"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Jake Weary’

Trigger Warning

Wednesday, November 20th, 2024

TRIGGER WARNING is a b-action vehicle for Jessica Alba (MACHETE, MECHANIC: RESURRECTION). You don’t see her in big movies anymore but she looks basically the same as you remember and she’s playing a CIA covert ops badass whose father dies, so she comes home to her small town, uncovers a criminal conspiracy and fucks up some motherfuckers.

When I saw the trailer I was thinking it was like how Netflix gave tough lady action vehicles to Allison Janney and Halle Berry and different people. But then it opens with a war scene in Syria and I thought oh no, this is more like a recent made-for-VOD movie that Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke would each have a couple scenes in. That’s the general feel of the thing, and storywise it’s all well-worn tropes, very low on original spins. It’s generic – all the numbers are there, all in order – but slightly above average for this sort of thing. Alba seems very dedicated and is cool in it, so at the bare minimum level of “is it a movie where Jessica Alba beats up a bunch of chumps?” it is successful. (read the rest of this shit…)

Message from the King

Friday, September 4th, 2020

MESSAGE FROM THE KING is Chadwick Boseman’s 2016 (pre-BLACK PANTHER) action(ish) vehicle, released straight to Netflix. I always meant to watch it – I’m sorry it took me a tragedy to get to it. It’s pretty good.

It follows the classic noir tradition of the outsider who comes into town because a loved one went missing or died, starts asking around, spying on people, finds out what happened, and goes after the people responsible. I tend to like that story format – in fact, I kind of played off of it in my book Niketown, now that I think about it.

The specific version of this type of story that MESSAGE FROM THE KING reminds me of most is THE LIMEY. That’s both a compliment (I love THE LIMEY and movies like it) and bad news (unsurprisingly it’s not as good as THE LIMEY), but I couldn’t avoid the comparison. Instead of British he’s South African, instead of a daughter it’s his sister, and instead of her being involved with an older music producer it’s an older movie producer. But it’s a similar thing of a guy from another culture going around to rich people parties, barging into front businesses, angering macho thugs who don’t know who he is and underestimate him, playing dumb but exploding into a few sudden bursts of brutal violence. (read the rest of this shit…)