Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Tuesday, April 9th, 2024
SIX-STRING SAMURAI is an artifact from another time – the early internet days, when movie nerds like us were a fringe group beginning to ascend to power, and before people would make fake trailers and put them on Youtube. Specifically it was the fall of 1998, after a strange summer of blockbusters everybody hated (GODZILLA, LOST IN SPACE, THE AVENGERS) but also some classics (BLADE, THE MASK OF ZORRO, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, WILD THINGS, OUT OF SIGHT) — see my overview of the season here. In the middle of all that Palm Pictures released this low budget post-apocalyptic movie about a Buddy Holly lookalike battling his way through the desert to get to “Lost Vegas.” It only played 16 screens, but it lasted 15 weeks. People must’ve been watching it.
I didn’t get a chance until it came to DVD, but I’d been hearing about it for months on The Ain’t It Cool News. In researching it I found an interview with director Lance Mungia where Harry Knowles acknowledged that his “over-the-top” review had raised expectations too high and led many people to be disappointed. And that’s my memory of what the reaction was at the time. I think I liked it more than some, I thought it was pretty cool, but it didn’t change the world. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian Tyler, Buddy Holly, Jeffrey Falcon, Lance Mungia, post-apocalypse
Posted in Reviews, Action | 23 Comments »
Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024
The producer I always associate with THE CROW is Edward R. Pressman. That’s a guy with a storied career – his name is on everything from BADLANDS to CONAN THE BARBARIAN to BAD LIEUTENANT, and he played Mr. Trend in CRIMEWAVE. He died last year but will have his credit on the upcoming THE CROW movie.
Apparently not involved in that new one was the guy who brought the project to Pressman in the first place, Jeff Most. According to a 2005 interview with Clint Morris at Moviehole, it all started when the young producer was looking for a comic book artist to do illustrations of a John Shirley script he was trying to get made. Someone told him to look at James O’Barr’s recently published The Crow and he was so impressed he reversed his plans and had Shirley write a script based on the comic. But getting someone to finance an R-rated comic book movie was difficult. He says 51 people said no before Pressman said yes. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bharat Nalluri, Bill Mondy, David Lea, Edward R. Pressman, Eric Mabius, Fred Ward, Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, Kirsten Dunst, Matt Greenberg, Walton Goggins, William Atherton
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comic strips/Super heroes | 14 Comments »
Monday, April 1st, 2024
DOWNTIME is a 1997 British film set in a dilapidated apartment building. I feel like somebody might’ve recommended it to me here years ago, but maybe it’s just in my head because the cover says “MOVE OVER BRUCE WILLIS, A BRITISH ACTION MOVIE TO DIE FOR.” I didn’t really think of it as an action movie, but the DIE HARD connection is obvious: it’s mostly set in one building, and much of it involves elevator-related danger, including climbing up onto the top of the elevator, climbing around inside the shaft, and the elevator falling and exploding. And it’s got a good look to it, with the camera moving around confidently (courtesy of ENEMY MINE and FIREBIRDS d.p. Tony Imi), so maybe there’s some McT influence in there.
But what makes it interesting to me is how much it still feels like something different. While DIE HARD is a pure action movie strengthened by the relationship drama in the middle of it, this feels like it’s a relationship drama that sometimes gets interrupted by some DIE HARD stuff, and keeps trying to brush it off and stay on track. Obviously straight ahead action is my preference, but I appreciate the originality of this approach, and it kept surprising me which directions it went. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bharat Nalluri, David Roper, Paul McGann, Susan Lynch, Tom Georgeson
Posted in Reviews, Action, Drama, Romance | 4 Comments »
Thursday, March 28th, 2024
Fairly often I get emails from people who made low budget movies, sometimes they seem to be familiar with me, sometimes they don’t, but they’re trying to do the very hard work of getting people to notice their needle out there in the haystack of what’s available. I sincerely wish every one of them well, but I don’t take very many of them up on it. My fear is that 99.9% of the time it’s not gonna be some hidden gem, or even some crazy failure, it’s just gonna be okay for what it is. And I know I’ll feel bad for them and want to say nice things, but what good does it do them for a niche critic like me to be nice about their movie being okay? I don’t know.
But this particular one, LOST PHOENIX, I decided to watch. After a long time. I was kind of slow about it. But writer/director James Couche (who is also editor and fight choreographer) had a good pitch for it: it’s his micro budget take on “90s mid-budget action movies with shades of inspiration from Hong Kong thrillers.” He also mentioned EL MARIACHI as an inspiration, production-wise. But it takes place in September 2020, and was shot from October 2020 through October 2022 in Richmond, Virginia. I know there are a ton of COVID horror movies shot out in the woods somewhere while people were bored, but this is the first time I heard of an action one. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: amnesia, COVID-19, Denver, Eliza Kelley, James Couche, micro budget, Wan Dral
Posted in Reviews, Action | 6 Comments »
Monday, March 25th, 2024
ROAD HOUSE (1989) is one of my all time favorite movies. It is simultaneously extremely of its time and absolutely of all times. There’s nothing like it, nothing as good as it, it’s a lightning bolt and they stopped making the type of bottle you would need to even try to catch it again. But it is possible to make a fun remake of it, and I know this because after many years of threatening somebody finally went through with it. ROAD HOUSE (2024) skipped theaters because it was made for the Amazon Prime Free Product Shipping and Digital Television Network, but I liked it more than any non-JOHN WICK or M:I theatrically released Hollywood action movie of recent years I can think of. It’s funny and badass and different enough from the original to stand on its own. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Bagarozzi, Arturo Castro, Billy Magnussen, Charles Mondry, Colon McGregor, Daniela Melchior, David Lee Henry, Dominique Columbus, Doug Liman, Garrett Warren, Hannah Lanier, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jessica Williams, Joel Silver, Kevin Carroll, Lukas Gage, Post Malone, remakes
Posted in Reviews, Action | 75 Comments »
Tuesday, March 12th, 2024
Johnnie To’s BREAKING NEWS (2004) opens with a crane shot of a cool guy in a leather jacket (Haitao Li, VENGEANCE, GALLANTS, MOTORWAY) walking down a block into a building, and the camera floats up and looks into the window of the room where he tells his fellow armed robbers, led by Yuen (Richie Jen, EXILED), that it’s time to bring the money out to the car. Then the camera lowers back down to the street where hotshot inspector Cheung (Nick Cheung, AH KAM) and his loyal subordinate Sergeant Hoi (Hui Shiu-hung, ROYAL WARRIORS, NAKED KILLER, LEGENDARY ASSASSIN) are in a car staking them out. They’re concerned about two unwitting patrol officers stopping the thieves’ car for a traffic violation – could mess everything up. The shot will continue uninterrupted as one of the officers asks about a bag in the back seat and then the guns come out. The camera turns every which way to see the different sides firing at each other, the civilians fleeing, the backup police cars arriving. It cranes up to get a look at the guy hanging out a window firing a rifle down, then hopping onto a ledge and dropping to the street to run. It doesn’t cut until the thieves flee the scene in a stolen police van.
The only thing I knew about BREAKING NEWS was that people made a big deal about this long take at the time (it’s about 7 minutes). But since then we’ve had TOM YUM GOONG, CHILDREN OF MEN, HANNA, BIRDMAN, 1917, ATHENA, etc., so it not only is it a more common technique now, but this is a relatively subtle use of it . It certainly doesn’t seem like the point of the movie. It’s just a cool way to open it and show how these characters are tied together. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Haitao Li, Hui Shiu-hung, Johnnie To, Kelly Chen, Lam Suet, Nick Cheung, Richie Jen, You Yong, Yuen Bun
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, March 5th, 2024
Revisiting DAREDEVIL obviously made me want to watch ELEKTRA again – this time in a director’s cut, but the differences are minimal compared to DAREDEVIL’s. It’s a different situation anyway because I actually did enjoy ELEKTRA when I saw it on video back in the day, and even wrote a review of it. So instead of “maybe I’ll like it better now” it was a “will I still like it?” situation. The answer is yes, I did.
That’s not a popular opinion. It was a big flop, and scoffed at from all quarters. Roger Ebert called it “a collision between leftover bits and pieces of Marvel superhero stories.” Manohla Dargis called it “The latest Hollywood movie to give comic books a bad name.” Mick LaSalle wrote, “It’s garbage” and complained that it was “twisted” to open with this contract killer character assassinating someone when “we don’t know what he did to deserve this.” At least David Edelstein said it was “only maybe two-fifths” bad because “these Marvel pictures are starting to blur together” (which now seems like a funny thing for someone to have said then), and he was wise enough to say it paled in comparison to A CHINESE GHOST STORY, THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR and THE HEROIC TRIO rather than X-MEN or SPIDER-MAN. Because that’s what it is: one of the American movies that’s not nearly as good as Hong Kong movies. But I still like them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy Bryan, Bob Sapp, Bryan Spicer, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Christophe Beck, Colin Cunningham, Edison T. Ribeiro, Goran Visnjic, Jason Isaacs, Jennifer Garner, Kirsten Prout, M. Raven Metzner, Mark Houghton, Marvel Comics, Mike Gunther, Natassia Malthe, ninjas, Rob Bowman, spin-off, Stuart Zicherman, Terence Stamp, Tom Woodruff Jr., Will Yun Lee, Zak Penn
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Martial Arts | 11 Comments »
Monday, March 4th, 2024
Note: in conjunction with this review I also made my third appearance on I MUST BREAK THIS PODCAST, discussing the movie with Sean Malloy. Thanks for having me, Sean! Always a fun time. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE.
WANTED MAN is the latest film by director Dolph Lundgren (MISSIONARY MAN). If you’re not aware, Lundgren is also an actor, so he stars as Mike Johansen, a way-past-his-prime cop. He’s introduced taking a morning beach jog, and of course he’s Dolph Lundgren (or stunt double – his hood is up), but he’s kinda limping, lumbering around. He has to take a bunch of pills. Later we find out he needs ankle surgery.
And he’s also in hot water. When he pulls up to the station and the protesters and media say, “That’s him!,” we realize oh shit… he’s the cop they were talking about on TV, the one that brutally assaulted a “migrant driver.” He sees the protesters and kinda does a whoops! and comically turns his pickup truck around. Later we see the indefensible bodycam footage, where he repeatedly slams a car door on the poor guy, yells about Mexicans and punches another officer trying to pull him off. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron McPherson, Christina Villa, Daniela Soto-Brenner, Dolph Lundgren, Erma Giron, James Joseph Pulido, Jesus "Rocko" Reyes, Jose Trujillo, Kelsey Grammer, Mexican border, Michael Pare, Michael Worth, Roger Cross, Tony Messenger
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs | 8 Comments »
Thursday, February 29th, 2024
A little over 20 years ago, in a whole different cinematic era, they made a movie of the Marvel Comics super hero Daredevil. It was a strange, in-between period for comic book movies – they were neither the exciting novelty they’d been in the BATMAN-inspired ‘90s or the dominant cultural force they would soon become with the MCU. BLADE, X-MEN, BLADE II and SPIDER-MAN had come out, so Marvel finally had a track record of successful movie adaptations. But none of these took place in the same world, and there was even a famous outtake from X-MEN where a guy in a Spider-Man costume ran into a scene as a prank, and it seemed hilarious at the time.
DAREDEVIL was a test of what The Ain’t It Cool News and other self-declared “geek” voices on the internet had been preaching. In fact, Harry Knowles wrote a rave review of the script more than a year before filming started. It’s meant to be a dark, gritty and faithful adaptation of a character beloved by comics fans, but not very well known to civilians. Sure enough it was a hit, though only enough to get a spin-off and not multiple sequels like Blade, the X-Men and Spider-Man got. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ben Affleck, Cheung-Yan Yuen, Colin Farrell, Coolio, David Keith, Erick Avari, Ericson Core, Graeme Revell, Jeff Imada, Jennifer Garner, Joe Pantoliano, Jon Favreau, Mark Margolis, Mark Steven Johnson, Marvel Comics, Michael Clarke Duncan, nu metal, Paul Ben-Victor, Tanoai Reed
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comic strips/Super heroes | 27 Comments »
Wednesday, February 28th, 2024
SHOWDOWN AT THE GRAND is a little indie movie with a premise and setting that are right up my alley. It’s sort of like MATINEE for people fixated on the movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s instead of ’50s and ‘60s. To me it doesn’t really build much from there, but it uses two top shelf actors in novel ways, applies elbow grease to areas where I didn’t expect it to, and has an overall enthusiasm that makes it worth recommending.
Dolph Lundgren (JOHNNY MNEMONIC) is in this movie, and that’s obviously what brought my eye to it, but the star is Terrence Howard (HUSTLE & FLOW), who plays George Fuller, owner of an old time one screen theater called the Warner Grand. He’s a larger-than-life figure who dresses like a cowboy and lovingly lectures everyone he sees about the supposed greats of forgotten exploitation movie history, making it sound like a religious sermon. Showing movies is his life, and maybe his home – if he has a house or apartment outside of the Grand we never see it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dolph Lundgren, Elizabeth Righetti, John Savage, Jon Sklaroff, Mike Ferguson, Orson Oblowitz, Piper Curda, Terrence Howard
Posted in Reviews, Action | 10 Comments »
