"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Archive for the ‘Action’ Category

Wedlock

Monday, February 5th, 2024

There are a bunch of directors who made legendary movies in the ‘70s and ‘80s but in the ‘90s were directing, like, episodes of Timetrax and shit. One such director is Lewis Teague, who gave us the outstanding large animal pictures ALLIGATOR and CUJO, plus FIGHTING BACK, CAT’S EYE, THE JEWEL OF THE NILE and COLLISION COURSE. But after NAVY SEALS it was all TV for the rest of his career.

Oh well. It’s respectable work if you can get it, and at least his small screen period started with a pretty fun sci-fi/action movie for HBO. WEDLOCK (1991) (also released on tape as DEADLOCK) is a futuristic prison escape movie that came out less than a year before Stuart Gordon’s FORTRESS. It’s not as good, but it was first. (read the rest of this shit…)

Fighting Back

Thursday, February 1st, 2024

FIGHTING BACK (1982), a.k.a. DEATH VENGEANCE a.k.a. STREET WARS, is another vigilante drama produced by Dino De Laurentiis, obviously wanting to follow up on his success with DEATH WISH after selling that off to Cannon. DEATH WISH II came out about three months before this, but if Laurentiis was trying to take the wind out of its sails, he was not successful. Cannon kept all the wind and this one remains fairly obscure, despite a nice blu-ray release from Arrow.

But it has some good people behind it. It’s directed by Lewis Teague between ALLIGATOR and CUJO, written by Tom Hedley (FLASHDANCE) and David Zelag Goodman (STRAW DOGS, LOGAN’S RUN, THE EYES OF LAURA MARS, FREEDOM ROAD). Rather than a badass like Charles Bronson it stars the more everyman-ish Tom Skerritt (who would follow this with THE DEAD ZONE, TOP GUN and SPACECAMP) and it seems to be going for a less pulpy, more down to earth approach… except in the important matter of the inciting incident. For that they provide us with as hysterical of a “crime is out of control these days” exaggeration as we could ever ask for. (read the rest of this shit…)

Sixty Minutes

Wednesday, January 31st, 2024

SIXTY MINUTES (60 Minuten) is a really impressive new addition to the Netflix library of international action, this one hailing from Germany. It feels very modern in the execution of its hard-hitting martial arts action, but it’s classical in its simplicity. A straight forward set up, an easy to understand goal, an emotional underpinning.

Here’s how it works. Octavio Bergmann (Emilio Sakraya, Warrior Nun), nickname Octa, is an MMA fighter successful enough to have his own gym in Berlin. He has a fight scheduled for today but it keeps getting delayed, and his team are trying to keep him warmed up, but he’s preoccupied because it’s his daughter Leonie (Morik Heydo)’s seventh birthday and he wants to make sure not to miss her party.

It must be said that this man is a bit of a fuck up. No one seems to think he’s been there enough for his daughter, who he had when he was 19 and didn’t stay with the mother, Mina (Livia Matthes, “Model,” CHARLIE’S ANGELS). On phone calls both his daughter and his ex don’t seem to believe he’ll really show up. And it’s implied that it was out of his control, but somehow he agreed to a fight on her birthday. The English title could’ve been DEADBEATDOWN. (read the rest of this shit…)

Throw Down

Tuesday, January 30th, 2024

Man, what am I doing leaving all these Johnnie To movies unseen? Whenever I watch one I seem to fall in love. Case in point, THROW DOWN (2004). As far as I knew it wasn’t even one of his more popular ones when Criterion released it in 2021, at least not in the U.S. It was just a forgotten Tai Seng DVD from the aughts. But now it is the recipient of the prestigious The Best Thing I’ve Seen Lately award.

Most of To’s movies I’ve seen have been crime movies. They have good action but they’re more notable for their visual beauty and operatic emotion. They usually feel more poetic than badass, though they can be both. THROW DOWN technically has some crime in it, but that’s not the main topic, and to my surprise this is largely a comedy. Not the broad type of humor I associate with Hong Kong cinema, but a very dry, offbeat sort of humor of different characters matter-of-factly following their idiosyncratic pursuits into strange situations and never making a big deal out of it. Never mugging, never underlining. (read the rest of this shit…)

Monk Comes Down the Mountain

Thursday, January 25th, 2024

Chen Kaige is an acclaimed Chinese filmmaker I have no familiarity with. Too classy for me, I guess. Now I finally watched one, but not one of his famous ones from the ‘80s or ‘90s, it’s his 14th film, a straight up kung fu movie from 2015 called MONK COMES DOWN THE MOUNTAIN. And the reason is because it’s based on a book by Xu Haofeng, who wrote Wong Kar Wai’s THE GRANDMASTER and directed THE SWORD IDENTITY, JUDGE ARCHER and THE FINAL MASTER. I adore his style and his themes and his two most recent (THE HIDDEN SWORD and 100 YARDS) aren’t available here yet, so I’ll take what I can get.

This is a good one but totally different from those other movies I mentioned. The ones Xu directs have a very artful economy and restraint to them, the compositions and camera movements are often very classical, the fighting styles are uniquely straightforward, often based around quick, simple movements rather than flying around all over the place. Don’t get me wrong, obviously I love flying around all over the place, but I like how distinct this other approach is.

MONK COMES DOWN THE MOUNTAIN is not that. Nor is it a TV movie starring Tony Shalhoub. It’s a big show-offy kung fu fantasy, with lots of digital FX, some of them pretty goofy. It was released in 3D Imax, and (unlike American movies, which are too cowardly to do 3D stuff in 3D movies) you can tell. And it’s often comedic in a broad, muggy kind of way. Xu’s movies tend to have a much dryer humor. (read the rest of this shit…)

One More Shot

Thursday, January 18th, 2024

Well, Scott Adkins has another franchise. ONE MORE SHOT is the new sequel to ONE SHOT, director James Nunn’s 2021 siege thriller shot in ROPE style (simulated to look like one continuous shot). The first film is really well made, with surprisingly good drama and performances, in addition to the cleverly planned camera moves and action. Many fans ranked it among Adkins’ best, but it’s a movie where he mostly just uses guns and never does a single flying kick, so I could not be a party to that. It also has a bit of a War On Terror mindset that I wasn’t too excited about. But it’s good.

Adkins, Nunn, and co-writer Jamie Russell have reunited for the sequel, which not only avoids those things I complained about, but is just a bigger and more novel action movie anyway. While the first was set at a CIA black site similar to the location of over 432,000 other military action movies since the George W. Bush administration, this one is set at an evacuated airport. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Beekeeper

Monday, January 15th, 2024

THE BEEKEEPER is a proudly absurd new Jason Statham vehicle where he plays a humble beekeeper – a guy who cultivates beehives and collects honey. But also he’s retired from being another type of Beekeeper – an operative for a secret organization who kill bad guys and use bee, hive and queen metaphors to describe their role in protecting civilization. (Not puns, though, sadly.) It has a good pedigree as far as these things go – the director is David Ayer (HARSH TIMES, STREET KINGS, SABOTAGE, FURY, SUICIDE SQUAD) and the writer is Kurt Wimmer (DOUBLE TROUBLE, EQUILIBRIUM, ULTRAVIOLET, director of ONE TOUGH BASTARD). Not that you really need that information. Honestly if you’re not sold on “Jason Statham plays an asskicking beekeeper” alone I don’t know what your deal is. But also I’m kinda glad because I wrote a whole review, I hope you will read it.

I’m not the first to note that this is a very January movie, that month dismissed as a dumping ground, which really means it’s a good time to release a certain type of mid-budget, low expectations studio action movie I dig. January releases of the last decade include TAKEN 3, WILD CARD, THE COMMUTER, PROUD MARY, DEN OF THIEVES, THE RHYTHM SECTION, THE MARKSMAN, and PLANE. Some of these I saw on video, some I saw in the theater, probly at a show starting between 12:50 and 1:30, with less than five other people in the theater, all men, all by themselves. That’s the natural state of this type of movie, in my experience.

THE BEEKEEPER takes the tradition of the January-ass action movie a little further. It’s not elevated January, but maybe January+. It looked so promising my wife wanted to see it too, so we went to a 7:30 pm show on the six story tall, 80’ wide Imax screen in the Science Center. With no one else in the theater. It was beautiful. (read the rest of this shit…)

Lone Wolf and Cub: White Heaven in Hell

Wednesday, January 10th, 2024

LONE WOLF AND CUB: WHITE HEAVEN IN HELL is the final film in the LONE WOLF AND CUB series – six films released between 1972 and 1974. It has the same writer of the previous one, Tusutomu Nakamura, but a director who’s new to the series, Yoshiyuki Kuroda (THE GREAT YOKAI WAR).

This is a good one to watch in winter because, as poetically described in the title, a bunch of it takes place in the snow. It opens with our deadly assassin papa and child, Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama) and Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa), skiing their weapon-filled babycart down a mountain. Must be a tall one because time passes, the sky turns dark, Ogami’s carrying a torch. Then the screen turns completely white and you see their silhouettes slowly become visible in the distance, like the opening of FARGO. And come to think of it I’m surprised this babycart doesn’t have a built in woodchipper. It has just about everything else you could need. Maybe it does and we just don’t see him use it. (read the rest of this shit…)

Sabotage (1996)

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2024

SABOTAGE is a Mark Dacascos vehicle and it’s from 1996, so it’s pretty early in his career – a couple years after ONLY THE STRONG, a year after CRYING FREEMAN, same year as THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, a year before DRIVE. So, one of the first times he should’ve blown up.

This clunky and disposable b-movie isn’t half as good as any of those I just mentioned, but it has some good bits and an overqualified cast. It’s directed by Tibor Takács (THE GATE, MANSQUITO, ROCKY MOUNTAIN CHRISTMAS) and written by Rick Filon (KICKBOXER 5: THE REDEMPTION, also starring Dacascos) and Michael Stokes (IRON EAGLE ON THE ATTACK, Paw Patrol). Dacascos stars as Michael Bishop, a bodyguard who used to be an elite special ops super military dude, which of course means it starts with a traumatic war experience prologue. But this was the ‘90s so it’s in Bosnia instead of Afghanistan. (read the rest of this shit…)

Riot (1996)

Wednesday, December 20th, 2023

RIOT (1996) is a Gary Daniels movie from director Joseph Merhi (L.A. CRACKDOWN, L.A. HEAT, L.A. VICE) that I decided to watch now because I heard it takes place on Christmas Eve. Daniels (between HAWK’S VENGEANCE and POCKET NINJAS) stars as Major Shane Alcott, an S.A.S. guy who brings his many karate tournament trophies with him to America, where he’s working with his friend Major Williams (Sugar Ray Leonard in his feature film acting debut) to train American soldiers.

This year Santa brought us a riot. A few Black protesters chant “No justice, no peace” as a crowd of white guys in flannel shirts and backwards baseball hats run around smashing cars and windows with bats and setting cop cars on fire. This comes from Canada’s b-action factory PM Entertainment, so it’s quite a stuntfest on a soundstage city block decked in Christmas lights. Merhi cuts that together with what I believe is real footage of various fires during the LA riots, accompanied by a laid back, saxophone heavy “O, Come, All Ye Faithful” by Teresa Tudury. (read the rest of this shit…)