Action

dir: Christian Zübert

2025

So now there’s another Die Hard variant, only this time it’s “German Die Hard but in the American Consulate so they speak German and English half the time, and WITH A WOMAN!”, plus she doesn’t really need to be in the building the whole time, but she chooses to, because they’ve kidnapped HER SON!

As Die Hard variants, this is ok. I don’t know why it’s made with an English-speaking (only) audience in mind, with people never speaking too much Deutsche before reverting to English at any given time, even if they’re not people known for their crisp pronunciation of the great Germanic language. I mean, Dougray Scott pretending to be an American who’s fluent in German?

His nationality is in his name, somewhat. Now, he’s playing mid-level bureaucrat middle aged villains with bad moustaches. It’s not Movember, Dougray, no excuses for that monstrosity.

The star of the show is a German actor I’m not going to pretend I’ve seen in anything else, being Jeanne Goursaud, playing Sara Wulf, an ex-special forces type person who is our main character.

Unlike a lot of films lately starring bald ex-wrestlers or bald Stathams, Sara can fuck people up royally with some okay choreography, but she often loses fights too, which is somewhat more realistic. I mean, special forces is special forces, but they’re more likely to kill a whole village through poisoning their water supply or torture civilians just for practice rather than actually have to dominate a consulate full of Marines.

dir: David Ayer

2025

Whoa whoa whoa whoa he’s A Working (Class) Man.

I’m the first to admit that when you buy a ticket to a Jason Statham movie, to act surprised that it’s like every other Jason Statham movie is a bit disingenuous, a bit deliberately naïve.

“Sure, the other twenty Statham movies I’ve seen him in have him playing an isolated stoic loner with super killing skills who comes out of retirement / obscurity to save / protect / kidnap a girl / get revenge, but then I watched the latest one and it was exactly the same as all the others!”

It’d be like watching any American movie and being amazed when guns appear.

Guns? I didn’t sign up for this!

Instead of saying this is like every other Jason Statham movie ever made, I’m just going to say it is almost indistinguishable from his last film, being The Beekeeper, except there are no bee puns at all. At All. And no Jeremy Ironses doing appalling American accents.

Speaking of which, Statham thankfully also doesn’t do an American accent, preferring to play a character that is a Brit and who served loyally for 20 years as a Royal Marines commando, killing the empire’s enemies around the globe with style, grace and presumably crumpets and cucumber sandwiches on tap.

Through this heroic work, as the gobsmackingly awful opening credit animations inform us, he bonded with his American military equivalents, a bond that has not faded yet though his service has ended, and he carries that work ethic through to his current type of employment, being hard labour.

Now, he is the working man of the title, in that he works in construction, which is fine.

I mean, if you’re a weirdo like me you could spend a whole chunk of time wondering why they went with this angle, and what it “means” to posit that a character working nobly with his hands (he’s a site manager / foreman, he doesn’t need to actually use his hands in theory). That kind of sociological pondering would amuse me perhaps the more I indulged in it, but it wouldn’t really give much of an indication as to whether this flick warrants a viewing, or whether it is terrible trash with no redeeming qualities. To point out that someone involved in this is fetishising the idea of a working class man without having any desire to depict a working class man in any way means “working man” is a costume, like “fireman”, “sexy nurse” or “stripper cop”, with no further depth to it.

dir: Martin Campbell

2025

Like I said, I sometimes like watching trash…

I have seen the same movie two nights in a row! Not literally the same movie, but literally the same genre, being Die Hard but with some permutation. Yesterday it was Die Hard but with an African-American woman as President saving the day. Today it was Die Hard but it’s the window cleaner who saves the day.

And what a day to save… Eco terrorists take over the building where an energy company, long known to be amongst the nicest and most ecologically sympathetic of companies, is lauding itself as a beacon of profitability and sustainability.

The company has been, you know, polluting the earth, murdering activists, convincing the British government to pass legislation that outlaws peaceful protest, but it’s the terrorists who are the bad guys? What’s happened to our collective moral compass?

Of course I am joking. When their leader takes off his mask, I gasped, because Clive Owen was playing the leader of the environmental activists. I gasped because I was surprised to see him. All those years ago he played a similar role (ish, in that he was the leader of a group of bank robbers in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, who was ethical and sensitive and all that crap), and it felt like something of an in joke.

His plan, and that of most of the people with him, seems to be to record the high ups at the company confessing to their many and varied crimes on camera, and then publish it on the internet, as if that would make a lick of fucking difference or even impact on their share prices at all.

At All. If anything it would make their stocks skyrocket. “CEO admits they kill activists and whistleblowers”. Things being as they currently are in the States they’d probably make him the head of the Treasury, as long as he promises to bludgeon people to death with tariffs.

(誤判)

dir: Donnie Yen

2025

Two of my favourite tv shows from the 1990s were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The West Wing. The longstanding joke viewers of both shows used to bandy about was “one of these shows is a fantasy about a group of competent, funny people who fight evil on a regular basis and win, and the other show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

No one really thought The West Wing was an actually accurate representation of life in the Oval Office, especially now that the current occupant is a feces-flinging orangutan, and we finally realise that if the worst people in the world get together, with the worst of intentions, the worst people will vote for them, with hilarity ensuing for the rest of the world, democracy be damned.

But at least it adhered to some real world aesthetics and physics. This here film The Prosecutor is possibly one of the least believable legal dramas I’ve ever seen in my life, and I say that as someone who knows nothing about the law in Hong Kong and how it is practiced.

The funniest, absolute funniest part is that this is allegedly based on a true story.

Ponder if you will this set up. There is a policeman called Fok (Donnie Yen), and he and his fellow cops take down an entire gang in an abandoned, I dunno, factory or something. They take them all the way down, as in, the opening gun battle is spectacular and vicious, even resorting to first person perspective like it’s a shooter. However, even though the boss of the gang is arrested at the scene, and nearly killed a cop (who Fok saved at the last minute, resulting in him being in traction), he gets off because of top notch lawyering.

Fok becomes so despondent at this result that he quits the Hong Kong police force, goes to uni to study law, and then 8 years later becomes a junior prosecutor, because he’s certain he could do better.