Tag Archives: Action

Midnight Screening: Robocop

Paul Verhoeven doesn’t know the meaning of the word nuance, and Robocop provides at least the opening arguments for why the world is a better place for it. Brash and brutal in its own quintessentially ’80s way, Robocop also chomps at the bit to lose itself to the royal flush of political satire that stamps out the dark heart of ’80s consumerist ultra-violence and the evils of capitalism with gusto and flair. Under its sleek, brawny hood lies a personality-surfeit aimed squarely at other ’80s action films. But the film never lowers itself to the tiredness of irony, instead opting for a sort of loving critique of action cinema that plays with its inadequacies and idiocies by exaggerating them and acknowledging that an anti-action film would be a hypocrisy most foul. When Truffaut claimed that any war film that wanted to hate war was dishonest because a war film innately positioned war as a form of excitement, the same could be said to apply to action cinema. Thus, while Robocop gets entangled in its conglomerate mass of neo-fascism and broad-sword crypto-leftism, it’s always glad to exist, always happy to be a film we’re watching, and never per-se anti-action … even if its political message chastising media violence considered along with the fact of its own hyper-violence may not be the most easily reconcilable tension in the film world.
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National Cinemas: The Killer

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Edited June 2016

In the annals of action cinema, only a few directors regularly serve up meaningful main courses. Few really claim even one all-time classic, and if you increase the limit to two, you’re really counting on one hand. Thankfully, Hong Kong malevolence maestro John Woo has enough panache in his step and off-kilter edge in his frame to cover a full crash course on the genre. Perhaps the only action director whose demented fugue bathes his entire (pre-2000) canon in a gusto that marks his films as individual slices of a larger action opera, this only speaks with more fluency to Woo’s oddly existential, personalized take on a genre typically reserved for more corporate penthouses. He’s a full-on longitudinal case study in hyperbolizing and electro-shocking violence and elevating it to an oblong poetry of human flesh and human desire trapped in perpetual motion, always searching for the next potential soul to take, or, for his ennui-addled protagonists, the next soul to find.

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National Cinemas: House of Flying Daggers and Kung Fu Hustle

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House of Flying Daggers

I suppose that, at some level, Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers is a marital-arts action picture, and a pretty terrific one at that. The thing is, and this is no surprise for someone who knows a thing or two about Zhang Yimou’s history as a dramatist who uses color, framing, and motion to define mood and texture, it just doesn’t feel like an action film, and it functionally has almost no interest in being one. Yimou is a great director of action, but not necessarily an action director, if that makes sense; he takes what would be action in another film and transforms the excitement into a far different beast, much less about what is happening and who is defeating/ battling who than the motion of the filled-in spaces on screen and their battle with the empty spaces dancing around them. House of Flying Daggers is an exciting film, but its excitement is far too abstracted, too cognitive and distanced and reflective, to fit comfortably into the bounds of “action” as it is conventionally defined.
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Stocking Stuffer Reviews: Buried and The Town

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Buried

Buried’s greatest success is its feel, quite literally. Mostly unknown Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes, with an able assist from a shockingly good turn from Ryan Reynolds as the only human body to appear physically on screen, excel at making us feel everything, from the minute, finger-twitching details up to the all-consuming oppressive fact of desperation at its most unadorned. Cortes’ story has begun before the film, but for the narrative he is choosing to tell he opens at the literal moment of most importance: Ryan Reynolds waking up in a coffin in Iraq, buried alive and with nothing to hold him over but a phone and a lighter. The crushing primitive quality of the box itself, the muddy fact of the earth weighing it down, the sweat on Reynolds’ face keeping his physical form from drying out even as each drop loosens one last bit of his soul from his body; all come alive under Cortes’ attuned hand and meticulous gaze. His shot selection is note-perfect, hugely varied but never indulgent, and always well aware of the power of a stagnant camera and the verisimilitude of natural lighting. It’s a very tactile film, a work of tension and bluntness that feels emotion right down to its bone, and Reynolds in particular is in spellbindingly sweaty, nervous form throughout. Continue reading →

Stocking Stuffer Reviews: The Raid and Meek’s Cutoff

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So what happened is this: As some may have noticed, I have removed my yearly lists of top ten films for the past five years from the site. They’d been taunting me with how quickly my tastes had changed, and I found them inadequate at this point. Instead, I will be conveniently replacing them soon with a long list of my 50 favorite films of the first half of the 2010s, now snugly coming to a close after five long years. Expect plenty of overlap, but the text will all be brand spankin’ new, and of course 2014’s crop of beasties will be on board too. I promise I won’t do this again, but a good portion of those lists were leftovers from my previous pre-blog writing days, and I wanted to start fresh with the new year.

For the next few days I will be uploading a collection of short reviews, in pairs for post-size sake (although the pairs will not be linked conceptually at all, unless you consider films released in the 2010s a sufficient link). All will be of films that are in consideration for the list (great films I first saw or re-watched recently, with some new and not-necessarily-so-great 2014 leftovers I just caught for the first time thrown in for fun). Just some stocking stuffers for y’all to tide you over this Holiday season.

The Raid: Redemption

2014 brought The Raid 2: Berandal, which upped things to operatic heights of artistic blood-letting and furious visual motion, but sometimes it’s the simple things that pay off in spades. For The Raid 2 frequently hits, and hits hard at that, but if director Gareth Evans took action down to the wheelhouse on a never-ending train ride of grandiose brutality, his storytelling stowed away to no avail. The end result was a film of two halves, one a rampagingly color-coded action extravaganza with an eye for physical motion and space, and the other a pretentious, over-cooked crime thriller with eyes for Infernal Affairs that don’t suit the film’s strengths. Continue reading →

The Waves, Man, The Waves: Point Break

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Point Break - 1991 Edited July 2016:

In a sane world, Point Break would have been released, forgotten, and then rediscovered and mocked for years on end as an early ’90s curio of archly-’80s action film types hyperbolically peacocking in a most philharmonic register, pushed to near-aneurysm limits of male moodiness no ’80s film ever dared to threaten. It should be terrible, simply put. Like, really really terrible. But then we do not live in a sane world. And Point Break is a pretty terrific barnstorming action monstrosity the likes of which the ’80s proper produced only a handful of times.

Even stranger: why it absolutely should have been horrible and why it is undoubtedly successful are inextricably and forever bound together in a Frankensteinian brew of knuckle-dusting, live-wire, allegro kinesis and full-tilt, pulpy bafflement. Director Kathryn Bigelow was infamously labeled a sell-out, a woman playing in a man’s world and joining the testosterone rat race to achieve success at the cost of her own soul. In reality, she turns the mirror on the rats and lets them bask in their roided-out bodies until they drown in the pungent masculine sweat. This inferno of action is actually a purgatory of caricature, a self-conscious orchestration of action movie types maddened and stirred to the realm of outright nonsensical hysteria. Parody not by distancing itself from the genre’s adolescence but by fulfilling the genre’s wildest, most adolescent fantasies until they puncture themselves with their own self-importance, Point Break is murder by flattery. Continue reading →

Genre Apex New Wave: Die Hard

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Edited June 2016

It is almost impossible to imagine a superior version of John McTiernan’s Die Hard. In addition to popularizing an entire sub-genre of action movies, it rightfully claims its place among the greatest films of its genre. Its premise is matched in its simplicity and lack of temptation to stray only by its ingenious precision and punishingly direct storytelling. Terrorists invade a building, take hostages, and remove any threats except, of course, one lone NYC cop (on vacation in LA to reconnect with his wife Holly) who must now save the day single-handedly. If it sounds trivial, well, this kind of film hadn’t really been done as often by 1988, and, either way, it’s really more about the species than the broad kingdom.

Among its laundry list of accolades lies virtually everything one could want from a high-octane action film; vertiginous pacing, nerve-frying direction, malicious editing that works like clockwork to hurtle the film forward in the bare minimum amount of time it could possibly take, and a human touch that slithers up on you when you’re busy being dissected. It is one of the few films made in the last thirty years that can legitimately claim to be an apotheosis of a form, insofar as it seeks to do one thing and does that one thing with a nigh-incomparable effectiveness. It’s a work of minimalist necessity, taking the form of a particularly pinpoint gear system. At the level of bare storytelling mechanics, it is stripped to the bone and almost psychotically elegant.
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New Wave(s) of Blood: Conan the Barbarian and First Blood

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Edited for Clarity

It is at this point, deep down within the most magical year of 1982, where the 1980s really began to “do” the 1980s, and things start to become much more symmetric with what those of us in the good ol’ 2010s might imagine when we pontificate about three decades past. For this reason, it felt wholly appropriate to cover a pair of films, one of them very much of the 1980s, and one rather shockingly not of this decade, but both of which would birth the two “biggest” (yes, this applies to both box office draw and muscle-mass) and most “1980s” stars of the day, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian should not work, and, honestly, it kind of doesn’t. It is just about the most hyperbolic, fetishistic-ally 1980s macho fantasy action film one could possibly imagine, the kind of product that sounds more like a modern person’s hindsight imagination of the 1980s than the real deal. The script, for one, is a non-entity from beginning to end, and its prurient, excessive, almost psychotic violence and tawdry childishness is about as straight-faced as it gets. It is totally and completely describable as “moronically and obsessively stupid”, and such a description doesn’t so much miss the point as ask us to consider what “stupid” even means. For Conan the Barbarian is so idiotically committed to being its chintzy self it creates its own special place where only it dares preside. This is an eccentric, weirdly watchable film, the kind of work that just defines guilty pleasure.
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Review: Summer of 08: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

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hellboy-2-creatures-700x525 If, as I am increasingly inclined to believe, every Guillermo del Toro film is a “Guillermo del Toro idea delivery device”, Hellboy 2 is right up there with his best works. This is to say, if a Guillermo del Toro film is all about the Guillermo del Toro visuals he can imagine for us and transfer to the screen, which is not necessarily the case but has some value for his highly and pointedly surface-level films, then Hellboy 2 is a hell of a film. It’s weighty yet zippy, filled with consequence yet light on its feet, it’s buttoned-up in all manner of cozy, boisterous lights and sounds, and it has a dreamer’s streak a mile wide. Many blockbusters attempt to find a center in their visuals, some of which succeed and many of which crash under their own superficiality. The visual splendor on display in Hellboy 2, however, exists on another level – its images do not merely heal the eye, but they achieve genuinely transcendent emotional heft all their own. Continue reading →

Review(s): Summer of 08 Short Reviews Round-up Part 1

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Iron Man

For all Marvel’s self-imposed weight as a blockbuster big-wig machine, Iron Man is rather shocking for how it’s essentially a chill-out superhero movie. A good portion of the film, particularly in the middle, has a surprisingly solid time enjoying itself as an old-school “hanging with movie actors” film, where the “event” mostly consists of watching Robert Downey Jr have fun playing with toys on screen and generally being snarkily amused in a way that pings between caustic and genial. It’s not quite a Bill Murray 80’s comedy, but being within reaching distance is pleasing in a way I hadn’t realized I missed. Continue reading →