Action

dir: Antoine Fuqua

2023

I am forced, against my will, to use the American spelling of this movie, though it goes against every fibre of my being.

I also applaud the makers for not going with “Equaliz3r” or “3quilzer” or even “Threequelizer” with some random 3s thrown in.

This is an enjoyable film if, like me, you could watch Denzel Washington pretty much do anything, sit at a table at a café, rearrange the napkins endlessly, drink tea, or watch him huffing and puffing up some steps. That’s the film, for me, watching a man approaching 70 climbing steep steps, and order tea. I don’t really need the other stuff so much.

Of course, that covers maybe 80 per cent of the film: Denzel just doing stuff, and coming to terms with his own mortality.

10 per cent is lectures on the physiology of hummingbirds. Fascinating stuff.

The other 10 per cent is watching Denzel brutally murder people with anything that comes to hand. There are killings so brutal in this that I hope I don’t have nightmares about it.

How do we reconcile these disparate energies within the one character, this strange monk-like man, so peaceful, so deadly? Well, does it really matter anyway?

dir: Andy Muschietti

2023

On the long list of things that exist that perhaps shouldn’t, maybe we’re safe to add this flick without delay. I mean, I could definitely be wrong. In the fullness of time, its worth might spontaneously appear out of nowhere, perhaps creating a context and appeal where currently those things are so profoundly absent.

I am not a betting man, being a shameless addict of many inclinations and permutations, but all the same I would not bet on it.

The sheer, staggering pointlessness of it all…

I watched it asking myself aloud “who the fuck is this for?” at several junctures.

People trained like performing seals by the Marvel Industrial Complex aren’t going to be interested in it, as it lacks colour, decent action set pieces, competent CGI, but in truth many of the most recent Marvel flicks lack that also, especially the ones tackling multiverses or quantum realms and such. Fans of the comic or the TV show with Grant Gustin as Barry aren’t going to like it, because this is a terrible approximation of the character in comparison. I can’t imagine, if there are Snyder-Bros so adamant that Batman V Superman or Justice League were great, ackshually, that they’d be willing or able to defend this, since Snyder didn’t direct it.

Ezra Miller fans? Do they have fans anymore? If people liked them previously for their cinematic performances in such flicks as We Need to Talk About Kevin, or the Fantastic Beasts movies, they may have second thoughts now considering Miller’s extensive legal troubles.

If you’re wondering why I’m playing the pronoun game, well, Miller identifies as non-binary, and as such I am using the plural pronouns not with respect for Miller, but more so for the non-binary community. Call people what they ask. It’s common courtesy, even if they’re crims, and it costs nothing.

The Flash didn’t have to be terrible. I have to imagine a reality where it isn’t a terrible and pointless flick. Somewhere in the multiverse there is a good version of this flick.

Sadly, we don’t have access to that one – we’re stuck with this one.

dir: Sam Hargrave

2023

Instead of doing something, I dunno, meaningful, like acknowledging the traditional owners of the land upon which I pontificate (sovereignty never having been ceded), instead I’d rather bring us together and acknowledge that Extraction is a terrible name for a movie and even worse for some kind of proposed franchise. The Extraction franchise? Ew. Nine out of ten dentists agree that “extractions” are procedures that even they don’t like performing, but they’re happy to accept the money for them anyway.

How do I know it’s a franchise? Because against all logic or expectations, by the end of the flick they clearly imply there’s going to be more of these, and they brought in Idris Elba in a small and strange cameo role as some mysterious rep of some agency or group that needs lead hero Tyler Rake’s extraction skills to extract people from various difficult places like the infected teeth that they are.

Tyler Rake is a hell of a name for an extractor. Thankfully he’s played by Australia’s Own Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth is the Mid Chris. Chris Pine is currently the Good Chris. Chris Pratt is the Bad Chris and Hemsworth is the medium one. I don’t make the rules, I just read a lot of trash mags in doctor’s waiting rooms.

Always waiting. Hemsworth can be charming or funny in other roles. He very much isn’t here. Here he just has to kill all the people that are attacking him, for two hours, and to feel bad about his son dying of cancer.

You might think “but wasn’t that the plot of the first Extraction? Yes, but this time he’s not killing all of Bangladesh to save a drug dealer’s son; he’s killing half of Georgia and then Austria, to save some other criminal’s family (from the criminal’s crime family).

You also may be thinking “um, didn’t the main character get killed at the end of Extraction?” Someone clearly didn’t sit through the credits.

Who would dare leave franchise opportunities on the table by allowing such a charmless character to die?

Look, the Australian SAS need all the positive press they can get at the moment. Just recently their poster boy for courageous bravery was revealed to be a psychopathic liar, bully and murderer. So they need a positive example for recruitment purposes.

Tyler Rake is the embodiment of a highly trained, highly skilled guy who can kill a thousand people, get stabbed, shot and run over a dozen times and still keep ticking along. He’s less an advertisement for the efficacy of the SAS’s training regime, and more just an Australian John Wick killing everyone who comes after him.

dir: Chad Stahelski

2023

Please, no more. That’s enough, thanks.

I have had ample sufficiency. John Wick has, by now - by film’s end - killed everyone that can be killed. There’s no one left. Each film has had an exponential increase in the amount of people he has to kill, and now, well, he’s done. We’re done.

I watched more people die in this flick than died in the entirety of Saving Private Ryan, and that was a WWII movie, in case you forgot, that starts with the invasion by the allied forces of the beaches of Normandy.

But there are deaths, and then there are deaths. Very few of the deaths in this flick matter, except when it’s characters you know or actors you recognise, and you forget them seconds after they happen, because they’re only happening to literally faceless goons.

And yet the mountains of corpses left in his wake…

So if we care at all, we care that the man of the title gets to have his way. He never sought all these people out – they come after him, and he has to defend himself. He only kills those trying to kill him. It’s just that everyone wants to kill him, mostly due to the bounty on his head of several million.

What is money, anyway? It has a siren call that none of these faceless goons can resist, even if Wick’s unkillability is well known. Presumably the assassin characters in this flick that are part of this strange world know that literally thousands of people have tried to kill Wick in the last 3 movies and failed, all mostly having been shot in the face or head, and yet they still keep dreaming the impossible dream and thinking “maybe I’ll be the one to defy fate and the gods”.

And the bounty keeps going up and up. It’s really beyond absurd. “I wasn’t prepared to go after the unkillable super assassin for only $10mill, but I’ll sure as heck give it a go for $15mill!”