Action

The Fall Guy

Fall guy fall down, go boom

dir: David Leitch

2024

If you’ve ever read any of my reviews, you would occasionally see me ask the question “who is this for” or “what is the intended audience for this flick?” Sometimes it’s rhetorical, because I can’t figure it out. Other times I’m making the statement to shame the filmmakers for pandering to a particular imagined section of society.

And if you haven’t read any of my reviews, you wouldn’t have noticed that, and you’re not reading this now, or ever, so, yes, I am talking to myself again.

Other times I ask myself the question while watching a film, and then I figure it out as a painful realisation dawns upon me.

Why you would be using fifty year old KISS songs on a soundtrack, why you would have multiple references to the Miami Vice tv show, why you would even resurrect a tv show from the 80s that this arises from, that starred Lee Majors, why you would then have visual and auditory call backs to The Six Million Dollar Man, which also starred Majors, why you would even be talking about the mechanics of filmmaking and the logistics of stuntwork, and then have an abundance of other references to the ancient times of yore?

And then it hit me, and I felt a deep, deep shame. The audience, imagined or otherwise, was me, specifically me, and other fat movie nerds of my exact vintage.

Much younger people than I, like, my kid’s age, don’t care about movies and don’t know, or get, any references earlier than the late 2000s. People older than me routinely yell “EH?” and cup their hand over one of their ears because they didn’t quite hear what you just said, or they didn’t understand most of the words you used in a sentence. You would say “it was a tv show in the 80s with Lee Majors”, and then they’d think you were talking about Lee Marvin, and start talking about how great he was in Cat Ballou and what a lovely singing voice he had in Paint Your Wagon.

Rating:

6 stars

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Argylle

What a stupid concept

dir: Matthew Vaughn

2024

Who is this movie for?

Sometimes the (imagined) answer can be illuminating, if you can get close to the movie production’s thinking. Mostly, it’s an excuse for baseless speculation and mean-spirited conjecture on the part of jerks just like me.

If I was to be cynical, and cavalier, which is not a state that comes naturally to me, I would guess that this was kinda sorta aimed at a middle-aged, middle-class ‘white’ female audience. The kind “they” imagine reads trashy thriller / romance novels in a bubble bath while drinking large glasses of wine. There might be the glow of candles present as well.

What I’m getting at is that this is an imagined category, not necessarily by creative people, but by the types of people who work in marketing. They imagine that there’s a market of abundant gin-soaked ladies who would want to burst into a cinema after a boozy afternoon in order to watch the same kind of wish-fulfilment action flicks that usually cater to men who watch in between picking up the remnants of chips or twisties that have fallen onto their chests. Maybe the crumbs fell inside their t-shirts even, which makes them even harder to get at.

Life is a struggle. But the imagined middle-aged woman, who, for some reason still really likes Barry White and all disco music in general, doesn’t like violent action flicks where people get shot in the head or have their limbs sliced off – they want the same kind of action (apparently), just without any blood and with lots and lots of colour.

Rating:

4 stars

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1166 reads

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

You look at something like this and ask yourself:
"Is everything getting dumber?" and the answer is
always "Yes, and then some."

dir: Adam Wingard

2024

I thought it would be “funny” to review Godzilla Minus One, a ‘serious’ throwback take on the genre that reviewers treated like it was Important and Meaningful, and then Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which no-one thought was important and meaningful, but does have no Japanese people in it and giant creatures fighting each other which totally don’t exist as a metaphor about scientific hubris or humanity’s place in the universe or anything, for that matter

I set myself these pointless little tasks because it amuses me, and it just makes my life harder for no good reason, but I stick to my pointless and arbitrary tasks, because someone has to…

So having watched the Toho - Japanese retro version, I am now set to review the ‘American’ version, which is from the Chinese film production company Legendary Films.

They could not be more different. I am sure such statements shock and confound the reader. This has far more scenes of giant creatures trashing and thrashing each other, killing probably hundreds of thousands of people, but that’s not a big deal anymore? In this world that they’ve put together, which initially mimicked the progression of the Japanese monster flicks by having Godzilla fight more and more monsters, instead has conjured a world where, yes, many of these so called Titans exist, but there’s also this supra-government entity called Monarch that tries to control or nudge the Titans depending on what they’re doing.

You might think their main task would be saving people’s lives but that wouldn’t look as interesting on the big screen, I guess.

And I didn’t really mind, to be honest. These Godzilla versus or Kong times etc flicks have zero regard for human life except for whoever the filmmakers put forward as the representatives of humanity, because tonnes of faceless people die, since the major punch ups always happen in populated areas, but it’s accepted as like the cost of doing business.

If all you want is to watch CGI Godzilla fight CGI King Kong, and then CGI other giant creatures, why would you care about the humans at all? Humans are like puny ants at the feet of these gods.

Rating:

6 stars

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Monkey Man

Monkey See, Monkey Punch the shit out of bad people

dir: Dev Patel

2024

I dunno – I think the argument about who should be the next James Bond’s just been settled.

Not only should Dev Patel play Bond next, he makes a strong case for directing the next Bond film as well.

That’s not meant as any disrespect to the other (pseudo) fan frontrunner, which is what certain chumps have been saying about Idris Elba for the last twenty years. The absolute truth is there is no way Barbara Broccoli would agree to either of them playing the role, lest she be hung at the Tower of London by a lynch mob made up of the last gasps of British colonialism made up of Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the ghost of Prince Phillip and Rishi Sunak, ironically enough.

Nah, if anything he’s now overqualified.

He made this flick for $10mill, which is practically unheard of. And to the dinguses that will accuse him of ripping off the John Wick franchise, I tell you not only do they have their math wrong, they have zero knowledge of action movie history if they think the genre started and ended with Keanu fucking Reeves.

Rating:

8 stars

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Madame Web

I'm sure her career will be okay, but yeesh

dir: S.J. Clarkson

2024

This is very bad, but, even worse, it’s very pointless.

So bad. How did they trick people into being in this? Did anyone think this was going to be a ticket to stardom and big cash payouts? Well, I’m sure they all got paid very well, but, yeesh, this is woeful.

Madame Web exists in this strange alternate Spider-Man world that doesn’t have Spider-Man in it. There are four movies now in this alternate setting, I think? All four are pretty shitty. Moebius I think exists, if I didn’t hallucinate it, as a very stupid movie, as do two Venom movies, which are also stupid and painful.

And now this. This is an origin story for some hero, I think, who’s blind and in a wheelchair. But before that ‘hilarious’ ending, it’s about characters whose names I’m not even going to use, because it’s too fucking stupid.

So I will refer at least to the actors in this. Dakota Johnson gets a lot of flack for not being much of an actor, or for being a nepo baby (a foot in the door and so much more), but I think that’s really unfair. I’ve never seen nor will I ever see those movies based on the 50 Shades of Grey books, because life is way too short, but I have seen her in a few films where she’s been great. She was great in The High Note, in Cha Cha Real Smooth, and in The Lost Daughter a couple of years ago, so that’s at least three solid performances I can point to.

I can’t blame her for the indifferent work she puts in here, but it really feels like she has no idea why she’s here, and can’t wait to get off set. And this script, ye gods, how fucking pointless.

Rating:

2 stars

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The Beekeeper

He's made of bees, maybe they keep him instead?

dir: David Ayer

2024

O Lordy, lordy. Spare me from such terrible times.

This fucking flick – it’s pretty fucking stupid. I guess that’s okay, but it’s almost comically, aggressively average, and grimly humorless to boot.

Jason Statham, once again, plays a guy with all the killing skills, who was content living a quiet life tending to bees, but then something happened and he had to kill about a thousand people in order to get revenge, sorry, I meant to say ‘justice’.

This is not Jason Statham’s first rodeo. He has literally played this role dozens of times already. And he’ll probably play it again for another 10 years before he gets tired of it. Although, honestly, he’s in his mid-fifties already, maybe do something different for a while? Might I suggest beekeeping?

There is something uniquely boring about the way the action is done in this flick. Most of the flick is Statham killing or punching or punch killing people who might as well have been mannequins in a mannequin warehouse. The people behind this flick think they’ve learned new lessons from the John Wick flicks in that they want to see someone besting hundreds of foes over the course of a bloated running time, but this flick has none of the flair or the inventiveness that goes into a lot of that stunt work and fight choreography. They felt they should skip that and just have Staham killing countless faceless minions in dull and grim ways. There is one decent knock-down-drag-out towards the end of the flick between Statham and some one-legged Afrikaner goon, but that’s it.

That’s a few competent minutes out of about a hundred minute movie.

Rating:

5 stars

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1487 reads

The Marvels

The holy trinity, a triangle of feminine energy, and some one-eyed dork

dir: Nia DaCosta

2023

Maybe this flick doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then none of them really do.

I can’t imagine that there were millions of people clamouring for this. Just a small subset (fans of Captain Marvel and Ms Marvel in comic book form, or the first Captain Marvel movie) of a subset (Marvel comic book fans), and those who enjoyed the mostly excellent Ms Marvel Disney+ series.

But they did it, and so we’re here. For whatever reasons (I don’t remember why, and I only watched the flick yesterday), at the end of the last episode of Ms Marvel, I think Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) sneezes or something, and Captain Marvel / Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) appears in her place, in her bedroom in New Jersey. How perplexing!

This flick extends on from that, with Kamala, Danvers and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who knew Danvers when she was a child, swapping places whenever they use their magical powers.

I don’t know if it’s a great hook or not, in fact, one could argue that it’s a terrible hook, but I guess it’s necessary in order to force the team up they require, which is the three of them working together to save... various worlds including Earth.

The various worlds… there are two other planets that pretty much get destroyed. I don’t even think that constitutes a spoiler, because the movie doesn’t seem to worry about it afterwards either.

Rating:

6 stars

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Badland Hunters

If it moves, shoot it; if it stops moving, punch it

황야
Hwang-ya

dir: Heo Myung-haeng

2024

The title of Badland Hunters is so generic, so unmemorable, that I hoped the actual literal translation of the Korean title was going to be something like “Big Guy punches the Apocalypse”, but it didn’t pan out that way. The literal translation is something like “Wilderness”, which is equally unmemorable.

You can’t always get what you want. But beyond a meaningful title, I didn’t want much. About the most I expected was that South Korean action star Ma Dong-seok would punch some people really hard.

I need not have worried. Even though the action sometimes relies on Nam-san (Ma Dong-seok) chopping some creatures or bad guys up with a scary looking machete, or shooting people with a shotgun (the promo poster for the movie has him aiming a shotgun at the audience, which gave me some pause), but rest assured the filmmakers knew exactly why the audience has come along to this flick: to watch him punch people really, really hard.

I also thought that a post-apocalyptic scenario wouldn’t lend itself immediately to punchy-punchy action. It’s usually supercharged V8 Interceptors and guys with guitars that double as flamethrowers. And, yes, most of Nam-san’s opponents are soldiers with rifles and lots of other guns, which is somewhat unusual, in my limited experience of South Korean flicks. But whenever there’s been too much gunplay, Nam-san’s opponents just seem to forget they have guns, and also politely array themselves so that Nam-san can kill them or knock them out one by one.

Very considerate of them. This flick is kind of insane, but it’s an almost reasonable level of insanity.

Three years in the past, there was a massive earthquake. Like, really bad earthquake in Seoul. It destroyed almost every building except one, which is called The Apartment. I had hoped it was a reference to the Billy Wilder classic The Apartment, which starred Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon, but I was just setting myself up for disappointment yet again.

I fully acknowledge that earthquakes can be terrible. They can kill thousands of people. At no stage is there an explanation as to why a bad earthquake ends civilisation in all of South Korea, or the rest of the world such that no-one comes to help during that entire time.

And there really should have been a reference to a catastrophic earthquake devastating North Korea and somehow also improving their quality of life in comparison to what they had before.

Rating:

7 stars

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Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning

There's no way you're going to get your deposit back for
that bike, no way

dir: Christopher McQuarrie

2023

The only thing that could make this cumbersome title more cumbersome would be adding “Part 1” to it, which they did, but they’ve since decided to not call whatever comes next “Part 2”, so what even was the point?

It’s common parlance or criticism to rag on the Fast & Furious flicks as being silly, stupid, physics-insulting etc, and they truly are dumb flicks, don’t get me wrong. But the thing is, wow, in long stretches of this flick I was sure I was watching Fast X. They’re practically the same flick and they also end, after 1300 hours, on a cliffhanger. Which is pretty unsatisfying.

At least this one does not have whatever the fuck it is that Jason Momoa was doing in that other flick.

Instead of Momoa, we have Esai Morales playing an antagonist who is always several steps ahead of the heroes, and presumably won’t make a mistake until the final moments of the next film.

As these films get longer and more complicated, it’s important to remember that none of it really matters, and that Tom Cruise playing these characters in his 60s is becoming increasingly less believable. The older he gets, the more he insists on having long scenes of him running, just to let us know he can still run fast.

We get it, Peter Pan, you can run fast.

The ultimate antagonist in this flick, you’re never going to believe it, it’s an Artificial Intelligence that they call The Entity. The Entity knows all and sees all. Anywhere there’s internet, the Entity is there. It knows everything about our hero Ethan Hunt and his band of merry pranksters, and can easily predict their actions and manipulate them weeks in advance.

It’s just so fucking smart.

Rating:

7 stars

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Ballerina

You had one job, apparently

발레리나

dir: Lee Chung-hyun

2023

Ballerina is a South Korean actioner where a depressed looking woman kills a bunch of men for the purposes of revenge, and also because they’re a pile of criminal misogynist arseholes.

This is not unlike many of the South Korean action films I’ve seen over the last few years. In fact, now that I think of it, even when the lead character wasn’t a woman, in at least 3 films I can think of, there was a depressed female co-star who for whatever backstory reasons had access to weapons and skills in order to punish a bunch of criminals.

It seems to be a common trope, but I guess I don’t watch enough South Korean movies to know how pervasive it is. Could just be a coincidence. Could just be that the times where I’m intrigued enough to start watching a South Korean violence action flick, it just so happens to have a depressed young woman wanting to get revenge on a bunch of loathsome criminals.

Maybe it says more about me than it does about South Korean cinema.

The film opens with a scene at a convenience store where a bunch of crims assault and try to rob the attendant. A young woman in a hoodie just wants to buy her can of soup or bag of crisps or whatever, and doesn’t even seem to really acknowledge that anything is going on. Once the shitheads start actively attacking her, she goes into full-blown Wolverine mode and starts tearing them apart with whatever is to hand, despite the fact that they have knives and use a lot of harsh language.

Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo) is some kind of former…I’m not entirely sure what. Bodyguard for hire? Security contractor? Often in these kinds of films the person is an ex or current National Intelligence Service agent, someone with serious skills and a sociopathic ability to apply them to…other sociopaths.

Rating:

7 stars

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2870 reads

Action

The Fall Guy

Argylle

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Monkey Man

Madame Web

The Beekeeper

The Marvels

Badland Hunters

Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning

Ballerina

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