THE SON OF NO ONE is the new one from Dito Montiel, who got onto my radar thanks to the unexpectedly interesting FIGHTING. This one also stars Channing Tatum, this time as a rookie NYC cop. Katie Holmes plays his wife. Al Pacino plays his cop dad’s partner. Ray Liotta plays his boss. Tracy Morgan plays his mentally disturbed childhood best friend. Juliette Binoche plays a reporter for a leftie weekly who seems poised to ruin his life by exposing a secret from his past. How the hell did I never hear about this movie until the day before it came out DTV?
Oh yeah, for the obvious reason. It’s not very good. But I’ll put it in the respectable try column if I ever start using a column-based system for categorizing movies, and if I remember this movie at that point, which seems doubtful, but you never know. (read the rest of this shit…)
Enough about premaquels. How about a good old fashioned straight up remake? Kinda refreshing!
Well, here’s the thing…
BOUNTY HUNTERS is a low-rent but likable b-or-maybe-c-movie that is the movie debut of Trish Stratus. I didn’t know who that was to be honest, but she was the 7-time Women’s WWE Champion, which it turns out is a thing they have. Stratus plays a bail enforcement agent named Jules who, along with her boss/special friend Ridley (Frank J. Zupancic) and wiseass partner Chase (Boomer Philips) get into some trouble when they make an unethical choice while picking up a bail jumper.
“You killed him?”
I never knew about HEAT until I read that Brian DePalma’s doing a new version with Jason Statham. [UPDATE FROM THE FUTURE: DePalma didn’t end up directing but it was pretty good and called 
J. EDGAR is the work of an unlikely biopic all-star team: Leonardo “The Aviator” DiCaprio playing the notorious FBI director (even though he’s an old man during alot of the movie), Clint “Bird” Eastwood directing, and Dustin Lance “Milk” Black on the keyboards. This topic required calling in the pros because J. Edgar Hoover was an asshole and a weirdo, but not in a charming or funny way, like Larry Flynt or somebody. And even though he was (according to many, including this movie) a minority – a closeted and tormented gay man – there is nothing anti-establishment about him. He’s not a guy who bucked the system. He created the damn system. Hard to make that glamorous in a movie.
ACT OF VALOR takes the covert-military-mission subgenre that we know so well from the works of Cannon and Nu-Image and puts a new spin on it: it’s a special ops procedural. Directed by 2005 Baja 500 winner Mike “Mouse” McCoy and stuntman/documentary editor Scott Waugh (together known as commercial directors “The Bandito Brothers”), it combines the old “elite team of warriors have to stop a mad bomber” formula with sort of a Soderberghian approach, building the movie around non-actors and taking advantage of their real life skills and unpolished presence. Except for the abducted CIA asset they have to rescue (Roselyn Sanchez from RUSH HOUR 2) the heroes are all played by actual Navy SEALs. “Active duty,” the ads and press releases like to say, so their last names are left off the credits.
After I saw MANDRILL I was looking at Marko Zaror’s filmography and realized there was one I hadn’t noticed before, a starring vehicle that he did in Mexico instead of his native Chile. IMDB lists it as a 2009 release, after KILTRO and MIRAGEMAN, but from the looks of it I’m pretty sure he filmed it before those (it seems to have played a Mexican film festival in 2007, and the trailer says “introducing the Latin Dragon Marko Zaror”). It’s credited to his Mandrill Films and Zaror Brothers companies, but directed by one-timer Peter Van Lengen instead of his better known partner Ernesto Diaz Espinoza. 
“You must be Mandrill. Who else would be so fearless as to kiss my woman in my pool?”
