This movie is designed as the ultimate nerd fantasy, like one of those Charles Atlas guy-kicking-sand-in-your-face ads adapted into a movie. In the first chunk, state of the art special effects are used to turn musclebound actor Chris Evans into a skeletal, 5-foot tall weenie. He also has asthma and other ailments glimpsed listed on a form, I didn’t catch if he was allergic to peanuts or not. He doesn’t know how to talk to girls or dance. But he fuckin believes, man. And he wants to join the military not to kill Nazis but because “I hate bullies.” Every time he tries to sign up they reject him on the grounds that it would be wiser to mail a bunch of potato chips in an envelope than to send this fragile little snowflake of a man into a war zone. So he keeps going back and re-applying under fake names. Fortunately Stanley Tucci as a scientist (and therefore a member or affiliate of the nerd community) sees what a good person he is and chooses him for a secret government program where they inject him with comic book shit that turns him into non-digitally-altered, musclebound Chris Evans, super soldier. Also he can jump high.

Because of his new body he’s able to talk to and get it on with a super hot and cool human female (Hayley Atwell). But don’t worry, Steve Rogers deserves some credit here, we can’t give it all to performance enhancing science. You gotta be a good person for this super soldier treatment to make you Captain America. This guy Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) is the leader of Hydra, he had an early version of the treatment but he was just such a dick that it made him into a monster instead of a super hero. I’m not sure what he’s supposed to be exactly, he’s not a skull. He has no nose but he has ears, and when they show him in extreme closeup you can see the black painted on cheekbones like Halloween makeup.

Fortunately the fantasy goes beyond the nerd wish fulfillment, so it ends up feeling pretty universal in its appeal. It’s also an idealized version of war heroism, where he gets to go prove himself fighting against guys who are even worse than Nazis. He gets to rescue his best friend, work with his girlfriend, not only does he win over the hard-bitten colonel (Tommy Lee Jones, a nice addition to the movie), but inspires him to come into battle himself and personally rescue the Captain while driving an awesome car. While Captain America is wearing his American pride on his sleeve (not to mention his pants, his chest, his head and his shield) he also represents diversity and world unity by putting together and leading an elite platoon that includes a Japanese-American, an African-American, a British guy, a French guy, and Neal McDonough.

Captain America’s powers work good for an action movie. No flying, morphing or shooting magic beams, just exaggerated strength, which most guys have in action movies anyway. That combined with Mr. Rogers’s never-give-up, can-do attitude means lots of punching, motorcycle jumping, jet plane commandeering, even a barefoot foot chase through New York City.

I was impressed by the wide variety of forms of transportation that the Captain ejects Hydra soldiers from. Off the top of my head I remember a truck, some motorcycles, a car I think, a train, two different types of aircraft and even a submarine (my favorite). That’s a good way to keep the action interesting when you got land, sea and air. Hopefully THE AVENGERS will allow him to throw people off a subway, a Segway, maybe a space ship.

There’s alot of fun action with Captain America and his team, the Captain Americans. Some of it is kind of rushed through in montages to show that time is passing. I wish they took the care to have a more elaborate sort of WHERE EAGLES DARE type of attack on a Nazi compound or something, but oh well. It’s pretty good stuff, and there’s one thing that’s unique about how he fights.

Because America at its best likes to think of itself as a defender and not an imperialist, Captain America’s primary weapon isn’t a gun, it’s a shield. It’s a really good one made out of “the rarest metal on Earth.” He uses it to deflect but also to bash things open. He throws it like a boomerang or a Frisbee. I’m sure it would work well as a sled, an umbrella, a water bowl for bald eagles to drink out of. In one great moment he tosses it down a hallway to jam some closing metal doors open, but immediately wishes he had it because a motherfucker comes after him with a blowtorch. I got kinda nervous actually when he had to leave his shield behind during one fight. I didn’t want him to lose that thing.

What is it about these Old Timey Throwback Adventure Movies, like this and THE PHANTOM? I guess if they were coming out a couple a year we’d hate them but they’re infrequent enough that they always seem refreshing. Do you remember the old pulp magazines and radio plays? No, we remember people remembering them. Instead of nostalgia for the actual time period we have nostalgia for the nostalgia of the time period. It’s made to remind us of the movies and things we’ve seen before about that time. This one is a little different because on the surface it pretends to be about war and patriotism. But it’s not so much filling an American’s heart with pride about what it means to be an American as reminding us of the kitschy fun of the progaganda they used to have, remember how we read that they used to have that? What a fun time! USA! USA!

Luckily you can get away with that because Nazis are the ultimate bad guys. I mean, who doesn’t hate Nazis? Only Nazis don’t, and fuck those guys. So you can watch a fun WWII movie and not have to feel bad about the bad guy soldiers getting shot or tossed off planes or whatever. It worked for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, obviously, but after SCHINDLER’S LIST Spielberg allegedly decided he wouldn’t do Nazis in a “fun” movie anymore because it’s too serious of a subject. Tarantino and Verhoeven have since made fun WWII movies, but not light like this. Those were hard-R movies that dealt specifically with the horrors of the war. Obviously neither Captain America or director Joe Johnston are ever gonna go that route, so they kind of go in between – it’s still WWII, it’s still Hitler, but swastikas are replaced by this Hydra symbol, and the bad guys actually separate from Hitler. So you can be content that the Red Skull is a fun bad guy that we gotta stop from ruling the world and hopefully not think too much about genocide or concentration camps. (Not that either of those things ever came up in an Indiana Jones movie. Or should’ve.)

In fact, Johnston shows us specifically where to locate Captain America on the Indiana Jones map. There’s a line about Hitler’s people being out in the desert looking for artifacts – but while those chumps are out digging up arks and getting their faces melted Hydra are the guys who have actually had success acquiring occult mcmuffins like The Glowing Cube of Whatever It Does. Johnston was the art director for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK as well as the second and third STAR WARSes, and he’s definitely going for some of that “Remember Good Old Fashioned Fun?” type nostalgia, with some success. There’s a motorcycle chase reminiscent of the speedy bike chase, there’s a mid-air battle that reminds me of tie fighters, the Hydra soldiers even wear masks kinda like the tie fighter pilots. (Yeah, I know about Star Wars stuff. I’m an American.)

I think they do fine skirting any potential WWII tackiness issues, but I’m a little iffy on the (ENDING SPOILER) climactic scene where Captain America chooses to sacrifice himself by forcing down a jet that’s headed to New York City on a kamikaze mission. Maybe nobody else was thinking United 93, but I was, and that took me out of it. But I can see how you could defend that. It’s sampling heroism instead of just tragedy, like TRANSFORMERS 3 did with its visual allusions to the Challenger explosion and people jumping out of the WTC towers.

Despite that somewhat ballsy move I think Johnston is about as bland of a director as has ever been created. He’s made few terrible movies and no great ones. People always like to dig out THE ROCKETEER – yeah, I remember that being pretty good too. But it was twenty years ago and it wasn’t exactly MAD MAX. Other than that his best movie is, what, HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS? I’d probly guess HIDALGO was pretty good, except I can’t because I saw it. He had old west Viggo Mortensen in a cross country horse race to unite the countries in the middle east, how the fuck did he make such a snoozer of a movie out of that? Nothing about it is real bad, but nothing about it is real good either. It has everything and nothing that a great movie needs. That’s also how we got JURASSIC PARK III and THE WOLFMAN. It’s the Joe Johnston touch.

He was a good art director, but the ones he actually directs don’t tend to look so hot. I guess WOLFMAN had some nice shots. This one is gloomy and colorless, with settings surprisingly similar to those of the widely hated low budget CAPTAIN AMERICA made by Friend of Outlawvern.com Albert Pyun. For the thumbnail at the top of the review I really tried but couldn’t find a still that I thought made Captain America look cool. It’s a director with an art background adapting drawings into a movie and somehow it’s not all that visual.

And there are little beats that aren’t quite there. Like there’s a funny part where Captain America is chasing a Nazi through New York and the guy throws a kid in the water. The Captain looks over the edge and the kid says “Go get him! I can swim!” Great joke, good timing and everything but why doesn’t the Captain look like he’s about to dive in to save him, don’t you need that to set up the joke? Johnston’s got the words but doesn’t know how to deliver it quite right.

Oh well. It works. It’s not as beautifully directed as BLADE or IRON MAN. It doesn’t look as stylish, it doesn’t feel as new. But it does follow the Marvel pattern of having a strong cast centered around a charismatic lead. Maybe not quite on the level of Thor, but I thought the story and action were better. There are lots of two-dimensional but fun characters, some funny lines and moments, a good pace. Red Skull is only an okay villain, but at least Weaving uses an accent partially based on Werner Herzog’s (that’s what it sounded like to me and then I read that really was his intent).

There are the really visionary, interesting comic book movies like BLADE 1-2, the Nolan BATMANs and HULK, and there are the also rans. This is for sure in the lower category, but as far as those go it’s one of the more entertaining ones. Like a pretty solid western as opposed to a great one.

It’s a nice fairy tale of a naive human stickbug who, through will power, science and jumping, saves lives and inspires his entire country. Like most super heroes you get a scene of kids running around dressed as him, to show that he has inspired them. It’s nice to see the kids of all races playing together like Captain America and his team. Although it sucks that the white kid has to be in front carrying the garbage can lid.

EVEN MORE ALL-AMERICAN END SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

If it wasn’t a setup for THE AVENGERS I’m sure it would’ve ended on that sweet but obvious note. It would’ve stayed in WWII which would be nice because I’d like to see those characters like Peggy, the Colonel and Neal McDonough again. But they wanted to get him to 2012 in his own movie so it wouldn’t seem silly when they do it in THE AVENGERS. So they worked it into the structure, a wraparound story about him becoming The First Avenger.

I like that they don’t overexplain it. We learned earlierr that his metabolism works so fast it’s impossible for him to get drunk. We can assume this is why he crashed in Antarctica and woke up 70 years later, no need for Nick Fury or somebody to give him a speech about it.

The reason the wraparound works for me is it turns Captain Nerd’s Greatest Fantasy into a uniquely tragic figure. Not even like Batman, because there’s nothing to avenge. The movie ends with this poor bastard realizing that in the blink of an eye he skipped 70 years, so he lost the girl he (in his mind) just fell in love with. In fact everybody he knows has disappeared. We never heard about a family, but we saw all the friends and allies he made, all gone. Now some guy in an eyepatch is yelling at him and he’s gonna have to work with the smartass son of the guy who used to build his weapons. Music has gotten terrible, he missed the V-Day celebration, and also free love and all that shit. And the Rambo and Rocky movies. He was just in WW2, now they’ll probly ship him off to Afghanistan with no peace time in between. Damn, he’s probly still getting used to his new body, now this shit. He’s Ripped Van Winkle.

And the weirdest part – maybe the ingenious part – is that he responds with one line that plays like a cute little joke, and then it slams into the credits. It pretends it’s saying “HOORAY!” but really it’s horribly sad. I say maybe it’s ingenious because I love the weird contradictory feeling it gives me, but I suspect that wasn’t what Johnston was going for. I’m not really sure. And it doesn’t really matter.

So it was no surprise when he starred in and directed one of these “funny old guy” movies in the wake of GRUMPY OLD MEN and all those. No Walter Matthau or Jack Lemmon in this one, but you got Clint, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner as geriatric former Air Force hot shots who blackmail their way onto a Space Shuttle mission to rescue a Russian satellite so ancient nobody can understand its guidance system except the old guy who designed it (Clint).

I always avoided this one, but I shouldn’t have. You know, people said it was “GRUMPY OLD MEN in space” or “SPACE CAMP with wrinkles” or “TOUGH GUYS with a space shuttle instead of a train and satellite repair instead of armed robbery,” so I fell for it and thought that’s not really a movie I need to sit down and watch. But I should’ve known that with Clint at the helm it was gonna work.

The broad humor about boners and what not is kept to a minimum. This type of movie can belittle old people with lots of jokes about diapers and shit, and then condescend to them with some cute bullshit at the end that says “hey don’t worry grandpa, you’re all right. Thanks for paying to see our movie.” But this doesn’t feel like that, it seems very sincere in siding with the Space Cowboys’s stubborn old man ways. They’re shown to be correct. Most of the humor is not at their expense. The joke isn’t that they’re out of touch or whatever, it’s that they enjoy using their old school ways as a tool to torture younger people (or James Cromwell) for their own amusement.

Clint brings his usual sense of class (jazz soundtrack, occasional moments of quiet beauty or tension) and Dirty Harry attitude (even as an old retiree who locks himself in the garage by accident he still has the badass presence, obvious exasperation for authority and knack for wise-ass insults intact).

At its center this is about Clint avenging James Cromwell for being a dick to him a long time ago, and making up with Tommy Lee even though they’ve both been dicks to each other. It’s about men who thought they didn’t get a fair shot when they were young getting that shot against all odds when they’re old. By all rights they should’ve been the guys to go up into space, but Cromwell sent a monkey named Marianne instead. Now, whaddya know, the tables have turned. It just took some patience and retirement. And decades of bitterness, I guess.

Years later when this satellite is causing trouble he has to call in Clint but Clint refuses to just consult – he’ll only help if the entire Team Daedalus can do the mission. Cromwell gives in, but he has his group of young people training alongside them “in case” they don’t pass the physical, so there’s competition and shit-talking between the oldsters and the youngsters, and Cromwell doesn’t really intend to let the seniors go into space.

Throughout the movie Clint and the boys keep talking to people who have a dad or a mentor or somebody that they knew back in the day, and then there’s an awkward moment when they find out the person is dead. It only emphasizes how lucky they are to still be around, let alone get to achieve their dream, save the world, etc. But I think there’s a missed opportunity here. I think one of the members of the young team should be a monkey, the son of Marianne, Cromwell’s way of really rubbing their nose in it. But they try to be cool and mature about it so Clint says Marianne, huh? Whatever happened to that old sonofabitch anyway? And the monkey uses his keyboard to say MARIANNE DEAD.

The weirdest touch in the movie is the prologue, where younger actors play the Space Cowboys, but their voices are dubbed by Clint and friends. I don’t know, it’s kinda distracting, like modern Kareem voicing GAME OF DEATH Kareem in BRUCE LEE: A WARRIOR’S JOURNEY, but I didn’t mind it too much. I head about it and always assumed it would be ridiculous, so when I finally saw it it didn’t seem so bad. And the guy playing young Clint (Toby Stephens) has just the right squint and eyebrow dip. I bet that guy feels pretty fuckin cool, and he should. And Huge Ackman was probly pissed he didn’t get to do it, he was the reigning Young Clint Eastwood at that time.

SPACE COWBOYS is nothing great, but it’s a completely enjoyable popcorn type movie and a good weekend afternoon use of one disc in my Clint Eastwood 35 Films box set. I never figured I’d see Clint’s face CGId onto a floating astronaut. They should put that on the MTV logo. Take that, youth.

Early in William Friedkin’s THE HUNTED we are introduced to its hero, L.T. Bonham (Steven Seagal), an expert in tracking, knife fighting and wilderness survival who used to train special ops soldiers in these skills. As he learned that the guys he was training were being sent to assassinate people for purely political purposes he grew disillusioned and quit. So now he’s in the BC wilderness where we see him track an injured wolf through the snowy woods, get the trap off of his paw, chew up a root and rub it on the wound as a homeopathic healing agent. Then he tracks the responsible poacher down at a tavern, bangs his head against a table and tells him never to do it again.

Oh wait, did I say Steven Seagal? Actually L.T. Bonham is played by Tommy Lee Jones. I was surprised how much of this movie reminded me of Seagal, though. The story is about a special ops badass (Seagal– er, I mean Benicio Del Toro) who comes back from Kosovo totally wacked out and kills some guys, and Tommy Lee Jones (UNDER SIEGE) is the guy who trained him so he has to help catch him. So I thought it was gonna be like FIRST BLOOD meets THE FUGITIVE. Not Steven Seagal meets Steven Seagal.

Unlike FIRST BLOOD there’s not alot of build to this guy snapping, not alot of pushing him too far. There aren’t circumstances back home that make him go crazy, it just happens because Kosovo was so bad. Friedkin pretty much depicts Kosovo as Hell, the whole place lit orange from flames. It’s kind of a surreal opening because it starts with Johnny Cash’s voice reciting a poem about God and Abraham. And it throws you off balance when some action movie starts out narrated by Johnny Cash. He could be the voice of God, or of the movie’s narrator, or of Uncle Jesse from DUKES OF HAZZARD. Whatever he is he’s a weird person to welcome you to an action movie. But he’s Johnny Cash, so you trust him.

When Benicio gets back stateside he of course hides a Bible in a tree and lives in the woods and then slaughters a bunch of heavily armed killers using only a knife and maybe some mud or leaves or something. Friedkin cleverly leaves it up to you to decide whether the dudes were actually government “sweepers” there to take him out, as Benicio swears, or innocent deer hunters with overly powerful weapons, as the FBI will later claim. At any rate the FBI guilts Tommy Lee into going after him because he’s the world’s best tracker. He’s the best guy for the job even before he figures out that the killer was one of his students. He taught him this wilderness survival shit, he taught him stealth and tracking, and worst of all he taught him some badass knife fighting techniques where you kill a guy like 9 different ways in five seconds.

And I wasn’t joking about that wolf tracking scene. You tell me that’s not a Steven Seagal character. It could be William Lansing, Seagal’s character from OUT OF REACH, who is retired from the game, disillusioned, and tracks an injured bird through the woods. But that was a year after THE HUNTED so instead I will cite the precedent of Dr. Wesley McClaren of THE PATRIOT, which came out 5 years before THE HUNTED. McClaren is retired from the game, disillusioned, helping animals and people in Montana. In the opening he tracks a sick pony and gives it homeopathic medicine.

And I love that followup where he confronts the poachers. When the guy’s buddies jump up for a fight Tommy Lee holds out one finger so commandingly that they all back down. And you don’t blame them. I mean, if you digitally put Seagal’s face onto Tommy Lee, you could take this scene and put it anywhere in ON DEADLY GROUND and it would seem right at home. It’s also vaguely reminiscent of the end of OUT FOR JUSTICE, where Seagal tracks down the guy who threw a dog out of a car and kicks him in the nuts.

Del Toro’s character has some Seagal in him too. He’s like THE GLIMMER MAN, trained to be deadly and invisible, considered to be “off the reservation,” framed and hunted by the agency that created him because he knows too much, has a relationship with a woman and a little girl. That’s about the only thing that keeps it from being a Seagal movie is that you have two of these type of characters, evenly matched, facing off for the entire movie. Seagal has to have the pyramid structure where he works his way through many bad guys and gets to the top. He doesn’t do a one-on-one. If it was a Seagal movie he’d be forced to play both characters, they would have to rewrite it so they’re twins or something.

I wonder if anybody told the Oscar winning director and the two Oscar winning stars that they were making a Steven Seagal movie? Even stylistically, early on, it has a bit of the feel of those European espionage DTV movies Seagal does. And Del Toro does a couple weird things that are easy to imagine in a Seagal movie. For example when the sweepers/hunters are confronting him in the woods he hides somewhere and loudly whispers “If you kill with your bare hands there is a reverence” as if some spirit in the woods is reciting warrior cliches.

Because it’s a Friedkin movie though it’s inspired by a real guy who really has that job, who worked as a consultant on the movie. So the tracking scenes are pretty cool. Friedkin does it the old fashioned way, using pictures to show things in a movie instead of the new way where you wave the camera around and make sure you can’t tell what is happening but then maybe somebody explains verbally what’s happening. With this one Tommy Lee will be in a woman’s house, she claims Benicio is not there, Tommy Lee looks at the sink and there is a closeup of a little bit of soap with hairs in it from shaving. (don’t worry, it appears to be stubble, not pubes)

Unfortunately, because they do it this way they have to exaggerate it so that we non-master-trackers know what we’re looking at, and this is one of the movie’s weaknesses. Benicio is so obsessed with tracking that he teaches a little girl how to read squirrel tracks, and he knows he is being chased by the world’s best tracker, the guy who taught him. And yet he leaves perfect muddy shoeprints on the kitchen floor of the place he’s hiding out at. When he climbs out of a manhole he not only leaves the lid open, he throws his construction helmet on the sidewalk, showing which direction he went. Can’t even be bothered to throw the helmet into a garbage can or across the street where he’s not going.

Del Toro is a brilliant actor and a lovable weirdo. He’s pretty convincing both at being a deadly knife fighter and at being crazy. But something about him here, I don’t know. He’s so weird and distant it’s hard to really empathize with him, but he’s not evil so you don’t want to root against him. Tommy Lee is much more sympathetic, an interesting character somewhere in the middle between the blowhards he used to play and the quiet guys he plays now. When he’s tracking he’s kind of a hunched over weirdo scurrying around like a man-sized mouse, looking for clues. Then when he’s threatened his entire physicality changes and you believe he could stab a guy to death even if he forgot his knife.

Which brings me to the knife fights in this movie, which are classics. There are a couple different fight scenes and they are topnotch, especially considering how much of it Jones and Del Toro seem to really do themselves. Catching up with this movie four years later I’m surprised to realize it’s one of the best action movies of the 2000s. That doesn’t mean it’s a classic, because the competition ain’t that fierce, but it’s a pretty good one. There are some interesting characters and ideas here but even if you don’t like them you will love the action. There’s even a William Freakin’ Friedkin car chase to add to the list with FRENCH CONNECTION and TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. Okay, it’s not on the same scale as those two but it’s got a great gimmick where he gets stuck in gridlock and has to ram his way out.

So don’t write off Friedkin yet, and don’t write off action movies. THE HUNTED may not be perfect but it’s something more important: hard evidence that good old fashioned action movies are still possible in the 21st century. No CGI, no Avid farts, no jokin around and muggin. Just a couple interesting characters chasing each other and trying to stab each other, just like it oughta be.

[ratings]

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is one of those movies that’s so quiet it can be uncomfortable to watch with an audience. Alot of scenes all you hear is the wind blowing lightly over the wide open Texas plains, or the cars driving past outside a motel room, along with every squirm, every sigh, every shoulder crack in the theater. At the end when I saw the music credit for Carter Burwell I honestly couldn’t for the life of me remember any point in the movie where there was music.

So it’s clearly a little arty, it’s not like anybody’s gonna mistake this for THE MUMMY RETURNS. Or for THE FRENCH CONNECTION for that matter. It requires a little patience. But there’s so much about it that’s so fuckin good that it will win over all kinds of people from all walks of life. At first.

It’s a movie full of great performances and great characters. James Brolin’s boy Josh has a career-catapulting role as Llewelyn Moss, Vietnam vet who’s out hunting when he stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone real bad, and decides to take home a briefcase of money as a souvenir. Javier Bardem, with his worst haircut since PERDITA DURANGO, plays Anton Chigurh, an enforcer who’s gone crazy enough to kill pretty much anybody who sees him along the way while spouting philosophy to justify his actions. And Tommy Lee Jones, in another topnotch quiet old lovable sadsack performance like he’s been doing lately, is the disillusioned Sheriff Bell who follows the trail.

And it’s a movie with alot of great talking, a script that pays careful attention to the interesting ways different people put words together. But this time credit doesn’t go as much to Joel and Ethan Coen, the brothers out of Minnesota who made the movie, as to Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the book that way already. Alot of the dialogue is lifted straight out of the book so it has alot of classic lines. I was glad they kept my favorite: Llewelyn’s wife asks him where he got that gun and he says “At the gettin’ place.”

This is a jawdroppingly awesome piece of filmatism, but is it a piece of Badass Cinema? This is a question not relevant to most reviewers but since everybody else has already written ten books worth about every other angle I might as well focus on this one.

Let me show you part of an email I got this week:

Vern,

Maybe you can help me on this one. See, last night, my girlfriend and I went to see No Country For Old Men. Both of us are fans of the Coen Bros. and of Badassery in general, so we were pretty pumped… So here’s the conundrum: We both walked out of that movie pissed off and thinking that it really sucked big donkey balls…

Throughout the first two thirds or so of the movie, we were onboard. It was slow-paced but felt like a tension was building which would eventually pay off when everything tied together in the end. Then, something happened. That something is that either the Coen Brothers forgot to make about 30 minutes worth of the movie or that the theater forgot to include a reel or, most likely, the movie fell flat on its face with absolutely no resolution to any of the story lines. I mean, seriously, the main characters just sort of disappear. After spending an hour and a half or so watching this cat and mouse game play out between Brolin’s character and the psychopath who wants his money back, we get treated to a disconnected scene of Tommy Lee Jones’s character now being retired and bam! credits. What the fuck?!?

Then the crowd applauded and [REDACTED] and I just stared at each other like, “did we miss something?”… So, I implore you, if/when you’ve seen No Country For Old Men, either (a) tell me that you agree that it fell apart and those douchebags in the theater in Hollywood were clapping because they feel like if they don’t understand what the fuck just happened it must be good so they better applaud so as not to look stupid or (b) tell me what it was that she and I missed, maybe a subtle line or scene, maybe something major that will make me feel stupid for not catching… but, SOMETHING that makes this film something other than a two hour wank. OR (C) write a review about it (best option).

I need help, less I lose faith in films for about the fifteenth time this year.

Thanks,
Chris.

I knew of at least two other people who had this problem with the movie. The first was a guy in the back of the theater when I saw it who, when the credits rolled, said “That’s it? I don’t get it.” You could hear it all throughout the theater so everybody laughed and then he said, “What? I don’t get it!”

The second was another Ain’t It Cool reviewer, the guy called Massawyrm. He infamously panned the movie for not giving the audience what you usually get in this type of story. He blamed the Coens’ “experimental streak” and if that’s the case then the experiment was to try to measure human tolerance for a faithful cinematic translation of a Cormac McCarthy book. That dude already did it in his book and the part that flipped Massawyrm’s wig in the movie is actually even stranger in the book because

TOP SECRET SPOILER SECTION (highlight)

Having seen it now I think actually the guy in the back of the theater has the more legitimate gripe. The end of the movie seems pretty abrupt, it is definitely jarring if you don’t know what’s up. There are certain things you instinctively expect a story like this to resolve, but this one has a different agenda. It’s telling you a different story than you thought it was and you might not realize this until the credits roll.

In the book they keep going back to Bell’s point of view, like that narration he has at the beginning of the movie, so it’s not a surprise that it’s his story, that’s sort of the idea from the beginning. I still thought that one little trick was jarring, but I also thought, well, it’s a book. What do you expect. You know how books are. In the movie, the Coens do such a good job of making it a great fucking thriller, that it’s even crueler when it pulls the carpet out from underneath your feet. Personally I think that’s kind of cool that they fuck with the audience that way but I can see how it would be fingernails on a chalkboard to some people.

The other thing is that with a book you’re prepared because you’re holding the book in your hands, you’re not blind, you know you’re on the last page so you’re at the end. Or if you are blind and you’re reading a braille book you still can feel that you are at the end of the book.

I remember when I read the book I Am Legend I got to this part where something huge happened and I thought holy shit, what’s gonna happen now? And I turned the page to the next chapter only to realize there is no next chapter, there’s some other unrelated short story in the back of the book. It felt like when you step off a curb or a step and for some reason the drop is bigger than you were thinking it was and you lose your balance. It was a great ending but I wasn’t mentally prepared for it to be the ending, I lost my balance.

But at least with that I could flip back a couple pages and re-read it with that in mind. With a movie in a movie theater if it ends when you’re expecting more it must be pretty disorienting.

So the temptation I guess is for people who liked that to say people who didn’t are stupid and for people who didn’t like it to say that people who did like it are just pretending they did to seem smart. That’s pretty much what Massawyrm did. I would say that it’s true, stupid people wouldn’t like this movie, but plenty of smart people wouldn’t either. I have sympathy because if I hadn’t read the book I bet it would’ve thrown me too. It’s fair to expect a thriller because parts of the movie would fit in the best thriller you’ve ever seen. There are two extended chase sequences that I already know are for the ages and I just saw the movie a few days ago. Most movies are not this intense, it feels like bullets are whizzing over your head for real. And at least a couple scenes, including the first one, are just like scenes in BLOOD SIMPLE. So it’s not stupid to wish for a perfect thrill ride like that. I’ve seen people saying “don’t go to a Coen Brothers movie expecting DIE HARD” but how about going to a Coen brothers movie expecting BLOOD SIMPLE?

You know what? I can’t lie. If there was no book and this was just a crime thriller and wasn’t all contemplative and shit, I might’ve liked it just as much. And maybe it doesn’t matter that there’s a book. I bet if it was the ’70s or if it was somebody not as good as the Coen Brothers they would’ve hedged their bets and Hollywooded it up with some more traditional resolution of the stolen drug money caper. But I knew the Coens wouldn’t do that. It’s called NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and it’s not talking about stealing Waylon Jennings records from the retirement home. It’s talking about Sheriff Bell coming to terms with his obsolescence in today’s violent world. Not exactly high concept. But worth making a movie about.

So my answer to Chris was that this is not exactly Badass Cinema. Somebody might say it’s an arthouse approach to Badass Cinema, like POINT BLANK, and since POINT BLANK is one of the all time greats of Badass Cinema that means you can be arthouse without devaluing the Badass. True enough, but POINT BLANK’s badass credentials are built around a lead played by Lee God Damn Marvin, a character who kicks down doors, fires into empty beds, wants his money back. The most badass character in NO COUNTRY is the villain. And yes, Llewelyn certainly pulls enough buckshot out of his shoulder to qualify. He even has the Vietnam vet background of many action heroes. But that “That’s it? I don’t get it” ending tells us that it’s Bell’s story, and Bell may be a man’s man but he’s not a badass, and has no interest in being one. He really would rather be retired, eating at cafes, putting on his reading glasses, “listening to old timers.” And not in a Billy Jack or Steven Seagal way where he is a pacifist but he’s still gonna kick you in the face and throw you through a window. This story is serious about it.

That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the movie, it just means to re-adjust your expectations if somebody told you that’s what it was. I think even some people let down by the end will go away kind of liking it because it’s such a highly concentrated dose of pure filmatism. Not just the tense scenes but all the quiet, moody ones. Llewelyn coming across the dead bodies and piecing together what happened, later coming back guiltily to bring water to the lone survivor. Bell and deputy examining the scene later, discussing the dead dog, the “second fracas.” The powerful score by Carter Burwell, I can’t wait to listen to it again and really study it. (Just kidding, I think he formatted the CD of his score wrong and they thought it was supposed to blank so that’s what they used.)

If nothing else NO COUNTRY will be remembered for having a classic villain. If I remember right there’s only one person in the movie who ever saw him without dying. Another guy asks him if he’s gonna kill him and Chighur says, “It depends. Do you see me?” I thought of him as an angel of death. Bell describes him as a “ghost.” And Chris told me in a later email that at one point when something happens to Chighur somebody in his theater said “How you gonna kill death?”

Like the book, the movie doesn’t skimp on the violence, and that’s probaly where the badass confusion comes in. There’s more than one graphic scene of self-bullet wound surgery. These are some tough dudes and they’re not gonna cry about it, but it’s graphic enough that you know when somebody gets tagged it has consequences, like when John McClane steps across glass as opposed to when he falls of an F-35 jet. One of many great scenes is when Chigurh makes a molotov cocktail out of a car to cause a distraction as he storms into the back of a pharmacy to steal what he’ll need to turn his hotel room into the ER. That’s taking it one step further than Rambo. Chigurh has a higher standard of health care than Rambo. By the way wouldn’t it be weird if they did CHIGURH: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN PART 2 and he’s working for the government now to save some hostages? I’ll answer for you, that would be weird.

The thing is, I think ultimately “the ending” of this one will not be the issue. Once a movie is around for a while and you’ve had a chance to think about it and to see it more than once it stops being about the plot the way it unfolded for you the first time you watched it and starts being about the movie as a whole. I would bet that some people who didn’t like the way it turned out the first time will later go back to it and, with pre-knowledge of what’s gonna happen, appreciate more how it comes together. The way Llewelyn comes across these dead drug dealers, not ever seeing what happened to them, and later the Sherriff (and the audience) find him the same way. There’s some kind of symmetry to it. It’s not just a random sucker punch. It just seems like one.

This fall, if you see only one contemplative literary adaptation with some elements of Badass Cinema that seems like a random sucker punch but actually has some symmetry to it in retrospect, see NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

[ratings]

Flynn is not a director that has been intensely studied, you’re not gonna find a whole lot of information on him (although Shock Cinema did an interview with him a couple years ago.) I really know nothing about John Flynn the man, but since I’m very fond of three of his movies in particular Moriarty asked me to write up a little something.

Mr. Flynn’s most famous movie, the one every one of you should see, and my number one “FOR GOD’S SAKE WOULD YOU PEOPLE PLEASE PUT THIS OUT ON DVD?” pick since POINT BLANK came out is ROLLING THUNDER. Written by Paul Schrader, this movie is in the vein of TAXI DRIVER if it was a little more of a straight ahead revenge movie. William Devane plays a Vietnam vet who comes home to a hero’s welcome, but becomes very distant and feels nobody understands him. Things get worse when he gets robbed and loses his hand to a garbage disposal. He definitely has more to complain about than John Rambo in FIRST BLOOD. So later there is revenge.

I don’t really know a way to describe the plot without making it sound cheaper and dumber than it really is. This was one of the first movies to deal with Vietnam vets coming home to find that things just aren’t the same anymore, a theme that is unfortunately still pretty potent today. But that’s just one level. More importantly, it works as pure badass cinema. And that’s just about my favorite thing in movies: a real effective tough guy film that underneath also has something to say about the world.

There’s a great scene where Devane goes to get his buddy Tommy Lee Jones to go on a revenge rampage with him. He interrupts the family dinner walking in in full uniform, and Tommy Lee, without hesitation, just gets up from the table and joins him. He just looks at him and he knows. That’s one of my favorite moments in any movie because it’s that great “oh shit, it’s on” moment of badass anticipation, and at the same time it shows how really only another guy who was in Vietnam can truly understand him.

Another favorite (also not on DVD, for crying out loud) is THE OUTFIT. I thought I was about the only guy who cared about this one until I saw Harry mention it a couple times in the last year or so, apparently they played it down there in Austin. THE OUTFIT caught my interest because it’s based on Richard Stark’s third Parker novel. If you’re not familiar with the Parker novels, the first one (called The Hunter) was the basis for both POINT BLANK and PAYBACK. A couple of the later ones were also made into movies – Slayground was a movie starring Peter Coyote, The Seventh became THE SPLIT starring Jim Brown (never on video), the Jugger was the very, very loose basis of a pretty terrible Godard movie called MADE IN USA.

Well, THE OUTFIT is either the second or third best movie based on a Parker novel, depending on how you feel about PAYBACK. Robert Duvall plays the Parker character in this one. It’s actually a pretty direct sequel to The Hunter/POINT BLANK/PAYBACK because in that one Parker pisses off the organized crime corporation called The Outfit, in the second one (The Man With the Getaway Face) he goes on the run, and in this one he gets fed up and convinces his friends to all rob Outfit-run businesses at the same time. No more running. For the movie Flynn (who wrote the screenplay too) added a different motive (they killed his brother) and like most of the adaptations he makes the character more sympathetic. But Duvall is a mean, tough bastard, there’s a really good score and the movie has a real momentum to it. As an added bonus to fans of the books you get to see a few of the recurring characters, including Parker’s long time partner Handy McCay (called Cody and played by Joe Don Baker). Robert Ryan’s character Mailer, by the way, is based on the same character William Devane played in PAYBACK.

The third great movie by John Flynn is – and please, hear me out on this one – OUT FOR JUSTICE starring Steven Seagal. I know you guys are gonna laugh at this one because most of you are not Seagalogists like I am. But it was when I saw this that I looked up John Flynn and made the connection that it was the same guy who did ROLLING THUNDER and THE OUTFIT. Due to my vocation I’ve seen every movie Seagal has ever made several times, and I have long been convinced that OUT FOR JUSTICE is the best directed and most genuinely badass of all of them. In fact, Flynn is one of the very few directors who managed to put his own stylistic stamp on a Seagal picture. It’s not the funniest or most representative Seagal picture, but it’s my favorite.

If this movie starred William Devane or Robert Duvall I’m sure it would be more respectable like those other two. Instead it has my man Seagal struggling to do a New York Italian-American accent, which is admittedly pretty laughable at times. But it has Seagal at his meanest, some of his best fights ever, and the most distinctive story of any of his movies (although I wish they would’ve cut out that epilogue where the dog pees on the guy’s head). It looks and sounds different from all the other Seagal pictures. The score is by the same guy who did the noodly guitars of ABOVE THE LAW and HARD TO KILL but it’s a more ominous and timeless sound that hits you in the balls like Seagal would do if you happened to be in the bar where he comes looking for Richie. Or if you were mean to a dog.

Stylistically the movie is great too. The cinematography is grey and gritty. I love the way they shot the bumpy car chase. With the intense camerawork and the appearance of Jerry Orbach it seems to be the long lost father of all the cop shows they have now. This movie also has hands down, by about a hundred miles, the greatest opening credits of any Seagal movie and most action movies of the era. The scene involves Seagal throwing a pimp by his tie into some garbage, then tossing him headfirst into a car window. There’s a menacing shot looking up at Seagal through the hole in the windshield, it freezes on his mean face and says STEVEN SEAGAL (filling up the whole god damn screen) and then OUT FOR JUSTICE.

Some other Flynn movies you might’ve seen include Stallone’s prison movie LOCK UP and the morbid and in my opinion cheesy horror movie BRAINSCAN, which was the first movie written by Andrew Kevin Walker. Although he was always gravitating to these genre movies, Flynn actually started out pretty serious with 1968’s THE SERGEANT. Rod Steiger apparently plays a macho army sergeant who has to deal with his repressed homosexuality when he realizes he’s attracted to a private played by John Phillip Law. That’s not a movie you’d expect from the director of OUT FOR JUSTICE, or subject matter you’d expect to see in 1968, so maybe it’s another one they oughta put out on DVD. Come on people, you got every season of GOLDEN GIRLS I think we can start getting to some of these John Flynn movies now.

Anyway, it’s too bad. I think we lost an uncharted titan of Badass Cinema this week. But of course some people out there lost a friend and family member, so best wishes to them. Rest in peace John Flynn, and thank you for taking the time to kick our asses.

[ratings]

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Tommy plays Pete, a Texas ranch hand with unspecified past, and his best friend Melquiades is played by a guy named Julio Cesar Cedillo. He’s not in the movie as much as Pete though, because he’s dead. The movie opens with some good ol’ boys driving around with guns and they see a coyote chewing on something, and they shoot it. Then when they go to gather up the sweet, sweet coyote meat they notice that what the coyote was chewing on was The One Dead Body of Melquiades Estrada.

Poor Melquiades – dead and the cops don’t seem to give a shit. We don’t know it at first but it’s pretty easy to figure out that the culprit was this asshole border guard named Mike Norton (Barry Pepper from THE 25TH HOUR). He’s a scary Timothy Mcveigh looking motherfucker who obviously doesn’t get much joy out of life but does like to throw in a little of the unneccessary roughness when chasing illegal immigrants. This guy is a real asshole and you expect him to be over the top evil. But the shooting is an accident, a misunderstanding.

Doesn’t matter though. Pete is pretty pissed off about his best friend being dead, and even moreso when the sherriff, Dwight Yoakam, doesn’t notify him and just has Estrada quickie-buried with a little cross that says “Melquiades, Mexico” on it in sharpie. See, Melquiades once made Pete promise to have him buried in his home town. So Pete finds out Mike is responsible, kidnaps him at gunpoint, forces him to dig up Melquiades and then they head on horseback to Mexico to find the home town and bury him. And that’s what most of the movie is about.

So no, it’s not a remake of THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL. Similar, maybe. I haven’t seen that one.

Although the story is pretty basic there’s alot of subtle little things that break from your usual hollywood expectations. For example, Mike doesn’t even bother to plead his innocence until long after he’s been kidnapped, and even then it’s kind of a half-assed “for what it’s worth” kind of thing. I think maybe part of him agrees that he deserves this punishment. As much of an asshole as he is, he feels bad about killing the guy. (That said, when it happened he just said, “Hey man, you all right?” He didn’t run up and check his pulse.) Another thing is, you expect Dwight Yoakam to be the heavy for the whole thing, that he’s gonna chase them to the end, maybe begrudgingly gain a respect for his foe and turn the other way as he escapes or something like that. Instead of that you just hear second hand that he didn’t want to deal with this shit and went to Sea World. (I’m not shitting you, that really happens in the movie.)

Also there’s some clever moments, like a great scene where Mike and his wife are home not really talking to each other and a soap opera on the tv communicates through bad dialogue what they probaly oughta be saying. And a blind man who listens to Mexican radio even though he doesn’t understand Spanish, and some Mexican guys who watch American soap operas even though they don’t understand English. But mostly it’s real simple and subtle, organic, down to earth. Everybody compares it to Peckinpah. Stylistically it’s not much like Peckinpah, but the tone is similar – very grim and quiet with some dark humor. And the subject matter obviously has gotta remind you a little bit of BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA. It gets pretty damn gruesome too with that body. It decomposes. It attracts ants. We’re not talking WEEKEND AT BERNIES here. We’re not even talking WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S 2.

Remember that movie STAND BY ME, it was about how some kids bond and learn about life by journeying to go look at a dead body. This movie is about guys who bond and learn about life by journeying WITH a dead body.

Melissa Leo, who I didn’t recognize from HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET, is also in the cast, and a couple other people. In a way you could compare this movie to CRASH (not the perverted Cronenberg one but the newer, sillier one) because it uses some farfetched coincidences and has a redemption theme. But this is more my speed because it’s a pure, solid, brooding tough guy movie. There’s a couple tricks in the beginning, skipping around in time (it’s written by the guy who wrote AMORES PERROS and 21 GRAMS). But it boils down to the simple story of crazy as fuck Tommy Lee Jones dragging pissed off, beaten to a pulp scumbag Barry Pepper to Mexico to bury a body.

I don’t know if this is one of those “I’m gonna direct a movie just this once” type dream projects or if Tommy Lee Jones is seriously becoming a director now. But I hope it’s the second one. This is good old fashioned nuts and bolts meat and potatos type of filmatism, none of this fancyboy showoff shit. We need at least a couple of these type of guys to still be alive if we’re not gonna damage our brains forever. Tommy Lee’s a good man, he doesn’t need to pimp himself out in shitty hollywood movies when he could be making movies like this. I bet you ten bucks Tommy Lee got more satisfaction and pride out of this one then he did MAN OF THE HOUSE.

Thank you Tommy Lee for the first true badass Cinema of 2006.

[ratings]

The movie starts out with a guy jumping off a building. Tommy Lee is at the funeral and shortly after receives a letter, and a key, from his dead ‘Nam buddy. In the letter the dead guy explains that he’s been preparing an attack on Central Park for a long time. The key leads to a ridiculous stash of guns, bullets and bombs. There are also maps showing where this guy has already planted explosives around the park.

I’m not really sure why the guy had to kill himself before pulling his little massacre. But Tommy Lee, having lost his shitty job and not being allowed to see his kid is pretty much in the mood. His ex-wife chews him out for being a fuckup and asks him “Why don’t you just do something about it?” Cut to Tommy Lee in full camo, plus face paint and Yankees cap, ready to conquer Central Park. It’s 3 days until Veteran’s Day and his only demand is to keep people out of the park until Veteran’s Day.

The story is set up incompetently (why do we need a voiceover of the letter explaining everything when we could discover everything visually, piece by piece?) but I love this idea. Most people would think “Holy shit, my friend was completely nuts, but should I tell the cops or just try to get rid of this shit?” Tommy Lee happens to be the one guy who would take all the weapons and finish what his friend started. That’s a good premise for a movie right there.

Once he takes over the park (which he does just by making a phone call and detonating a couple bombs) the rest of the movie of course has the police trying to foil him and him trying to “make his point” about the treatment of veterans. Yaphet Kotto plays the wise and sympathetic police captain. A Yaphet vs. Tommy Lee showdown could be pretty good but unfortunately the antagonist is a weasely Jeffrey Combs looking motherfucker who is the deputy mayor. He just wants to have Tommy Lee killed and he’s played too broadly to be taken seriously.

Also not surprisingly you got a female journalist who sneaks into the park to try to get a good story. Tommy Lee is worried she could get shot or step on a mine or booby trap so he keeps her around. You know how movies are, it’s dumb when somebody talks to themself too much, but nobody wants to go non-verbal. So you get these characters who exist only so that the main character has somebody to talk to. Anyway she tries to make a documentary about him. I don’t think she really knows what she’s doing, I wonder if she is into the Maysles Brothers and stuff like that? Also she is shown sucking her thumb while asleep which I thought was an interesting touch. Not sure what that was about. Nothing against thumbsuckers, you just don’t see that in too many movies in my opinion.

Also there’s a funny part where the ex-wife calls into the park on the emergency phones and gets jealous because a woman answers.

I think this could be remade into a great movie, but this ain’t it. The action is cheesy (lots of explosions and bullets that never hit anyone) and come to think of it I’m not sure I would even classify it as action. There is nothing exciting or badass about any of the violence in this movie. The very worst part though is the way they try to make him into a folk hero. There’s a scene where people on the street are interviewed and they talk about how he’s “a regular guy like us” and they admire him for standing up, but of course they don’t say what exactly he’s standing up for. Come on man, you gotta work a little harder than that. You gotta make us like him, you can’t just tell us that the hard working, straight talking working class New Yorkers like him. You’re trying to force it. I guess it was okay when they showed a veteran’s group wearing “THE PARK IS MINE” t-shirts during the Veteran’s Day parade. At least that was kind of ambiguous.

The one thing the movie really has going for it besides the premise is Tommy Lee, who obviously is great at barking out orders. It’s funny to see him interogating innocent parkgoers asking them “What are you doing here?” I’m not sure why this only happens once or twice though. I thought New York was a pretty big city with lots of people in it but I could be wrong about that, I’ll have to look it up.

At the end the deputy mayor sends in two mercenaries, a Trautman looking dude who’s “an idol to Soldier of Fortune types” and, believe it or not, a guy from the Viet Cong. That’s pretty insulting to Tommy Lee, of course, but he manages to take care of them. I kind of wonder though what happens after the movie is over. I bet “Soldier of Fortune types” would be pretty pissed that he killed their idol.

I should warn you that the music is by Tangerine Dream. I don’t know why a guy would call himself Tangerine Dream, so I’m guessing it’s a band. But it sounds like one guy playing a keyboard so I wonder what the band does. Maybe one guy does the black keys and the other guy does the white keys, I don’t know. Anyway, I’m not a fan of Tangerine Dream, or ’80s keyboard scores in general. Only John Carpenter knew how to pull that off. Plus, these guys don’t seem to give a shit what’s going on in the movie. At the very end he has made it to Veteran’s Day and he’s supposed to turn himself in, and all the sudden he just sets off all the bombs and there’s huge fireballs everywhere like he blew himself up. But Tangerine Dream is playing happy victory music. So then it’s not a surprise when he somehow walks out okay. I’m not sure what he blew up exactly or why but I guess it’s happy, according to Tangerine Dream.

The director is Steven Hilliard Stern, who also did MAZES AND MONSTERS (Tom Hanks anti-Dungeons and Dragons tv movie) and ROLLING VENGEANCE (guy goes on monster truck rampage) and this is pretty much on that level. The weird thing is it’s based on a novel by a guy named Stephen Peters, who wrote the late ’90s classic WILD THINGS. The PARK IS MINE book came out in 1982 so it may not be a FIRST BLOOD ripoff, unless it was either a rip off of the book or written and published really fast. Whatever the case is, it’s not FIRST BLOOD. In fact, both movies have a scene where cops shoot at the protagonist from a helicopter and the helicopter blows up, escalating the battle. In FIRST BLOOD the cops die. In THE PARK IS MINE the cops get out and run away safely before the copter explodes into a huge ball of flames. That pretty much sums up the difference between these movies.

[ratings]

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a couple a comments – number one, the black guy is okay i guess, but i don’t think he would last long inside. number two, i guess it was pretty funny at times. the woman, whatserfuck, she looked pretty good.

sorry if this has already been cover – first timer here

–vern

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The picture opens with corny music as heroic Vietnam POWs arrive home at an airport, among them William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones. Mr. Devane will be our protagonist this evening, and as he pretends to enjoy the ceremony honoring him as a great american hero, you can tell right off the bat that he’s not quite there. He’s got a wife and kid waiting for him, and the kid doesn’t even remember him he’s been gone so long. Some guy named Cliff is there to give them a ride home. “You remember Cliff?” the wife says innocently, and you fuckin know what that means.

The wife left the house exactly how it was, to make the return more comfortable for him. And that makes you think how fucked up it would be to be locked up for years and all you want to do is come home, but then when you get there you don’t even recognize it. That would suck, and he didn’t get this. But what also sucks that he did get is his wife immediately tells him she’s been fuckin Cliff and they’re gonna have to get a divorce. There is a great scene where Cliff tries to have a man to man talk with him, and brings him a beer. You expect the major to chew Cliff out but he’s just real nice about it, which makes it so much creepier. Instead of beating up Cliff he makes him uncomfortable by pressuring him into pulling up his arms behind his back like his torturers did to him in ‘Nam. And the major almost seems to enjoy it. Making Cliff uncomfortable. Then all he does is tell him, “I’d appreciate it if you don’t call my son a runt.”

Now I already mentioned there’s gonna be some revenge involved in this picture, but it’s actually not against Cliff. Instead, there is a ceremony where a department store awards the major with a silver dollar for every day he was locked up – somewhere around $2500. Afterwards, a bunch of rednecks (including Roscoe P. Coltrane from the Dukes of Hazzard) show up at his house to try to force him to give them the coins.

Now look, I know I’m one to talk, but these here are some dumb fuckin criminals. I mean no offense to the handicapped but this is one retarded fucking crime. The Radio of home invasions. These guys are stealing $2,500, but they bring like 5 guys. If they’re splitting it five ways, that’s only $500 each, right? And the way they choose to go about getting this $500? By torturing a man who is famous for being tortured for years on end. The exact guy that you should probably not want to torture information out of. Because obviously the guy knows what he’s doing when it comes to getting tortured.

Worse, they end up killing his wife and kid, and stuffing his hand in the garbage disposal. So it’s double murder plus, for 500 fucking silver dollars. If they can even carry them. Nice fucking plan, fellas.

Anyway, soon after our guy gets out of the hospital with a hook on his hand he starts tracking the motherfuckers that did this to him, trying to find their whereabouts, so that the revenge can take place. Once he catches their scent he goes out to visit his old war buddy Tommy Lee Jones. This is another great scene because the whole family is there (including brother-in-law Paul Partain, who played the obnoxious Franklin in TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE), nobody knows what’s up and they’re all gonna have dinner together. But Devane takes Tommy Lee aside and says, “I found him.” “Found who?” “The sonofabitch that killed my son.”

Tommy Lee doesn’t even hesitate, he says, “I’ll go get some equipment,” and starts getting ready to go kill the motherfucker. And as they’re about to start supper the family is kind of confused because William and Tommy suddenly leave, completely suited up in their uniforms.

It’s a simple movie but it’s a good one. So much tension and so much that is obviously going on that the characters never talk about. It’s a little bit TAXI DRIVER, a little bit FIRST BLOOD. I guess Schrader said that in his version there was no family, the guy was just a maniac because he was so damaged by the war. He seems to think the family was Hollywood bullshit, but I disagree. It creates so much great tension, and if you read up on the divorce rates, domestic violence etc. that happens in military families (not even POW) it is clear that this has a basis in reality. I mean coming home to find out your wife fell in love with somebody else was a common experience after Vietnam, and it will be now. I just read today about a soldier here in Washington State who they think killed his wife and left her in the bath tub. His dad said, “That’s not my son. My son is still in Iraq, and for that you can thank George W. Bush.” I think the major’s dad could’ve said the same thing about his son, although you probably should thank his captors and various other factions. Bush was playing all day water volleyball at that time and obviously cannot be blamed for these problems.

The director, John Flynn, also did the pretty good THE OUTFIT (with Robert Duvall as Richard Stark’s Parker character, who you know and love from POINT BLANK and PAYBACK). And he did OUT FOR JUSTICE, which for my money is Steven Seagal’s grittiest and best directed movie, even if Seagal does a bad Italian-american accent for the whole thing. Apparently his first movie THE SERGEANT, not available on video, had Rod Steiger as a drill sergeant who hides his attraction to new recruit John Philip Law by treating him like shit. Unfortunately other than that the rest of his filmography is pretty uninteresting.

Anyway this a real good one and highly recommended for all those trying to catch up on the ’70s badass classics. Along with POINT BLANK it is high on my list of pictures sorely needing a DVD release.

[ratings]