Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
This is the early Van Damme picture that was written by David S. Goyer of BLADE fame. I know that guy has gotten some shit since he directed BLADE 3 and it wasn’t as good as the other two, but I give him credit. Sure, his directing needs work, but BLADE 1-2 are A+ action screenplays with the ideal balance of humor, brooding, swagger, mythological mumbo jumbo and pitch perfect build to moments of badass payoff and clever action scenes. Plus he worked on DARK CITY and BATMAN BEGINS, and I say anyone who works with Chris Nolan but also wrote a movie for Van Damme is worthy of respect.
In this one Van Damme plays a cop from Quebec (they always gotta have a different excuse for his accent) who puts five shots in a serial killer called The Sandman, then gets sent on a mission undercover in a prison to investigate mysterious inmate murders. Robert Guillame plays his best friend in prison, and I’m not sure how BENSON ended but he must’ve been up on some serious corruption charges to wind up in this place. He also got stabbed in the eye so he looks like a kindly, smaller Tiny Lister. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David S. Goyer, JCVD
Posted in Action, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
Over my several years as a rising Seagalogist I have been asked many times who would win in a fight between Seagal and Van Damme. I have also been asked who would win between Seagal and Bruce Lee. I have never been asked who would win between Seagal and vampires, but I know now that the answer is Sea(SPOILER)gal. But this is also one of those whoever-wins-we-lose type scenarios because, I’m sorry to report, AGAINST THE DARK may be the least interesting movie Seagal has ever made.
Some might disagree. Many who don’t like Seagal’s movies criticize him for the exact reason why I think he’s interesting: he keeps making the same type of movie over and over again. To me it’s the perfecting, tinkering, and slow evolution of that formula that makes the movies cool. You don’t listen to blues to hear brand new riffs. Still, it SEEMS like it would be interesting to see his first attempt at a horror movie. But let’s be honest, nobody’s expecting it to work as a horror movie, and it doesn’t. So it should be a real Seagal movie, but it isn’t. It’s a shitty Sci-Fi-Channel-worthy vampire siege movie where one of the characters happens to be played by Seagal. And not even the main character. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, Seagalogy
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews, Seagal | 9 Comments »
Friday, December 12th, 2008
PROLOGUE: Long ago, a brave warrior (Jet Li) and a graceful dancer turned actress (Michelle Yeoh) did the movie TAI CHI MASTER together. Then both went to Hollywood and did Lethal Weapon and James Bond and shit. But they had not forgotten each other. They were gonna star in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON together. But Jet backed out for the incredibly classy reason that he had promised his wife to take the year off from movies and be with her while she was pregnant. Years later, they had another chance to do a movie together in Ronny Yu’s FEARLESS – but Michelle’s scenes got cut out of the theatrical version. So it was this last summer, 15 years later, that the two were finally reunited on the big screen. BUT IT WAS IN THE FUCKING MUMMY 3! How’s that for a Tales From the Crypt type twist ending?
Okay, I should get a couple disclaimers out of the way. First of all, mummies are not one of my favorite monsters. Off the top of my head the only mummy movie I can think of that I like is BUBBA HO-TEP, but that didn’t really need to be a mummy to be good. It just needed to be a slow moving monster so an elderly Elvis could be a fair match for it. If it was about a giant space slug or mutant sloth it could also be good if it had the same characterization of a sad, lonely Elvis Presley. The Universal MUMMY with Boris Karloff is a great monster at the beginning, then he disappears and it’s just Karloff in a fez for the rest of the movie. It’s no DRACULA, I’ll tell you that. And as you can see above I didn’t think the Hammer version was that great either. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Wong, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Rob Cohen
Posted in Action, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Sunday, December 7th, 2008
Punisher War Zone? More like Punisher BORE Zone!
Nah, that was not sincere punning. Actually I was not bored and in fact enjoyed this stupid movie. What I mean to say is “The Punisher? More like The FUNisher!” But you know how it is, people tend to prefer negativity to positivity. That’s why there’s three movies called THE PUNISHER and not a single one called THE REWARDER. So I went the extra mile, I gave you both types of puns. Merry Christmas.
The Punisher is a unique motion picture phenomenon. Not too many characters are in movies three times, with three different actors, three different directors, three different approaches. Not sequels or remakes, each one is a do-over. I can relate to this type of series because I myself am a unique motion picture phenomenon: I am the rare individual who sort of enjoyed all three versions of THE PUNISHER. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ray Stevenson
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 81 Comments »
Sunday, December 7th, 2008
LIONHEART is Van Damme circa 1991, and his best up to that point if you ask me, which by reading this you agree to do. As a matter of personal taste I think competitive fighting is one of the squarest action subgenres. You got less room for chase scenes and explosions, the rules and locales of the fights are too rigid. I mean nothing against a good pre-fight jitters locker room scene or a spooky ancient temple with torches and mystical snake statues, but I prefer a more urban style of action movie. One with crooks and creeps, alleys, fire escapes, car windshields.
LIONHEART is a smart compromise because it continues the competitive fighting of BLOODSPORT and KICKBOXER but in a cartoonish underground fighting circuit in New York and Los Angeles. This is another subgenre that gets old fast, usually because you get sick of looking at the same dimly lit arena with a fence or barbwire, maybe a strobelight. This one avoids that pitfall by having a new location and crowd for each fight: a circle of cars (with people rollerskating around), a swimming pool with all but the deep end drained (crowd in bikinis like it’s a pool party), inside somebody’s mansion (a black tie event) and (my favorite) a racquetball court. Brian Thompson is there but never fights. The real villain is Cynthia (could’ve sworn the credits just called her “The Lady,” but maybe I imagined that) the stereotypical L.A. rich bitch of the ’80s: short hair, expensive clothes, sexually and capitalistically aggressive. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: JCVD, Sheldon Lettich
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 46 Comments »
Friday, November 28th, 2008
Josef von Sternberg was an Austrian-American director whose first film, 1925’s THE SALVATION HUNTERS, is considered by some to be the first American independent film. He worked with Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hughes, he discovered and bedded Marlene Dietrich, Robert Mitchum threatened to throw him off a pier, he directed 25 movies including THE LAST COMMAND, THE BLUE ANGEL and THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, and his influential films and stubborn dedication to directorial vision made him a hero to proponents of the auteur theory. Also he had a son named Nicholas Josef von Sternberg who was the cinematographer for DOLEMITE.
While DOLEMITE is arguably not as accomplished a picture as THE SCARLET EMPRESS, it does follow in von Sternberg’s spirit of independence, and that’s part of what appeals to me so much about the works of my man, the legendary Rudy Ray Moore, who passed away last month. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Rudy Ray Moore
Posted in Action, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Friday, November 21st, 2008
Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
Vern is the greatest writer about film writing about film anywhere that film is written about. If you disagree, I will pay a big guy to punch you in a soft place.
I haven’t seen TRANSPORTER 3 yet, but thanks to this review, I feel like I have. Every word’s a gem, Vern. Thanks for the huge Friday morning belly laugh.
Check it out. Tell me I’m wrong.
Here’s a test for you. How many times did you rewind the part in TRANSPORTER 2 where he sees in a reflection that there’s a bomb on the bottom of his car so he drives the car off a pile of junk, flips, successfully hooks the bomb onto a nearby crane and lands the car safely? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Besson productions, Corey Yuen, Jason Statham
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews | 30 Comments »
Friday, November 14th, 2008
QUANTUM OF SOLACE
(a particular amount of consolation)
You and me we’re movie nerds. So when we go out to a movie we try to see it on the biggest, nicest screen. We see it in Imax if we can, or we have our favorite theaters where we hope it will be playing. But you gotta wonder why we keep doing that when more and more movies are not designed to be comprehensible on a large screen. Increasingly, action movies are designed to be viewed on your phone or wrist watch or whatever silly shit they invent next. Why do I wait out in the cold for two hours to see this movie on the giant Cinerama screen when it’s just gonna guarantee that I will have no idea if James Bond’s car is in front of or behind the other car, which one went off the cliff, what James Bond is doing to the guy he’s fighting and also which one is James Bond? At the very least they should rope off the front 2/3 of all these theaters since Marc Forster, the director of QUANTUM OF SOLACE, apparently was not told that people may sit within 250 feet of the screen. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 007, Daniel Craig
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews | 72 Comments »
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
DARK AGE
In my ongoing tribute to the land of MAD MAX and CHOPPER I have come across another good giant crocodile movie that pre-dates ROGUE by a good 20 years. But this one actually has John Jarrat – the widower Russell in ROGUE, the fuckin maniac in WOLF CREEK – as the park ranger hero.
This one reminds me of RAZORBACK a little, because it reminds me of JAWS a little. The director, Arch Nicholson, was second unit director on RAZORBACK, but his movie is in a more realistic vein, less stylized and exaggerated. The crocodile never runs through the side of a house and steals a baby like the razorback did. The photography is pretty naturalistic, it’s by Andrew Lesnie whose name seems familiar because he did the LORD OF THE RINGS movies, the BABE movies, and I AM LEGEND. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, giant crocodiles, Viggo Mortensen, William Lustig
Posted in Action, Drama, Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 2 Comments »
Friday, September 19th, 2008
Take a look at that cover there. If you know me then you know I had to watch that movie.
I’m not stupid. I knew it would be, uh… problematic. “Probaly unwatchable” is I believe how I pre-described it to friends. But I figured as long as it stars the team of DMX and Kris Kristofferson I’m gonna get something out of it.
True, DMX has failed to deliver on the promise I thought I saw in him when I first saw BELLY. He seems to have pretty much lost his mind (up in here, up in here) and is not above making cameos in unwatchable DTV garbage in order to pay the legal bills for his poor driving, impersonating of federal officers and lack of dog feeding. So DMX alone is not a selling point. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DMX, DTV, Kris Kristofferson
Posted in Action, Reviews | No Comments »
