Posts Tagged ‘Richard Wenk’
Tuesday, September 5th, 2023
THE EQUALIZER 3 is another fine entry in Academy Award winner Denzel Washington’s only ongoing franchise. It has a very different setting than part 1 or part 2 and he’s up to slightly different things, so it’s not exactly a rehash, it’s pretty different in a way. In another way it’s exactly the same as the other two, or any number of movies starring Liam Neeson. Very solemn and serious, but also over-the-top and absurd. Kinda melancholic, but also kinda awesome. And that’s what we want. If you don’t want any part in a “we” like that then that’s fine, you know what to do.
Washington (VIRTUOSITY) stars as Roberto McCall, née Robert, former Marine and DIA officer turned pro bono bad guy slayer. In the first one he took on the Russian mafia and corrupt police while working at Brand X Home Depot, in the second one he took on mercenaries, kidnappers and gangs while working as a Lyft driver, and in this one he takes on the Camorra (afiliated with Syrian terrorists) while chilling out like a retiree in gorgeous Altamonte, Italy. He gets there by accident, though. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alessandro Pess, Andrea Dodero, Andrea Scarduzio, Antoine Fuqua, Bruno Bilotta, Dakota Fanning, David Denman, Denzel Washington, Eugenio Mastrandrea, Gaia Scodellaro, Liang Yang, Remo Girone, Richard Wenk
Posted in Reviews, Action | 37 Comments »
Thursday, September 23rd, 2021
I don’t know if Maggie Q thinks of herself as an action star. She’s a good actress, and in recent years she’s been in horror movies and thrillers and on Designated Survivor, and she has a new sitcom coming soon. Maybe one of her best known roles was the title character in Nikita, where I assume she kicked a multitude of asses every week, but it’s not like anybody puts the original TV Nikita Peta Wilson or the original movie Nikita Anne Parillaud or the second movie version Bridget Fonda in a category with Jean-Claude Van Damme and those guys. They’re just actors without much association to the genre.
But I respect that Q specifically came out of Hong Kong martial arts films. She’s American, but as a young woman she worked as a model in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, where she was discovered and trained by Jackie Chan. Some of her Hong Kong films were Benny Chan’s GEN-X COPS 2, Ching Siu Tung’s NAKED WEAPON and Daniel Lee’s Seagal-produced DRAGON SQUAD, before coming to Hollywood for cool supporting parts in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III and LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. She’s been in a bunch of stuff since then, including the DIVERGENT series. A lesser known one I thought she was cool in was PRIEST. But I kinda thought she’d moved on from that, so as an action fan I was so thrilled when I first saw the trailer for THE PROTÉGÉ and realized she not only had a legit starring role action vehicle, but one that was made to be released in theaters! And it really happened! I saw it in one!
This was a few weeks ago, many of the reviews I saw were negative, and it’s probly pretty much gone already, but it’s on VOD now and on disc soon. So I want to put in a good word for it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Maggie Q, Martin Campbell, Michael Keaton, Richard Wenk, Robert Patrick, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Action, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, January 15th, 2019
THE EQUALIZER is not a great movie, but it is part of a great American tradition to allow the finest actors an opportunity once they get older to make movies where they pretend they’re Steven Seagal and break dudes’ arms and drill ’em in the head and stuff. To help people. Very loosely based on the ’80s tv show, Denzel Washington (MALCOLM X, RICOCHET) played Robert McCall, a mild mannered, O.C.D.-having widower with ugly sneakers who works at an off-brand Home Depot and also happens to be an ex-secret-agent badass, so when he sees enough injustice he decides you know what I’m tired of being hoodwinked and bamboozled, I’m gonna vigilante the shit out of these Russian mobsters or whoever.
Had things gone a little differently maybe we’d all be excited for Denzel’s much-hyped return to the popular VIRTUOSITY franchise after sitting out the last three, but we play the cards we’re dealt, so THE EQUALIZER 2 is Denzel’s first ever sequel. Also back are director Antoine Fuqua (BAIT), writer Richard Wenk (VAMP, 16 BLOCKS, THE MECHANIC, THE EXPENDABLES 2, COUNTDOWN, JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK), Academy Award winner Melissa Leo (who played a different character on an episode of the TV show in 1985!) as his old agency boss Susan Plummer, and Bill Pullman (CASPER) as her non-ass-kicking husband.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antoine Fuqua, Ashton Sanders, Bill Pullman, Denzel Washington, Melissa Leo, Pedro Pascal, Richard Wenk
Posted in Action, Reviews | 33 Comments »
Tuesday, April 25th, 2017
I’m happy to see that some of the films produced by WWE Films still fulfill the original promise of that prestigious banner: traditional low budget action vehicles for pro-wrestlers. For a while they were doing normal movies that didn’t take advantage of their stable of larger-than-life muscle dudes. So how the hell am I supposed to learn who the different wrestlers are? Watch wrestling?
This one taught me who Dolph Ziggler is. I’d heard the name and I always assumed he would be a tall Ivan Drago knockoff, but it turns out he’s just a longhair dude of standard WWE height and build. Here he ties his hair back to play Ray Thompson, Seattle undercover narcotics cop who is totally in trouble for how edgy and not by the book he is. For example he fake kills his asshole partner Kendricks (Josh Blacker, DRIVEN TO KILL, ELYSIUM) during a bust by shooting him in the vest. He saves his partner’s life and gets 200 guns off the streets, and it’s possible that this level of law enforcement awesomeness is actually just acting out due to the tragic death of his son. At least, that’s what we suspect when his wife finds him drinking a beer and reading bedtime stories in their son’s completely-untouched bedroom. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dolph Ziggler, DTV, fake Seattle, John Stockwell, Josh Blacker, Kane, Katharine Isabelle, Michael Finch, Richard Wenk, WWE Films
Posted in Action, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Friday, September 30th, 2016
First of all, man, I am never gonna get that theme song out of my head. It’s on the original and the three sequels and on this remake it’s just on the end credits, other than some sly hints at its rhythm adapted to percussion and that exotic flute type thing that modern film composers love. But it’s so catchy and I’ve heard it so many times this last week or two that it’s burned onto my brain like what used to happen to TVs if you left it on a DVD menu all day. Thanks alot, Elmer Bernstein.
In Antoine Fuqua’s THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, we have a small town in Kansas (not Mexico) being threatened by a wealthy land baron (not bandits) who comes in with a bunch of killers, and makes a shitty, non-negotiable offer for their land, that he says they can accept or be killed when he comes back in three weeks. And he makes this threat at gunpoint inside the church! Not cool.
This opening shows the dangers of normal people standing up to these bullies: they quickly execute the first guy who does it, and this escalates into a massacre. This asshole Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) tells the in-his-pocket-out-of-fear sheriff to leave the bodies where they are, burns down the church and stops by the whorehouse on the way out. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antoine Fuqua, Byung-hun Lee, Chris Pratt, Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Haley Bennett, Luke Grimes, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Matt Bomer, Nic Pizzolato, Peter Sarsgaard, Richard Wenk, Vincent D'Onofrio
Posted in Action, Reviews, Western | 46 Comments »
Monday, September 29th, 2014
All things being equal, THE EQUALIZER is Denzel Washington’s TAKEN. It’s the one where they figure out people like to watch a really commanding older actor be smarter than everybody and kill a bunch of criminals. It has some gestures of seriousness and takes a bit to get to the killing, but once it does it’s pretty straight up about being a violent, lowbrow action movie. It even has the Academy Award winner doing the ol’ slo-mo-walking-away-from-a-fiery-explosion shot. I guess he did that in MAN ON FIRE too, and shot more beautifully from what I remember. But this one is more my speed because it’s not trying to rub my nose in the shit, it’s just trying to be stupid fun.
And by the way I apologize for awkwardly shoe-horning “all things being equal” in there at the beginning. It just seemed like something you do. But let’s try to get past it.
Written by Richard Wenk (VAMP, 16 BLOCKS, THE MECHANIC REMAKE, THE EXPENDABLES 2) and sort of based on the ’80s TV show of the same name, this has Denzel (RICOCHET) playing Edward Woodward’s character Bob McCall, now a book-reading, OCD widower square who works at “Home Mart,” wears polo shirts tucked into dad jeans and cleans his New Balance sneakers with a toothbrush every morning. Then one day when an acquaintance from the diner where he hangs out (Chloe Grace Moretz, TODAY YOU DIE) gets badly beaten by her Russian pimp (David Meunier, a.k.a. Cousin Johnny from Justified) Bob decides to try to help her. And it turns out his previous job was at the CIA or something (the agency is not specified) and that he’s real good at massacring a whole bunch of armed criminals using found objects and guns he takes out of their hands. Gino Fellino would be proud. He even sticks a corkscrew in a guy’s chin and we see it poke up into his mouth. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antoine Fuqua, Bill Pullman, Boston, Chloe Grace Moretz, David Meunier, Denzel Washington, Martin Csokas, Melissa Leo, Richard Wenk, TV movies, vigilante
Posted in Action, Reviews | 53 Comments »
