S.W.A.T

I kind of put 2003 right in the middle of the great CGI assault on cinema. We saw the 21’st century in with a different kind of action movie, a kind that many would agree would never live up to their practical stunts/effects clad counterparts of the 70’s and the 80’s. Writing now in 2011, this flick is 8 years old and we may be now living in a time where over used CGI is being noticed by so many people all at various levels of film fan-ism. The days of flash editing and Computer graphics are not and will never be behind us, I just think that film making teams are slowly figuring out how to use certain techniques to enhance a film without it being so focally evident that it is being relied upon 100% for creating all the action scenes in a movie. Subtlety vs. Practicality. But fast editing will probably always be used to cover up badly designed, performed & choreographed action.

Passchendaele

Trench warfare during World War 1 was horrific. Not just because of the combat methods employed by the fighting forces, but the conditions under which soldiers lived made for high casualties from both sides. Trench warfare as a fighting method had to be resorted to for one major reason, to compensate for advances in weapon technology against the lack of development in mobility. Soldiers were under constant threat from being shot by snipers, blown apart by heavy artillery, and being shot by regular rifles if they were ever visible to the enemy. Most attacks were carried out on foot against occupied fighting lines meaning that usually the defending army had the advantage.The battle of Passchendaele occurred in 1917 in Belgium and is one of the famous battles of World War 1. I cannot say that I am any wiser about the real events of the battle having watched this movie, it affirms the horrors of the battle, but when the movies driving theme isn’t military related, it tends to be a bit sketchy on the real gruesome and more interesting details. Passchendaele is a Canadian movie set against the “distant” back drop of WW1 but the films events mostly take place in Canada.

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen

I watched The Green Hornet movie a few weeks ago, Seth Rogen was way out of his depth and Christoph waltz was criminally misused, and the action was pretty much all slow mo mediocreness. That’s my review within a review! So last night I watched Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, which is also, a movie featuring The Green Hornets sidekick Kato. It’s a better “Green Hornet movie” than the soulless Hollywood release, but at times the plot gets a little convoluted.

Donnie Yen reprises the part of Chen Zhen, a character first played by Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury, then again by Jet Li in Fist of Legend. I enjoy writing about plot when I decide to review a movie, and of course my experience, but.....I really don’t want to go too deep into the plot details of this movie here, there were multiple subplots running simultaneously, pretty much every conversation that took place in the movie introduced a new scenario, character, plot development, double cross, allegiance, twist or whatever. It sure was all over the place as far as the narrative goes, but still really enjoyable with some quality Donnie Yen directed action.

Dial M For Murder

I guess It takes a real crazy sick kind of individual to possess the capabilities to commit a murder, to actually take the life of another person, to be able to walk up to somebody or in this case behind somebody and kill them, you have to be either a cold blooded evil mother fucker or just plain crazy. The first thing that slightly detracted me from this awesome story is the lack of emphasis towards human emotion when faced with the prospect of having to commit a murder.  Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), jealous of his wife’s brief love affair with Robert Cummings, and rightly so, blackmails his old college buddy Alexander Swan (Anthony Dawson) into murdering his unfaithful wife (Grace Kelly) whilst her ex love interest is in town. This is the only difficulty I had with this movie, the guy he’s blackmailing seems like a smart and educated guy, not psychopathic or even in the right mind and out and out evil, he was just a guy trying to keep himself out of Jail as Ray Millands character had him pinned with details of his slightly dishonest, but not necessarily murderous or violent past.

The Astronaut Farmer

The premise of this movie is complete and utter bullshit. But it works in a strange kind of way. The dramatic elements are generally pretty good and I did kind of get into it, but the shortcomings were just a big huge black mark over the screen for the duration of the movie. Who the fuck, regardless of how super clever and rich you are, can build a full scale fully functioning space rocket in their back yard and launch it into space? In this flick, Billy Bob Thornton does just that.

I think this is one of those movies that get’s a decent budget, a star player, and a full commercial release, but nobody really gives a shit about it. I just have a hard time imagining 2 months prior to release a group of movie fans going “yeah Astronaut Farmer’s out soon, I really want to check that shit out”. This was probably enjoyed in theatres by majority whim ticket purchasers, people who turn up at the cinema to watch a movie, or see what’s showing online after they have decided that’s what they’re doing. AF totally passed me by in 2006, I actually came across it in an Amazon sale and read a synopsis, I just thought “wtf”, so i watched it and yes, as far as films go it was ok, it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t that good either.

Spartan

This kind of caught me off-guard last night. I bought this on DVD about 4 years ago and I only just got around to watching it, some movies do that too me, when deciding what to watch I think about them too much and try figure out what I’m in the mood for. In the past with Spartan the blurb on the back of the case always seemed to push me back a notch in my contemplation for whatever reason. I think the fact it was written and directed by David Mamet sold it to me in the shop as opposed to an explosive description of what will probably turn out to be a mediocre execution of said description. So, as for being caught off-guard, Spartan is slightly more than a straight ahead thriller, with enough shifts in the story and new developments/goings on adding to a pretty dense plot throughout the whole movie. This is a slick as hell, fast paced and punchy film.

Dragon Tiger Gate

Dragon Tiger Gate was a pretty cool movie that I didn’t enjoy as much as I really wanted to. It had one of those stories that I don’t like, it’s straight forward but pointless. This is a Kung Fu movie starring Donnie Yen so why does it need a good story? It’s the action that speaks here. Well maybe if the movie was actually full of action with a throw away storyline then that would be ok, but that isn’t the case. It’s fantasy, a superhero movie. Everybody has powers and super crazy Kung Fu moves, but I just found it quite boring.
DTG is a school for orphans where they are trained from a young age to do kung fu to protect themselves from criminal gangs and the like. Dragon Wong (Yen) and Tiger Wong (Nicholas Tse, New Police Story) are step brothers who knew each other as young kids. Dragon Wong was adopted by a Triad boss (Ma Qwun) after his mother was killed in a fire; he grew up to become his body guard, now a kick ass kung fu master and gangster. So the whole thing revolves around a plaque called the Luocha Plaque, which is a symbol of authority within the Luocha gate (A criminal gang), and its holder is considered second most powerful to the Luocha Gate leader Shibumi (he’s a crazy masked demonic type evil fucker with superpowers and kung fu skills). So this plaque goes missing and Yen is sent out to retrieve it, this reunites him with his step brother Tiger, and another dude called Turbo they meet after a huge showdown in a Japanese restaurant (who’s wicked with Nunchaku, but according to the master at DTG he needs practice).

Wanted

It took me two years to get round to watching this one. I didn’t really have any anticipation for it or any desire to rush out and watch it. I found myself pressing the record button on the remote after reading it’s synopsis a couple years down the line figuring it’d be an easy watch after a busy weekend or something. Well, most of my uninformed preconceptions of this film were backed up by what I saw, an utterly ridiculous over the top combo of forgettable action scenes and a totally flawed story line. The first thing I want to mention, James McAvoy. I thought he played well, but I hated his character. The guy deserved everything shitty going on in his life. So he was in a job he hated, his girlfriend was cheating on him with his alleged best friend, although the film doesn’t show us any signs of a close friendship between him and his buddy, he was just a guy he works with. Apparently he doesn’t really care about anything in his life, he’s a confused unhappy dude in his late twenties and I cannot see how an audience is meant to identify with such an annoying character, he’s a fucking loser with little desire to pull his finger out and fix things. I think the only people that could avoid being distracted by this character are those who couldn’t give a crap about whether they like him or not and just want to watch explosions, average CGI driven action scenes and Angelina Jolie. Which to be honest seem to be the movies strong points as far as what ‘Wanted’ wanted to achieve.

Repo Men

Not to be confused with the 1984 Emilio Estevez flick. That was Repo Man and was about repossessing cars, but in this one the story focuses on two people in the repossession business, hence the name Repo Men, but these guys don’t repossess cars, they repossess Organs. Not the musical kind, the human kind, although the organs aren’t actually human organs, they’re artificial human organs! Sound crazy! This is the year 2025 man, the world has gone completely bat shit crazy according to this movie.

Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker both work for a corporation called ‘the union’. They have weird little tattoos on their necks of the company’s logo. The Union has perfected the design and manufacture of artificial human organs. They sell them from their outlets to people in desperate need of hearts, lungs, livers, pancreas’ etc. They’re very expensive, there’s a scene near the beginning with a guy being sold a pancreas, $600,000 dollars, at something like 23% APR (I can’t remember over how many years, but still). However there’s a huge catch, you have 3 months, and if you fail to make a payment after 3 months the repo men will come and take your organ back. Simple!

Command Performance

When people that can’t play drums try to play drums whether in real life, on film or whatever but you can’t hear what they’re doing (you can only see them play), you can usually tell they can’t play for shit. I think it’s pretty obvious if you look closely. I was shocked to find when this movie kicked off that Mr Lundgren can clearly play drums. Having looked this movie up on IMDB apparently Dolph is a drummer in real life. That’s Wicked, I didn’t know that. But, I could tell from watching him play in this movie, that he had a natural posture and actually was co-ordinating his body to play something that could pass as a drum beat.

That’s right, Dolph Lundgren is the drummer in a rock band in this one. He must be the oldest member of the band, but he plays without his shirt and in a pair of aviator sunglasses and looks as cool as fuck!

Command Performance basically rehashes the Die Hard formula but does it in a way where it doesn’t really matter, there are enough subtle differences and the movie is entertaining enough that you just go with it and enjoy it.

Felon

This movie directed by Rick Roman Waugh, a stuntman on Tango & Cash, Universal Soldier, True Romance, Hard Target, Last Action Hero, The Last Of the Mohicans, Lethal Weapon 2, They Live, Ghost Dad(?).....Just to name a few. So with a pretty neat script, a camera or 2, a prison set, Val Kilmer & Stephen Dorff. This fella has crafted a decent prison movie.

Stephen Dorff plays a mid 30’s family man, he has a young son, a caring wife, a nice house; he’s just secured a business loan to expand his construction business. Set up nicely for something real shitty to happen, and for sure it does. He hears an intruder in his house one night and takes a baseball bat and chases the guy off, but once the robber is in retreat, Dorff takes a swing right to the back of the melon, knocks the robber down and kills him instantly. This is quite a heavy moment from a character point of view, my only complaint with this particular part was the actual impact between the baseball bat and the head wasn’t hard enough in a filmatic sense, they should’ve used a bigger and louder sound effect, and cut it in a way to really show blistering impact, it was a a little weak, but the guy is lying dead on the floor and Dorff stands their crapping himself.

Flash Point

This one is a Hong Kong action movie starring kung fu master Donnie Yen, also another one teaming Donnie (also the action director ) with director Wilson Yip (IP Man, Dragon Tiger Gate). It’s pretty cool, but was slow to really kick off. It builds the pieces of the story by introducing us to a smuggling gang of 3 Vietnamese brothers, Donnie Yen as the cop on their case, and Donnie Yens partner Wilson (Louis Koo, Dragon Tiger Gate) as an undercover cop working with the Vietnamese brothers. I think this story has been told thousands of times, its generic & unoriginal and I think it’s just an easy vehicle on which to base some fucking incredible action scenes.

The movie is very well played, the acting is excellent, Louis Koo’s performance clearly stood out as that of a solid actor, he’s been in allot of movies I haven’t seen but I think he’s better known in Hong Kong as a serious actor as opposed to an action star. The best thing about this movie is by far the action. The fights are incredible, the gun play is well designed, coherent and enjoyable to watch. The movie combines these two styles of action fairly evenly. When the action becomes hand to hand combat it goes one step ahead of being a kung fu fight. Donnie Yen uses MMA in this sucker! Mixed Martial Arts! These are techniques we see in the ring, in the UFC. The amount of fight styles we see on screen is incredible. I got to be honest and say I wasn’t sure exactly what some of the different styles were by name, but watching the extras on the blu ray told you allot about what they were trying to accomplish. The fighting is noticeably different from Donnie Yens usual approach.

Sherlock Holmes

Being unfamiliar with the source material or previous interpretations of Sherlock’s adventures on film kind of put me somewhere near the bottom of the list of people really looking forward to this movie. I kind of knew who he was, but I couldn’t have told you a thing about him. Sherlock Holmes is a fictional British detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Unorthodox in approach to his investigations, a bit crazy eccentric, dark and mysterious, insecure maybe even homosexual, I didn’t know he was a cocaine addict but that too. The suggestions that were made about the character Sherlock Holmes in this Guy Ritchie flick lacked any real depth, seemed to purposefully avoid the hard facts and at times were ambiguous, because this is a family fun film.

Fatal Move (Duo Shuai)

Typically gangster flicks deal with many characters. They usually have large families and a hierarchy of ranks and responsibilities within the enterprise. Fatal move is the story of a Chinese Triad gang led by ‘Big Bro’ Sammo Hung. It’s a solid gritty and violent movie, the plot is pretty standard for most of the film. Gang loses territory-has to take it back from rival gang-cops are onto them for gang type illegal activities-drug shipment raided by cops-gang divides and sub sections fuck each other over for money, That kind of stuff. But I couldn’t help but actually find myself slightly confused as to who was on whose side as the film came to a close, I think a second watch would make this clearer, but the double cross element of the movie ended up a little on the convoluted side. This isn’t usually a major problem I bump into when watching subtitled films, but once Sammo’s gang divided, all the names I’d associated with characters all of a sudden started to not match up to who I thought they were, this may not be a major flaw in the movie, it probably isn’t, I actually think it’s just one of the few problems with not understanding the language the film is performed in, subtitles are fine or pushing the story along, but having to deal with 20 or so Chinese names, putting them to faces, learning who they were with, who’s side these dudes eventually end up on, they (the subs) actually held me back a bit here. But it didn’t stop me from enjoying the movie.

A Bridge Too Far

The amount of times I’ve made a mistake, no matter how huge, and I’ve stood there for a second and tried to justify why I made it, the reasons, what went wrong eventually trying to persuade myself it wasn’t actually my fault. Kind of makes you feel better sometimes, but when it involves the lost lives of thousands of allied soldiers, I’m not sure I could forgive myself that easily. A Bridge too far tells the epic story of the largest airborne military operation in history, codenamed operation market garden. The plan was pretty much to end the war early with this huge allied invasion. The beginning of the movie sees Dirk Bogardes’character Lieutenant General Browning briefing his generals (Sean Connery, Ryan O Neal, Gene Hackman),  with the plan, apparently conceived by future US president General Eisenhower (the highest ranking officer in the allied forces during WW2) and his two top generals, Patton and Montgomery. Sir Dirk Bogarde shows, on a map exactly what’s going to happen, and he makes it sound so simple. The German armed forces are beginning their decline, at this point of WW2 (1944) they were fighting in the east of Europe, in Russia, in north Africa, the German war machine is spread thin, supplies are low, so is ammunition, and so is morale, which is obviously just as important as food & bullets. So the allies plan to fly 35,000 men and drop them something like 30 miles behind enemy lines in Holland, then capture 3 bridges and hold them, then the advancing land forces, heavy armor (tanks) and infantry can push forward eventually into the “industrial heartland of Germany”. Sounds plausible, if it works the war could be over and everyone gets to come home, happy days! But there were a number of problems that makes this outcome extremely unlikely, as I’m watching a movie I can obviously see what the Germans are currently up to in Holland, the allies couldn’t, they had to rely on reconnaissance and intel. At the beginning you are given pretty detailed exposition regarding the intentions of both sides, the overly ambitious allies, and the weakening Germans.