guys let an old white man go (although they regret it by the time they’re in the car).

Through some clever tricks Costello tracks the team down and gives them his money, his watch, and his restaurant. They go to the daughter’s house to examine the scene of the crime, using superhuman hitman insights the way Vin Diesel did his car whispering investigating an accident scene in FAST AND FURIOUS. Then they go looking for the killers.

This is an A+ film of Badass Cinema, with top shelf examples of many of the most important badass elements: stoicism, honor, brotherhood, unspoken respect, grimacing tough guy faces, slow motion strutting, and of course the titular noun. Spoken mostly in English, with a Hong Kong director and French co-producers it has a great sort of international feel, paying tribute to Jean-Pierre Melville and John Woo and John Woo’s tribute to Jean-Pierre Melville, with absolutely gorgeous modern cinematographicism. (Because of the colors and lighting in this movie and the lines on Hallyday’s face I recommend the blu-ray if you have access to it.)

The script is subtly brilliant. Costello’s backstory is pretty simple, but we learn it piece by piece and have to put it all together ourselves. Eventually we understand his odd ritual of taking Polaroids and writing on them with Sharpie, and once we understand that we also understand more about the circumstances around his badass juxtaposition (he’s an excellent chef), and this even tells us something about his relationship with his daughter, since she was also a good cook in the opening scene. (Food is a theme in the movie, actually – the idea of bonding by cooking for someone or eating together, and the idea of rejecting somebody by refusing their food.)

The highlight of the movie is Costello’s bond with these three killers. These guys are all so cool and they speak so few words. Lam Suet as Fat Lok brings some comic relief with his fondness for food, but he’s probly the toughest. They’re cold-blooded killers, they don’t show emotion, but I think they have at least a little compassion for Costello and his situation. There’s a point where they could easily get out of this thing, but they choose to stay loyal to Costello to their own possible doom. It seems to be a matter of professionalism, but I think they also want to seem him win this one.

The violence in the movie is beautiful, taking place in atmospheric locations that feel almost otherworldly: the woods where leaves are always dropping, or the dump where garbage is always blowing around. But honestly the shootouts aren’t the exciting parts in this one. My favorite parts are the stare-downs, like when Costello sees the hitmen leaving the hotel, or especially the scene at the campground where the two groups walk toward each other. In this world killers know killers, they have killdar. And they’d rather warn each other off with facial expressions than upset their kids by shooting in front of them. Nobody ever gets scared or tries to get away or insults each other. It’s more like a poker game. (Not celebrity. Regular.) Everybody knows what’s going on here. Nobody has to say anything.

I know a couple of my readers have a kneejerk hatred of slow motion. VENGEANCE is a good argument for it. It’s not very extreme, usually just a little slowed down. But here’s a movie where the anticipation and the tension is the best quality, so why not give us more bang for our buck? It also gives us better eyesight. We can see every subtlety of their badass staredowns that we’d miss at regular speed. Slo-mo gives us super powers.

At first I thought the name “Costello” was an obvious reference, but then I couldn’t figure out who would be Laurel. If his name was Laurel and Lam Suet was called Costello that would make sense. But there really is no fat guy/skinny guy type team in this movie. Therefore I can only make a guess that there is a very small possiblity that it could be a reference to LE SAMOURAI, which also has a stoic French trenchcoat-wearing hitman protagonist named Costello. I don’t know if you’re supposed to read that as just an homage or as a hint that this is the further adventures of Le Samourai. That Jef Costello survived somehow but got hit in the brain so he decided to retire from the game and open a restaurant. Johnnie To even had Alain Delon set to do the role but when he met with him and showed him the outline Delon changed his mind.

That’s okay, Hallyday is even better. It’s like how Warren Beatty was gonna play Bill in KILL BILL. Interesting, but it worked out for the best. Hallyday’s been in some other movies, but it turns out he’s mainly known as the French Elvis Presley. I don’t know, maybe the movie seems silly to French people because of that, but to the rest of us he sure has an interesting face to stare at.

VENGEANCE is a movie that somehow delivers on the catharsis of revenge while completely dismantling the logic of it. Usually a revenge movie has to really rub it in, make us hate the creep that’s gonna get it, make us thirst for his cool refreshing blood. It’s easy to hate these hitmen and their boss based on the crime, but the more you learn the weaker the case against them. The only real difference between the bad guys and the good guys is that the good guys leave witnesses alive sometimes. They’re still hitmen, and so was Costello it turns out, and I figure he probly still would be if he hadn’t been shot in the brain.

The boss who is the main target of vengeance, George Fung (Simon Yam), doesn’t seem all that evil either. He has a debatable “just how evil is he?” scene with his girl at the beginning (debatable because he has a legitimate reason to be angry at her), but the crime that’s being avenged was done to defend himself from someone that planned to turn him in. Bad, but not that bad by industry standards, you gotta admit. It’s a fact of life in the business they work in. It’s not some senseless crime you can’t make sense of, it’s just how it is in this world.

During the conflict Fung behaves professional, even friendly, calling up our hitmen to politely ask if there’s any way to work this out. When they say no he doesn’t threaten them or throw a fit and say “I treated you like a son!” or any of that shit. It’s more like they just put in their 2 weeks notice and he knows it’s probly hopeless but he has to ask because they’re good employees and he wishes he could convince them to stay.

When he sends an army of thugs after them he watches the battle and he can’t stop laughing. To me it seems like it’s because he’s a fan, he can’t help but enjoy watching those three work. Pretty harsh to his current employees, but it’s so much more original and interesting than the usual thing where the boss gets all pissed that his guys are getting mowed down. This boss loves it. He’s a sportsman.

But the best trick in this movie I gotta do a SPOILER to discuss. So here it is. For reasons I won’t get into Costello ends up losing his memory. He doesn’t remember his daughter anymore, he doesn’t remember what happened, doesn’t even remember what “revenge” means. So what purpose does his revenge even have anymore? Usually you can say it won’t bring his loved ones back, here you can say it won’t even get him any satisfaction at all, because he doesn’t remember what happened. But to these people it doesn’t matter. They live by a series of rules. The machine has been turned on, it’s too late to turn it off. They’ve been hired, they made a promise, they’ve turned on their boss, they know what Costello wanted, they’re invested in it. They’re protective of him, they even leave him instructions what to do in case they fail and he has to do it without them. Doesn’t matter if there’s any sense to it. They’re gonna get the vengeance.

And so are you. Everybody go rent VENGEANCE, please.