Given that it stars a veritable “Who’s Who” of modern action stars — e.g., Tony Jaa, Tiger Chen, Iko Uwais, Scott Adkins, Michael Jai White — it should go without saying that Jesse V. Johnson’s Triple Threat boasts some pretty impressive fights. I pressed “Rewind” on several occasions so that I could watch certain bad-ass moves again, particularly from Chen and Adkins, and I winced more than once at scenes of particularly brutal carnage. As an added bonus, Triple Threat possesses a certain gritty, DIY feel that adds to its intensity. I just wish the storyline had been a wee bit stronger. It’s promising at points, with a pair of mercenaries on the run from some other mercenaries while protecting a Chinese heiress, but got muddled whenever it tried to inject some humor or backstory into the proceedings.
To its credit, The Marvels felt like director Nia DaCosta was trying to do something different with the MCU formula. Much of that’s due to the inclusion of young Kamala Khan, aka, Ms. Marvel, who was a delight in her own series back in 2022. Khan brought some much-needed levity to the movie, which had me laughing out loud on several occasions. But at the end of the day, The Marvels is still an MCU title, which means that it’s still plagued by the franchise’s apparent lack of direction. As with most recent MCU titles, I can’t shake the feeling that the movie’s events don’t actually mean anything or are leading up to anything meaningful. And the obligatory mid-credits scene only adds to the sense that at this point, Kevin Feige et al. are just throwing random ideas at the wall to see what, if anything, sticks.
John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China never fails to put a huge smile on my face, starting with Kurt Russell’s iconic performance as trucker Jack Burton, who finds himself in over his head while battling sorcerers, monsters, and kung fu masters straight out of Chinese myth and legend. I love how the movie is an obvious homage to kung fu and wuxia movies, and even stars a couple of martial arts movie legends like Carter Wong and Jeff Imada. I love how it plays with an Americanized (i.e., overly exoticized) version of Chinese culture even as it subverts that by making Russell’s swaggering, tough-talking, John Wayne-esque hero perpetually confused and out of his depth. (As Carpenter put it in his DVD commentary, Burton is a sidekick who thinks he’s the main character.) I love James Hong and Victor Wong’s performances as Lo Pan and Egg Shen, respectively. Basically, I love everything about this movie, from its beginning to its surprisingly bittersweet ending. May the wings of liberty never lose a feather, indeed.
On paper, watching a nameless hitman methodically clean up all of the loose ends after a hit goes sideways sounds like a pretty boring way to spend two hours. And it is… until it’s not. Those expecting the sort of stylized wall-to-wall action that’s usually associated with “hitman” movies will likely be disappointed here. But kudos to director David Fincher and star Michael Fassbender for creating a film that becomes increasingly engrossing as the titular assassin goes about his bloody business with cool detachment, determination, and inspirational aphorisms like “Anticipate, don’t improvise” and “Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.” (All delivered via internal monologue, natch.) At times, it almost feels like a heist film as you try and figure out how he’s going to overcome each new dilemma. It doesn’t hurt that The Killer has some occasional flashes of dark humor, such as the hitman’s reliance on Amazon and the gig economy to do his job. A lesser director might try and beat audiences over the head with that as social commentary — as in: modern society requires us to live like an amoral, yoga-practicing, Smiths-loving hitman in order to survive — but thankfully, Fincher avoids that pitfall.
Along with Chuck Norris’ The Octagon, Enter the Ninja kicked off the “ninja craze” that swept through American pop culture in the early-to-mid ’80s. Franco Nero (of Django fame, and dubbed here because of his thick Italian accent) plays a former mercenary-turned-ninja who travels to the Philippines to visit an old war buddy — and soon finds himself squaring off against thugs, greedy tycoons, and even a former fellow ninjutsu trainee. Make no mistake, Enter the Ninja is not a good film if evaluated objectively. (For starters, I’m pretty sure I could be way more stealthy just sitting on my couch than the assassins depicted here.) But when watched through the goggles of nostalgia — and specifically, the nostalgia of what it was like to be a ninja-obsessed grade schooler — it’s still not a good film. But it is fun to watch, if only because it offers you the opportunity to visit the exotic and strange alternate reality that exists only in ’80s ninja flicks.
Shamelessly aping (npi) Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now for a monster movie might be a little on the nose, but in the case of Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island, it turns to be a pretty decent idea. And when you throw in some impressive-looking visuals, lots of intense (read: gory) monster brawls, and best of all, some delightful John C. Reilly kookiness, then you have a movie that’s way more than the sum of its parts. In other words, Kong: Skull Island possesses a sense of fun and zaniness — be it Reilly’s unhinged performance, Samuel L. Jackson’s scenery-chewing, or the elaborate monster designs — that’s sorely lacking from the rest of Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse titles.
It threw me for a loop back in 2015 when Hou Hsiao-hsien, who is now retired, announced that he was making a wuxia film, and I doubt I was alone in that. But this is Hou Hsiao-hsien we’re talking about, so The Assassin isn’t exactly Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, or House of Flying Daggers — for better or worse. Like those films, The Assassin is absolutely gorgeous, from the rich costumes and production design to the unbelievable Chinese landscapes and scenery. But the storyline — a skilled assassin must prove her loyalty by killing the man to whom she’d one been betrothed — is more of a mixed bag. Hou is extremely fond of “pillow moments” (to use Roger Ebert’s term) and pregnant silences. Which means that The Assassin’s story is often as obtuse as it is engaging, if not more so. Sometimes this stylistic choice works and draws you into the film and the characters’ inner lives and sometimes, it’s just frustrating, particularly when political conspiracies emerge and immediately feel anticlimactic.
I should’ve known we were in for a rough time when Jason Statham’s bad-ass one-liner to a villain was about estate planning, but at that moment, I still thought The Beekeeper would be one of those “so bad it’s good” films. But no, it’s just bad. Like mind-numbingly, eye-rollingly bad. Like “How many people starred in this because they needed to pay their mortgage?” bad. There is, of course, the awful dialog, which requires the likes of Jeremy Irons and Minnie Driver to slum it. But there’s also the grim tone that’s not really grim but rather, desperately wants you to think it’s grim and a storyline that requires characters to suddenly know things they couldn’t possibly know in order to keep things moving towards a hollow conclusion. I have a pretty low bar for Jason Statham movies: I just want to see him punch cartoonishly bad guys in the faces and look cool while doing so. I gave The Beekeeper an extra half-star because the bad guys being punched are slimy tech bros but still, it makes you long for the cinematic brilliance of the second Transporter movie.
The first Equalizer movie only worked as well as it did because of Denzel Washington. In the case of The Equalizer 2, though, not even he’s enough to save it. Washington is still the same ol’ former government agent/assassin who now helps people in need, mainly by inflicting grievous bodily harm on thugs and abusers. But this time, after a close friend is killed in an apparent robbery, it’s personal. But there are also storylines about a Holocaust survivor and a young kid who needs saving from gangs, so it gets a bit muddled and directionless before culminating in an over-long showdown in the middle of a hurricane. But because you know that Washington’s character isn’t really in any danger of getting killed or even seriously injured — which, by the way, was actually a plus in the previous film — and the bad guys will make stupid mistakes despite supposedly being highly trained government operatives, it just grows increasingly tedious by the minute as you wait for the foregone conclusion of an ending.
I really enjoyed Siddharth Anand’s War, starring Hrithik Roshan; with its crazy action sequences and wild twists, it felt like a Bollywood version of a Mission: Impossible movie. So I was excited to see the two reunite for Fighter, which looked like it’d be the Bollywood Top Gun. Alas, Fighter is nowhere near as enjoyable as War. Or Top Gun, for that matter. Given that it’s an Indian film, wild tonal shifts are to be expected. Even so, Fighter puts you in a tailspin as it veers between war carnage and brutal terrorism, goofy “buddy film” hijinks, overwrought melodrama, and smoldering romance, with the requisite dance numbers thrown in. (For the record, nobody, and I mean nobody, smolders like Hrithik Roshan, especially when he’s walking in slow motion, which constitutes approximately a fourth of the nearly three-hour film.) What makes Fighter especially eyeroll-inducing, though, is that nearly all of its scenes are slathered in jingoism and over-the-top nationalism that just suck the fun right out of the film. Meanwhile, the surprisingly shoddy CGI and visual effects render the many dogfighting scenes more silly than thrilling.
The only reason this film works as well as it does is because of Denzel Washington. He brings the requisite amounts of gravitas and screen presence to make you believe in his haunted ex-super-deadly-guy who now seeks redemption by taking out a bunch of Russian gangsters in violent, blood-soaked fashion. Of course, being an Antoine Fuqua film, The Equalizer occasionally dips into hyper-stylized, CGI-enhanced silliness — which is a shame, because I much preferred the slow, seemingly mundane burn of the film’s first act — but even then, it remains eminently watchable because of Denzel. No one else could’ve pulled it off, of that I’m convinced.
Mamoru Oshii is best known for directing classic anime films like Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer, Ghost in the Shell, and the Patlabor movies, but he’s also taken his hand at live-action over the years. I loved the Matrix-y Avalon years ago, and with its baroque, CGI-heavy visuals, Garm Wars: The Last Druid is cut from the same stylistic cloth. Which means that it has some occasionally stunning visuals even as it suffers from a bleary, washed out look that makes it look like one long Final Fantasy cutscene. The story’s an interesting-if-convoluted blend of Celtic mythology, sci-fi, and post-apocalyptic cyberpunk, but nobody — not even Lance Henriksen — is going to win any awards for their performances. (Kenji Kawai’s score, on the other hand, is lovely.) And after about 90 minutes, the film just sort of peters out, which is ironic given the epic final imagery. In the end, this one’s really just for Oshii diehards.
After 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon refused to make another Bourne movie without director Paul Greengrass, so Tony Gilroy — who wrote the first three Bourne movies — hopped into the director’s chair and enlisted Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz, with middling results. That’s no slight on Renner and Weisz, who do the best they can with an inert storyline that verges into the realm of sci-fi with its talk of genetically modified super-soldiers. There are flashes of a more interesting film here and there, and Renner and Weisz share some nice moments. In the end, however, The Bourne Legacy is just a pale imitation of the films that preceded it, from the hectic, rapid-fire editing and elaborate chase sequences to the ever-increasing array of shadowy government projects with boring-yet-ominous codenames.
At the risk of sounding like a lazy critic, is Asteroid City the most Wes Anderson-y thing that Wes Anderson has ever done? With its story within a story within a story structure, heavily affected performances, carefully controlled camerawork, and production design that pushes Anderson’s trademark style to the nth degree, I think all signs point to “Yes.” As with most Anderson movies, there’s a bit more going on beneath the surface; for starters, Asteroid City tries to raise questions about the extent to which fictional narratives can capture the elusive nature of truth. But it does so in such a stilted and affected manner that I question its efficacy. That said, I love the film’s production design and cinematography, which makes you feel like you’ve been dropped down inside a sun-bleached vintage postcard from the 1950s. And I’d probably watch an entire film about Montana and his cowboy band.
Given that Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat is one of my wife’s favorite books, it was inevitable that we’d see the movie adaptation in theaters. Directed by George Clooney, it’s a handsome and serviceable sports movie that hits many of the requisite tropes with its story about a team of underdogs who must rise above their differences and win the big championship — in this case, the 1936 Summer Olympics — for the sake of their country… and themselves. And insofar as that goes, The Boys in the Boat is decent enough. But it’s a surprisingly thin film, character-wise. A good sports movie gives all of the teammates moments to shine. The Boys in the Boat, however, focuses on just one of the titular boys (Joe Rantz, played by Callum Turner) to his teammates’ detriment. We learn little-to-nothing about any of them nor do we get any deep sense of their camaraderie, so there’s really no emotional investment in their struggles — or payoff for their triumphs.
Elf is one of those movies that feels impossible to review because of its position in our shared cultural consciousness concerning the Christmas season. We all know the story of Buddy the Elf, and his epic journey through the candy cane forest, the sea of swirly twirly gum drops, and the Lincoln Tunnel. Few actors have ever been so perfectly cast as Will Ferrell, though some of his antics are a bit less endearing now, twenty(!) years after the fact. But the movie’s true star is the North Pole’s immaculate production design, which perfectly captures the look and feel of those classic Rankin/Bass specials of my childhood. Here’s a fun bit of trivia: Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World) was originally offered the directing gig, but opted for Bad Santa instead. One can only imagine the alternate reality of a Zwigoff-directed Elf.
I remember the kerfuffle that surrounded Fight Club when it was released back in 1999, with detractors calling it perverse and fascist. It was a box office powder keg, with many criticizing its darkness even as they missed the point of the darkness. An obvious issue with watching a film that was so controversial so long ago is the extent to which the ensuing years have dulled its edges or weakened its bite. Given that it’s almost 25 years old, some aspects of Fight Club do feel dated, like its MTV-esque flashiness. But its critiques of consumerism, capitalism, and advertising are perhaps even more relevant in today’s FOMO-driven and influencer-saturated world. The same could also be said concerning its depiction of Tyler Durden’s philosophy, which starts off with some valid points about modern masculinity but inevitably descends into dehumanization and nihilism. (Indeed, the film almost feels nigh-prophetic in light of the recent rise of incel culture and hucksters and cult leaders like Andrew Tate who can often seem very Tyler Durden-esque, albeit with none of Brad Pitt’s charisma or humor.) There’s the unavoidable irony of a big-budget Hollywood movie with major stars critiquing consumerism, but Fight Club has plenty on its mind that’s still worth considering, even now in 2023.
I must’ve seen Batman Begins at least three times when it was in the theater. As a comic book nerd, I was so thrilled to see a comic book movie that took Batman seriously, especially after the Joel Schumacher trainwrecks in the late ’90s. Drawing inspiration from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, Batman Begins chronicles Bruce Wayne’s initial efforts as the Caped Crusader after traveling the world to understand the criminal mind; as such, it’s suitably dark and stylish. Watching it now, nearly twenty years after its release, some parts definitely hold up better than others, though. Not surprisingly, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman are excellent in their roles, and I loved the believable manner in which Bruce acquires his fantastical Batgear. Unfortunately, Nolan edits the life out of his action scenes and at times, the film’s darker tone takes on a self-important air. Also, for all of the film’s realistic approaches to Batman’s skills, training, equipment, etc., we never do see how Bruce and Alfred deal with the massive amounts of toxic guano that would certainly fill the Batcave.
Here’s the best way I can describe Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, the 37th installation in the long-running movie monster franchise: it takes almost everything that’s beloved and celebrated about the Big G’s various incarnations, distills them down to their purest essence, and delivers a movie that’s filled with as much heart and conviction as it is kaijū spectacle. There’s none of the campiness that’s often associated with Godzilla movies, nor is there any cynicism or satire like 2016’s Shin Godzilla. Instead, it’s a deeply human and heartfelt story about guilt, sacrifice, and redemption that just so happens to also feature a giant lizard with atomic breath rampaging through post-WW2 Tokyo. Almost 70 years have passed since Godzilla roared onto the silver screen, and Godzilla Minus One is proof that he’s lost none of his potency as a cultural icon.
I often round up a half-star rating if for no other reason than I respect the fact that an artist put something out into the world for us to enjoy. Not so this time, because I’m annoyed that Gareth Edwards’ The Creator isn’t a better film. Much of the film’s hype centered on its visuals, and yes, The Creator contains some truly stunning visuals that evoke Blade Runner, were it set in Southeast Asia rather than dystopic Los Angeles. Impressively, Edwards shot his film for a “mere” $80 million, which just goes to show what’s achievable with a clear concept, good production design, and an expert approach to visual effects. Unfortunately, none of that translates to the storytelling, which is both heavy-handed and lazy, particularly when it comes to the burgeoning relationship between the two protagonists (a disillusioned American soldier and the robotic child super-weapon he’s supposed to kill), a relationship that Edwards really wants you to find moving and affecting. (And don’t get me started on the ham-fisted critique of American imperialism.) There are occasional flashes of brilliance — someone please make a movie that explores the theological ramifications of AI monks — but too much of The Creator feels like a string of gorgeous VFX shots in search of a good story, and ultimately left wanting.