"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Carter

CARTER is a new South Korean action spectacular just released on Netflix today. It’s a real runaway roller coaster, bowling ball rolling down a steep hill, adrenaline jolt type of movie, so in that spirit I’m gonna try to plow through a review and get it up real fast, like in the old days.

I’m not always on top of the South Korean cinema, but this one is from director Jung Byung-gil, whose THE VILLAINESS (2017) ranks high for me in the list of the best action movies in the last decade. CARTER is in some ways not as good, but it’s even more action-packed and technically awe-inspiring, so I absolutely recommend it.*

*To most people. Some restrictions apply, see later in review for details, ask your doctor if CARTER is right for you.

Joo Won (FATAL INTUITION) stars as Carter Lee, a guy who wakes up face down in a hotel room surrounded by gun-pointing CIA agents. He has a freshly stitched-up, cross-shaped wound on the back of his head, and there’s a trail of blood leading from under the covers across the floor. He doesn’t remember who he is or what the fuck is going on, but the agents show a video of him holding one Dr. Jung Byung-ho (Jung Jae-young, SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE) hostage and saying to come get him in that hotel room.

As if that’s not enough drama for one morning he suddenly starts hearing a woman’s voice from an implant in his ear telling him what to do – starting with jumping out the window because the place is about to explode. So, you know, he’s only wearing thong underwear but he runs and leaps through the glass and and drops through another window into a bath house where some mobsters are torturing a guy and they have all their weapons laid out next to the tub so he ends up in a very long battle running around fighting and slashing dozens of naked or nearly naked attackers with a scythe. And it continues in that vein, but with some spy shit mixed in. One of those types of movies.

There are several stretches of the movie that do slow down to breathe, talk, and provide exposition. Arguably some of those are too long. But most of the 132 minute running time is given over to breakneck, ultra-violent, ridiculously ambitious action set-pieces. Much of the convoluted background of what the fuck is going on has to be decoded in the background of that, which can be disorienting. What we know at first is that a deadly pandemic originating in the DMZ has spread across the globe, Dr. Jung managed to cure his daughter Ha-na (Kim Bo-min) and is transporting her to mass produce an antibody treatment in a plan negotiated between North and South Korea, but they’ve gone missing. Carter is trapped between the CIA and a North Korean coup, not sure what side he’s supposed to be on or who he can trust, but he decides to go along with the lady in his ear, Han Jung Hee (Jeong Sori, I think), and bring Ha-na to her.

The main reason for CARTER to exist is also the reason some people will absolutely hate it: it’s an excuse to take the knockout action cinematography/choreography/FX work of THE VILLAINESS to even higher levels of quadruple backflip show offery. My friends who can’t stand moving cameras should never, ever think about watching this, because the opening ten minutes alone would literally kill them and send them to Hell for the sin of not appreciating outstanding craftsmanship.

If by any chance there was a worldwide shortage of cranes, gimbles, drones or steadicam rigs in the past year or so, the production of CARTER would be my prime suspect. The movie is presented as one (obviously not really) continuous shot, but I actually didn’t pick up on that until surprisingly far into the movie. The numerous times the camera U-turns to watch the battle from another angle, or swoops up into the sky to look down on it from above, or dives down under a vehicle to watch from under the chassis for a bit, or zooms in on something important like the hitch about to stop holding two train cars together, basically act as edits. So we get the visual storytelling provided by a series of images without the chaos of fast edits that muddy up so many action scenes.

That won’t be much consolation for people who are sensitive to movement or who will dismiss it on the basis of the many times when the digital effects can’t live up to the brightly lit, realistic look of the movie overall. There’s an omen close to the beginning, a very cool transition where the camera is following a squadron up some stairs but then goes up into the sky to follow a bird, and the bird looks like an unfinished effect. There are many other times where the digital stitching of shots is very noticeable, or where the physics of a flying person or vehicle in a bullet time type shot just look off and give it a video gamey sort of jankiness. So obviously the people who so often think the Hollywood movies with gigantic budgets look too fake will have a problem with this one. I’m not that guy, so I was able to roll with it.

I mean, I would love if this all looked 100% convincing, but being as that’s not the case, I would rather they had these incredibly cool shots that look phony than just calm down and do a normal movie. I mean I like the Robert Zemeckis-ness of it. When an admittedly phony looking multiple motorcycle pileup turns into a fiery explosion as they tumble down some stairs, the camera follows a flaming tire rolling away and down into a river and then meets back up with Carter escaping on the other side.

The way the camera constantly flies around and spins and twirls will surely make some people dizzy. It got me for a second in the part where he’s winding through alleys on a stolen Papa John’s delivery scooter (with bare feet – he’s wearing only underwear and a leather trench coat he found). But I swear I had no problem following this. It’s flying around like a rocket but it’s not shaky and it’s not chopped up so it’s almost literally like a ride. I found it absolutely thrilling.

Anders aka @pod-hard on Twitter had a good way of describing CARTER on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/outlawvern/status/1555675592258859009

I was thinking of it as a ‘90s Hong Kong BOURNE IDENTITY with the energy (but not douchiness) of CRANK and the camerawork (but not artiness) of ENTER THE VOID. And it reminded me of the constant momentum and innovation of HARDCORE HENRY, except on a much bigger scale, and without the problem of not being able to see the protagonist’s expressions and poses (which caused me to turn that one off). It’s also a child of the freeway chase in THE MATRIX RELOADED, benefiting from the technical innovations of FURY ROAD. (I wish the score was more like the techno of the former than the escalating bombast of the latter.)

So it’s an insane spy movie with exploding phones and molar bombs and fighting and stabbing and shooting on almost every conceivable type of vehicle (car, scooter, truck, bus, van, motorcycle, train, plane, helicopter) except for water ones. Save that for part 2 I guess. Since we can’t have that yet, we throw in some rage zombies for good measure. Sometimes on fire.

It’s hard to convey just how much action there is in this and just how ambitious it is. One of the most famous sequences in THE VILLAINESS involved a sword fight on motorcycles (later heavily homaged in JOHN WICK CHAPTER 3). Here Jung expands on that in an incredible motorcycles vs. van chase/fight/shootout with lots of FAST & FURIOUS style jumping or hanging from vehicles, a DOBERMANN style face-scraping, and the camera hovering and in out of the open doors on either side of the van. At one point (through movie magic) there are three vans driving high speed next to each other with their doors open, and he’s leaping freely between the three of them fighting multiple enemies. Meanwhile many of his pursuers meet their doom in spectacular ways like when a motorcycle crashes and flies in the air and smashes into the window of a bus, causing the bus to skid out and roll onto its side, in turn causing several more motorcycles to crash into it and hurl into the air.

That’s in the first half of the movie. Shit gets even crazier. When Carter is taken onto a jet you know there’s gonna be a big fight and a very long skydiving scene. I liked the one in THE GRAY MAN, but this one is way more elaborate, with a weird mix of yeah-that’s-obviously-an-effect and wait-a-minute-is-this-part-real? He has to jump without a chute to steal both Ha-na and a chute from another guy. And they’re shooting at each other in mid-air but it’s pretty hard to hit under those circumstances. And also there’s a knife fight and they’re dodging some flaming debris from the plane.

The final transition to the ground is very fake looking but then they land in the back of a pig farmer’s truck for the best and most MAD MAX-esque part of the movie. Motorcycles chase the truck, the driver gets shot, little Ha-na has to steer over his body while Carter fights some guys in between the pigs. He kicks a guy through the tailgate, a bunch of the pigs fall out, a motorcycle with a sidecar hits one of the pigs and is upended…


…another motorcycle crashes into that motorcycle and the driver rolls off, then a Jeep hits the first motorcycle, is launched into the air and lands right on the driver of the first motorcycle!


The amount of imagination put into all the gnarly shit that happens is straight up sinister. If you, like me, admire the audacious excess of BAD BOYS 2’s corpse dumping bridge chase, here’s something kinda like that that’s actually a coherent and thrilling action sequence to boot.

And there’s even more where that came from. Just little things that happen casually. Like when they’re escaping in a Jeep through a tunnel and zombies mob the vehicle but another zombie runs up behind them firing two pistols and as they drop starts running on all fours but another guy runs up and shoots him in the head but as he falls he shoots up and hits that guy in the head. Or in the bath house scene when Carter punches a guy who’s holding a blade and that guy falls over and accidentally stabs the guy they have hanging upside down. It’s not the type of action where it’s the same shit over and over – guns guns guns, punch punch punch. It’s voluminous variations of crazy shit. I’m not even gonna get into the part where they’re hanging off of and jumping to and from helicopters. Or several other sequences.

I like a movie that has a healthy respect for jolts of random chaotic mayhem. Here, for example, peaceful moment in nature is interrupted by a glob of zombies pouring down a waterfall. But ghouls are not needed for shit to pop off. In the bathhouse sequence, after Carter seems to have won and drops to his knees to catch his breath, the camera does an EVIL DEAD swoop through all the bodies and injured people all the way to the other end of the building, where it meets up with the high-out-of-her-mind naked woman we saw puffing smoke when we first came in, now holding a gun and shooting people as Carter finds the exit. (To a stairway where he will battle another swarm of people and get knocked out of a window and break his fall on the guy who falls before him and bounces [very unnaturally] off a passing car.)

I’d even say there are some settings and surreal touches that qualify as smart. Carter gets cornered while cutting through a cheesy haunted house maze in a warehouse, surrounded by fake corpses in coffins and stuff, but then there’s an explosion so when he leaves he’s stepping through actual puddles of blood and over actually mangled bodies. Another one is when he and Ha-na blend into a street protest where everyone is wearing paper masks of Ha-na and Dr. Jung. So Ha-na puts on a mask of herself and Carter, who’s sort of protecting her like a father, puts on a mask of her father.

IMDb is light on credits for this, and most of them on the movie are in Korean, so I don’t know who to credit for the action choreography/direction. But one credit that’s in English is for stunt coordinator Simon Rhee – Dae Han from THE BEST OF THE BEST 1 and 2! (He also plays a bus passenger, but I didn’t spot him.) There are so god damn many stunts to be coordinated that I gotta assume he’s a stunt coordinator and not the stunt coordinator, but whatever he did, good for him!

By the way, this is one of those weird-ass international co-productions I love so much. He’s not listed on IMDb yet, but there’s a whole sequence where Carter gets captured by the CIA and has to listen to a big English-language monologue from Luke Cage himself, Mike Colter. Then a more sympathetic American played by Camilla Belle (THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, THE PATRIOT, THE QUIET, 10,000 BC) tries to help him.

With so much of this happening outside in the daylight I don’t think this looks as stylish or atmospheric as THE VILLAINESS, and because it’s trying to do so much more with its FX-integration it ends up looking cheesier at times. But occasionally I think there’s an added value to the artificial-ness. Belle’s big scene is a conversation with Carter as the camera rotates around them standing in a moving bus. The rain and tinted windows give it an obvious rear projection look, but as her heart breaks at the realization he doesn’t remember her the camera stops on her face, her surroundings go out of focus and the outside world looks almost black and white.


A similar approach is used for the scene where Carter finally gets his memories back. The doctor injects him inside the Jeep, the camera rotates around to his face, and he looks more saturated than his surroundings as it hits him.


There is some ambiguity, though, about whether those are his real memories. If Belle’s character (named Agnes according to IMDb) and Hee are both telling him the truth, then he was a CIA agent named Michael Bane who became a spy for South Korea and fell in love with Hee while undercover in North Korea. But before that he would’ve been in love with Agnes, who swears she knows him better than “that voice in your ear,” i.e. Hee, so it’s tragic for her. But I think the movie hints at possibilities that Agnes could mistaken about his identity (I don’t believe we ever hear the DNA test results that she promises will prove her right) and/or that his recovered memories are not really his.

As you can tell from that description, the story is just as convoluted and hard to follow as THE VILLAINESS. And it even shares the themes of changed faces and deep undercover missions and unexpected love. However, THE VILLAINESS has the benefit of so much melodrama that you (or at least I) become emotionally attached to the protagonist early on, helping you to hang on when you’re lost. CARTER is a little more challenging in that the story requires him to be a total cipher, and for neither he or us to understand what’s going on much of the time. So I imagine the stupendousness of the action scenes will be lost on some people in a way they wouldn’t if the story allowed us to be more engaged in the character from the beginning.

But in the end the answers are given, the bigger picture becomes clear, and becoming emotionally invested is the payoff. I wasn’t sure it was gonna work for me, but it did.

I’m sure some will dismiss CARTER as a demo reel for the action team. Okay, that’s probly not too far off, but it’s a demo reel that’s better than the average action movie. Maybe the English language scenes were even meant as practice for Hollywood. I read that Jung is attached to a post apocalyptic comics adaptation starring Gerard Butler (which sounds pretty cool), but I’m unclear if that’s really still happening or not. I don’t need it to, because generally these sorts of talents are wasted on American movies. On the other hand, if a FAST & FURIOUS or a Marvel movie had a couple of setpieces done on this level it would absolutely blow people through the back wall. They would think it was the greatest thing they’d ever seen.

Vote Carter.

 

This entry was posted on Friday, August 5th, 2022 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Action, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

32 Responses to “Carter”

  1. One day I really have to take a motion sickness pill and do a double feature of this and HARDCORE HENRY. (And then sleep for the rest of the day, because these pills make you sleepy as fuck.)

  2. Holy Cow! CARTER is Bat Shit Crazy and by that I mean it’s an insanely good action thriller. Think EXTRACTION (Man fights off wave after wave of assassins protecting a child) fused with HARDCORE HENRY (single take action sequences with a decidedly videogame-y aesthetic), seasoned with CRANK (for the sheer audacity of it’s set pieces) and finished off with a sprinkling of RESIDENT EVIL (Virus-infected Zombies!). And if that wasn’t enough, the plot is convoluted in the way only Koreans make them and the whole movie is an unbroken “One-Shot” take (meaning a server farm’s worth of digital effects was used to make you think it is).

    It’s quite simply one of the most audaciously inventive and exhilarating action movies to come our way in awhile.

    As far as newly dropped Netflix actioners go, my advice is: Screw THE GRAY MAN and embrace CARTER!

  3. I’m typing this as I watch; I’m about 18 minutes in (Carter has finally put some clothes on). I respect the effort but I haaaaate the execution. The whole thing looks like a game, or like it was shot with drones and head-mounted GoPro cameras. The constantly moving camera isn’t exciting; it’s annoying as fuck. I watched PREY last night and that was shot in a much more traditional manner and it was fantastic. This is 100% Not My Thing. I strongly doubt I’ll make it to the end.

  4. Oh, this is definitely the new CRANK. So batshit insane.

    The CGI skydiving sequence was a bit too fake for many taste though.

  5. Watching this right now, and it’s dubbed because I’m fighting a fever and it makes this feel even more like a fever dream, and the awfulness of the exposition is pretty hilarious, especially when that American Reporter lady gives a running commentary on something a villain is doing, TROLL 2 style.

  6. Those who dislike this movie at least owe it to themselves to just check out the chase sequence involving bikes and 3 moving vehicles side by side, Vern describes it so well, where Carter and his assailants jump from the center van to inside the one on the left, then back to the center, then to the one on the right, all the while trading kicks and punches and ….Jee-sus! I rewound and watched this scene alone 3 times! It’s like you’re an action fan and watching this going…oh yeah, that’s hitting my sweet spots. It’s violent, the fight choreography is spectacular, the visual inventiveness is just stunning. Last time I got this exhilarated with a fight taking place amidst a high speed chase was in THE RAID 2.

    Check it out…else, as Vern says, be doomed to Hell, where your punishment will be to watch THE DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA YA SISTERHOOD on an infinite loop.

  7. As someone who’s been wallowing in South Korean Cinema, especially their action thrillers for almost 5 years now, CARTER is yet another example why most of them leave modern American Action Movies in the dust. Barring a JOHN WICK here, a FURY ROAD there, some really cool Jesse V Johnson flick now and then, a lot of today’s American Action movies resemble that guest in a party standing in a corner, sipping a cocktail and admiring the wallpaper.

    Korean Action movies are the rowdy guests who gate crash, yell “What is this???A fucking funeral?” loudly, proceed to crank up the music, and then trash the place. The results may not always be pretty, and you know the police will be called at some point but Damn! You know you’re in a freaking PAR-TAAAAAY!!!

    In fact Don Lee, who’s been carving quite a name for himself as Korean Cinema’s Go-To Bruiser, has been in some great flicks recently that’s a throwback to the old school 80s style one-man-army actioners which used to be the forte of Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Norris at their peak. But seasoned with that Korean Cinema Special Sauce of hard-edged violence and comedic interludes, which by the way was also a hallmark of peak HK Cinema.

    CARTER takes all that and jazzes it up with some very showy “hey look at this, ain’t this some cool shit” style of gimmickry which I don’t mind because, as Vern mentions, the action is still, despite all that drone and crane shot camera swooping, very coherently staged and filmed.

  8. Well, this was certainly something. Its central conceit is never convincing thanks to weirdly smeary digital transitions, the storytelling is at the level of a CALL OF DUTY tutorial, a good chunk of the craziest action looks like a cross between an unused pre-viz and BLUE’S CLUES, and Luke Cage’s big speech is some embarassing “Travolta’s opening monologue in SWORDFISH” sub-Tarantino hackery, but none of that matters because the energy of this thing is just off the charts. Realism can take a sickle to the throat and bleed out in its undies next to its killjoy pals Good Taste and Restraint. I’ll take this gonzo artificiality over cinema’s 400,000th take on the goddamn HEAT shootout anyday.

    THE VILLAINESS, by dint of telling an actual story with character motivations and emotions and stuff, is definitely superior, but I’m fully in favor of the go-for-broke, throw-the-whole-fucking-pot-of-spaghetti-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks confidence on display here. I really hope Michael Bay watched it and thought, “You know what? I’ve been holding back.”

  9. I know it’s tough to wrap your mind around (gawd knows it is for me), but we skipped a couple of years and 2017 is no longer ‘this decade’. I also know I sound like a prime-grade a-hole but I’ve read your opening paragraphs a couple of times now (for reasons) and I just can’t get over that. Now I can maybe read the actual review. Get your jogging in today, Vern.

  10. I… don’t know why you’re mad about jogging, but I will change it to “in the last decade,” in case anybody else is feeling aggressively pedantic.

  11. Well, I liked it, though I won’t begrudge someone for not getting a buzz off it–there is a good amount of Bayhem in Carter’s DNA. This and Six Underground could be Secret Santas. But, weigh that against its 110% commitment to being pure balls-to-the-walls action, with about as much plot as an NES game. There’s an almost auteur level of no-fucks-given about anything but The Good Shit–it makes stuff like Crank or Jolt look like edgelord posers monkeying around with the video effects in Avid. Hell, even Doomsday only had a run-of-the-mill plague; this goes ahead and makes them rage zombies.

    It took ten years, but we finally got a Total Recall reboot that’s worth a damn.

  12. Since I couldn’t stop myself from posting the dumbass thing that I did, the jogging bit was my attempt at lightening the mood. I just remembered that you mentioned that you were jogging not too long ago. I guess my people skills have, like everything else, atrophied after the last couple of years.

    Sorry, I’m not really in a good place right now.

  13. I’ve spent my fair share of time in that place myself, Jerome, so I know there’s no advice that’ll help. So I’ll just say I hope your stay is a short one.

  14. Thanks, Maj. I do appreciate the thought.

  15. That’s okay Jerome, sorry I wasn’t nicer about it. I thought you were making fun of me for mentioning jogging or something. I sometimes feel like it’s dorky to mention but then I remember one time years ago somebody told me they appreciated me posting about it because they were trying to get in better shape for health reasons and they found it inspirational. It was probly just that one guy but I remember that sometimes.

    I don’t mind the correction though. I hope things get better for you soon.

  16. I’m one of those people who (too) often thinks Hollywood movies with gigantic budgets look too fake, but I loved this. There’s a lot of thought and talent, and so much enthusiasm behind those (sometimes) shitty effects, as opposed to, I dunno, Uncharted or your basic MCU crappy action scene. The energy on display here is beyond infectious, and the movie repeatedly made me laugh out loud with its batshit intensity (I mean that in the most flattering way possible – the… um, appreciative, disbelieving laugh? is one of my favorite reactions that an action movie can elicit.)
    Whether they knew from the beginning that it would look like this or if they ran out of budget in post, they completely own it. The stitching of different types of cinematography within the same scene made me think more of a music video than a movie, which probably helped ease me into its madness. The demo reel comparison is also fair.

    There are two scenes I really didn’t like – the free fall bit (which of course Netflix would excerpt that as the preview, because man they can’t seem to take one step without shooting their foot off) and the motorcycle-only chase (as opposed to all the other chases with motorcycles in them) but that one redeems itself with the crazy-ass exploding clusterbike ending. Oh, and the infodumps and scenes where people just scream at each other (looking at you, doctor in the airplane) really did go for too long.
    Finally, I know this is a hoary old complaint by now (I don’t really mean it as a complaint, more as an observation) but the video-gaminess of this one is off the charts, right down to that awkward transition from when you’re watching a cutscene to when you get to control your character, which I’d never seen replicated in a movie before.

  17. Gave it a blind try and had to catch my breath 5 minutes in. It is awesome. The stretched thin budget mixed with the bare bones plot and insanely high ABV (action by volume) give it a kind of punk energy that I enjoyed immensely. In that regards it reminds me of Shoot’em Up and yes Hardcore Henry.

  18. Am posting this here for no other reason than this is yet another Netflix actioner I wanna shamelessly recommend:

    DAY SHIFT is BLADE, if it had a considerably lighter tone and was mostly shot in the day. The plot’s the usual recycled fluff about Jamie Foxx being this down on his luck pool cleaner with an estranged wife (seriously, Hollywood is going to shock me into a coma one day by actually writing a hero in a stable loving relationship) and daughter he’s on the verge of losing as they’re planning to move to Florida. He needs money, and needs it fast. Luckily California is a hotbed of Vampires and Foxx is an Ace Vampire Hunter and even more luckily, Vampire Fangs fetch a great deal of money.

    Forget the plot, because what DAY SHIFT has going for it is some great action and fights. Directed by ace stuntman and fight coordinator extraordinaire JJ “Loco” Perry, the vampire beatdowns are brilliantly choreographed, shot with clarity and edited with precision. Even Scott Freaking Adkins shows up in a cameo to lay down some hurt.

    A Perfect Beer ‘n’ Pizza evening watch.

  19. I enjoyed it too, mostly for the action, but there was some fun plot and character stuff, though I think it could have been better if in this world, Vampires were known about publicly and the only reason Bud was doing stuff on the DL was because he was unlicensed at first, and flouting the rules later. Also how much you enjoy it outside of the action may depend on how much you can tolerate Franco as the comic relief wussbag sidekick. I could also do without Snoop Dogg doing his “contractually obligated to be treated as the coolest character in the thing just because he’s played by Snoop Dogg” thing he’s also done in STARSKY AND HUTCH, several pro wrestling appearances and that Star Wars Cantina Scene Adidas commercial.

  20. I saw DAY SHIFT last night and really liked it. I’ve never understood the thing about making the sidekick a dork the hero can be mean to. Everybody knows, or should know, that the sidekick gig belongs to a mean and weathered old timer who comments what the main dude is doing wrong, and gets funny oneliners in return (see Connery and Cage in THE ROCK as an example). But other than that it was great. And who knew Steve Howey would actually be cooler than Scott Adkins as one of the Nazarian brothers!

  21. Interesting. I would consider Goodspeed the sidekick for the majority of that film.

  22. THE ROCK has no hero, just a pair of dueling comic relief sidekicks. Cage wins because Connery isn’t used to stealing scenes from anyone who can steal them back.

    I kind of hate THE ROCK. It’s one of the few Bay movies I can’t even enjoy ironically.

  23. Okay, okay…I should have picked an example that didn’t steal all the thunder from my main point. BLADE, SHERLOCK HOLMES, BATMAN BEGINS, THE BOONDOCK SAINTS, UNFORGIVEN, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, THE WILD GEESE, OPEN RANGE, SHREK…

  24. A lot of those seem like straight-up mentors to me, not sidekicks, but I see what you’re getting at.

    I thought DAY SHIFT was a blast, combining the “riding around getting into fights and shooting the shit” hangout vibe of THE DEBT COLLECTOR with the world-building of JOHN WICK, creating a much more blue-collar milieu that I’m always going to prefer to the “fancy suits and swank hotels” decadence of so much action cinema. I often think of this Raymond Chandler quote about Dashiell Hammett: “[He] gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”

    I will admit that Franco’s character was the most questionable aspect. Eventually they found somewhere fun to go with him, but if screenwriters stopped using this “uptight desk jockey with a lot of ‘feminine’ attributes who needs to be taught how to man up by the hero” archetype for the next, oh, fifty years or so, I wouldn’t complain. I really don’t think there’s anything new to milk from this particular dynamic and DAY SHIFT did not prove me wrong.

  25. I didn’t like DAY SHIFT, overall, because I thought the script was embarassingly bad and the majority of the acting performances were bad because of it. I loved the premise, look and feel though — I loved that it was about a working class vampire hunter in a sun-baked setting, that’s very cool and fresh. I wish the movie truly was THE DEBT COLLECTOR except with vampire hunting, that would have been great.

    The stunts, effects and action were *so good*, though. In terms of quality, there is so much daylight between the fight scenes and every other scene. I was watching it wondering how a movie that seemed so half-assed outside the fighting could have such good action, then the end credits hit and the director’s name popped up, and that at least explained why the fighting was so good.

  26. I can’t let Steve Howey go just yet. I’ve always liked him in SHAMELESS, and even REBA, but didn’t really figure him as an action man. Rumour has it he’s the new Harry Trasker in the TV version of TRUE LIES. Could be interesting…or not.

  27. CARTER though… the final shot had me and my kid screaming with joy and disbelief at the TV. The whole thing is 2 tons of fun, can’t comment on DAY SHIFT but everyone interested should CARTER the hell up posthaste.

    PS Sorry to hear about it Vern, feel better soon. I was in your shoes a few months ago…

  28. Anyone seen KILL BOKSOON yet? Just out on Netflix, it’s the latest in a spate of films about female assassins that’s been a trend these last couple of years; KATE, GUNPOWDER MILKSHAKE, THE PROTEGE, PROUD MARY, and if you want to go global, MARIA from the Philippines and the recent FURIES from Vietnam not to mention Korea’s own THE VILLAINESS.

    I did like it, although it needs to come with some caveats: Anyone buzzing off the action high of JW4 or FURIES or even expects this to top something like CARTER, best check expectations at the door. BOKSOON is a drama, a surprisingly layered and even at times poignant one that sees a mother attempting to form a connection with her moody teenaged daughter, herself struggling with her sexuality. Difference being, Mommy is a Grade A Assassin with John Wick-ian levels of skill and lethality (and a reputation to boot) working for a company that has it’s own High Table-style rules.

    It’s anchored by terrific performances from veteran actors Jeon Do-yeon as the titular Killer (how nice to see a middle aged actress take center stage as opposed to being shunted to the sidelines in some mentor role….Hollywood, take notes) and Sol Kyung-gu as her suave but no less bad-ass Boss. It bears DNA traces of LA FEMME NIKITA, LEON and even KILL BILL, but the resultant mixture is pure Korean Secret Sauce in their absolute mastery of genre-mashing. It also comes with the less endearing Korean Cinema traits of being over-plotted and overlong, but if you’re in the mood for a more measured take on the Assassin Genre, give this a chance.

  29. I didn’t care for KILL BOKSOON. Not as action packed as i hoped.

  30. Korean Movie title “Carter”.. I have no animal rights as they use the real pigs to make a movies and smash the pigs on to the roads and let the bullet gun shot through them and let them runs over by the vechiles.. Poor Animals

  31. Missing some words on my previous comment; So I write again in more precisely as below..

    The Korean Movie title “Carter”.. I See no animal rights in this movie as they use the real pigs to make a movies and smash the pigs on to the roads and let the bullet gun shot through them and let them runs over by the vechiles.. Poor Animals

  32. That sure didn’t look real to me!

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