Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
THE HURT LOCKER is the best movie of 2009 so far excluding all movies about old men who fly around using balloons. It’s a tightly constructed action-suspense movie, but also a character piece and an acting showcase. It takes place in Iraq 2004 and it says something about war, but it’s not especially political. It’s more about a place and a time and a mindset. Nobody in the movie talks about why the Americans are in Iraq or whether they should be. They’re just there. It’s their job, they gotta survive until the end of their rotation (the days are counted down onscreen).
This is the story of a 3-man bomb disposal unit. They get a new team leader at the beginning, and he’s played by Jeremy Renner. I don’t know if his team recognizes him from DAHMER like I did, but shit man, look out. From the beginning he seems a little unstable and alot reckless, and they gotta worry if this will prevent them from getting safely to the end of that countdown. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Jeremy Renner, Kathryn Bigelow
Posted in Action, Drama, Reviews | 107 Comments »
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Although THE CROW is what most people remember Brandon Lee for, it was this 1992 urban martial arts picture, his next to last starring role, that made the most serious attempt to turn him into an action icon. It positions him to continue his father’s legacy but in the context of American action of the early ’90s. John Woo and Jackie Chan movies were catching on huge here at that time, and this movie took plenty of influence from the shootouts and choreographed fights that excited us from those.
But it starts out on a Bruce Lee note. The opening credits have Brandon Lee in a white tank top like his dad sometimes wore, doing martial arts in front of a black void. His character is raised in Hong Kong, and sometimes speaks Chinese, and is living in the shadow of a father everyone admires. In an interview included on the DVD Lee mentions that the movie was written specifically for him, which isn’t surprising. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Al Leong, Alan B. McElroy, Brandon Lee, Dwight H. Little, Powers Boothe
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 45 Comments »
Sunday, July 19th, 2009
MEN OF WAR is a Dolph Lundgren mercenaries-on-a-mission movie. In the surprisingly atmospheric opening Lundgren’s ex-Special Forces character Gunar is hanging out on the streets of Chicago, wearing a hat he could wear if the movie was set during the Depression, his breath showing in the cold air. Some tough guy rudely tells him to talk to somebody, gesturing to a limo. “In the back seat?” Gunar asks and when the answer is yes he bashes the guy’s head through the backseat window and leans in to talk to the passenger. So you don’t have to wait too long for the movie’s declaration of badass intent. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dolph Lundgren, DTV, John Sayles, Tiny Lister
Posted in Action, Reviews | 33 Comments »
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
I don’t know if you can sense it in the air or anything. It doesn’t really come until the end of the year, but this is the 20th anniversary of TANGO & CASH. To be honest I don’t think I ever saw this one before, but I wanted to see it and review it a little ahead of all the hoopla. As much as people like you and I are will to talk about TANGO & CASH all the time I’m sure eventually we’re gonna get a little worn out by all the retrospectives and parades and everything that I’m sure they’ve been planning.
So now I’ve seen it and I know TANGO & CASH is a fun but not all that great 1989 action movie that personifies (moviefies?) the excess of the ’80s, and not just because it has a monster truck in it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrey Konchalovskiy, Brion James, Geoffrey Lewis, Jack Palance, Kurt Russell, Robert Z'Dar, Sylvester Stallone
Posted in Action, Reviews | 36 Comments »
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
BIKER GANGS SAVING P.O.W.s IN VIETNAM DOUBLE FEATURE: THE LOSERS and NAM ANGELS
In THE LOSERS a Vietnam era biker gang is recruited by the American military for a dangerous mission to recover a CIA agent being held in Cambodia. I guess it’s a mission that has to be done off the books, plus it requires high speed transportation. Biker gang it is. So they build some modified combat bikes, figure out a plan, practice it on a miniature model, then go for it.
But not until the last 25 minutes or so. That’s what’s unique and (I admit) disappointing. Most of the running time is spent fucking around, getting into trouble at bars or visiting their Vietnamese girlfriends. Very little of the backstory is explained – it seems like most or all were soldiers before, but it’s not clear how or why they came back. They don’t show them being tracked down in the U.S. and pressured to join. They’re already on board at the beginning. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: bikers, Cirio H. Santiago, Jack Starret, Vernon Wells, Vietnam, William Smith
Posted in Action, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
From the director of ENTER THE DRAGON comes Jim Kelly as BLACK BELT JONES. Black Belt Jones is a cool, afro-sporting karate expert and sometimes government agent. He doesn’t have any other first name, but you can call him “B.B.” if you want. He tries to stay out of conflicts but then a crime lord named Pinky (Malik Carter) kills the owner of the karate school, Poppa “Pops” Byrd (Scatman Crothers). The government or somebody wants the land, so the mafia pushes Pinky, so Pinky is after the karate school. Pops wills it to a daughter nobody knew about named Sydney (Gloria Hendry from BLACK CAESAR), they use threats and kidnapping to try to force her to give it over, Black Belt helps out, etc.
Obviously it’s a silly movie and at times it’s sloppy, but it has many of the funny and absurd types of moments I look for in a movie like this. A couple of my favorites:
1. Robert Clouse’s directing credit is over a freeze frame of Black Belt aiming his gun at a dude who’s running away. When it unfreezes the bullet hits the guy in the ass. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Jim Kelly, Robert Clouse
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 32 Comments »
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
After the disappointment of TERMINATOR SALVATION the last thing we need is another movie that fails to live up to James Cameron’s original creation. But here is TERMINATOR WOMAN, which not only lacks the punch of Cameron’s two sci-fi action classics, but also fails to communicate to the viewer (in this case me) why the hell it’s called TERMINATOR WOMAN. The cover says “It’s about time!” as if to suggest it’s exciting to have a woman Terminator (before TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES), but the movie isn’t even remotely about robots or even terminating, and there’s also a man in the movie who fights on what is portrayed as an approximately equal skill level with the woman. So if she counts as a Terminator then he must too. I’m not sure why it’s not TERMINATOR MAN AND WOMAN.
TERMINATOR WOMAN is about two American karate cops in Africa fighting some crime lord who wants to get back some gold that was stolen from him. But the crime lord is not Warwick Davis, it’s Michel Qissi, also director, co-writer, fight choreographer and fight editor.
If you don’t know Qissi you at least know his friend: he grew up with and trained with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Onscreen he most memorably played Tong Po, the villain in KICKBOXER, although he was uncredited (it said Tong Po played himself). But here is his first try at directing (he did one other, 2001’s EXTREME FORCE). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Jerry Trimble, Karen Sheperd, Michel Qissi
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 16 Comments »
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
DIRECT CONTACT is the new Dolph Lundgren DTV movie directed by Danny Lerner (SHARKS IN VENICE) and written by Les Weldon (RAGING SHARKS). It comes out in the US on Tuesday and has already been released in Thailand, Kuwait, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden.When we first meet Dolph as Mike Riggins, life is not the best. #1, he lives in a Balkan prison. #2, he owes a bunch of gangsters money, and some guy spits in his food, so he has to fight everybody and stab a dude in the eyeball. #3, the screws come in and club him like a baby seal. #4, he gets put in solitary. #5, when he pukes up blood a rat comes over and starts eating it.
On the other hand, it’s kind of a cute rat eating the blood he puked up. Not RATATOUILLE cute, but he doesn’t look like he has fleas. Well-groomed. So it could be worse. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dolph Lundgren, DTV
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews | 29 Comments »
Monday, June 8th, 2009
See, this is the type of gold I’m always digging for. This is why I keep browsing and renting weird old movies I don’t know much about. I’m trying to find a movie like HIT!. Last time I rented a Billy Dee Williams movie it was AGENT 00-SOUL, which I’d wanted to see for years only to discover it’s not a serious movie, it’s a “comedy” where he just keeps tripping on things and falling out of things. It makes the worst Leslie Nielsen movie look like the Coen Brothers.
But HIT! is not only a serious movie, it’s revenge-meets-arthouse, almost like POINT BLANK. It’s an ambiguous, slow-burn revenge movie with great performances and character moments and a creepy Lalo Schifrin score. There’s more care put into the buildup and the little moments than into the action movie parts, but they’re good enough for that to be a fair trade.
In the beginning a teenage girl dies from a heroin overdose. Billy Dee plays her father, some kind of CIA agent. He doesn’t talk until 15 minutes into the movie. Before that he just smolders. His boss tries to help him out, tries to send him on a vacation. But he wants to go after the source – not the street pushers, but the top of the pyramid, some guys in Marseille who run a heroin cartel. Of course the agency tells him not to, and of course he does it anyway. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy Dee Williams, revenge, Richard Pryor, Sidney J. Furie
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 30 Comments »
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
I’ve missed some potential good ones at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, but I was not about to miss the midnight show of BLACK DYNAMITE. If you don’t know what this is, it’s a retro blaxploitation movie where Michael Jai White (also co-writer) plays the title character, an ex-CIA, Vietnam vet, kung fu practicing, five-women-at-a-time-fucking badass motherfucker trying to find out who killed his brother.
Doing a blaxploitation homage in 2009 sounds good on paper, because there are a finite amount of authentic movies of this genre. At a certain point you run out of blaxploitation to watch, and you need more. It never hurts to have backups. But when you think about it there are a million ways for a movie like this to be disappointing or worse. BLACK DYNAMITE has great posters and trailers, but that doesn’t prove anything. For my tastes it’s a fine line to walk. I didn’t want to see something too jokey or spoofy, something that was mocking these movies more than paying tribute to them. And there’s no reason to assume an independent film out of nowhere from filmatists without that much of a track record will capture a vintage blaxploitation feel. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Michael Jai White, Scott Sanders
Posted in Action, AICN, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 29 Comments »
