John Woo – VERN'S REVIEWS on the FILMS of CINEMA

WARNING: This unfinished review here was written in the year 2000 when I was young and stupid. I’m leaving it here for the comments, for historical purposes and for my own accountability, but please if you’re just looking for a review of HARD TARGET read the one I wrote 16 years of wisdom later.

Well as you can see above, I reviewed John Woo’s HARD BOILED long ago. In that review I was obviously right about a bunch of crap that I said. For example, HARD BOILED is still a masterpiece. And as I predicted, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON was a masterpiece that blew away the combined artistic merit of every American Chow Yun Fat movie times ten. But I was wrong that after the success of CROUCHING TIGER my man Fat would never do an american movie again. Back then I would’ve been happy to hear that but that’s because I never saw fucking BULLETPROOF MONK. Oh for crying out loud, what is the man doing?

Anyway, hindsight is 50/50 or whatever but looking back I think I should’ve focused my review more on John Woo. That’s the real tragedy is what happened to John Woo after we abducted him to American shores. The very next movie he did was this one, HARD TARGET. And man, this is not even a huge step down. It’s like, he just falls all the way down the stairs. I mean you can see similarities in the use of slow motion and everything but everything substantial about John Woo and his style is not here. And these days the slo-mo could be considered a bad thing now that we’ve seen it imitated for more than a decade. Anyway, this is a historic movie because it signalled the beginning of the importation of Hong Kong directors and the first known case of the legendary Curse of Van Damme, which would later strike Tsui Hark (2 times), Ring Lam (3 times) and Ching Tsu-Tung (the rare Steven Seagal variation of the curse).

A few movies later Woo recovered his footing with FACE/OFF but that was it man. The best we can expect from him now is a dumb action movie that is entertaining in it sheer stupidity and surprises you with the occasional light touch of John Woo sentimentality. Think MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: 2.

Now that we know there’s no hope for a return to the real John Woo, it is easier to enjoy this moronic piece of shit. The story is a variation on the Most Dangerous Game story of humans hunting humans. Lance Henriksen, one of our greatest actors in our worst movies, leads a group of scumbags running a service for decadent millionaires who want to hunt homeless veterans (“volunteers,” they call them).

[why didn’t I finish this review?]

VERN

VERN has been reviewing movies since 1999 and is the author of the books SEAGALOGY: A STUDY OF THE ASS-KICKING FILMS OF STEVEN SEAGAL, YIPPEE KI-YAY MOVIEGOER!: WRITINGS ON BRUCE WILLIS, BADASS CINEMA AND OTHER IMPORTANT TOPICS and NIKETOWN: A NOVEL. His horror-action novel WORM ON A HOOK will arrive later this year.

http://outlawvern.com

The post Hard Target appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

Last week in my pornographical critiquery of the works of Radley Metzger, I offered the theory that all america needs is alittle bit of god damned ELBOW GREASE for crying out loud.

But you know what, in the week that has past since I wrote those words, I feel that I have really grown up alot, due to some experiences I had in a movie theater watching Shanghai Noon and the Mission Impossible Part 2. And that is why I now believe that last week’s column was superficial and immature.

The truth is, everybody needs a little elbow grease but it goes deeper than that. If you want to use elbow grease you first have to have two things. You have to be in it for two things. The two Ps. And I’m not talking about paper and pussy, sorry guys. I am talking about passion and perfectionism. Although pussy is also a worthwhile goal it should not be your number one priority in my opinion.

And I really do believe, at least this week, that that’s what it all boils down to, is the passion. There are alot of individuals that have ambition, or even talent, but they don’t have passion. And that is why their art works is lacking. I am talking about individuals like Michael Bay, etc. People who could hook up a digital editing contraption blindfolded on top of a tree in a windstorm but couldn’t shed a tear to save their lives.

You can have all the technique in the world, all the know how and make do. You can have the special effects, the big stars and the $300 million budget. But if you don’t have passion you have jack squat in my opinion. You don’t have a legitimate work of Cinema.

Then the second step is the perfectionism. This is what marks the true masters of the form. Yours truly, I am an individual with passion, but not perfectionism. For example, read my column, I am obviously not a perfectionist. 90% of my writings are garbage. I don’t have what it takes to be a master.

But when you get an individual with both of the Ps coming out the wazoo, that is when you have a true master. An individual like Jackie Chan and John Woo, the two Chinese gentlemen who created the two pictures I saw this week.

Now what we have on display here is what happens when you trap two true masters within the hollywood system. These are two poets of the physical Cinema who are putting their Passion and Perfectionism up against a system designed to squeeze every bit of life and creativity out of them. The system wants to show the poets who is boss.

SYSTEM: You can’t spend a week on this scene, motherfucker. We’re on a schedule here. We’re on a budget. We gotta deliver.

JOHN WOO: But sir, I know I ca–

SYSTEM: Shut up bitch! We got Memorial Day weekend!

JOHN WOO: Yes bu–

SYSTEM: Ha ha, don’t get so worked up. No one will notice. It’s only a movie. We’ll put in some music. It’ll be super!

JOHN WOO: Yeah but when I did Hard Boi–

SYSTEM: Action!

Now as true poets and masters, John and Jackie aren’t completely confined by the Hollywood cage. They are able to squirt a few drops of inspiration between the bars. In Shanghai Noon, Jackie does some funny shit. He fights some indians and what not. There is a white guy who is also cracking wise all the time. Not bad.

Same deal with Mission Impossible. The actor Tom Cruise is flipping all over the place. There is a flying motorcycle deal. The cars spin around and there is also a gun fight although not a good one in my opinion. There is a bird who is Tom Cruise’s friend, he is a young dove perhaps the same dove who starred in the other John Woo pictures. I think I heard somewhere he is John Woo’s pet dove. His name is Dovey.

So what I am saying is these are not bad pictures. But they are not the works of Passion and Perfectionism these individuals are capable of. Because in the US the two Ps are illegal.

Back in Hong Kong, these motherfuckers would’ve cut off their balls to make a better movie. I mean if they thought it would work – I’m not sure why that would make a better movie but it’s just one example. Anyway they would spend weeks or months to choreograph one shootout or karate scene. They knew these were the heart and soul of a John or Jackie picture, and they wanted to do them right. They wanted to challenge themselves and do something new and top anything that anyone else had ever done. They didn’t even think about delivering on schedule. In fact that would have been an insult to the art of Cinema to deliver it on schedule. They purposely didn’t deliver it on schedule. FUCK the schedule and FUCK YOU for even bringing it up. Asshole.

Not you, I’m talking to Hollywood.

In Hong Kong, Jackie and his buddies couldn’t afford air cushions, so they jumped off of buildings onto cardboard boxes and matresses. They couldn’t get insured, so they said “Fuck it.” (But in Chinese.) They ran over cars and jumped off of buildings and ran up walls and jumped motorcycles onto moving trains and jumped through windows and also kicked each other I suppose and although they must have thought a little bit about safety because they never died, that wasn’t the number one priority. They wanted to do the best stunts. There is the story about how Jackie jumped off a building and broke his back and as soon as he got healed, he went back and did the same stunt again and got it right.

You see, passion. That is something nobody in america would consider. No passion. We suck.

In John Woo’s classic film Hard Boiled, you got stunt men skidding around on motorcycles, rolling around on gurneys, shooting ten hundred thousand million bullets while holding a baby. All the important stuff you don’t ever see in american pictures because it’s not safe. These are stuntmen that do crazy shit, shit that nobody in their right mind would do, and no American union would allow. And you know why they do it?

The passion. The perfectionism.

And you know what else, Hard Boiled is about as violent as any movie could ever be and that is why it could not possibly be released with a rating in America, because its passion is too big for our rules.

So what I am saying to all you artists and stunt people out there, is let’s see some god damn passion for cryin out loud. Let’s forget about the rules, the schedules, and the systems. Let’s see some guys who are willing to die for the Cinema. I think it is appropriate that I am asking you this on Memorial Day, a day that honors the individuals who got shot or blown up for what they believed in.

Well you and I, we believe in something else, and that is Cinema. Let’s do it guys. God bless the Cinema. My home sweet home.

–Vern

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post the two Ps appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

Well god damn here’s an action picture like I’ve NEVER seen. This is a must see for ANY action fan and I am not fucking joking. I mean you don’t have to see Payback, you don’t have to see Die Hard with a Vengeance or any of these other movies I talk about but in god and mary’s sweet name of christ jesus, you OWE it to yourself and to the lord to see this chinese picture Hard Boiled.

I mean don’t get me wrong I like the van dammes and what not but this is on a whole other plane flying way up in the sky. It will forever change what you expect from an action picture in my opinion although I only saw it this afternoon so what the hell do I know. But it is to shootout movies what Godfather is to mob movies or Jaws is to shark movies. Don’t take this the wrong way but it is such a leap ahead it is like die hard times ten. It is WAY, and I mean WAY more violent than anything you will see in the US of A but at the same time the characters and story plot are far more developed.

Hard Boiled This has the most balls to the walls action scenes you’ve ever seen in your god damn life. Trust me, I know, even if the Die Hards are your idea of a great action movie your gonna shit yourself. (I mean I’m not saying I shitted myself I’m just saying, this one knocked me out you know, that’s all, it was impressive.)

I am talking about hundreds of gun shots, walls and windows splitting apart, people dying left and right, blood spraying on windows, things catching on fire, people rolling across rooms on gurneys blowing motherfuckers away. There is a shootout in a hospital that lasts more than 20 minutes and never gets dull. There is a scene where two arms dealer gangs have a huge battle in a warehouse, crashing cars and motorcycles into each other, firing uzis, throwing grenades. Only after the battle seems to be over does the hero, a cop named Tequila swing in on a rope and attempt to take on all of the survivors singlehandedly. And do a damn good job I might add.

This is one of many classic shootouts, and Tequila is the type of dude who gets knocked over onto a banister and decides to slide down it, firing all the way down.

But still, it’s the characters and the storyline that you really care about. This is partly cause the gang of filmatists behind this one led by director John Woo don’t look at this like your typical good vs. evil, cops and robbers type scenario. The gangs have a good side and the cops have a bad side. From the beginning Woo cuts between Tequila and a gang assassin Tony Leung walking in the same place and manner, drawing a parallel between these two. (The assassin turns out to be an undercover pig but he feels a family type bond with the gangs he pretends to be a part of.)

Leung’s first boss Mr. Hui is Hong Kong’s king of weapons smuggling, but he seems like your friendly grampa. And he never even shows a dark side, he lets Tony kill him when he betrays him. You gotta feel for this guy and for Leung having to kill him.

The gang boss Johnny has a one-eyed henchman named Mad Dog and this guy is a baaaaaaaaad motherfucker. He drives into the warehouse and crashes his motorcycle, sliding across the pavement and STILL SHOOTING. He spins away from the motorcycle and never loses his balance. Stays on his feet and doesn’t skip a beat before killing more motherfuckers.

I mean we see this guy shooting people, throwing a grenade into an office, slitting the throat of an invalid, leaning into a flaming car to light his smoke. And yet this is the guy who turns his gun on Johnny for killing patients in the hospital, says you have to draw the line somewhere. You see what I mean this is a big action movie but the characters aren’t all good or all bad, they are a little more complicated.

I mean the pigs aren’t exactly the pope either. if you pay attention in the opening teahouse shootout, the guy that turns out to be an undercover cop actually uses innocent bystanders as a human shield! WHich is how you can tell he’s a cop. Typical but you don’t usually see that in movies.

There is also a real freaky ass type of technique where when Tequila is in trouble he is able to go to the jazz bar and get advice from director John Woo himself. John just gives him some type of yoda advice and Tequila says “thanks Mr. Woo.” I guess it’s kind of like how Bugs Bunny can reach up and grab the animators paintbrush. I don’t know what all that’s about it kind of blows your mind but oh well man I like it.

Anyway Tequila is a classic Badass and illustrates an important point about Badass Cinema. And that is that juxtaposition is an important element of any Badass. Most of the best Badasses in Cinema have a cute hobby or a sensitive side which, through contrast, only serves to accentuitate the Badass qualities. For Tequila, it’s playing clarinet in a jazz club, because he always dreamed of being a musician. Clint Eastwood used the same shtick in In the Line of Fire although he chose piano. For Tony Leung, it’s origami – he makes a paper crane every time he kills a motherfucker. For me, it’s the Writing to document my journey.

The juxtaposition can be visual too though, like a 300 pound mexican with tattoos and scars, holding a balloon. That would be a good one. For Tequila, he runs through a hospital with a big gun in one hand and a baby in the other. He even sings to the little crumb crusher and wipes the blood off his face. There is a legitimate reason in the plot for why he’s carrying the baby but it’s still a cool thing to bring along during a bloodbath in my opinion.

Chow Yun Fat plays Tequila and he is an actor with 1) chops 2) charisma and 3) attitude. He can charm a gal with his smile or blow a mans head off it doesn’t matter. He is the chinese Bruce Campbell or Willis, a man whose talents are too big for this world.

Now I know what you expect me to say next. “Mark my words, this Chow Yun Fat is gonna be huge. The nerds on the internet will worship this dude like a god. We must bring him to our shores immediately for his first American pictures.” The type of shit I said when I thought I discovered Bruce Campbell. Well look pal I’m not a retard I did my research this time. Yun Fat has already done three movies in the American language thank you very much.

But let’s face it that’s not good enough. I don’t mean to get patriotic here because really I could give a rats ass about the red white and what not but jesus man, we can REALLY do better than this replacement killers bullshit as far as I’m concerned. Without Yun Fat that movie would be NOTHING. In Hard Boiled he is one of many top notch elements but in these American ones he’s Atlas holding the whole god damned movie on his shoulders. And I don’t even wanna TALK about this Anna and the King and I garbage, I haven’t seen it so I’m probaly totally wrong, but let’s get real here.

What is America’s #1 export? That’s right it’s movies. If we want to make the best movies in the world we should be on our knees BEGGING this man to make movies with us and if we can’t offer anything as good as the Hong Kong then Hong Kong has won him fair and square. And their gonna keep him. Right now he is doing a film in cantonese with Michelle Yo from the James Bonds. Not only that but it is a historical flying karate type picture from acclaimed director ang lee AND it has a great title, Hidden Dragon and Crouching Tiger or something along those lines. Do you know what that means? DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT FUCKING MEANS?

Don’t play dumb jackass you fucking KNOW Crouching Tiger Hiding Dragon is gonna be better than his american movies and we’re never gonna see the dude on our soil again. Great job hollywood way to go guys.

Anyway long story short Hard Boiled #1 action picture of the ’90s thanks

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Hard Boiled appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

Sometimes in a man’s life, he decides to move from Hong Kong to America, do a movie with Jean Claude Van Damme and then spend the rest of his life struggling to regain what he once had. Fighting to just be John Woo again. Hoping to recapture that innocent time when he was the guy who did THE KILLER and HARD BOILED and not the guy who wants to produce a computer animated movie about ninja turtles.

Maybe you read about all those teenage Iraqi christians who went on a long journey hidden between boxes in the back of a truck to escape persecution and find freedom in America, and Uncle Ashcroft thanked them by throwing them in prison on unspecified “immigration violations” with no charges or plans to ever release them. Well this isn’t as bad, but I think most americans are still pretty ashamed of how we rewarded all the Hong Kong directors seeking asylum in Hollywood with the Curse of Van Damme. Anyway, if anybody could’ve overcome it we all thought it would be John Woo.

Windtalkers And there are different schools of thought as to how much John Woo has Totally Lost It at this point. I think I stand in the majority in saying that FACE-OFF could proudly sit on a shelf not exactly alongside his Hong Kong work but, you know, not that far below it. Maybe across the room or something but still, within the same basic section of the house, in my opinion. It was a movie that brought american style action to ridiculous new levels, while backing it up with way more sincere emotion than most americans thought they wanted. And you also gotta admire some of the gutsy choices he made, like doing this ridiculous face switching concept in a not-futuristic setting, and casting Joan Allen in a role that any other director would’ve given to a young blonde model who wants to try acting. She even gets a buttshot with suggestive bass guitar. It was definitely a John Woo movie, but it also tried some new things he hadn’t done before, like sci-fi concepts and actors playing multiple roles. I think Nic Cage was more impressive here than in the one he won the oscar for, NIGHT OF THE DRUNK or whatever it was.

But then there was MISSION/IMPOSSIBLE. I am still amazed that one hollywood blockbuster series based on an old tv show could get Brian DePalma, John Woo and David Fincher all to do one. It shoulda been great, but Woo just didn’t work out. Maybe he didn’t know how to work with that kind of studio involvement. It’s a really dumb movie but at least he put some John Woo moments in there, like the car chase that was like a dance or the scene where the bad guy disguised as Tom Cruise takes his Tom Cruise face off and underneath he is crying because his lady friend betrayed him. I figured Woo missed on this one, but he still had it in him. I didn’t agree with the people who said he had finally lost his soul.

But WINDTALKERS doesn’t help my argument. This is his World War II drama, about one of those “little known chapter in american history” type deals. Turns out Navajos were used as “code talkers”, broadcasting american military orders in coded Navajo language so the Japanese couldn’t translate it. The premise is that Nic Cage is assigned to protect one of the codetalkers, or more specifically, protect the code. If the codetalker Ben is in danger of falling into enemy hands, Nic is supposed to kill him.

Now tell me that’s not a premise John Woo should be able to hit out of the park. You got the violence, you got the cultural sharing, you got the bonding, honor, betrayal – all that John Woo shit. Obviously Nic is gonna try not to get too close to Ben, then is gonna get too close, then is gonna get in the situation he was afraid of when he tried not to get too close in the first place. You kinda know what’s gonna happen, but you don’t REALLY know what’s gonna happen because who knows where John Woo is gonna take you? Well, that’s what I thought. But John takes that and instead of giving us a John Woo picture he gives us your every day mediocre american war picture.

The movie starts out with Nic’s bad war experience before he gets the codetalker assignment. He follows an order that he probaly shouldn’t have and it ends up getting all his buddies killed. So this sets up that he’s got something to prove and in the very next scene, they’re already zooming in on him and you hear all his buddies yelling in agony. Like we might’ve assumed he was thinking about something else as he sits in a wheelchair at the veteran’s hospital. Half an hour into the movie I think there were already 3 different types of flashbacks used.

Now let me say that although it was wasted, I appreciate that they even used this topic. A while back I was trying to explain to my correspondent Andrew from New Zealand that in american popular culture, native americans barely even exist in a contemporary type situation. With the exception of SMOKE SIGNALS and an occasional big guy in a prison movie, it’s like a meteor came down and killed all the natives when John Wayne started playing cops. In New Zealand it sounds like most people are aware of issues involving descendants of the natives vs. descendants of the settlers. And not just ’cause a Maori guy played Django Fett. But here white people seem to forget that natives even exist outside of casinos and firework stands. Here at least is a movie acknowledging the existence of natives in the 20th century, and they also show that a native can be raised catholic and believe in the US of A and all this business.

Unfortunately there is nothing in this movie that is a surprise, except the part where Christian Slater gets graphically decapitated. Not to give anything away. To illustrate this concept, let me give you a brief quiz.

1. There is a macho character who makes racist comments about “injuns” and picks a fight with Nic’s Navajo partner Ben.

TRUE OR FALSE: This character ends up being saved by one of the Navajo and immediately admits out loud that he was wrong about them.

2. In the inevitable climax, Ben is injured and it is Nic’s duty to kill him before he is captured. Although Ben was angry when he learned of the “protect the code” orders he is now resigned to do his part, and yells for Nic to “Do it! Kill me!” What happens next?

a) Nic kills Ben and must live knowing that he has done right for his country but wrong for his friend. The audience is left to mourn the loss of Ben and contemplate whether to trust your country or your conscience.

b) Nic suddenly puts the gun down, announces “No one else dies!”, and dies heroically saving Ben. In an epilogue, Ben brings Nic’s dog tags to a scenic landscape and performs a traditional Navajo ritual with them.

ANSWERS: duh.

SCORING: 1-2 correct: Spielberg eat your heart out. Hold the popcorn, you’re a Hollywood expert! 0 correct: Move over, Schumacher. Don’t quit the day job fuckwad!

And I’m afraid this doesn’t work on an action level either. First of all, I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure this “world war 2” was an actual war. So it’s hard to get as excited about the action as you do say in HARD BOILED when it’s a total fantasy, and they’re riding around on gurneys or sliding down banisters shooting through thug after thug.

In the past though that didn’t stop John Woo from achieving. BULLET IN THE HEAD for example has that whole Peckinpah “outraged by the violence I am depicting so beautifully” type feel. I mean that’s what the whole movie is about, a dude who still has a bullet lodged in his head, as a constant reminder that this shit isn’t really so fun. There are some incredibly brutal scenes in a Vietnam POW camp. In fact I saw a double feature of this with HARD BOILED afterwards and a couple people actually walked out in the middle and missed HARD BOILED completely, because they couldn’t take it.

Well the war is pretty brutal here too, with lots and lots of bayonet stabbing, people catching on fire, also I don’t know if I mentioned this but Christian Slater gets his head lobbed off with a sword and you see it laying on the ground there for a second. (Spoiler.) The problem though, is fucking Jerry Goldsmith. This asshole did the score, and he won’t fucking shut up. You know how that gal Lauryn Hill from the Fugees, she does some songs where she’s covering Dionne Warwick or whoever, and she’s singing, and the rapper Fugees have nothing to do. But they don’t want to feel left out so they’re on stage too going “1 2, 1 2, yeah, yeah.” They don’t know how to restrain themselves. Or another example, some bands they got a guy on guitar, he’s always gotta be fuckin soloing, he can’t just do some rhythm to back up somebody else every once in a while. They always gotta be in the spotlight.

Jerry Goldsmith is that guy. All through the battle scenes, all you can think of is TURN THAT FUCKIN MUSIC OFF. There is no way to get involved in the reality of these scenes because Jerry is so busy rubbing up against you trying to show off how triumphant he is. Later on there are a couple scenes where he starts trying to be a little less bombastic and a little more on the majestic side, but even here it pulls you completely out of the movie. This is a problem that only the American John Woo could have. The Hong Kong John Woo would have no problem dealing with Jerry Goldsmith. “Hey Jerry, I want to show you something in this room over here. Sit down Jerry. Oh, hold on, I forgot something. Wait here.” Then he locks the door. They can do that over there, because they don’t worry as much about unions and insurance and shit.

Anyway, it’s not a terrible movie. I’ve seen worse. But I’d rather John Woo stay home with his kids than go to battle just to make movies that Rob Cohen or somebody coulda made.

NOTE: actually turns out it was James Horner who scored it, not Jerry Goldsmith. I would change it in the article but I am too busy. Sorry Jerry.

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Windtalkers appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

Recently I reviewed RED SCORPION and I talked about The Enigma of Dolph Lundgren. The enigma is that this guy who I’m betting is fascinating in real life (he’s a big muscleman martial artist who does dumb action movies, but he’s highly educated) has almost no presence in movies. Well after seeing this topnotch John Woo TV movie I take it back. It turns out when he’s not pretending to be Russian he’s got all kinds of charisma.

I know this is made for TV, not video, but it’s exactly the kind of gem I’m looking for when a dig through all this crap. A ridiculous, enjoyable and unusual action movie. The main reason it’s unusual is that Dolph Lundgren’s character is afraid of the color white.

Well, it’s a long story. Something in his past that he doesn’t quite remember yet has given him a phobia. Dolph is playing some kind of federal marshall or something turned bodyguard. And he’s got alot of problems. For one thing, his friends recently died and he has to adopt their precocious daughter Casey. For another thing, another friend (Fred the Hammer Williamson to be specific) was recently killed protecting a supermodel from a stalker, and he has to take on that case. Even though Casey’s parents were in trouble with organized crime in the prologue, it’s said their death was an accident and we never learn otherwise. But that’s okay because Dolph is haunted by the death of the Hammer and the death of his father, and two separate deaths are more than enough for an action hero to be tormented by. Especially an action hero who is afraid of the color white.

Blackjack At first he kind of lucks out on this white thing, because the model-stalker he’s after likes wearing all black. Not in a goth way, more of a Johnny Cash I guess. You figure if the hero is afraid of the color white, he’s gonna come up against Puff Daddy or somebody and be in trouble. But he lucks out. At first. Then he comes up against the stalker dressed as a nurse. Not like Elle Driver, a male nurse. It’s not THAT crazy of a movie. Or maybe it is, because soon after that he fights the stalker in a milk factory, in a giant puddle of milk. White milk. You might think I’m joking about that, but I’m not. This is a great movie.

This is not your ordinary stalker, by the way. I’m not sure how this is possible, but he has henchmen on motorcycles. They never explain how and it doesn’t seem to occur to Dolph that it’s odd. Anyway, there are lots of flaming motorcycles, which is a good thing. This guy’s better than your usual villain too. For the first half of the movie you don’t even hear him talk, you just see him setting up snifer rifles in far away apartments. There’s a great scene where he’s going to kill the model and he’s shaky, it kind of looks like he might be fondling himself outside of the frame. Then while he spies her through the scope and gets ready to pull the trigger he starts to cry. He’s not quite as interesting later in the movie when he talks, and it’s weird because he looks like this suave European dude but he turns out to be a redneck. But he does do some weird things like tie Dolph up in front of a bunch of dummies made out of hay and blond wigs. You don’t see that every day.

Before the Hammer gets shot he seems to be overestimating this stalker. This guy tries to shoot the model while she’s on the runway, but he misses and hits a vase (maybe because he’s crying). Investigating the crime scene, the Hammer says that they are “disappearing bullets” and that means “this guy is a real pro.” But he’s a real pro that can’t shoot for shit. Hammer says “We know he can hit from ten blocks away.” Yeah, he can hit a fucking vase. I want 24 hour surveillance on all the vases within a ten block radius.

I thought the Hammer was overestimating this crybaby but the guy does turn out to be pretty smart. Somehow he figures out that Dolph is afraid of white, and invests in alot of drapery. And I think it takes alot of balls for him to point out that Dolph is afraid of the color white. I mean, they’re fighting in milk and Dolph seems kind of freaked out, and it occurs to him that this is caused by a phobia of the color white. Okay, it’s one thing for that theory to occur to you during a fight. It’s another thing to say it out loud. I mean, in almost all cases where you’re fighting a guy and you announce that he is afraid of the color white, you are gonna look like an idiot. Afraid of white? Where the fuck did that come from? That’s pretty random.

Another thing that’s unusual about this movie: I really think Dolph is supposed to be gay. He lives with an eyepatch wearing dude played by Saul Rubinek. This guy helps him out and cooks for him, so you could argue that it’s his personal assistant. But he always introduces him as “my friend Thomas.” There’s a scene where he has to bring the super model to the house, and Casey asks “Is she your girlfriend?” and he says no. And then his female psychiatrist, who obviously digs him, comes over to help, and Casey asks “Is SHE your girlfriend?” and he says no. And his friend Thomas seems a little annoyed by all these women coming in the house.

At the end of the movie the model kisses Dolph, and it’s ambiguous as to whether he is in love with her too. This is the only part that made me think, “Hmm, maybe he’s not supposed to be gay.” But I’m still going with gay because it makes the movie way more interesting. I mean, it’s kind of sad to think that he’s afraid to tell Casey why he lives with his friend Thomas.

In fact, BLACKJACK is a good argument for gay marriage. What if Jack gets shot or run over by a flaming motorcycle or something? Shouldn’t his friend Thomas get the same visiting rights as a spouse? Shouldn’t they get the same health care coverage? Fuck man, there’s no way Jesus would be against Jack and Thomas being married. They’re a great couple. I bet Jesus would even be best man if he was asked. These are some cool motherfuckers. And one of them has an eyepatch. I mean come on.

By the way, Dolph’s character is named Jack, which maybe explains the title BLACKJACK. Also, he carries bladed playing cards that he uses as weapons.

I like Dolph alot in this movie. He’s not the dumb hunk of meat I’ve seen him play in other movies. He’s actually charming and he seems like a guy you would hang out with, even if you don’t have alot of gay friends. I mean he knows how to fight, and “there’s no better backup in a fire fight,” says little Casey. But he has to juggle alot more than that. He has to deal with raising this new daughter while stopping a deadly stalker AND trying to keep the model off of drugs. And by the way I forgot to mention that he had a problem with painkillers some time between the opening scene and the present day. So he’s complicated. Also he teaches her how to dance.

The great thing about watching BLACKJACK now is that it’s just become ripe. Because back in 1998 when it was made, there was still that naive hope that John Woo had great things ahead of him. He had just done FACE/OFF which seemed to prove he could fuse the strengths of his Hong Kong movies with the Hollywood method of filmatism. It was before MISSION/IMPOSSIBLE 2: THE REVENGE OF MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and more importantly it was before WINDTALKERS. After those I think most of us kind of gave up on John Woo and forgot about him, left him to the hole he dug for himself where he’s stuck being listed on IMDB as director of video game and cartoon adaptations that never materialize.

So now that we’ve seen John Woo’s fate, it’s easier to accept him doing a movie where Dolph Lundgren plays a gay guy with bladed playing cards who’s afraid of the color white. This is not the John Woo that blew us through the back of the theater and into the lobby and then into the restroom and through the side of the restroom and then back through a new hole in the back wall of the theater and back into our seats in HARD BOILED and THE KILLER and BULLET IN THE HEAD. This is the other John Woo, the silly one we* also love, the one who directed HARD TARGET and that part in MI2 where they fly off their motorcycles for a mid-air chest bump.

(*and by “we” I mean “I”.)

Let me describe the opening scene for you, then you’ll know what you’re getting into. Our man Jack gets temporarily blinded while protecting the little girl from bad guys. So she climbs on his back and tells him where to walk and where to shoot. Like Master Blaster or The Double Man in EL TOPO. Okay, so that’s cool, but then what’s even better is that a grenade gets thrown down, so Jack throws the girl out the window and she bounces off of a trampoline into a swimming pool. And then he jumps on the trampoline and fires off the trademark John Woo double-pistols while in mid-air. The first ever slow motion trampoline mid-air gunfight.

Really the only complaint I have is in the casting of the little girl (who is annoyingly plucky at times) and the supermodel (who is not nearly exotic enough to be a famous model). But it’s a TV movie so I forgive it.

If anybody knows of any other movies as good as BLACKJACK, please tell me. It’s not right to keep this kind of information secret.

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Blackjack appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

tn_faceoff FACE/OFF is a crazy one-time-only deal, a strange collision of people and movements that could only really exist in that specific place and time. Not before, and definitely not since. On that day the wave of late ’80s Hong Kong action cinema crashed and exploded against the rocky shores of Hollywood, spraying sideways and soaking Nic Cage and John Travolta, who happened to be standing there. It’s not the only American John Woo movie I like (we’ll always have HARD TARGET and BLACKJACK), but it’s the only one that seems like The Real John Woo. It takes that old Hong Kong John Woo we loved, with all his emotional sincerity and unhinged sense of stylized action, and combines him organically with big budget Hollywood, achieving a smooth balance where the Hollywood bullshit side doesn’t overpower the other one.

mp_faceoff This movie has several big shootouts, an SUV vs. jet vs. building chase/gun battle, and an incredible high speed boat chase that includes some done-for-real crashes and explosions shot just as beautifully as they’d be now when carefully faked frame-by-frame in a computer. It also has some high quality acting by Nic Cage, of both the regular and mega varieties, as he plays the bad guy and the good guy pretending to be the bad guy and especially when he’s playing the good guy inside the bad guy trying to explain that he’s really the good guy. And it has big absurd sci-fi concepts made even more far-fetched by Woo changing a futuristic sci-fi script to present day 1997. But despite all this Woo’s main interest is in the characters, their relationships and unexpected turns, the bad things the hero does and the good ones the villain does.

Holy shit, this movie really does have everything, doesn’t it? If you start naming random things most of them will be in it. Margaret Cho as a government agent? Yes. CCH Pounder burned alive? Check. Little bowl-cutted moppet shot dead on a merry-go-round? Yep. Nic Cage dressed as a priest doing Mick Jagger poses at the L.A. Convention Center? You bet. How ’bout him just beating the shit out of one of the kids from That ’70s Show? You got it, pal. Joe Bob Briggs cameo? Uh huh. Barefoot waterskiing in a suit and tie? Of course.

In the beginning it’s Travolta vs. Cage. Travolta plays Sean Archer, covert counter-terrorism task force supercop. Cage is Castor Troy, insane terrorist-for-hire who killed Archer’s son six years ago and now is dressed as a priest and groping choir girls shortly after planting a bomb. Soon Castor ends up in a coma and the authorities decide that the only way to find out where the bomb is before it goes off is to transplant Castor’s face onto Sean and have him go undercover in prison with Castor’s awkward weapons-designer brother Pollux (Allesandro Nivola). Good plan, right? Unfortunately Castor wakes up, forces the doctors to give him Sean’s face (I mean, it was just sitting there) and kills everybody who knows about the operation.

So I guess come to think of it this is John Woo’s version of one of those body switching comedies like FREAKY FRIDAY or LIKE FATHER LIKE SON. The terrorist is in the cop’s body, pretending he’s trying to bust himself, having fun sexing up his enemy’s wife (Joan Allen) complete with a huge but not quite DESPERADO number of candles. (Romantic dudes in movies always light like 150 candles before fucking.) He also pays more attention to Archer’s daughter, although in a sleazy uncle kind of way, smoking with her, giving her a butterfly knife, beating up the boy (Danny Masterson) who doesn’t understand that no means no. That last one seems a little hypocritical considering how many women Castor sexually harasses in this movie, but I guess in his defense they do seem to succumb to his evil charms, not actively fight him off like this girl does to this kid.

Meanwhile Archer is a cop in a criminal’s body, so he gets to do fun stuff like rot away in a high tech prison, talk to Thomas Jane, etc. Once he gets out his only possibility really is to pretend he’s Castor Troy and go gunning for fake Sean Archer. He teams up with the director of THE NOTEBOOK and with Gina Gershon reprising her RED HEAT/OUT FOR JUSTICE role of Tough But Nice Girl Affiliated With Villain Who Doesn’t Deserve the Treatment She Receives From the Cop Protagonist. She’s the real Castor Troy’s girlfriend, but not close enough for him to tell her about the body switch. So Archer-as-Troy has to improve their relationship just as Troy-as-Archer is improving his marriage.

There’s always this tension like Archer might be found out while he’s undercover, and Pollux Troy keeps giving him suspicious looks. But I don’t really get that because he’s not Darkman, his skin’s not gonna melt soon. Is there really some danger of Pollux thinking “My brother’s been acting strange since he woke up out of his coma. I bet he’s not my brother at all but in fact a cop whose had my brother’s face transplanted over a high tech mask, had his body and hair surgically altered and a microchip implanted in his vocal chords to re-create his voice”? No, I don’t think he’s gonna think of that one. So the implausibility of the whole thing makes the secret more plausible.

Alot of this is about putting people in awkward situations. Archer-as-Castor has to protect the kid he threatened to get taken away from Gershon. Troy-as-Archer has to visit the grave of the son he murdered, or accept condolences for the deaths of people he killed. Also a doctor at the end has to talk to Archer about his original body’s bullet scar without saying “I have no idea what you’re talking about – remember, the original doctor who did the surgery got burned alive along with your best friend Tito.”

So it’s larger-than-life characters shrunk down to regular life-size by being given human flaws and strengths. The terrorist pays more attention to Archer’s wife and daughter than he does, but the cop pays more attention to Troy’s girlfriend and son than he does. (In fact, the real terrorist doesn’t know it’s his son, only the impostor knows). Troy gets colleagues killed but he’s way more fun around the office. They switch bodies, lives and sons. They’re the same! Like a John Woo movie.

That might not be enough substance to power a low budget drama, but combined with top notch (and comprehensible, which was expected back then) action and style it’s pretty potent. Woo does all those things people started making fun of him for: double-pistoled side leaps, Mexican standoffs, birds (this time it’s pigeons and seagulls) flying during a shootout in a church, slow motion hero shots of dudes with sunglasses and long black coats blowing around in the wind, nice suits for all men. It’s probly Woo’s nicest looking photography because it’s the look he was using at his peak but when he could afford better lighting and film stock.

Other people were imitating his style back then, but nobody could fake his tastes. I don’t think another director would’ve insisted on Joan Allen to play the wife, or if they did I don’t think they would’ve done a leering shot of her butt. Or what about the scene where Gina Gershon’s son is caught in the middle of a gunfight and the best Gershon and Nick Cassavetes can come up with to protect him is to put headphones on him, so he watches a bloodbath while listening to a cover of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”? I’m not sure it’ll cut down on the therapy he’ll need in later years, but it does make for a distinctive shootout.

mega-faceoff Then of course there’s the unmistakable Nic Cage touch. This is probly in my top 5 favorite unCaged performances under BAD LIEUTENANT, MATCHSTICK MEN and VAMPIRE’S KISS because he does some really emotional scenes as Archer but also gets to go full-on Mega for Castor Troy, and even gets to be Archer trying to go Mega to pass himself off as Troy. He’s a cool iconic character because he has two beautiful gold and black guns with dragons on the handles, and I’m guessing it was Cage’s idea that the case he keeps them in is always stocked with a pack of Chiclets.

Travolta is also fun in the movie, going mega because he’s imitating Cage. I’m sure they worked together to come up with how the character should act, but it’s the Cage characteristics that are most noticeable. When Travolta takes off his coat, carefully folds it up while prancing around as a pre-bomb-defusing ritual you definitely gotta be reminded of Cage. I wish Travolta would’ve tried some of those silent film monster facial expressions though, that would’ve been funny.

Two random things that make me laugh in this movie:

1. At the end the daughter, whose father doesn’t really understand her or pay enough attention to her, switches back to normal hair and makeup, as if she now agrees with the blaming-the-victim statement “you dress up like it’s Halloween and ghouls will try to get down your pants.” What are you doing there, John Woo?

2. It seems to me like they really don’t need to do the hair at the same time as the facial surgery. I mean, I know they’re in a hurry, but I just think it would be better to have a stylist take care of hair dos after the surgery is complete.

FACE/OFF is as schizophrenic and mixed up as its characters. It’s a silly action movie but also a 138 minute straight-faced melodrama. It expects its audience to care about adult relationships and emotions but also to accept this ridiculous bodyswitching technology and superhuman gun and stunt skills. I can see why it might be too crazy for some people, but for me it’s just right. The act of making FACE/OFF probly blew out all of Woo’s filmmaking fuses, but at least we got this one last distinctive John Woo movie.

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Face/Off appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

tn_bettertomorrow If you look for pictures from John Woo’s 1986 breakthrough A BETTER TOMORROW you’ll mostly find Chow Yun Fat lighting a cigar with a burning counterfeit American $100 bill, or wearing a real nice suit holding two guns. That’s from the beginning of the movie when his character Mark is a big shot in a Hong Kong syndicate. That’s not a better tomorrow, that’s a more financially stable yesterday. Most of the movie takes place years later, when Mark has been shot in the leg and has to wear a metal brace, so he’s now just an errand boy instead of a Big Brother.

mp_bettertomorrow In fact, Mark is not the main character, I’d rank him at #3 in story importance. The movie focuses on Mark’s partner in crime Ho (Ti Lung) and Ho’s cop brother Kit (Leslie Cheung). Like Mark, Ho is hot shit at the beginning, considered a Big Brother by the gang, but he gets busted, while a trainee named Shing (Lee Chi Hung) gets away. After a 3 year prison bid Ho gets out and genuinely wants to go straight, to have a better tomorrow. He turns down high-paying crime gigs and works at a taxi garage owned and operated by reformed ex-cons. He hopes all this will allow him to become close to his little brother, but no dice.

See, while Ho was away that prick Shing worked his way up the ladder. Now he basically runs the gang, and he had Ho and Kit’s uncle assassinated. Kit blames Ho and won’t forgive him. He won’t even talk to him as an estranged brother, he tells Ho to address him as “Officer.”

Kit’s life is not strawberries and cream either. He’s been investigating this gang for years but he gets kicked off the case just for being related to Ho. His marriage isn’t going too hot either. He spends so much time on the case he’s not supposed to be on that his wife Jackie (Emily Chu) feels neglected. Kit could really stand to switch faces with Castor Troy for a while so his wife can get some attention. There’s a weird scene where Jackie sits looking at a huge, fancy birthday cake that she apparently made for herself while he completely ignores her to look through some files. She’s in tears by the time he finally talks to her, and when it turns out that he did remember to buy her a present it’s like that makes everything okay.

But you should’ve fuckin paid attention to her and ate the cake, dumbass! Looked like a good cake, too.

This is John Woo, so these relationships can be mended, but only after some bleeding. The old boss and Ho respect each other, but the gang is under new management. Shing wants Ho back on the team, thinking they can take advantage of his brother being a cop. So they try to force him into it through sleazy tactics like attacking the garage. Pushed over the edge, Ho does pick up guns again, but only to get his brother the evidence to put these dicks away.

Alot of John Woo movies are about the overlap between heroes and villains, the bad things good people do, the good things bad people do, the bond between cop and criminal, the unlikely respect between men on opposite sides of a fight. But the main theme here is the capacity for villains to become heroes, the fight to become a better man, the hope for a better tomorrow, or to prove that they have (according to the literal translation of the title) “The True Colors of a Hero.” Ho and Mark start out as these slick, cool anti-heroes, then they become regular working class individuals and their goal is not to get back on top again, it’s just to stay out of that life. Well, Mark kind of wants to go the “one last score” route, but Ho truly wants to go straight. And he has a going-straight mentor in his boss at the garage (Kenneth Tsang).

Kit, I have to tell you, is one of the dorkiest John Woo heroes. He’s just such a prude, kind of effeminate and in my opinion a shitty husband and brother. Not exactly the type of movie cop you watch and think “I wanna be him when I grow up.” Mark, on the other hand, is really fuckin cool. When he’s rich he looks like THE KILLER, but later he’s more of a relatable tough guy wearing a black duster and chewing a matchstick. A BETTER TOMORROW was actually a surprise smash hit, a low budget movie without much advertising that broke Hong Kong box office records and influenced a huge run of crime movies throughout the ’80s and ’90s. And Mark stole the movie. Apparently black dusters became hugely popular after the movie and are still sometimes called “Brother Mark’s coat.”

I really like this one. It has a good melodramatic story, some impressively stylized violence (like when Mark gets a slo-mo punch to the nose and then the blood flows out. How did they even do that?) and a catchy keyboard theme song that I think is the perfect balance of cheesy and awesome.

In later Woo movies his shootouts and his style got more elaborate, bringing this type of movie up to maximum strength. But the power and the success of this one show that it’s really more about the characters and the emotions than the ten thousand flying bullets. There’s a great shootout where Mark massacres a roomful of guys responsible for setting up Ho. It’s kind of funny because he comes in with a bunch of guns in his coat and he stashes them in some potted plants in the hallway, then he goes in and shoots the guys, comes out and picks up the different guns as he needs them. It doesn’t make alot of sense because he already was able to fit them in his jacket when he came in, and nobody frisked him or anything, so why does he need to stash them? That’s what I thought but then I realized maybe he’s pacing himself. He wants to make sure he doesn’t run out of bullets so he parsels the guns out. By the time I get to this point in the hallway I should have this many bullets left.

But as much as I enjoy that scene I don’t like it as much as the one where Mark and Ho see each other for the first time after Ho gets out of the joint, and they embrace each other and talk about the shitty places they’re at in life and what they should do about it. Pure manly soap opera, the John Woo that’s not known by today’s generation that just makes fun of his slow motion doves and sideways guns.

Most of all I like this movie because it has that theme of redemption. You get to root for these guys and they’re almost doing the right thing. They’re the best type of movie-violence-creators – the ones who are only killing so they won’t have to kill anymore.

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post A Better Tomorrow appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

tn_bettertomorrow2 A BETTER TOMORROW II is a crazy fuckin sequel. The story is incredibly convoluted, the plot (or plots) divided between Hong Kong and New York, continuing the story of Ho, Kit and Jackie, but also following a new character called Uncle Lung (Dean Shek) in conflict with the police and with two unrelated crime syndicates. The weirdest (and best) part is that they actually used the gimmick that’s always joked about but almost never actually done: Chow Yun Fat plays Ken, the never-mentioned-before-twin-brother of his deceased part 1 character Mark. I probly don’t have to say any more than that to convince you this movie is stupid. I liked it though.

mp_bettertomorrow2 Ho is in the joint again, because he let Kit arrest him at the end of part 1. But ever since he helped bust that asshole Shing the cops must expect him to be their new bitch. They’re investigating Ho’s old mentor Uncle Lung, who they think is involved in counterfeiting again, and will let Ho out if he’ll spy on the old guy. But Ho says Lung has been reformed for 10 years and he refuses to take part. So Kit moves in calling himself “Billie” and dating Lung’s daughter Peggy (Regina Kent) so he can get close enough to bug the office and shit. When Ho finds out about this he worries about Kit’s safety so he does take the deal, hoping Kit will drop the case.

Well, Ho was right. Lung is clean, his business is owning a shipyard, but he’s getting threats from gangsters who want to take it from him. Then he gets set up for some murders, etc. Remember in part 1 Ho had Kent (or Ken? that’s what IMDB says but I thought it was Kent), that cool ex-con boss at the garage? He goes to him for help sneaking Lung out of the country and Kent says “This goes against my principles. But principles can be changed.”

(I’m so disappointed in Kent. Sequels seem to take away everybody’s integrity.)

As Lung goes to New York he finds out the Hong Kong gangsters killed his daughter. He goes to stay with a friend whose daughter reminds him of his own, and then she gets killed by different gangsters. He’s starting to approach Paul Kersey levels of tragedy here, nobody should know this guy, it’s too dangerous. But instead of turning him into a vigilante the trauma causes him to shut down. He stops eating and talking and picks up a bunch of strange tics. He kind of acts like a monkey.

Luckily he has Mark’s twin brother to look after him. Ken owns a little restaurant and has a crew of dedicated young people who think he’s awesome because they read about his brother in comic books (!?). His situation is similar to the restaurant owner in WAY OF THE DRAGON – the local gangsters are coming in and causing chaos, demanding protection money. But instead of getting Bruce Lee to stand up for him he does it himself, acting crazy, offering the mobsters a 25 cent bribe, then forcing them at gun point to eat fried rice that was on the floor. I want to emphasize that this is not something they normally do at the restaurant. By all accounts the fried rice is very good and there’s no reason to believe it is served in a manner that is in any way inappropriate. It’s only for these particular mobsters who are threatening him and causing a scene, because they have to be taught a lesson.

So anyway, the mobsters blow up the restaurant.

There are alot of different conflicts here, but after the plot flails around for a while it just comes down to Ken, Lung, Ho and Kit reunited in Hong Kong, getting a whole lot of guns and grenades and going after some gangsters in a mansion.

You know how sequels try to top part 1s? Kit one-ups being an asshole to his wife on her birthday by going to take part in a shootout while his wife is giving birth. Ho actually tells him he should stay with her, and he’s gonna do it until Ken turns and gives him a thumbs-up. The implication is that Ken is so fucking cool that hanging out with him would be worth missing the birth of your own child.

I don’t know, you can judge for yourself but in my opinion Kit made the wrong choice there. I mean Ken is cool, maybe miss a funeral cool, but not miss a birth cool, in my opinion. Also, you know, the shootout doesn’t work out very well for Kit. Spoiler.

I forgot to mention that the artist who drew the comic books about Mark gave Ken Mark’s actual bullet-ridden duster, so he wears that, if that makes any difference to you. Different character, same actor, same coat. Different matchstick, most likely.

Ken gets the most firepower here, including a rifle that sprays sparks and about a dozen grenades. In New York he gets to do a HARD BOILED type shootout, except it’s a traumatized adult he’s bringing to safety instead of a baby. He gets to shoot while falling backwards down stairs. The shootouts are great, but not as good as HARD BOILED because too much of it is one-sided. Not just that the bad guys are missing their shots – they don’t even have guns alot of the time. It’s more of a massacre or a rampage than a shootout. But it’s still got that A BETTER TOMORROW theme song, so it’s hard not to think these guys are awesome. Every time I hear that song I want to stand up and put my hand over my heart. If I wore a hat I would take it off out of respect.

I like that once again this is about people trying to get out (or stay out) of a life of crime, to find a better tomorrow. But when you think about it this is one of those movies where something really tragic happens but it tricks you into thinking something awesome happened. At the beginning of the movie Lung was a completely reformed criminal. He used to be a gangster and now he was standing up to gangsters to keep his legitimate shipyard business. But the cops didn’t believe he was clean and hassled him. He got framed, his daughter and friend’s daughter were murdered and he was severely psychologically damaged. But our heroes came along and helped nurse him back to mental health… so he could go kill a whole bunch of people!

That’s not a better tomorrow. You turned the reformed man into a killer again. It’s everything he fought against. This is sad. But…

No, I guess it’s not sad. Music doesn’t lie. It’s awesome!

Woo directed again, but apparently he and producer Tsui Hark had alot of the ol’ artistic differences. From what I’ve read Hark wanted it to be more about Lung than Woo did. So the movie ended up getting cut together by some editing company without being overseen by either Woo or Hark. As goofy as the movie is I’m kind of surprised to hear that because it has a whole lot of Woo in it, starting with the opening ballroom dance montage. It’s a crazy mess, but the type of crazy mess I can respect.

http://youtu.be/9C2XNiE9dPg

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post A Better Tomorrow 2 appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

tn_redcliff woozone Some of you young kids might not know about The Curse of Van Damme. It was an early ’90s phenomenon named after (but not necessarily caused by) our favorite Belgian kickboxer/actor because of his track record for personally delivering talented Hong Kong directors to Hollywood. They’d come over, inject our action movies with a very small watered-down dose of what they had been doing back at home, then their bodies and minds would be completely drained by the studio beasts, leaving them hollow husks whose names on movies were no longer desirable. I mean you got John Woo – who used to wear his heart on the back of his director’s chair, who used special cameras powered by liquified male bonding and typed his scripts in inks made from tears of passion – directing a movie so obviously for a paycheck that, in my opinion, it was even titled PAYCHECK.

But the curse can be broken. Six years and no theatrical releases later John Woo returned home, filming a Chinese movie for the first time in 17 years, and what he came up with was a motherfucking masterpiece. The damn thing is so powerful somebody tried to chop it in half and it just grew into two complete movies. Whoever did it I bet they just ran away because they knew if they chopped those in half you’d have four RED CLIFFS and they would conquer the earth, guaranteed.

mp_redcliff These came out in ’08 and ’09, so there’s been plenty of time to watch them. But some of you guys probly haven’t seen ’em, and can relate to me on this: I was intimidated. I mean I heard alot of good things, but you know, it’s a Chinese historical epic, and it’s 2 hours and 20 minutes just to get to the halfway mark. It’s one of those things you want to do, you plan to do, but you rarely feel like doing it. Like working at a soup kitchen. But then I watched those BETTER TOMORROW movies again and I promised a return to the Woo Zone and I decided it was time to bite the bullet. Or I guess in this case the arrow, there aren’t guns in this one. Maybe that’s all Woo had to do to reinvigorate himself, switch up the projectiles.

I gotta tell you, it was tough going at first. This is a movie based on very famous Chinese history and legends, stories and characters that Chinese audiences are familiar with, that you and I never fuckin heard of. And there are a couple different factions and a whole bunch of different characters and although they do a good job of distinguishing them from each other visually I wasn’t able to remember which name was which face, so then when they’re talking about each other I don’t know who they mean and I get kind of lost.

So about an hour into the movie I was thinking okay, this looks beautiful and has some really cool scenes and stuff but I don’t think I’m gonna be able to get through this whole thing yet. I’ll just struggle through part 1, return it and rent it again for part 2 some other time.

But then the battles started, the crazy fuckin battles. I don’t know how much this is supposed to be based on real shit, but it seems even more exaggerated than 300, and with a bigger scope. The first big battle is like an endless parade of inventive action. Remember the phalanx in 300, where they hold their shields together to form kind of a metal wall? In RED CLIFF they do it in tortoise formation, a giant circle of interlocked shields, and at one point the camera actually pulls back as the phalanx morphs into a giant tortoise. They use their shields to block opposing soldiers inside one big metal corridor, then joust them. They trap them inside a big circle, toss in a bunch of nooses and drag them out of the circle so they can spear them. You know – the ol’ noose ‘n stab. When the bad guys form a little tortoise themselves the good guys loop around them with a rope with metal things strung onto it and just crush the whole fuckin turtle shell. Squoosh. Super Mario formation.

By the time part 1 ended I was on much more comfortable footing, I felt like I mostly understood who was who and what was going on and I abandoned plan A (return DVD to store without watching part 2) for plan B (immediately put in disc 2 and find out what happens because this shit is awesome). And part 2 begins with a little “previously on RED CLIFF” type recap that makes it all seem so simple, I wondered what I was so confused about.

But you won’t even have the same trouble because I want you to see this movie so bad that at the end of this review I prepared the visual guide I wish I had had to help me understand who was who during that first hour. You know how at an opera they give you a thing that tells what the story is, and you’re familiar with that before you watch the opera? Yeah, me neither, but I think I read that somewhere. Anyway, if you’re intimidated just use my cheat-sheet below and you’ll be fine.

* * *

I’m pretty sure RED CLIFF is the HUGEST fucking movie John Woo will ever make, but he’s still John Woo, so he spends alot of time focusing on the small and intimate things too. That’s the visual theme I noticed most: zooming in on small things while GIGANTIC things are happening in the background. The opening scene is all about the Emperor focusing his attention on a bird in his throne room, while he’s clearly ignoring the drums of war. The drums are metaphorical, the bird is literal, and he sits and whistles and smiles at this little bird that flew into his huge throne room while his entourage seems embarrassed and uncomfortable. The Emperor is very feminine and gussied up like Queen Amidala from the Star Warses, and his gruff war hero chancellor Cao Cao stomps in ahead of his troops and yells at him and guilts him into letting him go start some war. You can tell the Emperor doesn’t want the responsibility of knowing the right way to handle this guy. He’d rather be playing with the bird.

That type of imagery keeps coming back, for example when Zhou Yu holds up his feather-fan to compare to his troops standing in “goose formation.” The story focuses on this group of leaders and strategists in the middle of giant armies, it’s about the tiny within the huge. And the shot at the end of part 1 demonstrates this the most: it’s an incredible 2 1/2 minute continuous (heavily digital but very real looking) shot that follows a messenger pigeon flying from Red Cliff, across the river, over entire armadas, down to the river bank over the armies on horseback, through a stadium where a soccer-like game called cuju is being played, and then Cao Cao says that “for the Battle of Red Cliff I am ready…” It’s an awe-inspiring shot (apparently one of the most expensive CGI shots to date) that’s a metaphor for the whole movie, a map of the locations for part 2 and a heart-pounding Oh Shit It’s On cliffhanger… all at the same time.

(if anybody ever ends a part 1 out of 2 in a similar fashion again it will be called a redcliffhanger)

Another way that John Woo gets intimate is with the badass juxtaposition. And there are alot of badass characters in this movie so there might be a world record amount of badass juxtaposition. We got the guy whose wing-fan “keeps him calm.” We got warriors who bond by jamming together (I wrote down that the instrument is called a “quim,” but the internet doesn’t seem to back me up on that). We got a guy who weaves sandals (both a calming hobby and a symbol of weak grass working together to become strong). We got a guy who takes care of the messenger pigeons and carefully bathes them.

There’s a long section of the movie where my man Zhuge Liang first helps out a peasant whose water buffalo was stolen by soldiers, then somebody runs in yelling “It’s a breech birth!” and next thing you know he’s helping deliver a baby horse! He names it Meng Meng and has to promise it won’t be used as a war horse. There should be an animated spin-off about the Young Meng Meng Adventures.

There is talk about tea ceremonies. In Part 2 they say that Cao Cao wouldn’t appreciate the art of tea, and sure enough he gets a chance to show he’s not that interested. On the other hand he is into poetry. It’s partly in an aggressive way (“I am still waiting to carve my poetry onto that cliff!”) but also he uses it ceremonially, like he recites poetry while they burn the bodies of plague victims.

But in order for there to be badass juxtaposition there has to be a proportionate amount of badass. Otherwise you just got a lime wedge or a maraschino cherry in a big empty glass. Some of these epic battle movies bore the shit out of me because they’re just a crowd of dirty dudes yelling and running at each other with swords, they don’t got enough moves to keep my interest. Not RED CLIFF. This is part 1, only the preliminary battles, but it still tears through a long list of clever war maneuvers and superhuman asskicking techniques. There’s stabbing a guy with an arrow by hand, there’s yanking a guy off a horse by the flag, there’s the scene where they flip their shields around to reveal reflectors that shine sun into the eyes of the horses and make them all crumble to the ground, there’s FONG SAI YUK type overhead crowd walking, all kinds of shit. In a coincidental tribute to the most iconic image in HARD BOILED, there’s a scene where a guy carries a baby through a massive sword battle. In part 2 there’s another John Woo staple: a Mexican standoff. But with swords. A Han Dynasty standoff, I guess.

Let me give you one small example of the level of awesomeness in this movie, courtesy of Zhang Fei. This guy doesn’t even need a weapon, he can run through a platoon of armed men, beat the shit out of them, ruin their weapons, and ram a horse:

One of the top uses of horse-ramming in modern cinema. And that’s not even the end of the scene. After that he steals the horse and takes his side’s flag back.

Once I got into the Woo Zone RED CLIFF was the most exciting movie I’d seen in a long god damn time. To me it was a similar feeling to watching the LORD OF THE RINGSes. It’s every bit as cool without even the aid of monsters or wizardy magic of any kind. Of course it reminds me of other movies with armies and epic battles and martial arts and swarms of arrows, like HERO. But it also kept reminding me of STAR WARS. Well, mostly the prequel ones, but bear with me here. The heroes of this movie are just like the Jedis, larger-than-life warriors running around leading these huge battles, knowing all the crazy moves, putting themselves on the line, also wearing robes and using swords. And I know it’s based on actual history but I was still impressed by the wide selection of vehicles, weapons, armor style, etc. There’s alot of nice things to look at.

Part 2 doesn’t immediately launch into battle like I kind of expected, but by this time I was really into the characters so I was kind of glad it didn’t. In this part Sun Quan’s sister Sun Shangxiang, having convinced all the dudes that it is okay for a woman to go out and do shit, goes undercover as a soldier on the other side of the river. In her armor she passes for a guy, MULAN style, and turns out to be real good at cuju. She makes friends with a moronic prince, they even have a nickname for themselves together Pit and Piggy. But she’s not really fat enough to be called Piggy, she just looks fat because she’s wrapped in the detailed maps she’s drawing of all their side’s military formations. She’s taking advantage of his stupidity and willingness to help her, but she obviously likes him and feels that old bonding and guilt familiar from most John Woo movies and all undercover agent movies.

There’s other unexpected friendship and betrayal going on. There’s a guy from Cao Cao’s side allowed to visit the Red Cliffers because he was childhood friends with one of them, he tries to convince them to surrender and instead they send him home with false information. But they feel bad about it, even though he tried to screw them. “I have lost an old friend.”

Part 2 is alot of fun because it’s so full of clever strategy and tricks. Stuff like predicting the other side’s plan based on what they think the weather will be, and defeating that stategy based on superior knowledge of weather prediction. Inventing firebombs made of eggshells, fish oil and gun powder. My favorite part, maybe old hat for Chinese people but I never heard of this one, is the part about Zhuge Liang’s promise to get 100,000 arrows. He has a really clever way of getting the arrows, and when a miscount makes it seem like he’s a mere 400 short of the 100,000 he’s fully prepared to honor his bargain, i.e. let them chop off his head. They get pretty fuckin close. Would’ve been a mistake. Glad they didn’t fuck that one up.

Cao Cao has some good moves too, like when his men start getting Typhoid fever so he floats their corpses over to the other side. Pretty fuckin harsh. Hey, could you guys take care of these bodies? He’s shown not to be 100% evil though, too. He feeds a sick man, and talks to him about his son. He has a heart. In fact, that might be his biggest weakness. When his guys figure out that the war has something to do with him having an old crush on a girl they seem pretty pissed.

There it is again, the small and intimate inside the huge and epic. And it’s kind of the point. All this war, all this death, all this heroism and sacrifice, all this cunning and bravery, all because some stupid asshole saw a pretty girl one time and missed his window and never forgot about it. If it happened to most people it would just be an embarrassing thing they might get over with help from their therapist. But this guy is in a position to start wars over it. In his mind I’m sure he convinces himself that it’s not really about that, it’s these two warlords, they gotta be stopped! But if there was no girl involved, let’s be honest, he would’ve thought of something else to do with his time I bet. And we’ve loved watching these warriors and all the cool things they do, but we realize they’re not really fighting for a cause. They’re just fighting against some bullshit.

They shouldn’t even be put in that position. They should be left alone to play music and cuju and make sandals and shit. Cao Cao could come over and say his poetry at their jam session, and learn more about tea if he wants to. And then the pigeon guy could talk to the Emperor about birds, and Zhuge Liang could become a veterinarian. These guys all ought to be friends.

It started with a bird and it ends with a horse, returning to Meng Meng. He’s able to just be a horse, not a war horse. And hopefully all the humans were able to go on living without having to be war humans.

Even if this movie weren’t as great as it is it would be satisfying just to see John Woo get a chance to spend this kind of money to put this type of hugeness on screen. I mean, it’s not even his biggest budget – according to IMDb’s estimates it cost $80 million, about $45 million less than MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II. But if you were just gonna go by what appears on screen, RED CLIFF looks like about 75 times the budget of that one. As hard of a time as he has working in Hollywood there’s no way this one was easy, with all these gigantic scenes, whether working with hundreds of extras or faking it in computers, it all must’ve been a nightmare. Not even including all that stuff about how they were having to rewrite the script and Chow Yun Fat backed out at the last minute and all that. This is a once in a lifetime movie by a genius director somehow climbing back to the top of his game years after everybody gave up on him ever making a halfway decent movie again.

It just goes to show you shouldn’t completely give up on anybody. In the movie there’s a point where Lui Bei feels he has to back out for the good of his people, and everybody is bummed but they understand and say their goodbyes. But then he shows up again when he’s most needed, with a “you didn’t really think I would abandon you?” type of attitude. And that’s just what John Woo has done to us. Ladies and gentlemen, John Woo was back. I’m not gonna say he is back because if I were him I would go take a nap for about 20 years.

Clip and save my unofficial RED CLIFF VISUAL GUIDE!

Disclaimer: Contains spoilers. Might be hard to follow along with while watching movie. Outlawvern.com not responsible for damage to computer monitors caused by overly literal interpretations of instructions

redcliff-guide

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Red Cliff appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

I don’t think I’ve seen John Woo’s BULLET IN THE HEAD since the early ’90s. It was a double feature with HARD BOILED, and I remember seeing a guy walk out during a scene involving American P.O.W.s. I thought it was crazy that after the unparalleled gun violence of HARD BOILED there would be violence in the next movie that somebody couldn’t take. But obviously with the historical context it cuts a little closer to the bone, especially if that guy was a vet. That’s what’s amazing about this movie: made after THE KILLER but before HARD BOILED, it has the fun, brotherhood and crazy action of the best Woo while feeling more personal, more emotional than any of them.

It starts out like one of these nostalgic period pieces directors always make about the era they grew up in, like an AMERICAN GRAFFITI. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai giving dance lessons in a church. Slicking his hair back, photo of Elvis (and JFK?) on his wall. Big smiles and bicycle races. All this intercut with a knife fight, a gang rumble. It’s full of energy, almost like a dance number, but people are getting their heads through glass and shit.

This is the story of three life-long friends (Leung, Jacky Cheung, Waise Lee) reaching adulthood. Tony marries his girlfriend (Fennie Yuen) and there’s a beautiful night time reception with family and friends at an outdoor market. But these are not rich people, so Jacky has to borrow a stack of cash from a loan shark to pay for the reception, and on the way there he gets jumped by some asshole named Ringo. (This movie is an Elvis man, not a Beatles man.)

Well, Jacky’s not about to let his friend down so he makes it to the wedding with the money and tries to act like everything’s fine even though he’s extremely late and is bleeding from a head wound.

You talk about a bros before hoes policy, well when Tony figures out what happened he takes Jacky to go get payback on Ringo. Remember, this is on his wedding night. There are other things he could be doing, in my opinion. They go to find Ringo not with anger, but with a mischievous smile, and this neighborhood violence suddenly escalates to awesome martial arts movie with people fighting and swinging around on chains and shit and next thing you know Ringo is dead.

Whoops. Maybe ditch the new marriage, head to Vietnam and become smugglers? Why not?

So at an age when some people are going to college or entering the job market these three friends become criminals in a dangerous war zone. Back at home there were the rumbles and the riots against British rule of Hong Kong, but as soon as they hit ‘Nam they get their car and their goods blown up by a suicide bomber, they see riots, they get lined up with a bunch of other guys, cops holding guns to their heads threatening to execute them. (A nun with a bunch of orphans who have witnessed all of this chooses then to say, “Inside, children.” What, you waited until now?)

This is like a way better version of Tsui Hark’s A BETTER TOMORROW III, and for good reason: when the two disagreed about how to do that prequel Woo went off and made this instead. But in a way this is like a prequel to all of Woo’s movies. Okay, so it doesn’t show the doves being hatched or learning to fly real slow, but it does show the moment when the characters realize that they need guns. “As long as we have guns, the world is ours,” Waise decides.

It’s not until 37 minutes in that they finally get guns and go rob a store – it’s a big deal, like in JUICE. But as dangerous as New York of the ’90s was it’s nothing compared to Vietnam of the ’60s. The military shows up and our boys surrender before realizing that those guys don’t care about them at all, they came to steal not just the till money but all the jewelry. As the friends lay on the ground in surrender the bullet casings fall all over them. Bigger guns mean bigger loot.

They eventually make it to the night club where they were supposed to deliver the goods to a gangster named Leong (Chung Lin), and they’re shocked to see Sally Yen (Yolinda Yam), a famous singer from Hong Kong, in the house. Tony especially is outraged that this gangster they’re supposed to work for is obviously turning her out and won’t let her leave. They also meet Ah Lok, the Chinese Tone Loc, played by Simon Yam. As handsome and suave as Tony Leung is, Ah Lok is clearly the coolest guy in the movie. As they’re introducing themselves to him he excuses himself to go hand the piano player a cigar in exchange for a gun.

Well, you know how it is, before you know it our three friends plus Ah Lok decide to declare war on Leong and his gang, rescue Sally, shoot hundreds of people, blow shit up and steal a crate full of gold. Waise in particular is really into this box of gold, the other guys quickly sense that it’s threatening their friendship, but the motherfucker is lugging it around like Chow Yun Fat lugs a baby. And he would definitely change its diapers if he had to.

I’m a little confused because I read that Leong forces them to drink piss, like the story that was told in A BETTER TOMORROW. There’s a scene where one of them has to drink from a bottle, so I thought the subtitles didn’t make it clear that it was piss. That makes it alot more of a feat that he chugged the entire bottle, and understandable that he’s upset that his buddies didn’t drink any in solidarity. They could’ve been piss brothers. But then on Youtube I saw a deleted scene which is from the same part of the movie but has them having to drink piss from glasses. Not the same thing I saw.

In more happy news, we find out something interesting about Ah Lok’s cigars. See, at one point he pulled open his jacket to reveal he had a whole bunch of them, like one of those sleazy watch-dealers you see in the cartoons. I thought this was telling us that he was gonna be getting alot of guns from the piano player. No, even better: they’re actually dynamite that ignites when you split them apart. And he gets to use them.

The battles are long and varied and always uphill, sometimes even literally. It seems impossible that they could fight their way out of that mansion, but they make it by the skin of their teeth. Then they’re gonna catch a boat but the military shows up, and how are they gonna get out of that? Can they really fight all those guys and get away with both the gold and the singer? (Hint: they lose one of them, and it floats away like a beautiful flower petal.)

There’s alot of blood. It gets on Sally’s poster of Catherine Deneuve in BELLE DE JOUR – not a good omen. It gets on the camera lens – probly not even on purpose.

The title brings to mind any one of the many, many, many people that get shot the fuck up in this movie. Or maybe it brings to mind the soldiers holding guns to people’s heads, in the movie or in history, or in that infamous photo. But the titleistical bullet in the titleistical head is not a fatal one. It’s one that turns the poor motherfucker into an invalid, a deranged junkie. He makes it back home to Hong Kong and alternates between shooting up junk and shooting up the neighborhood. The bullet in the head is not just a slug. It’s the violence that stays inside them, damages their brains, makes them hate themselves, makes them rage against others. As long as they have guns the world is theirs, as long as they have a bullet the world is shit. Try hanging onto your box of gold, try forgetting that they shot your favorite singer, none of it matters.

BULLET IN THE HEAD may or may not be Woo’s best movie – I’m a HARD BOILED man, as I’m sure many of us are – but it’s for sure his definitive statement on violence. He makes it beautiful and fun and then he proves to you that it’s the opposite.

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Bullet in the Head appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

HEROES SHED NO TEARS is not just a great phrase to tattoo on your back or use as an adult recreational softball team name, it’s also a messy pre-A BETTER TOMORROW John Woo picture. We always talk about how the Hong Kong film scene that Woo thrived in was the Wild West compared to the Hollywood that ruined him. Well, then this was Rome or something. This is Woo when he was a straight up exploitation director. He was filming in Thailand, and shit must’ve been even crazier then than in the Tony Jaa era, ’cause they say they were using live rounds in some of these shootouts. Just shoot at stuff behind the actors. Squibs are too much trouble.

Eddy Ko has a great stoic screen presence as a Chinese mercenary on a mission in Thailand to crush some drug lords. After a battle he comes back to his little shack where his son Kenny and his late wife’s sister are waiting for him. Unfortunately he gets followed by some soldiers and the movie is about these mercs and their non-combatant associates traveling through battle torn rural Thailand trying not to get murdered by soldiers or a native tribe of skilled hunters.

The best and most crucial shot in the movie comes in a scene where they come across soldiers stopping a car full of western journalists and molesting them. It’s the ol’ crosshairs shot – rifle-scope POV on a woman’s back as she runs away. And this is the type of movie where the bad guys do indiscriminately shoot innocent women in the back, so we’re bracing ourselves for it. But suddenly she drops to the ground, out of view of the scope, revealing… Ko in a badass pose pointing his gun right at us! He shoots, and in the next shot we see that he doesn’t just hit, he hits through the scope and takes out the eye. So for the rest of the movie we have a sicko general with a bandage on one eye trailing our guy for revenge.

The movie takes on a little bit of a WIZARD OF OZ feel as they pick up more people along the way – the kid, the journalist, an American war deserter that he knew in his old days. That guy looks like Mathieu Kassovitz and seems to practice the BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES bomb-worship religion. We first meet him in a meditating yoga pose, wearing a bomb vest. I think he has two ladies, and there’s a completely out of place sex scene that apparently the producers added in against Woo’s wishes.

The son is kind of funny. He wears a striped shirt and short shorts and sounds like he’s dubbed by an adult woman, like a kid in a Godzilla or Gamera movie. He must not be a hero yet ’cause he cries alot, and seems like such a liability to have along. But in the end he runs in and rescues dad after he’s been strung up for 3 hours. There’s also a scene where the villains surround Kenny with a ring of fire and he seems to be burned alive, but then crawls out from under the dirt that he buried himself in to survive. (Didn’t Daigoro do that in one of the Lone Wolf and Cubs?)

I actually watched this before you guys recommended it on the EASTERN CONDORS review, but thanks for that anyway. It doesn’t compare to that movie, or to the later John Woos. But it’s got some good stuff in it and is important as a bridge between Woo’s early movies and his revolutionizing of the Hong Kong gangster melodramas. With its funny tangent about some of the other mercenaries gambling with the Natives it definitely reminds me of an old school kung fu movie, but then it gets into some serious gun fights.

It’s not essential Hong Kong cinema, but it’s uniquely enjoyable, an odd little journey just over the border of a place I like to call…

Well, maybe it’s more a state of mind than a place. Anyway, it’s a good zone, whatever it is exactly.

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Heroes Shed No Tears appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

tn_paycheck woozone? Remember when John Woo did a science fictional movie a while back that everybody said was shitty? This was after we’d all kind of given up on him, so I never saw it. Until now.

Ben Affleck, the director of ARGO, stars as Michael Jennings, an amoral engineering genius of a futurist Seattle, some time after the near-future one in STEALTH. (In the future the borders of Seattle will be stretched so far that they will include Vancouver, BC, which is all we see in this movie other than one helicopter shot over Seattle Center). His introduction is funny because he gets to do a John Woo slo-mo strut toward the camera wearing shades (it’s important to the plot that he’s finicky about sunglasses) and, uh, holding a computer monitor under his arm.

His job is to go into a locked laboratory for a few weeks, take the thing apart and reverse engineer a knock-off for a competitor. Afterwards, the people who hired him erase his memory of that time and pay him lots of money. I guess the idea is that he can’t share the information with other companies or with the authorities.

Of course, something’s gotta go wrong, because John Woo is not gonna make a movie just about an unethical guy building computer monitors. What happens is that his old rich buddy Aaron Eckhart (see, there’s your problem right there) hires him for a most unusual job: one that’s gonna take 3 years and then make him rich for life. He goes into some kind of Biodome type place and then all the sudden the job is over and he doesn’t remember what happened. Huh.

mp_paycheck All seems fine until he meets with his lawyer and learns that he signed off on forgoing all his stock options for some reason. So he gets nothing. And the envelope full of personal items sent to him was the wrong one, it just has a bunch of crap he never saw before, like a matchbook and a can of hairspray and stuff.

This is inspired by a Philip K. Dick story and apparently this gimmick is straight out of the story. Basically he has an envelope full of what seems like the junk somebody would have in a purse, but it’s actually things he left for himself as clues and useful tools. It seems the technology he was working on had something to do with seeing into the future. He knew they would try to kill him afterwards and “he engineered his own escape” with these things that will lead him to figure out what’s going on and help him to deal with it.

By the way, we know from his place of residence that he’s into palmistry and yin yang symbols and shit. And the technology he’s working on looks like a crystal ball. I don’t know what this means. Maybe engineers are modern mystics or something. Something deep, I bet.

Anyway, he’s on the run. FBI agents (including Joe Morton and Michael C. Hall) are trying to bring him in, and Eckhart’s guys are trying to kill him. And then they’re trying to catch him when they find out their future-seeing machine needs some repairs.

Uma Thurman plays Rachel, a biologist Jennings hits on at Aaron Eckhart’s party and then falls in love with during the three year missing period. He planned for her to escape with him, but post memory-wipe he doesn’t remember her. It’s an interesting idea, going to meet someone he figures he must love, but they don’t go very deep into it. Unfortunately it’s kind of a weak role for Uma. She’s supposed to be a genius biologist, but spends most of the movie just dumbly following her boyfriend and being told what to do. She does have a way of flirtatiously joking around with him that sort of works, and she does a couple enjoyably out-of-character kicks that may or may not be related to her training for KILL BILL (volume 1 came out 2 months before this, but I’m not sure which one filmed first).

Affleck seems like more of a meathead than he should if he’s this genius engineer, but I think he’s fine in the role. The only real problem with the casting is that this should obviously be a Nic Cage movie. It’s got the big high concept and the combination of clever and dumb. A little bit of NEXT, a little NATIONAL TREASURE, a little KNOWING. But it should be a Cager, with him playing it pretty straight. He couldn’t use Woo as an excuse to go at it Castor Troy style. I think he’d really make it funnier, though with a very mild type of mega where he’s not buggin out but just getting a little too emotional about everything. I can almost picture it.

One scene that Affleck does perfectly fine making funny with his acting choices is the scene where he’s supposed to meet Rachel in a cafe, but Eckhart sends an impostor (Ivana Milicevic, IMPOSTOR) since Jennings doesn’t remember what the real one looks like. Affleck plays the entire scene with a dumb, confused look on his face.

The script is by Dean Georgaris (LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE: OF LIFE). It’s one of those movies that’s kinda based on smart ideas but handled pretty dumb. It especially feels that way in the end, which I suspect was the victim of rewrites during production. Jennings finds out that just knowing the future from using the machine will cause all the countries to have pre-emptive war against each other, a self-fulfilled prophecy of doom. So his mission is to sneak in and destroy the machine… but when he gets to it he says (in a line dubbed in post-production?) “Let’s take a look at the future before we destroy this thing.” Why would he do that?

It’s tempting to call this movie JOHN WOO’S PAYCHECK, but even though it’s watered-down Woo I can’t really think of it as a sellout on his part. It was probly a fun challenge for him to do a big dumb studio sci-fi thriller. I think he did better with it than your average for-hire hack, but obviously it doesn’t have the purity of his Hong Kong work or the unhinged melodrama (and action) of FACE/OFF.

Come to think of it it kinda feels like Diet Total Recall, just like THE 6TH DAY did. But it’s not quite anonymous studio hackwork because every once in a while there’s a little action scene and you remember, “Oh shit, John Woo is directing this!” It’s a movie that’s all about setting up things that you know will come into play later (gee, I wonder why he put an extra stamp on that envelope?) so when Affleck is showing off his leftover wooden staff skills from DAREDEVIL at the beginning you know it’s gonna come up later. Actually, it took a while to get to it, I was starting to think Woo was gonna blow it, but he doesn’t believe in blowing it even in his shitty movies.

This one’s PG-13 so it’s not trying to be HARD BOILED, but the fights are always energetic and with plenty of impact, people being thrown and smashing through things. There are Mexican standoffs. There’s a part where a flower cart rolls with Paul Giamatti running beside it to block himself from bullets. For reasons I do not at all comprehend, and out of the fuckin blue, there’s a crucial scene where a CGI dove flies in slo-mo and knocks Affleck off a cat walk.

There’s also a motorcycle-car chase that I really enjoyed, especially one move in particular. Rachel’s riding bitch with a car right on her ass, she takes off her helmet and chucks it hard at the driver, beaning him on the skull and taking him out. The shot of him getting hit is from inside his car and it convinced me a stunt man might really have done that. I rewound it a couple times to re-experience it, the sign of a great action beat. I trust Woo to come up with shit like that. And in this one the guy’s supposed to be a genius so he can come up with even weirder shit to do. Like when he ends a subway tunnel standoff by dropping the bullet cartridge out of his gun onto the third rail, causing it to explode.

(Better start building that subway system, city of Seattle. You’re behind schedule.)

PAYCHECK doesn’t seem that old, but when I was looking for the poster I noticed it said “Available on DVD and VHS this May.” So it’s kinda old. It’s funny to see these movies that take place in the near future but they were made earlier in the 2000s so when they pull out their phones they immediately out themselves as out of date. They have Segways, but not smart phones. Also, Beanie Babies are apparently still popular in the future. Or maybe they come back as a nostalgia thing.

For me I think waiting ten years was just about right. If I’d seen it at the time maybe I would’ve been sad about Woo going so far out of his Zone. A decade later I had no expectations, and I know the movie did poorly and he finally left Hollywood and made a new masterpiece with RED CLIFF. Comfortable in this knowledge of the future I was able to enjoy PAYCHECK as a dumb movie with some transcendent moments. By which I mean a part where Uma nails a motherfucker with a flying helmet.

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Paycheck appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

tn_mi2 woozone? MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 was made at a time when the world just wasn’t ready for this particular MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2. There needed to be more of a cooling off period after the first one. We needed some time to learn that MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE sequels weren’t gonna be the elegant balance of smart-people thriller and blockbuster spectacle that Brian DePalma introduced in the first one, and also that John Woo was not gonna ever seem like the exact same filmatist who made THE KILLER, or HARD BOILED, or even FACE/OFF, again. Returning to it now it’s even more evident that it’s best appreciated by watching it like we watch other post-Hong-Kong Woo pictures like HARD TARGET, or his TV ones like BLACKJACK or the Once a Thief series. You just try to enjoy it as some Hollywood bullshit that he tried to add some of his particular style to. Here he treats it as an expensive studio movie love story set against a rogue agent trying to get rich off of a man-made disease and its cure.

Tom Cruise (JACK REACHER) returns as Ethan Hunt, who has graduated from IMF support man to lone wolf and is now so awesome that he spends his vacation rock climbing out in the middle of nowhere with no equipment. He doesn’t have his phone on him (it was 2000) so the agency has to send a helicopter to fire a rocket at him containing douchey sunglasses that give him his mission briefing. This is a good idea because the ol’ “this message will self destruct” means he throws a pair of sunglasses at the camera and they explode into the title, and everybody wants to see that.

Like the first one the screenplay is credited to Robert Towne, this time with story by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga (writer/producers from Star Trek: The Next Generation). They came up with another complex web and what not, but this one has shootouts and motorcycle stunts (not at maximum Woo level, but better than some other PG-13 action movies). Hunt’s mission, which it turns out he does choose to accept, starts out charming and ONCE A THIEFy because he has to recruit the beautiful master thief Nyah (Thandie Newton) so he flirtatiously intrudes on her jewel heist at a mansion party. They first make eye contact on opposite sides of some flamenco dancers, a red dress twirling and floating up between them. Before long they’re in a high speed chase on a mountain highway, their convertibles spinning together as they stare into each other’s eyes and the music from the dancing scene comes back. People used to talk about Woo’s “bullet ballet,” and here he explicitly does automobile flamenco.

Nyah ends up dangling off a cliff, he jumps from car to car, pulls her up into his arms, and it cuts to them in bed post-sex. Man, he knocks her off a cliff then knocks her boots! Only Woo would do this kind of heightened action musical romance shit. I respect that.

mp_mi2 But things get darker when we find out that the IMF doesn’t want Nyah for her skills, but because she was the rogue agent Ambrose (Dougray Scott)’s girlfriend until 6 months ago and he still has a thing for her. So she gets back with him as a mole in exchange for expunging her rap sheet. Not only is it dangerous, but she immediately has to fuck him. It’s like the agency forced her into prostitution.

Yeah, I’d say she gets treated the poorest of any female in a MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, but she arguably accomplishes the most of any of them until Ilsa Faust. I mean, Agent Emmanuelle Beart did some stuff for the team (dress up sexy and squirt poison in a guy’s drink) in the first one, Maggie Q got shit done in 3 and Paula Patton in GHOST PROTOCOL. Nyah gets pushed around and put in danger, but when the shit goes down she’s the one who comes up with a plan to stop the plague: inject the last sample into herself. That way they can’t kill her because they need to sell it. On the negative side she’s gonna have to jump off a cliff pretty soon to stop it from spreading.

Remember that gimmick of the Mission: Impossible pullover masks? This one opens seemingly with Ethan Hunt undercover as a Russian named Dmitri, but it turns out to be Ambrose wearing a mask to be Ethan Hunt as Dmitri (in other words it’s Tom Cruise playing Ambrose playing Hunt playing Dmitri). It’s part of a treacherous deception, not an actual IMF mission, but we also learn that the agency frequently uses the masks to mimic their own agents. According to IMF boss Anthony Hopkins, Ambrose has “doubled” Hunt two or three times. It makes sense – he kinda looks like Hunt. He’s the not-as-good Hunt. He got sent for the jobs Hunt couldn’t be bothered for, and now he loses his girlfriend to Hunt. In a moment that could only happen in a John Woo Mission: Impossible movie he verifies Nyah’s betrayal by meeting her disguised as Hunt – then when he takes the mask off he has tears rolling down his face.

The action goes not 100% into the real Woo Zone, but at least into the Hollywood backlot re-creation of it. There is an enjoyably ridiculous motorcycle chase between the doppelgangers that culminates in a game of chicken where both sides somehow sense that they’re supposed to jump off and tackle each other mid-air. Then it’s a knock down drag out on the beach with frequent cutting to close ups of the waves. Cruise looks small but the choreography makes him seem formidable. Lots of throws and hard slamming against the sand.

I suppose the go-to Woo scene would be the one that actually has pigeons flying in slow motion. A bunch of them. This has a great moment where the music revs up and a silhouette dramatically enters through smoke and you’re thinking “ah ha, Ethan Hunt is here to kick your–” but then you realize oh shit, that’s not Hunt, that’s the other guy dragging Hunt. Nice switcheroo.

And then a little later it’s revealed to be a trick where both of them are wearing masks of the other. Okay, that was Hunt getting the cool entrance there then. Good job.

Whatever you think of this movie, it will always be historically important for going over schedule and forcing Dougray Scott to drop out of X-MEN. We all know and totally agree that BLADE was the first and still best of the modern comic book era, but Americans will never give credit to a black man, let alone a Daywalker, let alone David S. Goyer, so they’ll skip to X-MEN for that honor. And X-MEN is more super hero oriented, so it’s fair to say that its success is what made it possible for Marvel to reposition themselves as a studio and eventually make IRON MAN and launch an empire with one more brilliant casting decision. But I truly believe that X-MEN would not have been a success without the charisma of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, and he only got it because Dougray Scott couldn’t do it, because John Woo took so long. So if you liked THE AVENGERS or GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY or any of those, send John Woo some flowers.

I think maybe the fatal error that made the movie more cheesy than necessary was Hans Zimmer’s decision to put together a rock band to play alot of the score. It’s kind of a cool idea on paper but I think it makes it play almost as self-parody. The forced coolness levels of Tom Cruise in black leather and shades riding a motorcycle or running (sometimes through fire or doves) in super slow motion, his long hair blowing in the wind, pushes the needle to the absolute limit. Throwing electric guitars on top of that is asking for a meltdown. Note how much the feeling changes when it goes from the opera at the beginning of this clip to the rock ‘n roll:

I think if he went for “classy” instead of “awesome” it would’ve worked alot better, and this one might not even be the joke of the series. Then again, I cannot deny the HARD TARGET style ridiculous fun of all that. So I like this one. And I appreciate a series that’s willing to have different directors and let them transform it into different styles. There oughta be more of that in this world.

 

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Mission: Impossible 2 appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

tn_hardtarget woozoneusa There was a time, I must admit, when I didn’t properly appreciate HARD TARGET. I had already been intoxicated by the unadulterated John Woo of THE KILLER, BULLET IN THE HEAD and HARD BOILED (in that order, I believe) so when I watched his 1993 Hollywood debut I could only see the compromises. American Woo was less violent, less stylish, less emotional and built around the stiff toughness of Van Damme instead of the smooth charisma of Chow Yun Fat.

But with the passage of time comes wisdom and context. From the perspective of today we can see that HARD TARGET stepped deeper into the Woo Zone than any of his subsequent American films save for FACE/OFF. More importantly, it’s clearly a masterpiece among Van Damme vehicles, themselves an enjoyable body of work that can benefit from some Woo. A pessimist sees HARD TARGET as Woo watered down with Van Damme. But I’m an optimist now so I know it’s a refreshing glass of Van Damme spiked with a shot of Woo tequila.

Van Damme plays Chance Boudreaux, itinerant New Orleans merchant marine of spec ops past and Cajun descent. Like Roddy Piper’s John Nada in THEY LIVE or a ronin in a samurai movie, Chance is a human weapon walking around trying to get work, a sheathed sword who represents the poor. We meet him trying to scrounge up enough pocket change for a cup of “tolerable” diner coffee.

mp_hardtarget The script was rewritten for New Orleans just to (sort of) explain Van Damme’s accent, but it seems organic because it’s a novel setting. We learn that the villains – who last worked out of Bosnia-Herzogovina – have chosen it as their playing field because of its misery, much like Predators choose to hunt in hot climates and war zones. New Orleans doesn’t seem Bosnia-bad, but it’s an eery ghost town. The police are on strike and the people are struggling to find jobs, even lining up for a shitty “direct advertising” gig passing out phone sex flyers. When Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler, DROP ZONE) comes into the diner flashing large bills Chance knows what’s gonna happen. He walks to the exit in slow motion, pauses to adjust the open door with his foot, causing a loud creak like in a spaghetti western, and uses the reflection in the window to get a look at the guys who are getting a look at her. When they try to rob her outside he beats them up. Mostly in slow motion.

That’s the secret to this being one of the best Van Damme vehicles. He’d done several of his classics already (BLOODSPORT, KICKBOXER, LIONHEART), but this is the first one directed by an artist dedicated to using all the brushes he has to paint a glorious portrait of The Muscles From Brussels. Introducing him with a cool camera move into his black trench-coated back, dissolve edits between closeups of his eyes, his earring, his, mouth, all accompanied by bluesy acoustic slide guitar, he’s like a Cajun Superman. Sometimes he walks in or out of a scene like THE RIGHT STUFF, the wind blowing his greasy mullet and coat. Woo slathers Chance and his world with style, and yes, at times there are doves fluttering past him, or in one case giving him a message. (Woo says that dove represents “The Holy Spirit.”)

When he interrupts that robbery he pulls open his coat like a cowboy revealing his weapon, but there’s no gun, no holster even. Just the leg he’s about to kick them with.

In his blue work shirt, getting shit done, Chance Boudreaux is a soaring tribute to the greatness of The Working Man. He does not let abject poverty, or his lack of a driver’s license, define his self worth. His initial motivation for helping Natasha (through a two-day freelance missing persons gig that he initially turned down) is to raise exactly $217 to pay his overdue union dues so he can take an able seaman gig.

The missing person is Natasha’s dad, a special forces veteran she’d been out of touch with. They discover that he’d been homeless, and then that he’s dead. Following the trail gets Chance mixed up with a dangerous criminal organization led by cruel Emil Fouchon (the great Lance Henriksen) and his psychotic right hand man Pik Van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo, Darkman himself in DARKMAN 2 and 3). They run a service providing rich assholes with the opportunity to literally hunt homeless veterans. They choose the prey based on skills and lack of family connections. With this one they screwed up.

Remember I told you how they offered BLADE to Denzel Washington, and even though he’s a great actor I don’t think it would’ve been as good? Here’s a movie that Woo wanted to give to Kurt Russell, but he was booked up (I guess that would maybe be with UNLAWFUL ENTRY, CAPTAIN RON, TOMBSTONE?). Universal had already wanted to use the script as a vehicle for Van Damme, who flew to Hong Kong to meet with Woo, the top choice of producer Jim Jacks. Woo added more action, knowing Van Damme could handle it. Russell would’ve technically given a better acting performance, I imagine, but it would’ve been a Chance Boudreaux who doesn’t jump up and kick a guy in the face while he’s driving at him on a motorcycle, and what would be the point of that? Peppering the gun fights with all those kicks is a major component of what makes the movie so fun.

still_hardtarget2 If you compare this action to HARD BOILED, like I used to, it can’t compete. The MPAA and the regular Hollywood shooting schedule saw to that. Woo only had 65 days of shooting for HARD TARGET; for HARD BOILED he had 123 days, with 40 for the hospital scenes alone. But comparing it to other Van Damme films or similar it really excels. The stand out scene is the absolutely crazy motorcycle vs. car duel. Chance’s motorcycle is leaking gas through a bullet hole, so he plays chicken with his pursuers’ vehicle while standing up on top of the bike, firing two guns. Then he crashes, rolls over the car onto the street, turns and shoots at the car as it runs over the bike and then explodes. There are also many fiery explosions caused by Chance’s uncle Douvee (Wilford Brimley, REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS, EWOKS: THE BATTLE FOR ENDOR) when a team of mercenaries chase Chance and Natasha to his isolated homestead. Poor guy has to pull the self destruct on his moonshining rig. That couldn’t have been an easy decision.

In fact this movie is so serious about fire that Henriksen does a major fire stunt himself. It’s very noticeable that he suddenly has his hair doused in fire proof gel, but it’s worth it to see his face while he’s running around in flames instead of the usual face-obscured stunt double approach.

Woo wanted Fouchon to be a little more developed than he ended up in the released movie, but even there he has a great Woo-villain touch: a scene where he plays piano, intercut with a montage of hunting humans. (The workprint version also had stock footage of big game hunting, from what I remember of seeing the bootleg years ago.) He might as well be that asshole teacher in WHIPLASH, though, because despite his musical talent he has no soul. When one of his rich clients feels bad and wants to let his prey live, Fouchon does not hesitate to kill the client. There’s also a brutal scene where he has Pik terrorize one of their employees by snipping off his ear lobe with shears. They make these guys so threatening you forget they can’t kickbox.

Screenwriter Chuck Pfarrer (who also plays Natasha’s dad in the opening) is a fomer Navy SEAL who wrote NAVY SEALS, DARKMAN and BARB WIRE and now does military non-fiction books like SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama bin Laden. I gotta give him credit for his genre chops on this one. It’s the classic MOST DANGEROUS GAME premise mixed with the mystery-loner-hired-to-help-a-lady and includes very good versions of the badass drifter, the heartless villain, the sadistic henchman, the eccentric family member and more. It does a good job of establishing this environment of New Orleans despair and hopelessness. Just about the only gainfully employed characters are a waitress and the nice cop (Kasi Lemmons, CANDYMAN) who is supposed to work a desk job but everyone else is on strike. When she’s (SPOILER) shot dead and left in the middle of the street it’s sad enough without remembering that this was her birthday.

These bad days for the working class play well against the villainous plot where rich people kill the poor for a thrill. According to the book Not Bad For a Human by Lance Henriksen and Joseph Maddrey, it was Henriksen’s idea to have the prey wear money belts that they (supposedly) are allowed to keep if they make it over the river alive. It’s supposed to show that Fouchon is serious about playing the game, he genuinely wants the challenge of the hunt. I think it makes it even crueler though because he’s forcing these people to bet their lives against what’s not necessarily a life changing amount of money. I mean, $10,000 is a whole lot to them or to me, but it’s not gonna buy them a house or last ’em much more than a year or so if they still can’t find work. I guess they could use it to get the fuck out of New Orleans.

“I need to tone down a lot of the violence. Well, everything has to be toned down,” Woo told Vibe at the time. The New York Times reported that “The first preview of ‘Hard Target,’ in May, was a disaster. The audience of young males laughed at some of the devices — freeze frames, dissolves, slow motion, choreographed violence — that are the director’s stylistic trademarks.” Woo says, “I wanted to use visuals to tell the story, instead of dialogue, and they didn’t get the picture.” He, of course, was right. But after MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 he must’ve given up on Americans ever agreeing with him.

Woo had to submit the movie to the MPAA in six different cuts before he got the R-rating. But those weren’t the only editing struggles. Van Damme tried to make his own cut that featured more of himself and less of Henriksen. The New York Times says he “was more or less blocked by the producers,” but that the studio brought in Bud Smith (SORCERER, DARKMAN) to replace original editor Bob Murawski (ARMY OF DARKNESS, THE HURT LOCKER) and “rough up” “Mr. Woo’s elegant pace.” Producer Terence Chang was willing to go on record that “John’s original cut was so much better, but for the test screening they recruited Van Damme fans, and they said, ‘We don’t like this. There’s too little karate stuff.'”

The poor quality bootleg of the workprint is about 20 minutes longer than the theatrical release. This time around I watched it from the thankfully-region-free British blu-ray, which at least has an extra 2 minutes of violence. But I think in any of these compromised forms it still managed to make it through the grinder with some personality intact. It’s a heightened brew of violence and style with both the surface and the texture of a good crazy action movie. Credit to Pfarrer or whoever came up with absurd ideas like Chance punching out a rattlesnake, biting its rattle off and leaving it as a sentient boobytrap. And it’s worth mentioning that this is one of the few movies where Wilford Brimley with a bow and arrow rides a horse in slow motion away from an explosion. That’s usually how I try to sell it to people.

still_hardtarget

They didn’t really make movies like HARD TARGET back then, and they definitely don’t now. It’s a real treasure.

 

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Hard Target appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

tn_brokenarrow woozoneusa BROKEN ARROW is John Woo’s second American movie, and maybe his most generic. Christian Slater (HE WAS A QUIET MAN) stars as Air Force Captain Riley Hale, who’s sent on a test flight with his browbeating mentor and pal Major Vic Deakins (John Travolta, CHAINS OF GOLD) that goes awry. Their experimental bomber is carrying two nuclear warheads to find out if they can do it without being detected via radiation. The trouble is, some low rent DIE HARD sequel type villains are waiting out in the desert for Deakins to intentionally crash the plane so they can steal the missiles and make the government pay a ransom to get them back. God damn dirty bombnappers.

Hale survives the crash and encounters park ranger Terry Carmichael (Samantha Mathis) and Deakins has devised various ways to slow down anybody else coming in to help, so they gotta John McClane and Zeus Carver it out. Slater and Mathis had already starred in PUMP UP THE VOLUME together. Later Mathis would be in another movie that Travolta was in, THE PUNISHER. They’re all fairly likable, but their characters are bland and lifeless compared to a Chance Boudreaux or a Castor Troy.

mp_brokenarrow A Vibe article about HARD TARGET mentioned “Maverick director Quentin Tarantino (RESERVOIR DOGS) is working on a screenplay starring Chow [Yun Fat] and an as yet unnamed American actor, to be directed by Woo.” I wonder if that project eventually became THE CORRUPTOR minus both Woo and Tarantino? We never did get that dream team. Instead we waited three years for Woo to direct Travolta during his post-PULP FICTION career boost. BROKEN ARROW also features Frank Whaley (Brett, the guy that Jules Winfield tells to “say ‘what’ again”), who was big in indie movies around that time because of SWIMMING WITH SHARKS. Delroy Lindo, who plays basically the same boss/exposition role as in the recent POINT BREAK remake, had been getting attention for his performance in CLOCKERS, and had also just worked with Travolta in GET SHORTY.

Screenwriter Graham Yost was also hot from writing SPEED (and he would go on to become the mastermind of Justified). But this is nobody here’s best work.

The action involves trekking through the desert and occasionally getting into various scraps involving various vehicles: Humvee, helicopter, train. No motorcycles this time. Too bad. There’s a major section that takes place in a very soundstagey looking mine shaft. Slater jumps around and does an occasional somersault, aiming his guns in more acrobatic ways than was standard for Americans in that era. But it all feels a little forced, and the rarity of the bullets ever hitting anyone sort of takes away their bite.

There’s a good John Woo moment when a grenade causes a collapse with the two leads on opposite sides. There’s some space above the pile of wreckage that allows them to talk to each other, but it’s too difficult to shoot each other. (Deakins does try.) Hale gets to tell Deakins what he’s figured out about his plan and see how he reacts. It’s kind of like a temporary time out.

You could say that Travolta is having fun. He plays Deakins as happy about being a traitor, showing his weird teeth and joking and doing weird things where he looks away and rubs his chin. I think it’s a little too self conscious, though. He did it much better in his later, better Woo movie FACE/OFF.

He’s got a decent sidekick in square-jawed-and-haired-and-chested Howie Long. He’s an amoral soldier who doesn’t realize at first that he’s teamed up with an actual madman. Whoops. This was the start of an attempt to turn the ex-NFL player into an action star, which culminated in FIRESTORM, a notorious flop that’s much more enjoyable than this is.

It seems like Woo was trying his hand at making a normal, boring American action movie, so he said “You know what, it seems like these Americans like helicopters?” There’s a helicopter that crashes head first after Hale shoots the pilot, and then it flips over, one of its rotors swinging at Terry and almost chopping her up. Later there’s another helicopter that gets knocked out by the EMP of a (questionably contained underground) nuclear blast and crashes, also head first, exploding toward Terry and Hale. Still later, Hale flies in on a helicopter to get onto a train, and then it flies low and uses its rotor to chop up one of the gunmen on top (one of the only gore moments in the movie). The copter ends up crashing when the train goes into a tunnel, exploding three times. Immediately after that a guy is attacking Terry on the train next to a helicopter that they have onboard for their getaway, and she kicks the tail rotor so that it spins and knocks him over. Hale sabotages the fuel line on that copter so that when the pilot tries to start it it explodes.

The standard action movie rule is that if a bullet hits any kind of a gas tank or other container holding flammable liquid, that container will instantly explode. I noticed that John Woo U.S.A. follows a different rule. In HARD TARGET the motorcycle gets bullet holes in it and leaks gas for a while before it gets run over and/or hit again by his bullets and explodes. In BROKEN ARROW the humvee leaks gas from bullet holes, as do some barrels of some sort of flammable liquid that then catches fire.

The score is by Hans Zimmer but also Don L. Harper and Harry Gregson-Williams. One of them I think blew it with the way-too-busy music during the mine sequence, but the slower, more Zimmery stuff would be perfect for a better Woo movie. The guitar parts are played by Rock n Roll Hall of Famer Duane Eddy. I guess that sort of sets the stage for Zimmer’s rock band scoring of Woo’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 four years later.

still_brokenarrow In researching the history of BROKEN ARROW I found a reference to it being re-edited by the studio, but no details. The credited editors are Joe Hutshing (JFK, SAVAGES), Steve Mirkovich (BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, CON AIR, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST) and John Wright (SPEED, DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE). None of them worked on other Woo movies, and at times it felt to me like they weren’t quite in sync with his style. There are some well choreographed sequences of jumping onto and hanging off of moving vehicles, shooting, getting knocked around, chain reactions that seem like cool ideas but play out a little stiff, like maybe they should be moving a little faster. But this might just be because the actors did alot of their own stunts, and they aren’t exactly Jean-Claude Van Damme.

I always wondered if it was the studio or the bad experience with HARD TARGET that caused Woo to tone down his style to the point of practically seeming like a TV movie here. I think maybe he was trying to be culturally sensitive by respecting the opinions of the stupid motherfuckers who laughed at his operatic style in the test screenings of HARD TARGET. I found an interview where he says that after that experience “I took the time to learn more. I watched TV every day, kept in touch with other people and saw how they talk, how they feel. I found out what the real culture is. Then I had more compassion for the society.” Big mistake.

Other than a (humorously out of place, I must admit) shot of Travolta slow motion strutting into frame to the tune of his theme song…

…there is very little of Woo’s visual style. I did notice one poetic touch that I suspect Woo added or elaborated on: the camera follows a butterfly in flight across the water, meeting up with a large swarm that flutters toward our heroes standing on the shore in the distance. It ends up being mentioned in the dialogue (he says there can’t be radiation in the air, or the butterflies would be dead) but I’m betting the script doesn’t specify such fanciful visual emphasis on them. Also the shot resembles the show-stopping carrier pigeon one that bridges RED CLIFF parts I and II.

Woo actually considers BROKEN ARROW “closer to my style” than HARD TARGET because he gets in a little of his beloved theme of bonding between hero and villain, having them be former partners who sort of have in-jokes with each other, like using boxing terminology and having twenty dollar bets even as they battle over nuclear missiles. In the end when Hale discards the singed twenty left behind by Deakins he looks sad about the death of his former friend.

I feel like BROKEN ARROW is a somewhat forgotten film. It probly doesn’t help that as of this writing Amazon’s DVD and blu-ray links go to an audio cassette of the soundtrack, but the movie’s only-okayness has got to be the main factor. Overall ’96 was not a great year for action movies, but there were certainly better. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, in fact, did the American-helicopter-action so much better that Woo was forced to do a sequel to it. EXECUTIVE DECISION was a better take on a DIE HARD/UNDER SIEGE/SPEED type movie with pilots. THE ROCK in my opinion is not a very good movie, but with Cage’s performance is more memorable and honestly it has a more Woo-worthy honorable villain (maybe thanks to Tarantino’s script-doctoring?). I’ll have to revisit MAXIMUM RISK and THE QUEST, but I feel like those are better. THE PHANTOM, SET IT OFF and ESCAPE FROM L.A. aren’t really in the same genre, but are all movies with action elements that are much more fun and memorable than BROKEN ARROW. I think I also prefer LAST MAN STANDING, as flawed as it is. And I guess we could argue whether BROKEN ARROW is better or worse than ERASER, DAYLIGHT or BARB WIRE.

In fact, this movie is pretty representative of the failed hopes of that period 20 years ago. There were such thrilling new things going on in film in the couple years before that it was easy to get swept up. We were so excited about any John Woo movie, and we were so excited about reborn John Travolta. And then they kept disappointing us with movies that were not quite there. But you know what? We just had to be patient. They worked themselves out after a while. Sometimes great things take time.

BROKEN ARROW does endure in two obscure ways:

1) One of the themes was used as Dewey’s theme song in SCREAM 2, which people still watch sometimes

2) The name “Ain’t It Cool News” comes from the scene where Travolta’s told he’s out of his mind and he says, “Yeah, ain’t it cool?” Weird but true.

 

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Broken Arrow appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

“Okay, I understand that, but Jack you need to realize that your sunglasses are the only protection you have from all the white out there.”

woozoneusaB It wasn’t part of the original plan, but as I was re-watching the American John Woo movies I realized I had to revisit this 1998 USA Networks TV movie (and unfulfilled backdoor pilot), even though I did an okay job reviewing it long ago. I’ve recently had good luck recommending it to a couple people who never heard of it, but I hadn’t seen it myself in 11 years. Fortunately this thing (shot right after FACE/OFF) holds up as an absurd and entertaining Dolph Lundgren vehicle that transcends its cheapo format.

Dolph plays Jack Devlin, a world class bodyguard who seems to work out of Reno. In the opening he agrees to a favor for an old friend who owns a casino and needs him to protect his little girl Casey (Padraigin Murphy) from the mob. She calls him “Uncle Jack,” which I took literally this time, but my research tells me that they’re not actually related.

It goes down kind like in TAKEN, where the kids get to Europe and are immediately kidnapped. Here gunmen arrive about 30 seconds after Jack walks into the house with Casey. He’s checking the rooms upstairs when they come in.

I described this opening action scene in my original review, but I have to do it again to make it clear why this is not a drill, this is a must-see movie. During the gun battle (which involves plenty of Hong Kong style jumps and slides and debris) Jack is temporarily blinded by a grenade and has to carry Casey around on his back, telling him where to shoot or kick. “Roundhouse! 7 o’clock!” she says at one point, and it works. It’s kind of in the tradition of Tequila carrying the baby in HARD BOILED, except if he was blind and the baby was telling him where to shoot.

Then the place is gonna blow up so he throws her off the balcony, she bounces off a previously-established trampoline and lands safely in the swimming pool. He jumps just as a gigantic fireball singes his ass (a great stunt shown from two different angles and done I believe by stunt coordinator and Dolph double Wade Eastwood)…

still_blackjack10
…bounces off the trampoline in slow motion, and he fires back at the mansion (two handguns, of course), and they actually exchange shots back and forth, hitting each other, while he’s in mid-air. If that doesn’t make you smile then there’s nothing I can do for you, friend. My condolences.

He saves the girl, and some time passes, and he has his eyesight back, but a combination of the blinding white flash and traumatic childhood memories of the death of his gambler father has caused a phobia of the color white. Sometimes if he sees too much if it it weakens him like kryptonite or confuses him or messes up his vision. His psychiatrist (Kate Vernon, PRETTY IN PINK, MALCOLM X) has him wear sunglasses, so this is the rare movie with a psychiatric basis for the hero always wearing cool shades.

By the way, IMDb has some interesting trivia:

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I suppose that’s true, but I believe I can explain it. Since it’s a Woo movie he wears nice suits and shirts. He doesn’t want to take that shit off.

Meanwhile his old friend Tim (Fred Williamson) is running a security company that’s protecting super model Cinder James (Kam Heskin, THE PRINCE AND ME II through ELEPHANT ADVENTURE) from a stalker. Not just like a weirdo who tries to get past security, but a cunning assassin who tries to take her out with a sniper rifle while she’s doing some kind of event for a contract she signed. They treat her like she’s the president, talking about “locking down” all the surrounding buildings and having “six units of NYPD” there. I feel like maybe they should just face reality and do their fashion thing in a secure location. My tax dollars should not go to this shit.

mp_blackjack Jack doesn’t want to take the case until Tim gets shot. Then he takes over pro bono. This is not a Woo movie where hero and villain find that they’re alike. The hero is awesome and the villain is a gross sicko loser.

Jack carries weaponized playing cards and a Zippo lighter that was involved in his father’s death. He knows how to do card tricks, how to dance, how to do pain-curing (and orgasmic) chiropractic techniques, and how to help drug addicts. He had a problem with painkillers himself after the blinding/bouncing incident, so when he finds Cinder practically OD’d he knows to mambo with her limp body until she wakes/cheers up. When it gets real bad he calls in his psychiatrist, who wants to be alone with her and then apparently cures her of drug addiction offscreen during a period represented by a wipe.

At one point Jack also does a Jar Jar type move because he unknowingly saves Tim’s life by clumsily knocking over a poisoned IV at the hospital. Good bungle, Jack.

Phillip MacKenzie (a zombie in the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake) plays the villainous stalker who turns out to be Rory, Cinder’s ex-husband, a “failed actor gone haywire” who does Shakespeare scenes by himself and “word on the street says he’s been training in weapons.” He shakes and cries while aiming at her with his sniper pistol. He claims to love her and be protecting her.

In one scene he keeps a butterfly in a jar. So there’s that motif from BROKEN ARROW. There it represented the survival of man and nature despite the evil of the nuclear bomb. Here it represents something beautiful cruelly deprived of its freedom.

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The best thing about Rory is that he has three faceless henchmen on motorcycles. I thought maybe I was misremembering that, but it’s true, and I still haven’t picked up an explanation of why they would be willing to kill and die (though they only end up doing the second one I believe) to help him stalk his ex-wife.

When he captures Jack he ties him to a chair, sits in a throne watching him and sets up five dummies made out of hay wearing blond female wigs with his friend Thomas (Saul Rubinek, UNFORGIVEN, DEATH WISH V) inside one of them so he keeps shooting them to scare Jack. Kind of an eccentric thing to do, in my opinion. But Jack uses his bladed playing card to cut the rope and throw at Rory, slicing his cheek so he’ll say “Oh my God – my face! You’re dead, Jack!” I guess since he’s an actor he’s vain, like Brakus in BEST OF THE BEST 2.

still_blackjack11 Another aspect that I wondered if I was making too much of it in my memory was the possibility that Jack is supposed to be gay. But it’s there just as much as I remember. At a glance you would assume that Thomas is Jack’s butler or something, but only because he cooks for him and takes care of him and lives at his house. They never treat each other like boss and employee. Jack introduces him more than once as “my friend” or “my friend Thomas.”Also, Thomas has some sort of past that gives him expertise in guns, which seems more like a guy that Jack would have a personal relationship with than a guy he would hire to cook and clean for him. Anyway, does Jack really have the money or lifestyle for a full time live in servant? And if that’s all he was, why would Rory choose him as the hostage to make Jack do his bidding?

There’s lots of dialogue that can be read two ways, including implications that Thomas is jealous of Jack buying a woman flowers. To be fair, Jack and Cinder do kiss once at the very end, but it seems like a one-and-done peck, definitely not a “we’re together now” or a “and now we have sex” type of kiss. So it doesn’t prove anything.

The opening is not the only great action. Maybe it lacks a trampoline, but I think the best chunk of action starts with one of Rory’s moto-maniacs attacking the security convoy by sliding a motorcycle under the limo and blowing it up with a time bomb. Then Rory walks out of the woods with a shotgun. His motorcycle guys drive by with machine guns and Jack does a couple of ultimate John Woo moves:

1. Slow motion two pistol launch off of burning car tackling guy off of motorcycle and landing in a somersault

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2. Stealing a motorcycle and purposely falling sideways and shooting up in the air at a motorcycle jumping over him and shooting down at him and then that motorcycle lands in the flaming car and explodes and crashes and lands on top of him.

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3. On the motorcycle he chases Rory, who’s on foot, but somehow goes from being like 5 feet in front of him to outrunning him and heading down an alley and into a warehouse, where Jack gets chased down a ramp by another motorcycle guy and spins around and drives backwards firing somewhere around 20 bullets until the motorcycle explodes into flames but then the guy drives out like a Terminator doing a flaming wheelie but then he falls off and Jack leaves.

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And that’s when we get to the famous (in my mind) scene where Jack chases Rory into a dairy and gets milk poured on him and can’t fight anymore because he’s afraid of the color white and somehow Rory figures this out and starts wearing white suits and hanging up white sheets for the rest of the movie.

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It’s kind of like reverse BLADE, because it’s all leading to Jack taking his sunglasses off when they eventually face off (no slash) again. In fact he purposely steps on them to be free of them. It’s like Luke taking off his headset and using The Force to blow up the Death Star. (that’s from Star Wars.) He can overcome his fear of white to win this fight against a guy in a white tux.

still_blackjack12 Even though it was made on less than one-fifth the budget and for a small screen and with Toronto TV crews, BLACKJACK infinitely more exciting than BROKEN ARROW. The second unit director and co-stunt-coordinator is Ken Quinn, who was the stunt double for RoboCop in the TV show. He did stunts in the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake as well as actual George Romero movies BRUISER and SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD. It does look a little TV-ish, and has a 4.3 aspect ratio, but the feel, again, is more Woo, owing in part to a high volume of slow motion shots. The cinematographer is Bill Wong, a Hong Kong guy who shot GOD OF KILLERS, ZU: WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, YES MADAM, ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA, etc. before coming to the U.S. to shoot Woo’s Once a Thief TV series.

And like HARD TARGET it’s a good mix of the Woo style and a particularly ridiculous strain of American action movie. So many “better” movies wouldn’t have the hero be afraid of a color, and then have a liquid of that color poured on him, and that’s why they are so boring and we forgot what happened in them. BLACKJACK waves its freak flag high, and in slow motion, with fire and butterflies all around it. Weirdly, though, screenwriter Peter Lance seems like a very serious guy. He was an Emmy-winning reporter and investigative correspondent for 20/20 and Nightline before he started writing for procedurals including Crime Story, Miami Vice, Walker, Texas Ranger and The Sentinel. BLACKJACK was his last credit before 9/11 sent him back into journalism, where he helped link the attacks to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He has written several acclaimed investigative books, mostly relating to terrorism, starting with 2003’s 1000 Years for Revenge, which argued that the FBI had many chances to stop 9/11. He only returned to television for the 2006 mini-series The Path to 9/11.

One time I tried to email him to ask if Jack and Thomas were really supposed to be gay, but I guess exhaustively researching the activities of terrorists and mobsters made him too busy to respond to a random dude.

I wonder what this would’ve been like if it had been picked up as a series? I guess Jack would protect different clients, raise Casey, spend some more time in casinos. Someone besides Woo would’ve directed and other episodes would most likely be lighter on flaming cars and motorcycles and buildings and people. So fuck that. We got the better option. Third best American John Woo movie, and a great showcase for Dolph.

 

NOTE: Look how cheap that is! Can you honestly tell me you don't need BLACKJACK in your life for $5.99?

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Blackjack (second review) appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

tn_windtalkers woozoneusaB WINDTALKERS is an American John Woo picture that I kinda hated at the time. I can prove it: here’s my review. But I watched it again and although I don’t really disagree with anything I said in that review, now I think it’s okay. Maybe this is because I watched the director’s cut, which is longer and more violent, like a real John Woo movie. Maybe it’s because I came to it with different hopes and expectations, having already not liked it. Or maybe it’s because I’ve grown and changed as a person and movie watcher since the last time. I suspect it’s a combination of all three.

This is Woo’s WWII movie, which makes sense because it’s about male bonding through violence, but also the evil of endless violence, and also a pretty invisible minority (the Navajo) reaching across cultural lines to achieve a common goal, much like Woo making movies in Hollywood.

Nicolas Cage, five years after his triumphant turn as Castor Troy/Sean-Archer-wearing-Castor-Troy’s-face in FACE/OFF, plays the less exciting but also conflicted protagonist Joe Ender, a marine who gets a medal for getting blown up but blames himself for not listening to his men’s cries to let them retreat. They all died because he stuck to his orders. After some time healing up and cheating on tests at the veteran’s hospital he jumps at the first chance to get back into combat, which turns out to be protecting Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach, FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS), a rookie who has been recruited because he speaks Navajo. A batch of “code talkers” communicate over the radio not only in this rare language, but using code words. For example, the Navajo word for “tortoise” means “tank.” A Japanese radio interceptor can’t even tell what language it is, says it sounds like they’re underwater. It’s an unbreakable code. Unless one of these guys get captured. And they kinda seem like they might.

mp_windtalkers Along with Ben you got his old friend Charlie (Roger Willie, ADAPTATION), protected by Ox (Christian Slater, BROKEN ARROW). Neither seem up for a fight. They’re nervous just being around the other soldiers, many of whom throw racist shit at them. In particular there’s Chick (Noah Emmerich, COP LAND), a redneck who talks about Custer and shit. At one point he jumps Ben when he’s cleaning himself and claims “I thought he was a nip” because his uniform was off. Double racism! (This is a clever scene too because it sets up a later one where Ben decides to put on a Japanese uniform to infiltrate their camp.)

But Ender is not just a bodyguard. He’s not even mainly a bodyguard. He actually has secret orders to kill Ben if he’s gonna be captured. They can’t have that tortoise stuff tortured out of him. Here he is again, ready to follow orders at the expense of someone who is increasingly his friend.

Cage does low-grade mega, constantly stressed out, dramatically popping pills (a Cage favorite), and even having a few bouts of inappropriate laughter (when they’re getting shelled by their own side and don’t have a radio to tell them to stop, when he’s telling the story of giving away his first medal). Beach comes off as a regular, nice guy. So Joe’s bond with Ben is more of a “this is a nice enough guy with a family and stuff, he doesn’t deserve to die” than a “this man is my brother, we are of the same blood, we are one” type thing. Maybe that’s why Joe’s willing to die for him. He doesn’t feel the need to have more time to hang out with him.

The friendship between Ox and Charlie is a little better. Ox is the only white guy that seems to notice how the Navajo are being treated and make an effort to invite them into card games and stuff. He hears Charlie playing his flute and decides to jam with him on his harmonica. Two distinct sounds styles coming together to form a new sound, one that can only exist from cultures coming together.

still_windtalkers At least in the director’s cut this is definitely the most violence in an American John Woo movie. It’s a whole fucking lot of shooting, stabbing, exploding, running, screaming, burning, shooting some more, blowing up some more, repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat two more times. The war scenes – like in Woo’s other anti-war films, BULLET IN THE HEAD and (arguably) HEROES SHED NO TEARS – are chaotic and feverish, soldiers trudging and killing through endless stretches of dirt and trees and oil barrels and shit. They’re a little heightened, because there are alot of somersaults, and more using bayonets like swords than your usual white boy Americans want to do in a war movie. But also machine guns and pistols and the shit that you’d expect.

Actually, I think it’s a weakness of the script that so much of this is about shooting and burning people when the basis of the story is this code. There are a couple scenes about trying to get radios for the code talkers to use, but it could use a little more emphasis on their task, since that’s the one part of the story that stands out from every other WWII movie ever made.

Otherwise it doesn’t really seem stylistically Woo-ish too often, but there’s actually one motif tying it to BROKEN ARROW and BLACKJACK. The shot that introduces Cage starts on a butterfly! People make fun of Woo for using doves alot, but those guys are amateurs, they have no idea that he also uses butterflies alot.

In this one it flies along the water, much like the butterfly in BROKEN ARROW.

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But then it comes to some blood in the water and immediately darts away, never to be seen again.

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There goes the innocence, I suppose. The blood turns out to be coming from a dead American soldier laying in the water, and the camera pans up to Nicolas Cage above him, firing a machine gun at somebody.

I retain my original dislike of the score by James Horner. He seems to often go for majestic and patriotic while the imagery is going for human misery and nightmarish mayhem, and not in a way that seems like deliberate juxtaposition. To me it plays more like he and Woo never got to meet to discuss the movie or make corrections. The music is often distractingly overblown and at odds with what’s underneath, confusing the mood and interfering with the momentum of the action.

Despite what the music seems to think, this is a movie that barely even hints at the purpose of The Good War. As much as the movie respects and sides with the soldiers in their plight, it is very much not a celebration of war. When Joe’s nurse girlfriend (Francis O’Connor, A.I.) mentions in a letter that she hears the war is going well and may be close to an end, you realize that these guys are never privy to the bigger picture. To them they’re not fighting toward a specific strategic goal, they’re just killing, killing, killing until they’re told to stop.

And nobody enjoys it. Woo is very fond of showing the soldiers looking regretful after killing. The codetalkers try to avoid even getting involved in the fighting for a while. At one point Joe finishes off a guy for Ben and it seems like a very thoughtful favor to not make him do it. But even Joe at one point is so nervous about making a mistake again that he pukes.

There’s a guy in their squad named Harrigan (Brian Van Holt, BULLET TO THE HEAD) who uses a blowtorch. In one scene he sprays a Japanese gun station with flames, and two guys run out on fire, flailing and screaming in agony. In HARD BOILED this would be an awesome moment, but here Woo plays it as horrendous. We get to both Harrigan and Ben looking horrified by what they’ve just done.

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Poor Harrigan gets maybe the Woo-iest death. He sees a little girl crying in a village so he kneels down, talks nice to her, gives her a chocolate bar. This sweetness is abruptly interrupted by a gorey, meaty shot to his shoulder as a Japanese squad comes over the hill. He picks up the girl and Tequila/Jack Devlins her out of the way, then puts her down and tells her to run, but she just stands there crying. All he can do is throw a Hershey bar to Mark Ruffalo, get her to chase it like a dog chasing a tennis ball. Then he turns to use his torch on the enemies, but a bullet hits the tank on his back, and this happens:

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And he stumbles and crawls around on fire and screaming (like those two Japanese soldiers he felt bad about killing earlier) until Joe comes over and shoots him.

Man, that poor girl is never gonna eat a candy bar again.

At its heart this is a movie about characters, particularly Joe and his learning to value friendship and humanity over what he’s supposed to do. And also it’s about the white dudes in general learning through experience that these Navajo boys are good people.

But more than anything I think it served to give Woo practice mounting giant battle scenes in a period setting. Six years later he fluttered away from Hollywood to do one of his best movies, the epic two-parter RED CLIFF. So far he hasn’t been back.

 

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post Windtalkers (second review) appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

tn_thekiller woozone As a guy specializing in writing about action movies, sometimes I worry I’m documenting an ancient art form. I romanticize a time when action movies were a rite of passage, a father-son bonding tradition and a major passion for many young people, especially males, but it seems like the youth of today aren’t necessarily interested in this shit. And if they don’t grow up on it then they’re never gonna have that moment when they get a little older and become aware of the other powerful strains of it from around the world.

That makes me sad because whatever they’re watching instead cannot possibly match the rush of joy I got when I saw my first John Woo movie – which was THE KILLER – or each time I revisit his classics now. At the time there was nothing else like it. Somehow that seems even more true today.

The things that are greatest about THE KILLER might be the things that would seem silliest to younger people: the unabashed style and the the unbridled, unironic emotion. I remember people who came up a few years after the era when Hong Kong action cinema was the coolest thing going – people who are old and decrepit now – who would make jokes about John Woo’s doves. “Ha ha, two pistols, and some doves, am I right? Ha ha, I know about a trademark, I have defeated him.”

Well, THE KILLER is gonna be way too much for anybody like that. And maybe I gotta face that they just don’t deserve THE KILLER. The cards are laid on the table in the opening, when Chow Yun-Fat as Ah Jong (or “Jeff Chow,” according to the credits) meets with his Triad manager Fung Sei (Paul Chu Kong) in an empty church at night. That happens in all action movies, but this church is lit with what must be a thousand candles, and there are doves and pigeons flying around, landing on the cross.

“Do you believe in all this?” Fung asks.

“I like it because it’s quiet in here,” Ah Jong says. “I feel comfortable just sitting here.”

(Note: I’d heard that the Dragon Dynasty Blu-Ray has “dubtitles,” transcribed from the dub instead of a direct translation, but it’s not true. The dubbed dialogue is very different and less natural, for example Fung directly asks “Do you believe in God?”)

See, it’s hypocritical for an assassin to hang out in a church. That he wants to symbolizes that there’s still a part of him that is good, that cares about (as the subtitles say throughout the movie) “honor and ethics.” That’s what this story is about. He’s sent to kill a gangster at a night club, and he does it. But of course this erupts into a full on gun fight. The place doesn’t look that much bigger than my apartment, and he fires around fifty bullets. He tries to shield the innocent club singer Jennie (Sally Yeh, PEKING OPERA BLUES), but fires his gun near her face and damages her eyes. And he feels bad. He kills people for a living, but this lady, who did nothing, who sings sappy songs that speak to the heart, he didn’t want to fuck up her life.

mp_thekiller In contrast to his cold-bloodedness moments ago when he kicked a table to flip it over and catapult a gun into his hand to shoot a guy with, Ah Jong looks immediately horrified. Jennie flails around, grabs onto a table cloth and pulls it down. He embraces her, tries to calm her, wraps his scarf around her bloody eyes.

One montage later – during which he hovers, listens to her sing and watches her, feeling like an asshole – he has one of those movie moments where he just happens to see two dudes walk up to her in an alley and try to gang rape her and he runs in and beats them up (an easy day for action director Ching Siu-Tung). He becomes her friend and protector. She can kind of see shapes, but not enough to recognize him as that last face she saw that’s burnt into her memory, staring at her through a sea of blood. He’s honestly not trying to get into a romantic comedy lie with her, but it happens. And her sight is getting worse, so he agrees to take one last job for HK 1.5 million so he can bring her to the States and get her surgery. He has to assassinate a politician as he ceremonially paints dots on the eyes of a dragonboat. Giving it new corneas.

Back in the day it was the gun fights that most captured our imaginations – firing two pistols at a time, sometimes while leaping through the air, pointing around corners, sliding or rolling, only seeming to reload when it was needed for dramatic effect. I guess Woo’s poetic fetishization of guns is a hard sell right now, as horrific gun violence increasingly terrorizes the citizens and fattens the wallets of the politicians willing to stand up and pretend that refusing to do anything about it means freedom and America and eagles and shit. But Woo, who last I heard claimed to have never fired a gun himself, has a different approach than the hardware-obsessed American action films of that decade (think RAMBO or PREDATOR). His shoot outs seem more based in the martial arts, emphasizing the movements of the combatants. Someone coined the term “bullet ballet,” and that was generally how we thought of Woo’s movies.

But in THE KILLER, and later BULLET IN THE HEAD, Woo (like one of his heroes, Peckinpah) alternates between thrilling action and sobering reminders of its consequences. Ah Jong’s pursuer Inspector Li (Danny Lee, CITY ON FIRE) says “every shot takes a life,” which is heartfelt, but not technically true. Usually several shots are used for each life. At the dragonboat festival Ah Jong hits his target right between the eyes and still puts two more in his back as he falls. But the iconic image of Woo’s shootouts is not anything to do with bloody squibs exploding out of people, it’s a Mexican standoff. Two men standing with guns aimed or pressed against each other. Mutually assured destruction.

To this day, nobody has matched Woo’s gunplay scenes, and yet it’s the style he lathers on outside of the carnage that really captivates me: the dreamy slow motion shots, the wavy bars of yellow, red, white and magenta neon reflected across wet cobblestone, the shot of Ah Jong in a dark suit, leaning casually against a wall in the club, bathed in red light, motionless, before he disappears from sight while others pass in front of him.

Woo likes to slow down time to admire the imagery, but he can also speed up to be kinetic. A scene of police discussing how to stop the assassination at the festival is laced with quick flashes of the boats racing, like the movie is so excited to get started it’s accidentally jumping ahead in time.

The documentary-like scenery of the festival widens the scale of the movie, but the highlight of the sequence is after Ah Jong flees from the police and then gets attacked on a beach by the Triads who hired him in the first place. A little girl is wounded in the crossfire, and he picks her up and drives off with her (evidence that his guilt over Jennie is not merely based in infatuation, as well as a precursor to HARD BOILED‘s iconic image of Chow running around with a gun in one hand and a baby in the other).

This is how Li is able to catch up with Ah Jong. He suspects, to the confusion of his colleagues, that this killer has a conscience, and will bring the girl to the nearest hospital. This is the ultimate iteration of one of Woo’s favorite themes, the two men on opposite sides who bond because they are reflected in each other.

Jennie even mistakes Li for Ah Jong when he approaches her in the restaurant. They become the two friendly men in her life, neither letting her in on what’s actually going on. It’s a complicated situation when Ah Jong and Li show up at her apartment at the same time and have each other at gun point, but they don’t want to upset her so they pretend to be old soccer friends, taunting each other with double meanings, aiming guns past her head because she can’t see them. This may sound like a farcical scene, but it’s played more for tension than laughs.

Many strong parallels are drawn between the two. When we first see Li he’s undercover. Just like Ah Jong, he’s lying about himself to get closer to someone. And when his betrayal is found out he chases some suspects onto a crowded trolley, and one of the hostages is so scared she has a heart attack. So both of them have friendly fire incidents. Ironically, it’s the cop who’s defensive about the tragedy and the killer who feels the need for redemption.

Later Li is retracing Ah Jong’s steps and sits in a chair where he figures out he was sitting when he shot somebody coming through the door. Woo brilliantly flashes between Ah Jong doing the shooting and Li re-enacting it, a piece of visual language that both tells us what Li has figured out and forces us to see them as the same.

It’s not as if the West was experiencing a dearth of action movies at this time. As THE KILLER was released in Hong Kong, LETHAL WEAPON 2 came out in the U.S. Also that year: KICKBOXER, ROAD HOUSE, BEST OF THE BEST, DEAD BANG, TANGO & CASH, THE PUNISHER. But when Woo’s films made it stateside they seemed like a revelation, a much more powerful strain of action than the type we’d grown used to. He gave us a jolt of adrenaline by depicting violence in an over-the-top style unlike anything we’d ever seen, then he turned around and tried to make us feel sad.

Woo’s best movies, and much of Hong Kong action cinema of the era, are rife with melodrama that may be off-putting to Americans only comfortable with cynicism, irony and wiseassedness. The idea of exploring the respect and loyalty between two male characters seemed so alien to the West that it was a cliche to refer to Woo’s films as “homoerotic,” as if friendship between men can only mean they want to fuck each other. In THE KILLER, Ah Jong not only befriends his enemy Li, but has an intense relationship with Fung, who considers betraying him to save his own ass from the Triads. The idea of the bond being broken and having to kill his old friend is so upsetting to Ah Jong that it looks like he’s about to cry. To me this intensity of emotion is not a quirk, it’s a big part of the appeal. Hong Kong action heroes are in touch with their inner the-end-of-FIRST-BLOOD-when-he-cries-to-Trautman.

Li seems somewhat worshipful of Ah Jong. Describing him to a sketch artist, he says that “He has a manly air about him. He’s a bit different from your average murderer. He’s very calm, quite intelligent. His eyes are very alert. Full of compassion. Full of passion.”

Yep, that sounds like Chow Yun-Fat all right. In Hong Kong, Chow had already gone from TV actor to movie superstar with his role as Mark in Woo’s A BETTER TOMORROW, which smashed all Hong Kong box office records in 1986 and won Chow a Hong Kong Film Award for best actor. But this is him at his most suave. He wears nice timeless suits or a tux with that white silk scarf. He has perfect hair. In disguises sometimes he looks even better – a mustache, salt and pepper hair, sunglasses, in a speed boat, with a sniper rifle like Golgo 13. It created a new image for Chow.

Had Woo had his way, there would’ve been an extra layer of smoothness, as he wanted Jennie to be a jazz singer and Ah Jong a saxophone player. Producer Tsui Hark put his foot down, believing jazz didn’t translate to Chinese audiences. Instead, Ah Jong’s badass juxtaposition is to play sad harmonica while looking up at the church steeple.

I never noticed this before, but there are some interesting parallels between THE KILLER and Woo’s career. When Ah Jong does the assassination, the Triads who hired him immediately turn on him and try to have him killed. For Woo’s part, Tsui was producing THE KILLER but turned on him when they disagreed about the editing of A BETTER TOMORROW 2, and Woo had to get the rest of the funds from Chow and Lee. Ah Jong took that last high-paying job so he could bring Jennie to America where there’s a better chance of getting her a cornea transplant. Woo actually had a few more jobs (BULLET IN THE HEAD, ONCE A THIEF and HARD BOILED, where he stuck both middle fingers up at Tsui by opening with Chow playing sax in a jazz club), but he too headed for the U.S. looking for opportunity.

Though I assume this is coincidental and intentionally reflecting his situation, Woo did start filming THE KILLER with only a treatment and wrote most of it while filming. An argument could be made for some of the story being autobiographical, at least subconsciously.

Released in Hong Kong a month after the Tiananmen Square massacre, THE KILLER was not an immediate hit like A BETTER TOMORROW. But it did go on to acclaim, winning best director and editing at the Hong Kong Film Awards. (It was nominated for best picture, but lost to something called BEYOND THE SUNSET, which is not available on video in the U.S.) Chow was not nominated for his acting in THE KILLER, but he actually won that year for Johnnie To’s ALL ABOUT AH-LONG and was also nominated for GOD OF GAMBLERS (among his opponents were Jackie Chan in MIRACLES and Sammo Hung in EIGHT TAELS OF GOLD). Paul Chu Kong got a best supporting actor nomination for playing Ah Jong’s manager and confidant.

In Leone terms, I consider THE KILLER to be kind of like A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS to HARD BOILED’s THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Or in James Cameron terms, THE TERMINATOR to TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY. I generally prefer the sprawling epic, but sometimes you want a tighter, more contained story. THE KILLER is a beautiful, envelope-pushing work of crime cinema, using extreme characters to show the fallacy of good guys and bad guys; the potential for man to fuck up, but also to make amends. It’s a perfectly mixed cocktail of technical elegance, balls-to-the-wall awesomeness and heart-on-the-sleeve sentimentality. Required viewing.

 

VERN

http://outlawvern.com

The post The Killer appeared first on Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinema.

“Very impressive. Though perhaps a bit excessive.”

–a quote from John Woo’s MANHUNT that I do not believe applies to the movie itself because the concept of excess does not exist in the Woo Zone

Welcome back to the Woo Zone, a dimension of violence and poetry, of bonding between enemies, of glorious slow motion badassness and tragic desecration of symbols of peace and redemption. When we’re not in the Zone, many of us have resigned ourselves to a world where John Woo is in the past, a face on Action Movie Mount Rushmore, but not a currently active artist. If that’s you, I am honored to bring you word of MANHUNT, Woo’s highly enjoyable new movie which has just been undeservedly sentenced to a Netflix dump in May. I saw it by buying a legitimate region A, English subtitled blu-ray from Yesasia.

The hype around this has been that it could be a return-to-form for the maestro, at last returning to contemporary-Hong-Kong-crime-action-male-bonding-with-doves after a detour into Hollywood studio movies (MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2, PAYCHECK) and then massive Chinese historical action (RED CLIFF). And that’s pretty much true. There are “good guys” and “bad guys” who gain respect for each other. There are a whole bunch of thrilling action sequences and guns used with artistic license. And I will definitely be telling you some things about the doves. There are some topnotch doves in this one. There’s also some dancing. Because Woo was once a dance instructor.

But Woo – despite throwing in a line of dialogue referencing the title of his breakthrough movie – doesn’t seem primarily interested in making a throwback to his own classics like THE KILLER and HARD BOILED. This is kind of his tribute to Japanese cinema. He made it to show his respect for recently deceased favorite actor Ken Takakura, who inspired Chow Yun-Fat’s style in A BETTER TOMORROW. It’s based on a book by Juko Nishimura that was made into a 1976 movie starring Takakura (not available on U.S. video – whatchya gonna do about that, Netflix?). Though some of the stars are Chinese it takes place in (and was filmed in) Osaka, Japan.

Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu, BODYGUARDS AND ASSASSINS, THE GREAT WALL) is a Chinese lawyer at a major Japanese pharmaceutical firm. One morning he wakes up in a hotel with a dead woman (Tao Okamoto – the cool sidekick from THE WOLVERINE) next to him. He knows he didn’t do it so he calls the cops, but they arrest him. Things look bad, but he knows the law, and surely he can– oh shit, this cop Asano (Kuniharu Tokunaga) tries to fake like Du Qiu stole a cop’s gun, and he has to make a run for it to avoid getting shot.

So it’s a U.S. MARSHALS kind of story – man on the run, set up in a conspiracy, has to stay ahead of his pursuers long enough to find out what’s going on and prove his innocence. (I say U.S. MARSHALS and not THE FUGITIVE because they seem to have framed him intentionally.) His Tommy Lee Jones is Detective Satoshi Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama, RUROUNI KENSHIN), who gets your traditional action movie supercop intro: using a trick (pretending to be some pushy livestreamer guy) to fearlessly walk into a hostage/bomb situation unarmed and then knock away the guns and arrest the militants. Woo also shoots Yamura’s feet strutting in like he’s a regular Tequila or Chance Boudreaux, but in my opinion the shoes he’s wearing look kind of dorky so I take that as a character moment. He’s kind of a square but he gets it done.

He also has a brand new partner, young Rika (Sakuraba Nanami, ATTACK ON TITAN), who he’s very gruff to, but it’s hard to dampen her enthusiasm.

There’s alot of good chasing on foot, through a subway tunnel, in a car, on jet skis. There are disguises and tricks and hostages. Vehicles flip and explode. Motorcycles drive through a house. He ends up in a shantytown where the homeless hide and shelter him. These are people who compete to be chosen as drug test volunteers for the very company Du Qiu has been working for. I guess they have faith that the volunteers never coming back means they’re off living the good life. Kind of like the pigs at the beginning of BABE when they see other pigs loaded onto trucks.

Du Qiu also gets some help from half-Chinese local Mayumi (Qi Wei), who he met at a party the night before everything went to shit, but there is some tension because, see, her fiance committed suicide after losing a lawsuit to Du Qiu. She had approached him trying to convince him to be a whistleblower or something, and got mixed up in all this shit.

Another complication: two fierce assassins on his ass. Their names are Rain (Ha Ji-won of South Korea) and Dawn (Angeles Woo, Woo’s daughter who was also in REIGN OF ASSASSINS and THE CROSSING) and they come in guns blazing on motorcycle-back. In another life this group could be friendly, people who would bump into each other and discover a mutual love for old movies and quote favorite lines from them. In fact, in another scene they could be that, because at the beginning of the movie Du Qiu happens to go into a cafe and have just such a conversation with them, not knowing that as soon as he leaves they’re gonna perform a massacre.

(My guess is that the lines they’re quoting are from the original MANHUNT, but I haven’t been able to confirm or disprove that theory.)

It gets more convoluted and more crazy as it goes along. This whole mess has something to do with (SPOILER) experimental drugs that give people super-strength and fortitude. So there is some climactic fighting with punches that send people across the room, and there’s some mind control and shit. Though it does have some of the spirit of those Hong Kong masterpieces we love, I consider this drug stuff to be a different thing I love in goofy Hollywood Woo. The third act shift into far-fetched sci-fi concepts made me think of FACE/OFF, and the willingness to be ludicrous reminded me of HARD TARGET, BLACKJACK and M:I 2. Also hats off to the high speed jet ski chase, which reminds me of the speedboat one in FACE/OFF. Which is a good thing.

Composer Taro Iwashiro is Japanese – he did AZUMI and the Japanese remake of UNFORGIVEN – but he’d already worked with Woo on RED CLIFF and THE CROSSING, and his score is kind of on the smooth side of jazzy, something Tequila would approve of.

There’s no butterfly imagery ala BROKEN ARROW or WINDTALKERS. This is dove Woo. I like for directors to have trademarks, so I hate when people make fun of Woo’s doves (it especially kills me when it’s a young person who skipped their Woo phase and that’s all they know about him, probly picked up from some Youtube wiseass or something). I am happy to report that in MANHUNT a car chase crashes right into some sort of dove coop and leaves them flying around for a whole fight scene. I believe there are some special effects involved, but otherwise this would be the ultimate Woo dove scene because (DOVE SPOILER) this is what happens: Yamura gets Du Qiu’s gun and is pointing it at him at close range, but a dove flies right in front of the barrel so Du Qiu uses that moment to kick him, and Yamura falls backwards in slow motion, and the dove flies past him so he turns his head to look at it, causing his skull to just miss landing on a large rock. The dove is like an angelic force that intervenes, preventing each of them from killing the other, so that they can eventually make peace. And there’s at least one other part where a dove seems to be observing or helping. Good work, doves.

There’s not a scene where a church gets shot up – instead there are two weddings, one in the present, one in flashback. And then the dress from the first wedding, saved as a memorial, gets filled with bullet holes. Similarly, some horses get shot at and chased by motorcycles. Violence always encroaches on purity in the Woo Zone.

But also enemies find mutual ground and form a bond. Du Qiu and Yamura pull Mayumi out of an upside down car together. Then they end up handcuffed to each other and have to fight off assassins, running around in perfect synchronicity to kick down a door, unsheathe a sword, reload a gun, slide across a floor shooting like a couple of Chow Yun Fats. There’s a great moment where Du Qiu gets a wounded Yamura to the hospital. Yamura has him uncuffed and tells him he never saw him. “You’re free. Go.” Smash cut to Du Qiu carrying him into the hospital anyway. He had a chance to go and he made his choice.

How is it that these guys are sent after each other and try to kill each other a bunch of times and then they decide they’re best friends? In this one, at the end, we get the female perspective: It’s because “men are simple beings.” Fair enough. I guess I like stories about simple beings.

I’m not gonna tell you this is Woo at 100% HARD BOILED powers. There’s definitely some yolk left. There are a few really weird and awkward storytelling techniques (still photos with ADR dialogue?) and the squeaky clean digital look really makes me miss filmstock. On the other hand he still has an enthusiasm for trying new things, such as a DePalma-esque sequence where Yamura and Rika try to piece together the murder based on the evidence. Rika starts to visualize herself as the victim and gets upset. Yamura sees the body outline dissolve into the victim, and sees himself handing the murder weapon to Du Qiu. By “seeing” it he realizes why it couldn’t be, why Du Qiu must be innocent.

This whole movie has an energy, an enthusiasm, and a specific point-of-view that I have been missing. It doesn’t have to be one of the top Woo movies for it to be a wonderful gift from the doves.

The post Manhunt first appeared on VERN'S REVIEWS on the FILMS of CINEMA.

I can’t explain this, and it’s embarrassing to admit, but somehow I had never seen ONCE A THIEF (1991) until now. How the hell did I not watch the movie that John Woo and Chow Yun Fat did between their two greatest home runs? Especially since I even watched the North American TV pilot he made based on it five years later! I knew this was gonna be more light-hearted and comedic than THE KILLER and HARD BOILED and that I probly wouldn’t like it nearly as much, but come on. Obviously it was something I needed to see. As I should fuckin known, it’s a fun time with some great stunts and action and a type of ludicrousness I enjoy in many Hong Kong films, if not usually Woo’s.

The story is about a trio of thieves, Cherie (Cherie Chung, PEKING OPERA BLUES), Joey and Jim (Chow Yun Fat and Leslie Cheung, reuniting after A BETTER TOMORROW 1 and 2). We meet them as they’re staking out an art museum for a heist, with Joey walking around admiring the art in the suave manner of Chow Yun Fat, Cherie pretending to be an idiot walking her dog through some deliverymen so she can mark the crate that holds the painting they’re planning to steal, and Joey strutting to his motorcycle in a leather jacket and scarf, bragging to a random street artist that he’s a famous thief. Soon they’re performing a really cool FAST AND FURIOUS-esque mobile truck heist that involved climbing on and under the truck, cutting a hole through the bottom, and gliding away with a parachute.

Joey and Cherie are apparently in love, which seems a little weird when we learn from flashbacks that these three grew up together as orphans, learning to pickpocket from abusive guardian Chow (Kenneth Tsang, also from A BETTER TOMORROW, as well as THE KILLER and THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS) before getting help from a nice police officer, (Paul Chu, also in THE KILLER), who has a chance to bust them but instead buys them food and becomes their godfather. As adults they live together in a beautiful rich people place where they do lots of joking around, including prank cakes and pushing each other into their full-sized indoor swimming pool with a wall of windows with a view of the lake it’s right next to.

Cherie has more qualms about stealing than the boys, and she’s also the only one who speaks French, so when a rich French guy tries to hire them to steal a painting from a castle she mistranslates to make both parties believe no deal is agreed to. But the boys go ahead and plan the robbery anyway – separately, and then they run into each other inside. (You know how men are.) The heist involves scaling a cliff with a grappling gun and discovering a secret room behind a fake cellar. (Is it a shame or pretty cool to have an amazing painting and then keep it in a stone chamber hidden behind a wall and the floor will kill you if you step on it but it’s always well-lit with candles anyway?)

There is some wonderful ludicrousness where Joey launches off Jim’s back and hangs from his feet from a chandelier and then Joey does a weird gravity-defying flip and Joey grabs his ankles and they swing like trapeze artists to grab the painting and then Jim does a back flip and Joey is left holding his shoes. (I remember the equivalent scene in Woo’s pilot for the North American TV series adaptation and I assumed it was his tribute to Ethan Hunt hanging in the quiet room in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, but of course I should’ve known Woo got there first.) Once they get the painting they still have to acrobatically navigate a grid of security lasers (which for some reason they’re able to see by looking through glasses of wine).

Although the action doesn’t have the poetic beauty of Woo’s best, he certainly lets loose with the stunts. Philip “Mad Dog” Kwok is the action coordinator, with Bruce Law (SUPERCOP 2) coordinating car stunts and fire sequences – both would also do HARD BOILED. I love the part where a bunch of cars roll down a big set of steps at the same time, like they’re toys being blown around by a leaf blower. A minute later there’s a sequence that involves Jim getting rammed on his motorcycle, jumping and rolling off and shooting the car so it blows up, then continuing a shootout with a bunch of people on foot and another set of people zooming past on a speed boat. Flowers and newspapers get shredded by bullets, Jim runs and rescues a kid in the middle of it all (just like Chow in THE KILLER) and Joey jumps his car off a dock into a boat and it (SPOILER) explodes!

It seems like he’s dead, but later, after Jim and Cherie have become a couple in Hong Kong, he reveals that he’s still alive, but confined to a wheelchair. He has a cool place where he lives with their godfather and paints and shoots hoops and talks to a bird named Bobo and says he enjoys computer games. I’m not clear if he really is playing King’s Quest and shit or if it’s only a cover for looking at blueprints to plan crimes.

Joey also reveals himself to their abusive dad Chow – who has done very well for himself and become a big shot crime boss; in fact Joey was secretly stealing that painting for him. He pretends to be happy to see him, then the motherfucker pushes him down a flight of stairs! Right in front of Godfather! Joey blames himself, and seems to be torn between these two father figures.

The gang gets back together when Cherie convinces Joey that Jim needs his help to steal a painting from a museum to get out of debt from Chow. It goes pretty OCEAN’S ELEVEN, with a complicated scheme involving an auction, stealing and making a copy of a key while ballroom dancing and breaking into a vault. Joey breaks in at night, slides around on the floor, beats up a whole bunch of guards, talks to Jim over a headset, but eventually Jim has to roll in to help him. There’s an excellent part where they work together to throw and detonate plastic explosives at security guards. It kind of feels like this will be the climax, but it actually culminates in a huge shootout and fight the next day at Joey’s crib.

This is a SPOILER, but the ultimate example of how silly this one is is that Joey gets shot up, mostly in the legs, then he leaps out to reveal that the lrgs were fake and so was his paralysis and he does a bunch of flying and spinning kicks! Moments later Joey performs an all-timer of an “I don’t think that would reall work, but I love it” improvised weapon: he puts some shaken up Coke cans in a microwave and a basketball in front of it and then it explodes and the basketball catches on fire and flies like a cannonball and hits a guy in the belly and propels him out the window. (Let’s see that on a very special John Woo episode of Mythbusters, please.) And in the very next shot an unexplained character credited as “Magician Henchman” (Declan Wong, GOD OF GAMBLERS PART III) fans out a bunch of playing cards which he starts throwing as deadly weapons!

So I guess what I’m learning here is that the specific type of beautiful preposterous I associate with some of Woo’s American work (specifically HARD TARGET and BLACKJACK) actually originated here. This scene is way goofier than what we get in most of Woo’s Hong Kong classics, but equally meticulous. So much happens in this sequence – just a huge amount of props used as weapons, so many bullets fired into everything Joey owns, so many henchman blown through windows, set on fire, electrocuted or shot in the ass. And Joey is doing handsprings, swinging a giant fishing pole as a weapon, breathing fire, smiling and having fun through most of it.

The synth score by Violet Lam is a liability, overly emphasizing which parts are supposed to be funny and using artificial orchestra sounds that in my opinion have dated poorly. I don’t want to harp on the lady so I wouldn’t even bring it up but I wanted to mention that she uses that one sound I knowmostly from low budget horror movies, the Digital Native Dance.

It’s weird to see Woo, who I love for his heart-on-the-sleeve melodrama, doing this much comedy. HARD BOILED has the baby peeing, but this has multiple pee related jokes, a line about farting, etc. But a bunch of the humor is good, it translates. Maybe because Chow does his charming smile most of the time when he’s talking shit. There aren’t that many parts with the type of painfully broad humor that makes me cringe, one exception being the happily-ever-after final scene which involves some mugging and fast speed and shit. But it’s still a thematically interesting theme because they achieve their dream of settling down in the U.S., and Woo paints a cartoonish vision of America: Disney characters on multiple clothing items, a Garfield doll, a framed poster of BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID on the wall behind Joey as he watches American football on TV. Woo still had HARD BOILED to make, but after that he moved to the U.S. too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had that same poster at his place. I don’t know about the Garfield doll. Maybe. Hopefully.

P.S. According to Wikipedia and IMDb, Joey and Cherie are nicknamed “Red Bean Pudding” and “Red Bean,” but that wasn’t in the subtitles of the DVD I watched. I swear there was one part where a French guy called Joey and Jim “Jules and Jim.” I guess it must’ve been a joke but I thought at first that was their names.

The post Once a Thief first appeared on VERN'S REVIEWS on the FILMS of CINEMA.