Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Wednesday, February 19th, 2020
TRUE VENGEANCE is a 1997 Daniel Bernhardt movie that I bought specifically because it was written by Kurt Johnstad. I think I was looking him up because he wrote ATOMIC BLONDE, and I remembered that he was the guy who wrote 300, 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE and ACT OF VALOR. I saw all of those in the theater and liked all of them, and it turns out his only other movie is this earlier DTV one that never even came out on DVD in the U.S. It’s directed by David Worth (KICKBOXER, LADY DRAGON 1 and 2), and I think you can understand why that combination of people made it something I needed to see.
Benhardt plays Griffin, who was a Navy SEAL and then a hired killer of some kind but after the death of his wife he quit the life to take care of his daughter Emily (Tessa Sugay, “Club Girl (uncredited),” TOKYO DRIFT, “Dancer (uncredited)” THE SOCIAL NETWORK). After a brief, incoherent sniper prologue we meet him cutely joking around with his daughter pretending he doesn’t know it’s her birthday. So yes, she is going to be kidnapped.
He has an older guy he calls his best friend named Sam (Harrison Young, Ryan as an old man in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN), who I think runs a garage and kind of seems like he could be the landlord like the guy in ROAD HOUSE? He’s involved in a great bit of b-movie flavor when he’s doing a crossword puzzle, asking for a word for “something that haunts.” Griffin suggests ‘ghost,’ but Sam says it has to be four letters, and just then a scary dude named Adachi (Keo Woolford, “Airport Worker,” GODZILLA) steps in looking for Griffin, who dramatically declares that “The Griffin you knew… is dead.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Beverly Johnson, Chad Stahelski, Daniel Bernhardt, David Worth, DTV, George Cheung, Harrison Young, John Eusebio, Kurt Johnstad, Miles O'Keeffe, Tape Raider
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Friday, February 14th, 2020
BIRDS OF PREY AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN is the movie that says “Okay, we fucked up that SUICIDE SQUAD movie, but Margot Robbie was great as Harley Quinn, right? Didn’t we kinda have something there?” And the answer is yes and yes, so luckily they gave her another movie. It’s the second feature for director Cathy Yan, whose 2018 debut DEAD PIGS takes place in Shanghai but stars Zazie Beetz. She obviously has Robbie’s pre-existing character and David Ayer’s SUICIDE SQUAD sensibilities to build off of here, but I think she makes it distinct – it feels to me like a studio hiring a promising new director to do her thing, not to follow instructions.
Formerly the abused girlfriend/sidekick of The Joker, this is the story of Harley’s life after breaking up with him. No longer enjoying the immunity provided by association with a famous psychopath boyfriend, Harley gets herself into trouble with various factions including but not limited to the gang run by Roman “Black Mask” Sionis (Ewan McGregor, MILES AHEAD, JANE GOT A GUN), police detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez, DANCE WITH THE DEVIL, Widows), somebody she punched in a roller derby bout (stuntwoman Keisha Tucker), and somebody who blames her for his face being tattooed like a clown and can’t fucking believe it when she doesn’t remember what he’s mad about (Matthew Willig, FULL CONTACT [1993], 3 FROM HELL). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cathy Yan, Chad Stahelski, Chris Messina, Christina Hodson, DC Comics, Ella Jay Basco, Ewan McGregor, John Eusebio, Jurnee Smollett, Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Matthew Libatique, Matthew Willig, Rosie Perez
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 44 Comments »
Monday, February 10th, 2020
TIGER ON BEAT is a 1988 Chow Yun Fat cop movie that’s not an untouchable masterpiece like HARD BOILED, but a goofy ‘80s time capsule sort of in the tradition of Hollywood buddy cop action comedies of the era. It opens and closes with an appropriately cheesy hard rock theme song.
Chow’s character Francis Li is that type of cop we’re supposed to be charmed by for his careless attitude (until he gets serious about a case) and his relentless hitting on every woman he meets.
We first meet him in bed with a woman, their ankles handcuffed together, when her husband gets home. Somehow he convinces the husband that he’s a good samaritan doing CPR on her as a favor to him while he goes out drinking. Because he’s this smooth-talking, crazy-lying guy I thought for a minute it was gonna be his BEVERLY HILLS COP. There’s even a pretty great synth tune, but unfortunately it doesn’t turn out to be as prevalent in the movie as “Axel F. Theme” was. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chow Yun Fat, Conan Lee, Gordon Liu, Lau Kar-Leung, Nina Li Chi, Phillip Ko, Ti Lung
Posted in Action, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Monday, February 3rd, 2020
THE RHYTHM SECTION is a cool fucking title when you realize what it means. As explained in the very first line of narration, it’s a piece of advice about how to stay calm while firing a gun or fighting: think of your heart as the drums, your breathing as the bass. But that’s hard to explain in a commercial, which is probly part of why there were like six people in the theater when I saw it.
Everybody else’s loss. It’s pretty good. Not at all original, but a solid meat and potatoes type of story giving a good showcase to Blake Lively, whose knockout turn in the pretty good A SIMPLE FAVOR I honestly thought should’ve gotten her an Oscar nomination. Now I pay more attention to her movies, especially if she’s playing a woman getting her Remo Williams training for badass revenge purposes.
She plays Stephanie Patrick, a drug addicted prostitute. Only three years ago Stephanie was studying at Oxford (yes, Lively does an English accent, which was only distracting for about five seconds), but her life became a mess after her entire family was killed in a plane crash. Then one day she gets this john who tells her he’s not there to have sex, he’s a journalist who has tracked her down because he has proof that the plane crash was not an accident, it was an act of terrorism that was covered up. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Blake Lively, character from a series of books, Eon Productions, Jude Law, Mark Burnell, Max Casella, Reed Morano, Sterling K. Brown
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 24 Comments »
Thursday, January 30th, 2020
IN HELL is a 2003 DTV JCVD joint. At the time it was the best 2000s Nu Image/Millennium filmed-in-Bulgaria DTV movie with an action icon getting locked up in a Russian prison, meeting a guy in a wheelchair who shows him the ropes, being mistreated and strung up outside in the cold, and becoming the champion of their fighting circuit. (Then UNDISPUTED II came out.) It’s Van Damme’s last film with director Ringo Lam (CITY ON FIRE, FULL CONTACT), following MAXIMUM RISK and REPLICANT. I like that some of the Hong Kong visual style and emotional sincerity come through, even though I could use fewer scenes where he rolls around in bed remembering flashes of his wife’s murder. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chris Moir, David M. Richardson, DTV, JCVD, Lawrence Taylor, Lloyd Battista, Marnie Alton, Mihail Elenov, prison, Raicho Vasilev, Ringo Lam, Robert LaSardo
Posted in Action, Reviews | 17 Comments »
Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020
a.k.a. Lukas
THE BOUNCER, a.k.a. LUKAS, is a quite good 2018 JCVD movie that in the right mood might be very good. Or in another mood it might be boring as shit. It’s the rare JCVD movie with an 80% critics / 49% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. (BLOODSPORT is 39% / 74%.) So it’s not his usual approach.
Narratively it’s a pretty straight forward crime drama or noir type deal – club bouncer with mysterious past gets into trouble through no fault of his own and is forced to inform on his shady new boss, putting himself and his daughter in increasing amounts of danger, caught between two sides he can’t trust. But tonally it kind of reminds me of UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION – a very grim and serious march into doom fueled by Van Damme’s ragged features and hard-earned non-verbal acting skills.
Don’t take that as a comparison in quality. REGENERATION is a masterpiece, I don’t think THE BOUNCER is. Nor does it have the same dosage or strength of action. There’s some vehicle and guns stuff that is REGENERATIONesque, but the occasional fights are raw and unexaggerated, more interested in brutal reality than cinematic flair. More RUST AND BONE than BLOOD AND BONE. Do not expect him to do the splits, do expect him to get knocked over and his face bloodied and he’s too winded to get up but maybe he’ll be able to roll over and shoot at somebody or crawl on top of them and punch their face in. Dour though it may be, I got a thrill out of seeing this broken-but-still-going type of Van Damme character in a movie that feels more artful and legit than the lower rent DTV stuff he sometimes ends up in. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: bouncers, JCVD, Julien Leclercq, Kaaris, Kevin Janssens, Sam Louwyck, Sami Bouajila, Sveva Alviti, undercover
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, January 7th, 2020
THE MERCENARY is what they’re calling the new one from director Jesse V. Johnson, though it’s just MERCENARY on screen, and was developed under the less generic (if goofy) title LEGION MAXX. Johnson, of course, has been on a hot streak for several years, with movies including ACCIDENT MAN, THE DEBT COLLECTOR and AVENGEMENT. This is his first in a while to not have Scott Adkins in it – instead it’s a vehicle for his lesser known but even-longer-time collaborator, Dominiquie Vandenberg. The Belgian martial artist met Johnson working on MORTAL KOMBAT, and starred in his first shorts Death Row the Tournament and The Doorman, then his first features THE HONORABLE and PIT FIGHTER, and has since shown up in ALIEN AGENT, THE HITMEN DIARIES: CHARLIE VALENTINE, GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS 2, THE BUTCHER and TRIPLE THREAT. He can also be seen in Yuen Woo-Ping’s TRUE LEGEND, but maybe his greatest claim to fame is training Leonardo DiCaprio for knife-fighting in GANGS OF NEW YORK and then becoming fight coordinator and appearing as a gang member. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alina Andrei, Carmen Argenziano, Dominiquie Vandenberg, DTV, Jesse V. Johnson, Louis Mandylor
Posted in Action, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Monday, January 6th, 2020
The final THUNDER WARRIOR movie came out in 1988, only a year after the second one. THUNDER WARRIOR III starts out seeming like it’s gonna be the NEXT KARATE KID or the BEST OF THE BEST 3 or the RED SCORPION 2 of the series, in that there’s a sort of white supremacist paramilitary type group set up as the villains. A guy named Colonel Ross is putting them through training drills and yelling something about “That’s why those yellow-asses at the Pentagon relieved me of my command!”
But these guys will pretty much just act the same as all the other racist hicks in town.
Thunder is still living peacefully near the desert, which I took to mean that there have been no recriminations for all the destruction and assaults on police officers and escaping prison and all that. And that the sheriff failed to kill him in that weird last shot of part II. But IMDb says he’s in Las Cruces, New Mexico, so I guess he’s supposed to have moved. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Fabrizio De Angelis, John Phillip Law, Mark Gregory, Native American
Posted in Action, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Thursday, January 2nd, 2020
Writer/director Fabrizio De Angelis and star Mark Gregory brought us THUNDER WARRIOR II (a.k.a. THUNDER II) two years later, in 1985, and it presumably takes place about that much later. Although Thunder went on an arrow/explosive/bulldozer/bazooka rampage, paralyzed a cop, destroyed some cop cars, leveled a couple buildings, and faked his death, he’s just casually back in town at a bar for some reason.
It’s exactly the kind of violent biker bar that’s in every movie like this, except for some reason a normal couple with a pre-teen son are there trying to eat dinner. The mom attempts to ignore the mob of drunk bikers loudly sexually harassing her, but the dad convinces her it’s time to leave, which kicks off a scuffle where the kid is about to be beat up until Thunder intervenes and takes on the entire gang almost by himself (he has a little help from a Native old timer who’s good with knives).
I want to point out that the bartender at this place really sucks. He watches the whole thing go down and makes no effort to keep things under control, not even a meek “Hey guys, cool it.” Then when the brawl starts he calls the police on Thunder. My Yelp review will not be forgiving. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bo Svenson, Fabrizio De Angelis, Italian exploitation, Mark Gregory, Native American, Raimund Harmstorf
Posted in Action, Reviews | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, December 31st, 2019
THUNDER WARRIOR, a.k.a. THUNDER is the first in a trilogy of low budget action movies of the 1980s. I think I saw it a long time ago, but since the hero, Thunder (Mark Gregory, 1990: BRONX WARRIORS), is supposed to be Native American, I was misremembering it as something made to cash in on the success of BILLY JACK. Turns out it’s a pretty straightforward ripoff of FIRST BLOOD, which came out the year before. It’s the same basic idea of a sheriff who thinks he’s a reasonable guy trying to unjustly kick a long-haired drifter out of his jurisdiction and causing him to go on a rampage. It doesn’t have the military veteran angle, and it involves a conflict over sacred Native land – admittedly very significant differences. Rambo was part Apache according to RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II movie and novelization, but that was never what he was fighting about.
Thunder returns from unspecified adventures to his small Arizona desert town just in time to find Deputy Barry (Raimund Harmstorf, THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS) sexually harassing his fiance Sheila (Valeria Ross, no other credits) at the gas station she owns and operates. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antonio Sabato, Bo Svenson, Fabrizio De Angelis, Francesco De Masi, Italian exploitation, Mark Gregory, Native American, Paolo Malco, Raimund Harmstorf
Posted in Action, Reviews | 13 Comments »
