Posts Tagged ‘assassins’
Friday, October 18th, 2024
(This review is pretty detailed and spoilery. The movie is great, so consider just watching it and coming back.)
THE SHADOW STRAYS is the latest ultra-violent crime/martial arts epic from writer/director Timo Tjahjanto. Like THE NIGHT COMES FOR US (2018) and the more comedic THE BIG 4 (2022), it was produced by Netflix Indonesia, so you can probly watch it right now wherever you are. (Important subtitle tip: at least on my Roku you have to click “Other” to find the full subtitle menu if you want to choose English instead of English CC.) Like HEADSHOT (2016), it takes place in a world of elite assassins trained (at least in some cases) from childhood. These ones are known as Shadows, and they’re more of a global mercenary agency, like militarized ninjas.
We begin in a snowy Yakuza fortress in Japan, where seventeen year old Agent 13 (the incredible Aurora Ribero) rises up out of an armor collection to decapitate a sleazy boss. She kills so many guys, almost eliminates the entire clan, but gets distracted by collateral damage and has to be rescued by her mentor Instructor Umbra (Hana Malasan, THE TRAIN OF DEATH). Afterwards, Umbra gets called off to “some shit show in Cambodia,” so 13 is sent alone to an apartment in Jakarta. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adipati Dolken, Agra Piliang, Ali Fikry, Andri Mashadi, assassins, Aurora Ribero, Daniel Ekaputra, Hana Malasan, Indonesia, Kristo Immanuel, Muhammad Irfan, Taskya Namya, Timo Tjahjanto
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime, Martial Arts | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, September 24th, 2024
A while ago I reviewed BABY ASSASSINS, the really fun 2021 Japanese action-comedy about two teenage assassins forced by their organization to get an apartment and day jobs. It has a bunch of top notch martial arts action choreographed by the great Kensuke Sonomura (MANHUNT, HYDRA, BAD CITY), but it’s mainly about the friendship, personality conflicts and growing-up-struggles of these two goofballs who have fun killing people but mostly enjoy laying on the couch eating desserts and talking about anime and stuff.
There’s actually a part 3 coming out, it played the New York Asian Film Festival in July and Fantastic Fest yesterday and I’ve seen more than one person saying it’s one of the best action movies of the year. Also, in Japan it’s already continuing as a TV mini-series called Baby Assassins Everyday (I watched the first episode on Youtube, and it’s a delight). So, shit, I better get caught up by finishing my review of part 2! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Akari Takaishi, assassins, Joey Iwanaga, Junpei Hashino, Kensuke Sonomura, Saori Izawa, Tatsuomi Hamada, Yugo Sakamoto
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 5 Comments »
Monday, November 21st, 2022
SECTION 8 came to VOD a couple months ago and now is on disc and I guess AMC+. It’s a solid and enjoyable movie of its type, with a good cast, some good fights, and liberal use of familiar action conventions that tend to be enjoyable. However I’m gonna show it a little tough love in this review because, as we agreed when I went on I Must Break This Podcast to discuss it last month, it’s pretty representative of where VOD/DTV action is at right now, for both good and bad. So there might be some value in going deep.
It has not one, not two, but three significant action stars in the cast – not as the lead, but in those we-can-afford-them-for-this-many-days-and-if-we-put-them-on-the-cover-we-get-financing type roles that are the bread and butter of this industry right now. One of the three is I think not used very well, one I did enjoy, another I think we will all agree is clearly the best part of the movie. All of them are added value along with Ryan Kwanten (RED HILL, 
), who stars, and Dermot Mulroney (SUNSET, THE GREY), who plays the villain with a grey beard that makes him look kinda like present-day-Mel-Gibson on the cover.
The story begins in “Mosul, Afghanistan” (uh… whoops) where Jake Atherton (Kwanten) is, we’re told, a really great marine, but his platoon is ambushed by the Taliban and only he and his mentor Captain Mason (Dolph Lundgren, HAIL CAESAR!) survive. I’m kind of unclear what happens, but later we’re told that Mason saved Jake’s life and also received a career-ending leg injury. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: assassins, Chad Law, Christian Sesma, Dermot Mulroney, Dolph Lundgren, Geoffrey Blake, Josh Ridgway, Justin Furstenfeld, Luke LaFontaine, Mickey Rourke, Robert LaSardo, Ryan Kwanten, Scott Adkins, Tracy Perez
Posted in Reviews, Action | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, July 27th, 2022
THE GRAY MAN is the new Netflix movie that they put so much into they’re actually doing promotion for it. Showed it to critics a week early, had the directors do interviews and stuff, as if they want people to know it’s there and maybe watch it. Almost like they’re in the movie business. Crazy.
It stars Ryan Gosling (ONLY GOD FORGIVES) as “Six,” a guy who was doing time for murder until a spook named Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton, ON DEADLY GROUND) got him released in exchange for dedicating his life to being a secret government assassin, or “Sierra.” One day on a mission in Bangkok he takes out a target (Callan Mulvey, BEYOND SKYLINE) who, before dying, gives him an encrypted drive he says has the dirt on Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page, MORTAL ENGINES), his new boss at the CIA who pushed Fitzroy out. When Carmichael acts suspicious about it on the phone Six decides to mail the drive to a retired handler he trusts (Alfre Woodard, CROOKLYN) and go on the run. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfre Woodard, Ana de Armas, Anthony Russo, assassins, Billy Bob Thornton, Callan Mulvey, Chris Evans, Christopher Markus, Dhanush, Jessica Henwick, Joe Russo, Julia Butters, Mark Greaney, Netflix, Rege-Jean Page, Ryan Gosling, Spiro Razatos, Stephen McFeely, Wagner Moura
Posted in Action, Reviews | 33 Comments »
Tuesday, November 5th, 2019
LEON (THE PROFESSIONAL) sums up Luc Besson pretty good, doesn’t it? He’s creepy about young women. Also, he’s really good at putting them in cool, stylish action roles. His latest in that vein, ANNA, came out this summer with little fanfare (or box office), at least partly because Besson had recently been accused of rape. Maybe it deserved to fail. But for whatever it’s worth it’s a solid movie full of what he does well.
It actually has alot in common with ATOMIC BLONDE. A beautiful bisexual spy (well, assassin in this case) double and triple crosses her way through end-of-the-Cold-War European intrigue with a twisty plot and a couple of long, impressive fight sequences. Charlize and her action and David Leitch’s intoxicating colors and music are more my speed, but ANNA has the advantage of being real complicated without being hard to follow. It’s a satisfying tale. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: assassins, Cillian Murphy, Helen Mirren, KGB, Luc Besson, Luke Evans, models, Olivier Megaton, Sasha Luss
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, February 14th, 2018
THE VILLAINESS is LA FEMME NIKITA with a little KILL BILL by way of South Korean cinema. A young woman with a troubled past has her identity erased, is trained to kill for the government, put undercover, given a mission, trying to earn her freedom. But she was already pretty damn good at killing before the feds got involved. They capture and recruit her after an incredible opening massacre, done in her POV – it’s first person shooter/slasher/stabber/kicker-through-window – until she sees herself in a mirror, then gets her head smashed into it and the perspective separates from her body, rotating around her as she continues to fight, mostly using gym equipment (the jump rope is my favorite) as weapons.
As her captivity, training and missions are depicted in somewhat elliptical fashion, the events leading up to that rampage also come out piece-by-puzzle-piece in flashbacks, not even in chronological order within themselves, and with some characters played by different actors in different periods. I find the story at times confusing and overcomplicated, but still compelling. Even if I didn’t, I’d still call THE VILLAINESS a must-see for the most audacious, envelope-pushing action filmatism I’ve seen in quite a while. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: assassins, Jung Byung-gil, Kim Ok-bin, Korean cinema
Posted in Action, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, January 28th, 2015
GOLGO 13 from 1977 – sometimes subtitled ASSIGNMENT KOWLOON, but not to be confused with ASSIGNMENT MIAMI BEACH – is the second adaptation of a popular Japanese comic book. Sonny Chiba plays an infamous assassin known as Golgo 13. But fuck the code name, his real name, or at least the alias he’s living under, is “Duke Togo.” I mean why would you even want people to call you Golgo 13 if you’re normally called Duke Togo? Just stick with the one awesome name, in my opinion. Don’t hog ’em.
This is a great role for Chiba because he’s just full of larger than life swagger. He wears flashy suits and sunglasses, he has boxes of weapons delivered to him at his hotel, he satisfies women, he’s the very best at killing people and outsmarting everybody. He’s Shaft times James Bond but sort of the bad guy, which makes him kind of cooler than either one. And director Yukio Noda (BRONSON LEE, CHAMPION) shamelessly drapes it in the stylistic cliches of the time. A good thing.
An opening about Hong Kong police responding to a murder moves to a small boat off Miami where a white man named Rocky Brown is expecting to meet the legendary assassin Golgo 13. He’s worried because he doesn’t see any boats around, when suddenly Golgo climbs right out of the water onto the boat with scuba gear. Two other white men watch on a telescope from a hotel balcony, discussing who he is, explaining him to us. Suddenly Golgo pulls out a rifle – is he gonna betray this guy that wants to hire him? No, he fires at the hotel, taking out both of the exposition guys. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: assassins, Sonny Chiba, Yukio Noda
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 11 Comments »
Monday, October 27th, 2014
I never figured Keanu Reeves would become an action hall-of-famer, but here we are. Of course he stars in the great POINT BREAK, but we can’t lie, we all kinda chuckle at his FBI surfer dude Johnny Utah in that. And then he was good in SPEED, but would that be enough? If that was enough Matt Damon would be an action legend. Of course, playing Neo in THE MATRIX trilogy sealed the deal, Reeves learned to do all that kung fu and that hadn’t really been done by a normal actor like that before and those movies and those fights hold up today. Still, it seemed like an anomaly in his career. He would always be Neo to the world but that would be it for Action Keanu, right?
Nope. Because he directed last year’s martial arts gem MAN OF TAI CHI and played the villain, creating and performing some more classic fight scenes. When I saw that I realized it was time to acknowledge his greatness. 47 RONIN put a little bit of a damper on that though because it was so boring I never even wrote a review. If I had it would’ve said “Some of the monsters are cool” and that’s about it.
But after JOHN WICK, Reeves’s strong connection to Badass Cinema cannot be denied. This is a fun, violent, straight-ahead revenge action movie. Reeves did not direct it, but his stunt double from the MATRIX movies, Chad Stahelski, did*. So it’s probly a style of directing too dangerous for Reeves to perform. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adrianne Palicki, Alfie Allen, assassins, Bridget Moynihan, Chad Stahelski, Daniel Bernhardt, David Leitch, David Patrick Kelly, Derek Kolstad, hitman, Ian McShane, John Leguizamo, Keanu Reeves, Keith Jardine, Kevin Nash, Michael Nyqvist, Randall Duk Kim, revenge, Willem Dafoe
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 176 Comments »
Tuesday, August 28th, 2012
Researching my review for CRYING FREEMAN I found out there was this five-years-older adaptation of the same comic. This one’s actually a Hong Kong action movie for real, but it’s not the moody John Woo type that influenced the 1995 version. This is the frenetic wire-fu style that was also big at that time.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: assassins, Clarence Fok, Dean Shek, Hong Kong action, Kazuo Koike, Maggie Cheung, Samuel Hui
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Martial Arts, Reviews | 25 Comments »
Monday, August 27th, 2012
CRYING FREEMAN (1995) is a pretty cool movie that I went back to hoping it would be better than I realized before. I did a brief write-up of it in a column years ago, but I’m not gonna link to it right now because most of the column is angry rants about what was going on in the news at the time and it makes me cringe. Based on a Japanese comic book (or “Japomic Book”) by Kazuo Koike, the same writer as Lone Wolf and Cub, CRYING FREEMAN is a moody, serious assassin movie with Yakuza, mind control, a witch, romance and tragedy. It takes place in 4 different countries (U.S., Canada, China, Japan) with the most convincing, of course, being the part that takes place in Vancouver, B.C.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: assassins, Byron Mann, Canadian, Christophe Gans, Julie Condra, Kazuo Koike, Mako, Mark Dacascos, Rae Dawn Chong, Roger Avary, Tcheky Karyo
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 26 Comments »
