Midway through the 1988 police-corruption thriller Shakedown, Sam Elliott’s undercover cop hands a revolver to Peter Weller’s disheveled lawyer and asks, “You know how to use one of these?,” and Weller responds in his default, deadeyed deadpan, “Fuckin A, bubba. I’m from New York City.” It’s a throwaway action-movie one liner, but the entire picture is framed within that assumption that anyone who’s tough enough to survive 1980s NYC street life is always a half-second’s notice away from engaging in some good, old-fashioned gun violence. The movie opens with Law & Order veteran Richard Brooks minding his own business smoking crack in Central Park, when he’s approached by an undercover “blue jean cop” who reaches into his jacket for a concealed weapon. By the time the ambulance arrives, both men are bleeding to death on the ground from gunshot wounds, with no witnesses having seen who shot whom first. To determine whether the crack dealer (Brooks) fired his gun in self defense, the public defender assigned to his case (Weller) has to team up with the only blue jean cop he trusts (Eliot) to shoot even more guns at even more cops & drug dealers across the city’s seedy underbelly. They start shootouts in the backroom brothels above 42nd Street porno theaters; they pistol-whip perps during fistfights on Coney Island roller coasters; they chase stolen cop cars through homeless encampments and set fire to the resulting wreckage. Fuckin A, bubba, welcome to New York City.
Shakedown doesn’t have the same lost-and-found mystique as the recently restored Night of the Juggler, but it emerged from the same vintage gutter sludge. Narratively, it’s a by-the-books buddy cop thriller, except one of the cops happens to be a lawyer . . . and maybe also a robot. Peter Weller is as glaringly inhuman as always in the lead role of a long-suffering public defense attorney who’s tempted to leave the street-level grime behind in favor of a cushy yuppie lifestyle at a private firm. He says he’s tired of having to defend the “the scumbags, the jerkoffs, the sex freaks, and the killers” of NYC in court, but anyone who knows him sees right through the facade. When he’s assigned to defend the Central Park dealer who killed an undercover cop in self-defense, you can tell he loves the job far too much to ever walk away. In order to prove his client’s innocence, he has to team up with the only non-corrupt cop left in the city: Sam Elliott, a humble Texan expat. We meet Elliot in a grindhouse cinema, watching an absurd downhill skiing shootout from director James Glickenhaus’s previous feature The Soldier, teasing the insane action spectacle to come once he & Weller hit the streets and turn up the heat. The movie quickly delivers on that promise, scoring its whirlwind tour through pre-Giuliani New York City with the infinite supply of “ghetto blaster” boomboxes that used to decorate every street corner, along with the dealers & sex workers who operated them.
Shakedown is classic NYC sleaze with a stacked cast of always-welcome reprobates. Honeymoon Killers legend Shirley Stoler briefly pops in as a takes-no-shit security guard. Corman veteran Paul Bartel plays a night court judge in a single scene. David “Richie from Sopranos” Proval plays the corrupt cop who mans the evidence desk at the local precinct, stubbornly blocking Weller from the evidence that proves his client’s innocence. It’s a never-ending parade of celebrity cameos for anyone who happens to be the kind of person who would be watching a 1980s corrupt-cop thriller named Shakedown. After recently seeing Weller in Of Unknown Origin & Naked Lunch, Stoler in Frankenhooker, and Bartel in Basquiat & Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, it felt like a kind of season finale for my personal year in trash movie watching. So, I’ve come up with a quick, arbitrary metric to see how it ranks against other vintage New York schlock thrillers I’ve watched this year: determining its production crew overlap with my two most recently watched TV shows. According to the IMDb “Advanced collaboration” search, Shakedown shares 50 collaborators with Law & Order and 27 with The Sopranos. That’s ahead of Night of the Juggler (28 Law & Order, 6 Sopranos) but behind Cop Land (an impressive 75 Law & Order, 73 Sopranos). Of course, that’s more raw data than it is analysis, but all you really need to know about this movie anyway is that it’s aggressively grimy and Glickenhaus blows shit up real good. The rest is just character actors & mise-en-scène.
It’s strange that we got two different films this year that were based on Stephen King novels that he originally published under his pseudonym of “Richard Bachman,” with TheRunning Man premiering just a few short months after The Long Walk. I haven’t seen the 1987 adaptation of Running Man since I was a kid, but I remember skimming the original text once in my adolescent years and not seeing many similarities, and reading that the earlier film had largely taken only a few concepts from the novel and changed much of the meat of it. Edgar Wright’s new film, based on a cursory examination of the text’s summaries online, hews closer to it, with a few modernizations to account for changing technology, as Bachman/King’s original, despite being set in 2025, couldn’t have foreseen the ways that we’d build our own dystopia. What struck me about this is that although The Long Walk was written when King was a student in the 1960s and was published in 1979, both that narrative and this one focus on a man driven to participate in a widely broadcast, necropoliticalbread and circuses-style contest that ends in either death or functionally endless wealth. For The Long Walk, it’s clear that King drew inspiration from the seemingly endless Vietnam War, the first war to be televised. (As a side note, the Latin for “bread and circuses” is panem et circenses, with the Long Walk-inspired Hunger Games taking the word “panem” as the name of the nation in which it takes place.) The origin of what inspired The Running Man is less clear.
Regardless, this made me curious about whether, consciously or unconsciously, King shunted the works in which he expressed rage against an unfair and unjust system into his Bachman-credited works while keeping his King brand spooky (as of the 1977 publication of the first Bachman novel, aptly titled Rage, King had published Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining). Rage, which has nothing to do with The Rage: Carrie 2, has become semi-notorious since publication, as to the rise of school shootings in the decades since its publication has haunted King, who removed the book from publication after it became associated with some actual acts of violence. In that novel, main character Charlie Decker retrieves a pistol from his locker after being expelled and goes on a rampage, but he does so with no real ideology and the only clues we get to his reasoning are flashbacks to his abusive childhood.
That’s not quite in the same wheelhouse as Running Man or The Long Walk, but the latter two do share similarities to the 1981 Bachman novel Roadwork, which could best be synopsized as “Charlotte Hollis does a Falling Down.” Roadwork features a man named Dawes whose sentimental attachment to the industrial laundry where he is employed and the house in which he raised his deceased son Charlie leads him on a campaign against the expansion of a highway that will result in both being demolished. He eventually finds himself in a standoff with the police before he detonates the house himself while inside of it, and the epilogue confirms that the highway extension project had only been approved so that the city could build the minimum number of miles to secure future federal funding. Roadwork was a contemporary novel, so it lacked the speculative fiction future setting of the dystopias of The Long Walk or Running Man, but despite a more realistic setting, the protagonist is still a person who, like the boys in the former and the running men in the latter, finds himself forced by an inhumanly callous and bureaucratic system into a path from which there seems to be no escape. It lacks the “being broadcast to the masses” element, but it is replaced by the fact that the piece is bookended by excerpts from a journalist who interviews Dawes both before and during his rampage.
With that frustration with (and ultimate defiance of) the system being a foundational element of most of the Bachman-credited works, and with the globalization of virtual omnipresence of social media creating a world in which most people have willingly submitted themselves to an online surveillance state, it’s not surprising that we would get a Running Man remake (or re-adaptation). And, if you’re going to do it, I can hardly think of a better person to play protagonist Ben Richards than Glen Powell, who has the handsome face and toned body to please a ravenous viewing audience, both those watching the film and the TV—or rather “FreeVee”—show within it. Edgar Wright has made some of my favorite little oddballs over the years; I was a huge fan of his Sean Pegg/Nick Frost/Jessica Hynes-nee-Stephenson TV series Spaced as well as Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and his Scott Pilgrim adaptation, and even if I was lukewarm on The World’s End and never saw Baby Driver, I was more fond of Last Night in Soho than most. The early reactions to Running Man, many of which expressed frustration with Wright and recommending he re-team with Pegg and Frost, had me worried, but I ultimately had a pretty good time with it. While catching up about recent releases we had seen in the top half of our recent podcast episode, Brandon and I talked about our different reactions to Predator: Badlands, and aligned on the fact that it was the perfect movie for a mid-afternoon beer at an action flick; this is exactly the same experience.
Ben Richards (Powell) is a laborer who has been blacklisted from virtually every job because of “insubordination” like telling a union rep about radiation leakage; that one megacorporation has a monopoly on virtually all industry doesn’t help. When his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is planning to hit a third shift at the seedy nightclub where she waitresses so that they can try to get medicine for their ill infant daughter, Ben instead heads off to audition for one of the many game shows that are presented on the megacorp’s FreeVee service. He promises that he’s not foolish enough to try and get on The Running Man, a show in which the contestants must try to stay alive for thirty days while staying ahead of the elite five person “Hunter” team led by the mysterious masked McCone (Lee Pace), the omnipresent “goons” (the corp’s privatized police which have replaced all other law enforcement in the U.S.), and all private citizens, who are incentivized to record and report the Runners with cash prizes. He ends up not having a choice, as he gets slotted to The Running Man after various physical and psychological tests, and he’s talked into accepting the signing bonus that will get baby Cathy in to see a doctor by network exec Dan Killian (Josh Brolin). Killian tells Ben that he thinks he has what it takes to go the distance, and even as he tries to endear himself to Ben by admitting that he says that to all the players but “this time [he] really mean[s] it,” Ben sees right through him, promising that he’ll destroy him in the end. Killian directs him to amp up his rage issues for the camera, and then Ben and the other runners, Laughlin (Katy O’Brian) and Jansky, are introduced to the in-studio and at home audiences by host Bobby T (Colman Domingo), where they’re painted as thieves, welfare parasites, and malcontents, to the jeers and boos of the frothing populace.
The rules are simple. Viewers at home can record and submit footage of the Runners via an app, and they get cash payouts both for confirmed sightings and if their contribution helps “eliminate” the Runner; Runners have to stay alive and on-the-run while recording a ten-minute tape per day and then mailing it in, supposedly anonymously. After a near miss with the Hunters while staying at a similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from YMCA, Richards meets Bradley (Daniel Ezra), a rebel who takes him in as part of the underground resistance and whose online presence as an anonymous exposer of the secrets of the broadcasts means he can provide all the exposition that Ben needs. He helps secret Ben to Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera), another rebel who plans to get Ben to an underground bunker after pre-recording his tapes so that he can lie low, and whose house is booby-trapped to the gills. Ben attempts to get more information out about the real activities of the megacorp, but his tapes are edited before broadcast to show him confessing to having enjoyed killing the goons sent after him and that he literally eats puppies. The longer he stays alive, however, the more the in-universe audience transitions from believing the villainous image that the show paints him as to finding him a bit of a folk hero.
Before Bachman was outed as King, some contemporary critics compared the “two” writers’ work and usually found that although their styles were very similar, Bachman’s endings tended to be more bleak than King’s, which were often dark but ended on an optimistic tone. I’m not sure I really agree; Carrie ends grimly, as does ‘Salem’s Lot, but this apparent discrepancy was highlighted specifically by Steve Brown, the bookstore clerk credited with cracking the case that Bachman and King were the same person, so there must be some merit in that analysis. The recent adaptation of The Long Walk makes minor changes to the ending (mostly regarding who wins) but retains that work’s dark tone. Wright’s reimagining of the finale of King’s Running Man rejects the original climax, in which Ben crashes a stolen jet into the megacorp network building, in favor of having Ben escape the plane’s destruction prior to the plane being destroyed by the megacorp’s missiles so that he can become the figurehead of a revolution. I’m not terribly concerned with textual fidelity, all things considered, but it’s worth noting that all of the Bachman texts have downer endings. Charlie is killed by the police at the climax of Rage, the winner of the titular Long Walk runs toward a specter of death on the other side of the finish line, Dawes blows himself up in Roadwork, and Ben Richards of the novel is a martyr (at best), not a revolutionary. Even the latter works that were published after Bachman’s true identity was exposed, Thinner and Blaze, end with their protagonists losing weight to death and being shot to death by the police, respectively. It does feel like The Running Man, in either prose or film form, shouldn’t really have a happy ending; it could have had a merely poignant one. Instead, this one ends in such a way that although it is a complete story in and of itself, it’s deliberately open-ended enough that it leaves the door open for a sequel that it should not have.
Politically, the film is kind of shallow. Ben Richards is a man with a short fuse, and his driving need is to provide for his family. He is a man with a motivation but without an ideology, and although he takes up arms against the system, one never buys that his personal vendetta against Killian transcends the personal into the revolutionary. We never learn what becomes of Ben’s wife and child in the novel, and that kind of ambiguity makes for a more interesting text, giving you something to mull over, while the film explicitly shows him reuniting with his wife after “winning” the game, after a fashion. There are the occasional very minor references to our contemporary real world and its problems. The only broadcast FreeVee that seems to exist consists entirely of game shows and a Kardashians spoof called The Americanos, which reflects a lot of the current media landscape, and there’s one piece of graffiti that reads “A[ll] G[oons] A[re] B[ad],” but no one is going to go into this film and see themselves in any of the characters with negative traits. That’s not something that every film needs to have, but when one is making a satire, which this film purports (and occasionally manages) to be, if there’s nothing that challenges the viewer to recognize himself in the brain-rotted masses who cheer for the death of an innocent man because of manipulation tactics, then what are we doing here? When the film does hit, it does so in the way that the audience is manipulated. In one particularly noteworthy scene, the mouthpiece of a show that gives Richards a bonus for the death of a goon brings all of the children of the dead men on stage for a candlelight vigil. It’s good stuff, and it’s in these moments that the film manages to show a little of the edge that it’s reaching for but failing to grasp.
It sounds like I’m really down on this film, and that’s not really the case. I had a good time, and this was a well-paced action thriller with a likable leading man and some side characters who, if they can’t be fully fleshed-out, can at least be quirky. Glen Powell’s selling some tickets based on his towel-clad hostel escape alone, I can assure you. ‘Tis the season of heavy, heady prestige dramas like If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, After the Hunt, Die My Love, and still more in the days ahead, and sometimes it’s nice to have something that’s pretty to look at and decently constructed, even if it’s a little empty, just to break things up a little.
The 2023 political thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline was a small production with no household-name movie stars and limited theatrical distribution. It vocalized leftist politics within the visual language of a mainstream heist thriller, often pausing its most explosive moments to explain the political motivations of its young domestic-terrorist dissidents, who actively disrupt the industrial processing of oil as a desperate act of global self-defense in the face of Climate Change. Despite all of its populist genre markers and its traditional Dad Movie rhythms, it didn’t make much of a cultural impact outside the usual cinephile circles. What it did accomplish, though, was presenting a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, dreaming of a better world for the American moviegoer and the American political discourse. And now, somehow, one of the last few Hollywood studios standing has put some real money behind making the real thing. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the finished action-blockbuster product that How to Blow Up a Pipeline only sketched out in blueprint, one with real Hollywood money and recognizable Hollywood celebrities vocalizing revolutionary politics within the structure of a 4-quadrant crowdpleaser. It’s in no more danger of transforming the real-life American political landscape than its low-budget indie prototype was a couple years ago, but it does have a much better chance of provoking substantial political conversations among a wide, mainstream audience, because it’s got major studio muscle behind its production & distribution — improbably.
If there’s any glaring deviation from the traditional Hollywood studio action thriller here, it’s in One Battle‘s choice to de-center its archetypal lone hero to instead give credit to the heroic work of political collectives. Much like Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling stoner detective in Anderson’s previous Thomas Pynchon adaptation, 2014’s Inherent Vice, Leonardo DiCaprio’s revolutionary burnout is continually ineffective in his attempts to save the day; he’s mostly just thrashed about by political systems larger than him as he drinks & smokes his way through the pain. At the start of the picture, he’s a young bombmaker who’s joined a political resistance collective called The French 75, helping them destroy property and free prisoners of the state in the name of a future America with “free borders, free bodies, free choices, and [freedom] from fucking fear.” However, after he fathers a child with the most erratic radical in the crew (Teyana Taylor), his politics become secondary to his domestic duties as a parent. His girlfriend splits the scene and the French 75 fall apart spectacularly under the pressure of a militant fascist named Lockjaw (Sean Penn), leaving DiCaprio’s stoner dad raising his daughter alone under a stolen identity, separated from any meaningful political resistance in his middle age. He’s only dragged back into action by the abduction of the mostly oblivious teen in his care (relative newcomer Chase Infiniti), who becomes a pawn in a three-way battle between an ICE-like immigration taskforce run by Lockjaw, the remnant scraps of the surviving French 75ers, and a secret white nationalist cabal that wields more political power than anyone else involved.
A lot of the humor in One Battle After Another‘s action sequences is a result of its would-be hero’s complete lack of heroic skills. He’s long scorched away the political rhetoric & secret passcodes from his early revolutionary days with decades of bong rips, and the countless gallons of beer have left him too sluggish to keep up in the endless string of chase sequences. When tasked to attempt small parkour maneuvers following skaters to safety during a police chase, for instance, he falls 40 feet to the ground and is immediately tasered unconscious. All of the meaningful political action in the film is executed by underground networks of revolutionaries working as a collective, including one run by a karate dojo owner played by Benicio del Toro, who helps him limp along for much longer than he possibly could otherwise. At his age, DiCaprio’s revolutionary is mostly a dad whose mission is to retrieve his daughter before she’s harmed by a fascistic government he failed to change for the better in his own youth. Even in that context, he has little effect on the outcome, pathetically so. That’s largely because the right-wing forces he’s racing to keep up with are so absurdly evil and well-funded that a paunchy, middle-aged stoner has no chance to make a dent in their armor. Sean Penn is especially grotesque as Lockjaw, continually finding new, inhuman ways to hold his body & mouth that are just as worthy of laughter as they are of disgust. The racist cabal that calls the shots above Lockjaw’s head are also presented as a hilarious punchline despite their vicious cruelty, as they’re characterized as a Christmas cult that chants, “Hail, St. Nick!” with the same ecstatic fervor that their imagined enemies chant, “Hail, Satan!”
I don’t personally care too much about Hollywood studio spectacle at this point in my life; the most potent images & ideas in modern cinema are lurking in microbudget indies that would be lucky to secure 1% of One Battle‘s speculated budget. Still, it’s encouraging to know the modern studio picture can be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people. Paul Thomas Anderson announced himself as a skilled craftsman as soon as he debuted with Hard Eight & Boogie Nights in the 1990s. His immediate Altmanesque control on large ensemble casts and his Scorsese-inspired tension between humor & violence have only become more personal to his own name & style as his work has sprawled over the decades since. Here, he acknowledges that the revolution will not be televised (going as far as to reduce that infamous Gil Scott-Heron piece to call center hold music), but he also argues that the revolution can be sexy & fun anyway. For all of the sparse piano-key tension of Jonny Greenwood’s score and the restless kineticism of Michael Bauman’s bulky VistaVision camerawork, the tone remains remarkably light. These revolutionaries cut up, they fuck, and they celebrate their minor victories with wild, infectious abandon. Before Anderson funnels all of the plot’s political warfare into a single highway chase on an open desert road, the audience would be forgiven for forgetting that we’re watching an action thriller and not an ensemble-cast character comedy. What’s most impressive about the movie is that it credibly succeeds in both genres while making time to clearly define the nation’s current political factions: our cartoonishly racist overlords, their pathetically naive servants who hope to join their ranks, the largely disorganized leftist resistance, and the ill-equipped everyday people struggling to just take care of their own despite the boots pressing on all of our necks.
I had somehow never seen a full episode of the criminal-justice procedural Law & Order before this year. Since the start of this summer, however, I’ve watched nearly 100 episodes of the series, as it quickly became my go-to nightly watch after I ran out of episodes of The Sopranos. As a result, nearly everything I watch these days is filtered through a Law & Order lens. It’s not just detective stories & courtroom dramas either. The show is so lousy with recognizable actors that I’ve already seen big-namers like Ann Dowd, Christine Baranski, Sam Rockwell, and Allison Janney repeat as multiple unrelated characters only four seasons into the show (among one-off stunt casting appearances from unexpected heavy-hitters like Elaine Stritch, Tony Todd, and James Earl Jones), like a local repertory-theatre troop with a globally famous cast. So, I like to think it’s somewhat justifiable that Law & Order was at the top of my mind during a local screening of the new Night of the Juggler restoration that’s currently making the theatrical rounds. Released a full decade before Law & Order premiered in 1990, Night of the Juggler is a grimy NYC detective story similar to the 1st-act investigations of my new vintage-television obsession. While it doesn’t share early Law & Order‘s more prestigious contributions from cinematographer Ernest Dickerson or mad-genius screen actor Michael Moriarty, it does overlap significantly with the below-the-line cast & crew, including Dan Hedeya playing a violently corrupt police sergeant in both titles. In total, there are 28 contributors who worked on both Night of the Juggler and Law & Order—mostly NYC-based character actors—which feels like a substantial number even if it doesn’t remotely compare with the 757 contributors who worked on both Law & Order and my previous nightly catch-up show, The Sopranos.
There is one major payoff Night of the Juggler offers that even peak-era Law & Order couldn’t afford: action. In most of the NYPD investigations on Law & Order, suspects who flee the scene are quickly apprehended by detectives Logan & Briscoe at the same shooting location where they’re spotted. The show is largely a crime-of-the-week soap opera that contains its scene-to-scene drama to a series of courtrooms, judges’ chambers, and holding cells. Night of the Juggler cannot be contained. It runs wild in the streets of New York City, staging multiple, lengthy chase scenes that hop from taxi to subway train to public park to porno theatre to underground cellar, leaving a trail of wrecked cars & hot dog carts in its wake. Its premise is typical to an early Law & Order episode, though, even if it’s one the show would likely save for a season-finale ratings spike. Cliff Gorman plays a run-of-the-mill maniac New Yorker who exacts revenge upon the millionaire real estate developers who gentrified his neighborhood by kidnapping one of the business pricks’ teenage daughter in Central Park. Only, he mistakenly kidnaps her doppelganger, the daughter of a tough-as-nails truck driver and former cop played by James Brolin. So, not only is there no way for the unscrupulous sleaze to cash the teen in for the demanded million-dollar ransom, but now he also has a crazed working-class brute on his tail who’s willing & able to punch him to death for the offense — as soon as he can catch up with him. Dressed more like a lumberjack than an ex-cop city boy, Brolin is a macho folk hero who takes a principled stand against the flagrant crime of late-70s NYC by chasing down the man who wronged him for vigilante justice while NYPD’s finest twiddle their thumbs (or, in the case of Dan Hedeya’s wild-eyed corrupt sergeant, attempt to take down the obvious victim instead of the obvious creep).
Night of the Juggler is the kind of low-budget, anything-goes filmmaking that’s most remarkable for the unpredictability of its minor details. Gorman’s unpredictability as the crazed kidnapper is especially thrilling. He’s introduced at a greasy-spoon diner, making a smiley face out of his bacon & eggs breakfast plate before dousing that culinary cartoon with excessive ketchup gore. He’s scary because his every move is impossible to anticipate, especially as he seemingly falls in love with his underage “Million Dollar Baby” kidnapping victim while making threatening phone calls to the wrong family about what he’ll do to her if they don’t pay up (including her sending her back home as “chunks of meat”). There is no shortage of NYC freaks on his level here. The city is overflowing with the criminally insane, making it near impossible for James Brolin to navigate his way back to his daughter before she’s torn apart by the horde. Despite drowning in that bottomless cesspool of cretins, both Brolin and his kidnapped kid continually express a deep, unbreakable love for the city and its people, which makes the movie oddly charming despite the frequent escalations of its violence. Sure, Brolin is on a similar vengeance mission as Charles Bronson is in the Death Wish series, but in this case the criminal he’s after is the racist lunatic, not the hero; Brolin generally loves the people of New York, chastising his ex-wife for abandoning the city for the safer, blander refuge of suburban Connecticut. When Mandy Patinkin appears as a vigilante cabbie, or Sharon Mitchell shows up to work the peep show booths on 42nd Street, or Richard Castellano stops his police investigation dead to instead inquire about how frozen yogurt is made, the Big Apple comes across as a great city spoiled only by its few bad apples, among which are the cops who care more about personal profit than the people they supposedly serve.
Night of the Juggler‘s recent return to theaters is a cause to celebrate among longtime fans who luckily caught it during its original run or during its subsequent late-night cable broadcasts, as it’s essentially become lost media in the four decades since. The new restoration is especially being heralded by genre-film junkies who watched the scuzzy, taped-off-the-TV scan of it that made its way to YouTube in recent years. That scuzziness isn’t totally inappropriate for a movie that mostly characterizes New York City as a collection of feral rats scurrying around underground jets of steam, but I imagine the pixelation of a low-quality YouTube upload would’ve made it borderline illegible during its multiple whirlwind street chases, so there’s never been a better time to catch up with it than now, really. Not for nothing, there’s also never been a better time to catch up with early seasons of Law & Order if you missed its original run, since it consistently aired out-of-sequence during its years of televised syndication. It also looks incredible streaming in HD as a relic from when major-network primetime dramas were shot on actual celluloid and featured contributions from world-class actors & cinematographers. Law & Order and Night of the Juggler: two great, greasy tastes that taste extra great & greasy together.
While viewing the recent political satire Mountainhead, I kept thinking about that frequent online refrain that people use as a response whenever someone posts something conspiracy-addled or which otherwise blows the mind of the poster: “This must hit so hard if you’re stupid.” Mountainhead itself is not one of those movies, as for whatever issues one may have with it, it’s certainly not meant to appeal to the kind of people whose ignorance gives them delusions of intelligence; it’s a mockery of those people. Many lines that came out of the mouths of those characters felt like exactly the kind of thing that probably sounds very smart to very stupid people. I was also reminded of the phrase while watching the new action flick Ballerina, advertised as being “from the world of John Wick.” I’m fairly partial to the John Wick series, lumping the first three films together in the #40 slot on a list of my 100 favorite films of the 2010s (and later giving John Wick 4 a 4.5 star rating when it came out a couple of years ago). Even with that being said, that series and this spin-off are exactly the kind of films in which the plot exists solely to put the protagonist through the ringer and have them face off against hordes of killers, setting them up and mowing them down. The narrative choice of introducing a whole underworld society of assassins with their own rules, regulations, and responsibilities in the first film allowed for the franchise to let that choice of mythos grow (and perhaps even balloon and bloat). By the fourth film, we were introduced to the concept of “The Table” that oversees the whole masquerade, “Harbingers” who enforce their rules and customs, “Adjudicators” who investigate potential violations of the house rules of the Continental hotels, a vast network of intelligence operatives posing as panhandlers and led by “The Bowery King,” and the Ruska Roma, the organization that trained John Wick in his youth and which presents itself to the world as a premier dance theater and academy while disguising its role as a school for assassins. All of which probably hits so hard . . . if, well, you know the rest. But sometimes, it’s okay to dare to be stupid.
The last of these was introduced in John Wick 3, when Wick (Keanu Reeves) meets with The Director (Anjelica Huston) to call in a favor. Ballerina has been in the works since before that time, when Lionsgate purchased the first script from screenwriter Shay Hatten with the intent to adapt it as part of the John Wick series. Hatten was then brought on to write both JW3 and JW4, which allowed him to plant the seeds for Ballerina, with the film eventually being produced nearly ten years after initial conception, with Len Wiseman, director of the first two Underworld films and former husband of their star Kate Beckinsale. Wiseman also directed that Total Recall remake that everyone hated, which, when placed alongside the duds in Hatten’s writing resume (which includes three Zack Snyder partnerships, for Army of the Dead and parts one and two of Rebel Moon), does not give one the impression that Ballerina was destined for greatness. It more than succeeds, however, at carrying the torch of this series, and is the first big dumb blockbuster of the summer, which I mean with all due respect.
Javier Macarro (David Castañeda) is raising his daughter, Eve, in a large waterfront mansion home, where he dotes on and adores her. One night, their home is invaded by a man (Gabriel Byrne) who intends to kill Javier and return Eve to her mother’s family, citing that Javier had no right to steal her away. Javier manages to kill all of the man’s henchmen but their leader escapes, and Javier succumbs to his wounds. This prompts the arrival of Winston (Ian McShane), the manager of the New York Continental, who delivers Eve to the Tartakovsky Theatre and its Director, in the hopes that she might find her place in the world of assassins in which her father was raised. Twelve years later, Eve (Ana de Armas) has spent all of this time learning both ballet and the art of delivering death, although she’s struggling with the latter more than the former. After a pep talk from mentor Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) in which she is encouraged to “fight like a girl” (i.e., dirty), and when she eavesdrops on the conversation between John Wick and The Director in JW3 and then asks the man himself for advice, Eve starts to gain the upper hand over her opponents. After passing her final test, gets her first field deployment as an escort for the daughter of a rich man whose enemies may attempt to abduct and ransom her. After an impressive action sequence in an icy nightclub called -11, her getaway is foiled by the sudden appearance of an assassin whom she manages to subdue, discovering that he has the same scarification that her father’s would-be killers had. The Director refuses to reveal any information, which leads Eve to cash in on her connection to Winston, who points her in the direction of a mysterious man hiding out at the Continental in Prague (Norman Reedus) who might be able to tell her more.
Strangely enough for these movies, the mythbuilding that has occasionally been a stumbling block for the series as it grew is hamstrung here. We eventually learn that Byrne’s character is the “Chancellor” of a cult that makes its home in the seemingly quaint European mountain town of Hallstedt, but while we hear about this cult over and over again, we never get any real idea about what their beliefs or goals are. There’s an electrifying scene early on in which Eve is put to her final graduation test at the dance academy, which sees her put in a room at a table with two disassembled guns, and another woman (played by Rila Fukushima, who is always welcome on my screen) enters, clearly furious and distraught that she’s been reduced to “a test.” When Eve asks her who she is, she tells her that she’s Eve, “in ten years.” Then a timer starts and she starts assembling the gun and … all we know is that Eve passed. When arriving at Hallstedt, all we learn about the people living there is that (a) no one is allowed to leave, and (b) it appears to serve the purpose of some kind of retirement home for past killers, where they can settle down and raise children. Other than the fact that you can check out any time you like but can never leave, there’s no indication that the so-called “cult” has any foundational beliefs or ideologies, and there’s a real missed opportunity there. Also, since most of us have seen John Wick 4, we know that John is destined to die, and sooner than later. Here, the film gives us two potential endpoints for Eve’s journey that show she doesn’t have to follow the same path that he does—retirement or “retirement”—but the film doesn’t seem all that interested in developing either of these ideas. They might be saving it for the sequel, but as a man who always loves fiction with cults in it, I was a mite disappointed that we never learned that the cult worships a personification of Death or is preparing for some kind of evil version of the Rapture, or anything else that would make them a “cult” and not a convenience for the narrative. Even the familial connections that we learn Eve has in Hallstadt are pretty obvious and end up being pretty irrelevant within minutes of learning them, and it wouldn’t be a Hollywood script if Eve wasn’t offered something tempting to her followed by someone making the obvious joke (which probably hits so hard if you’re stupid).
The action here is stellar, as always. I was hoping that we would get to spend a little more time with Eve’s learning curve, and that is an element. The thing about John Wick is that he’s an unstoppable force. You might be able to slow him down a little but, but you can never stop him, and the franchise is built entirely around watching him utterly destroy everything that gets placed in front of him. It’s like the Mission: Impossible or Final Destination films in that way; you’re here to watch the same movie as last time and the time before that, and you’re going to like it. When I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was going to see this one, he said that he had tried to get into the first one and couldn’t, complaining “It’s just Keanu Reeves killing people,” and I replied that these are movies that are more concerned with the ballet of violence. Ballerina, naturally, is no different from the other John Wicks in that way, as we get to see Eve use a pair of ice skates in a way that Hans Brinker could never have imagined, tear through cultists with a flamethrower (ho ho ho), and utterly destroy a kill team that was foolish enough to bring guns to a grenade fight. While we do get to see her improve, it’s done in a fairly trite way, as Eve initially struggles to gain the upper hand in matches against her larger, male sparring partners, until Nogi tells her to “fight like a girl,” at which point she starts kicking dudes in the nuts and becomes the class’s top dog. It feels like a very 90s line and a very 90s cliché, but at least it gets a fun callback later when Eve, armed only with rubber bullets, shoots one of her attackers in the groin. Her evolution to killer happens fairly quickly over the course of a montage and by the time we see her in the field after a two-month jump, she’s almost unstoppable.
I suppose that this is better than watching her struggle a lot more than John does in his films, because the audience for these movies can trend a little toxic. I’m sure that the people who are already calling her a Mary Sue in some dark, roach-infested corner of the internet would have been complaining about her being a weak and ineffective hero in comparison to the unflappable Chad John Wick if we had gotten to see her spend a little more time on the road to becoming a finely tuned killing machine. Instead, the film plays it smart by showing us that Eve is fully dedicated and will push herself past her limits even when she falls short in her academic environment, such as it is, and then cuts to her displaying an almost John Wick-level of hypercompetence in the field of dealing death. Later, when her quest to avenge her father (and rescue a young girl whose father was willing to die to get her away from Hallstedt but who wasn’t as successful as Eve’s father) triggers a sharp exchange between the cult and the Roma Ruska with the promise of a war between them if Eve isn’t stopped, the Director calls in the favor John Wick owes her and sends him to Hallstedt. For her part, Eve is brave enough to try and fight him when he shows up on the scene, and although she’s giving it her all, it’s immediately clear that she’s completely outclassed by him. She’d be dead within moments if John wasn’t willing to hear her out and, sympathetic to her story, he gives her until midnight before he hunts her down. It’s a good balance that Eve seems just as implacable as John until she’s actually face-to-face with him in a combat situation and he’s completely unfazed, dodging her attacks without breaking a sweat.
Beyond the aforementioned lack of depth given to the cult, my other big complaint about this film is that there’s just not enough ballet for a movie called Ballerina. We see Eve dance as a child and her tragic memento of her dead father is a wind-up ballerina, but after the opening credits, the ballet doesn’t come up again until the end, when Eve wistfully watches a performance by a former classmate who washed out (and fell back on her dream career of being a ballerina). I was really hoping that there would be a lot more dance-inspired action happening here, as would befit the title and concept. The film does seem more hesitant to show de Armas shooting people while Reeves was doing lots of gun-fu in his outings, which stood out to me a lot when her kit for her first mission is a non-lethal gun. We get to see her shoot a few people in Hallstedt, but until that point, we’re mostly limited to hand-to-hand combat, improvised weapons, and a whole lot of grenadery. I initially thought that this might be some old-fashioned Hollywood sexism happening in that they presume we won’t tolerate women being as violent as we allow men to be, but later in the film she burns dozens of men and women to death without flinching, which is even more horrific, so I’m not really sure. But given how much combat happened in the first half of the movie, would it have hurt to have Eve doing some pirouettes or en pointes somewhere to make her fighting style more distinct from John’s? In the moment in which she finds herself with a pair of skates in a boathouse and standing on the ice below the dock, I got terribly excited that we were about to see some ice dancing/fighting, but instead she just slices and dices. That’s all well and good (and hits hard if stupid), but it felt like a missed opportunity. This film could have been called Equestrian: From the World of John Wick and been about a girl’s riding academy that was secretly a cover for murder training and the effect on both the plot and the action would be negligible. If we go back to this well again, maybe we’ll get to see it next time.
Ironically, Fight or Flight seems to be flying under the radar. The new action comedy from first time feature director James Madigan is a lot of hyperactive, frenetic fun, even when some of the comedy thuds a bit. Some of that may fall on the writing duo of Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona. McLaren’s only previous writing credit is for the 2018 direct-to-Netflix Theo James vehicle How it Ends, while this is Cotrona’s first credit in that category after several years as an actor, most notably as the lead in the From Dusk till Dawn TV series. Despite some weak jokes that fail to land (no pun intended), this is still a pretty fun ride (no pun intended). And hey, stars of both of the turn of the millennium Halloween sequels (Josh Hartnett from 1998’s H20 and Katee Sackhoff from 2002’s Resurrection) appear in a movie together, even if they never share the screen at the same time. That’s something, right?
Hartnett is Lucas Reyes, who’s drinking himself to death in exile in Bangkok. Stateside, Katherine Brunt (Sackhoff) is busy leading a shadowy quasi-government agency/surveillance network. Her subordinate, Hunter (White Lotus’s Julian Kostov), informs her of a failed unauthorized action that resulted in an explosion in Asia, and that it appears that the incident involved “The Ghost,” a “black hat hacker” and terrorist about which no agency has ever been able to get any information. An overzealous lackey manages to find nearby footage that has been edited to remove the Ghost, Dead Reckoning style, and they extrapolate that they are headed for the Bangkok airport, with the nearest action team too far away to get there in time. Reluctantly, Brunt calls on Reyes, promising to clear up his legal status and allow him to come home. All he has to do is get on the plane, discover the identity of the Ghost and safely take them into custody, and deliver them to the agency alive when the plane lands in San Francisco. Should be simple, except that once they’re airborne, Brunt learns that this whole thing is a trap for the Ghost; an all points bounty has been put out for them, meaning that the plane is full of potential assassins.
That’s a concept that’s both high and a little broey, and it’s no surprise that when the jokes don’t work it’s because it leans into the latter rather than the former. After I had already groaned at the hyperactive stagey performance of the high-strung air steward Royce (Danny Ashok), what really thudded for me was one of the scenes that revealed more about the conspiracy. Brunt and Hunter take a walk outside of the agency’s headquarters as they discuss who knew what and when and whether or not one of them has any involvement in the leaking of the Ghost’s location, and there’s a lot of hay made (tediously) about how life is all about being top dog, full of machismo from both characters. When they end the discussion, they’ve reached a nearby waterfront, where a yoga class is being conducted by a long-haired hippie type; after they express their mutual disgust at this display, Brunt shakes her head and utters “Pussies.” It’s such a strange little cul-de-sac that exists for no reason other than to show Brunt and Hunter as adversaries vying for the position of alpha, with the oh-so-funny comical turn that it’s a woman calling people pussies. It’s these kinds of things that make this film feel weirdly out of touch in certain places, where ten percent edgelordiness seeps over and cheapens the whole thing.
Of course, the film is kind of a throwback in other ways. The “X on a plane” format is probably best remembered for giving us Snakes on a Plane, but this is more reminiscent of nineties skybound thrillers like Con Air and Air Force One, with a little bit of Final Destination-esque plane depressurization thrown in for good measure (this is not a spoiler; it’s the first scene). It’s got the shady government agency staffed by former CIA and other operatives but which now operates under a banner that remains undisclosed until fairly late in the game, and the conspiratorial actions that they perpetrate have a distinctly pre-War on Terror feel — more Enemy of the State than The Bourne Identity, although when the film shifts into fight sequences it utilizes the shaky cam effects canonized in that series before becoming the default in virtually every action thriller today. There’s also the presence of an inexplicably powerful supercomputer that the Ghost has created and which represents a threat to certain intelligence infrastructure, and the fact that this asset may be the reason that the Ghost was herded onto an airplane with assassins in the first place. Maybe because I was already in that headspace, this element felt very 90s to me as well, as the writing felt intentionally designed to imitate that “computers can do anything” optimism/fearmongering of the era, from uploading a virus to an alien mothership in Independence Day to deleting your entire identity in The Net. More depressingly, the film acts as if exposing governments and corporations for their exploitation of third world labor and participation in human trafficking would somehow have a negative effect on those entities. The reality that we all inhabit here in 2025 is one where people are still in the highest offices of power despite damning evidence of their involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and people still upgrade their phones every time there’s a new status symbol with full knowledge that they come from sweatshops that “employ” children. It’s cute that the film thinks that the Ghost’s wikileak might have some impact on anything at all; I wish I still had that kind of optimism.
Welcome to Episode #237 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of vintage genre films about Vietnam War vets suffering from PTSD, starting with the violent exploitation thriller Combat Shock (1986).
00:00 The Pope of Trash 08:50 Bastard Out of Carolina (1996) 13:00 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) 17:12 Under the Sand (2000) 24:15 Warfare (2025)
33:00 Combat Shock (1986) 52:15 Dead of Night (1974) 1:03:42 Backfire (1988) 1:17:10 Savage Dawn (1985)
I’m generally positive on the current state of film culture, at least on the audience end. Thanks to organizational hubs like Letterboxd, Discord, and the podcast circuit, it’s easier to find a wider cultural discussion on the niche cinematic artifacts I care about now than ever before in my lifetime, which leaves a lot of room for sharing & discovery outside the traditional print-media forum. Growing up, my familiarity with movie titles was determined by video store curation and magazine articles, but now there’s an infinite supply of Movie Discourse to delve into in all directions, if you care to look. It’s a blessing in terms of expanding the public library of accessible titles, but it can also be a little exhausting when it comes to those films’ analysis. Pinpointing what every movie is really “about” (i.e. Grief, Trauma, Depression, Isolation, etc.) gets to be a little tiresome over time, since it feels more like solving a literary puzzle than indulging in the art of the moving image on its own terms. Every modern film discussion tends to boil down to deciphering metaphor or interpreting the career-span mission statement of an auteur. As a civilian with a movie blog, I’m among the guiltiest participants in that constant ritual, and I genuinely don’t know how to stop compounding the problem with my own inane analysis of every movie I watch. How else could I justify logging all this stuff on Letterboxd?
The shot-on-video martial arts cheapie Furious is a huge relief in that modern context. A subprofessional, no-budget production from wannabe Hollywood stuntmen before they worked their way into the industry proper, it’s the exact kind of vintage cinematic artifact you never would have encountered in the wild unless it happened to be stocked at your specific neighborhood video store. Now, it’s accessible for streaming on several free-without-subscription platforms, backed by thousands of glowing Letterboxd reviews highlighting it as an overlooked gem. Better yet, it’s a film that sidesteps the need for any concrete analysis, since its story was obviously figured out in real time during its month-long shoot, purpose or meaning be damned. It’s all supernatural martial-arts nonsense that’s so light on plot & dialogue and so heavy on for-their-own-sake magic tricks that it plays less like a metaphorical puzzle to solve than it is a meandering dream dubbed direct to VHS. Sleight-of-hand card tricks and droning synths pull the audience into the opening credits with a chintzy sense of mystery, followed by 70 minutes of incoherent action adventure across the cliffs and rooftops of sunny California, with no particular destination in mind. Furious is much more concerned with convincing you that its stuntmen are jumping to their deaths from great heights or that its evil sorcerers are casting actual magic spells than it is concerned with filmic abstraction or metaphor. It’s illusion without allusion, the perfect salve for modern film discourse.
In the opening sequence, a nameless warrior fights off attackers through some very careful cliffside choreo while attempting to operate what appears to be a magic tusk, as it spins like a compass. It’s unclear where that compass is meant to lead her, since she’s soon overcome by combatant goons, who then bring the magic tusk to a sorcerer who runs a karate dojo out of a nearby 80s office building. The fallen warrior’s brother leaves his own mountainside dojo to investigate and avenge his sister’s death, which throws him into the middle of a wide conspiracy involving wizards and, possibly, aliens. Really, he just punches & kicks his way through a series of fights until he works his way up to the Big Bad, occasionally stopping to gawk at screen-illusion magic tricks, like the Big Bad’s ability to levitate or the main henchman’s ability to shoot live chickens out of his hands like bullets. Nothing about Furious makes much linear, narrative sense, but its curio collection of spinning tusks, severed heads, flaming skeletons, and so, so many chickens has its own distinct sense of magic to it. Our hero’s loopy revenge mission recalls the SOV surrealism of Tina Krause’s Limbo – Lynchian in the sense that they’re better enjoyed at face value than they are as 1:1 metaphors that can be unlocked through critical interpretation. Furious just happens to feature more punching, kicking, and stunt falls than Limbo, along with more bright California sunshine.
The “remastered” version of Furious currently available on most streaming platforms still looks like it was dubbed over an already-used VHS, which only adds to its charm as a vintage martial-arts novelty. Its narrative incoherence is also echoed in its editing style, in which every shot is either one beat too short or one beat too long, constantly keeping its rhythm off-balance. The fight choreography is just as precise as the editing is sloppy, however, with each punch & kick sharply delivered on-target. If I were to put on my 2020s movie blogger thinking cap, I’d say that the film’s narrative and editing incoherence reflects the protagonist’s hazy, disjointed mind as he recovers from the grief of his sister’s sudden death. Really, though, the movie just kicks ass because the fights look cool and there’s a wizard who shoots chickens out of his hands. It’s not that complicated.
It’s tempting to think that since online movie discussions have migrated from IMDb message boards to Letterboxd rankings and Film Twitter squabbles, communal tastes have skewed a lot less macho. We’ve supposedly been working towards a more inclusive online movie nerd community, leaving behind the white-boy Film Bro days of the late 90s & early 2000s, when the taste-defining IMDb Top 100 was wallpapered with dorm-room-poster titles like Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and Memento. You can still hear bellowing echoes from the Film Bro days of previous decades, though. It’s just now wrapped in a protective layer of self-aware irony, with prominent Film Twitter Personalities exalting the “vulgar auteurs” of “Dudes Rock” cinema, clearing space for meatheads like Zach Snyder & Michael Bay in rankings among the modern greats. It’s a mostly empty, flippant exercise, but a few genuinely great filmmakers do get swept up in the momentum of it – most notably Michael Mann. Clearly, Michael Mann’s most creative, vibrant work was his initial run of high-style genre films in the 1980s: Thief, Manhunter, The Keep, etc.. However, those are not the Mann classics that vulgar-auteur apologists cite in daily conversation. In true retro IMDb message board fashion, Mann’s name most often recurs during conversations about The Greatest Films of All Time in the context of two sprawling, macho crime pictures about dudes who rock: Heat & Miami Vice. To get a clear snapshot of how Film Bro culture is still alive & well in a post-Letterboxd world, you have to venture into The Mannosphere and spend some time with that hairy-knuckled pair.
To truly return to the macho Film Bro 2000s, you obviously have to start with 2006’s Miami Vice. Consciously updating the titular television show’s extremely 80s style of crime-thriller filmmaking that he himself helped create, Mann leans into the flat, digital aesthetic of the early aughts in this undercover cop procedural, again attempting to define the visual style of a new decade. As soon as Maxim babes go-go dance to Linkin Park in the opening minute, it’s clear that you have to harbor nostalgia for the bro-down flip-phone cheapness of the 2000s to appreciate Mann’s Miami Vice, or else you will continue to suffer for the following two hours. Colin Farrell & Jamie Foxx play undercover cops who work to manufacture a grand mid-deal bust, aggressively grumbling through a series of anticlimactic phone calls & meetings but occasionally taking breaks to order mojitos and ride on “go-fast boats” to a butt-rock soundtrack provided by Audioslave. Before the climactic drug deal inevitably goes wrong and concludes in a shootout, it plays like a DTV action movie without any action scenes, as if Mann had blown all of his squib & explosion budget on movie-star casting & SD cards. Miami Vice is a lifeless, hideous film about men who greatly respect each other and work tirelessly to protect the women they’re currently sleeping with. Mann’s embrace of the era’s jarring shift from celluloid textures to digital imagery was daring but unfulfilling; there’s no reason why a $150mil production should resemble an overlong episode of Cheaters. He did pave a path for more successful actioners to indulge in the uncanniness of modernity, though, getting way ahead of titles like Tenet, Ambulance, and Gemini Man. He’s undeniably a visionary, even when his vision is an ugly one.
1995’s Heat is a much more pleasant journey into The Mannosphere, one that will remind you that the major titles of the Film Bro canon aren’t individually “bad” by default; they’re just collectively limited by an overbearingly macho perspective. Nearly three hours long and supported by a cast so stacked it has room to include Bud Cort, Henry Rollins, and Tone Loc, Heat feels like the final word on a very specific category of macho 90s thriller (in which I suppose Point Break was the first word). Its cat & mouse game between a criminal mastermind (Robert DeNiro) and the harried detective on his tail (Al Pacino) is familiar in tone but epic in scale and sharp in detail, starting with an impeccably well orchestrated armored-truck heist and then spending the next couple hours provoking & profiling its many players (including actors as varied as Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, William Fichtner, Dennis Haysbert, Hank Azaria, Tom Noonan, Danny Trejo, Wes Studi, Jeremy Piven, and even a few people who aren’t men). Unlike in Miami Vice, there are multiple action sequences in Heat, with plenty standoffs & shootouts keeping the adrenaline up between scenes of gruff cops & criminals venturing home to protect & bed their respective women. Devoted fans of Mann’s Miami Vice will notice plenty of overlap with this earlier draft’s visual techniques, especially in its uneasy handheld closeups and in an awkwardly green-screened conversation held against the artificial backdrop of Los Angeles city lights. Heat has all of the Dudes Rock virtues of Miami Vice without looking like a syndicated daytime TV series that couldn’t afford to shoot all of its scripted gunfights. It’s even got Val Kilmer as a pretty-boy co-lead with awful hair, telegraphing Farrell’s role in the later, inferior film.
None of this reportage is helpful to the Mannsplainers of the world who are already deeply entrenched in The Mannosphere. I’m only speaking from a place of curiosity about why these two particular titles continually come up in the current film discourse, despite feeling out of step with the general mood of post-Film Bro movie culture. As a pair they’re instructive in how that culture has changed in the past couple decades, even though they land with opposing effects. To get a sense of how much better the current cinematic landscape is now in comparison with the artless, bro-infested aughts, check out Miami Vice. To get a sense of what might have been lost as we left that Mannscape in the rearview, check out Heat, which is an even more engrossing, entertaining thriller now that we’re not living in a world where every acclaimed movie appeals to the same audience.
There are currently 8,867 films on my Letterboxd watchlist, and roughly 8,000 of them will remain unwatched for all eternity. Every time a movie looks interesting to me, I toss it into the bottomless watchpit, with no concrete plans to dig it up at any particular time. Either it’ll tumble out of the Shuffle button at the exact right moment or it will rot there forever, and I think that’s beautiful. What I’m much more dutiful about it is my physical media watchpile, which fits neatly into one humble box besides my television that I’m not “allowed” to let overfill before bringing home more discs. Having a physical Blu-ray or DVD in my home is a guarantee that a movie will be watched—soon!—if not only because it then enables me to buy more Blu-rays & DVDs. The watchbox has been getting a little tight lately, though, so it’s time to clear out a few lingering titles with some short-form reviews.
I’ve been having especially good luck finding used martial-arts DVDs at local thrift stores this year, so that feels like as good of a category to start this KonMari process with as any. Listed & reviewed below are four kung fu action flicks I purchased on used DVDs at two local Goodwill stores in 2024 (the one on Tulane Ave in MidCity and the new outlet “bins” location in New Orleans East, in case you’re on the hunt). They all roughly follow the same story template in which a young fighter is violently wronged, trains for violent revenge, and then takes that revenge against his oppressors in violent spectacle. Their individual emphases on the wronging, the training, and the avenging vary from film to film, though, as does their entertainment value as vintage martial-arts relics.
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
By far, the best of this batch is the Shaw Brothers classic The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, which mostly focuses on the training aspect of the kung-fu story template. While most kung-fu revengers include a martial-arts training montage in which a young fighter is taught fighting skills & Buddhist philosophy in a temple of violence, The 36th Chamber expands that 2nd-act rebirth to stretch over the majority of its runtime. Gordon Liu plays a young student whose schoolmates & teacher are slaughtered by a fascistic government who sees them as a rebellious threat. He retreats to a Shaolin temple to learn how to fight back against those government brutes and is reluctantly trained by the monks who live there to be a world-class combatant. Most of the film features Liu solving physically challenging puzzles while older monks nod in silent approval, and he grows frustrated to be learning discipline rather than vengeance. His impatience eventually fades as he matures into becoming a deadly weapon of great wisdom, which is a gift he then vows to spread to the common man outside the temple so they can fight their oppressors in great numbers instead of as individual rebels.
I watched The 36th Chamber of Shaolin in its ideal format: a thrifted Dragon Dynasty-label DVD with a 10min RZA interview reminiscing about marathoning Golden Age martial-arts & porno schlock as a kid in late-70s NYC. The film would be considered a classic of Hong Kong action cinema without RZA’s help, but his grindhouse cinephilia helped sew its name into the fabric of American culture, so that every time you hear the words “36th Chamber”, “Shaolin” or “Master Killer” (the film’s alternate American title), a Wu-Tang Clan beat automatically plays in your head. It’s a little silly to include a 2min “Wu-Tang concert video” as an additional special feature, but there’s still some thematic overlap there in how the dozen people performing on stage at once have found strength in numbers that they wouldn’t wield as individual rappers. In his interview, RZA attempts to contextualize why Hong Kong martial-arts films might have resonated so deeply with him as a young Black youth in America, citing “the underdog thing,” “the brotherhood thing,” and “the escapism” as resonant themes. The truth is he more likely cited this classic so often in Wu-Tang lyrics simply because it looked & sounded cool. Either way, he’s right.
The Iron Monkey (1977)
The title & thrills of the 1977 martial-arts revenger The Iron Monkey are so much more generic & forgettable than 36th Chamber‘s that it’s usually only brought up as a footnote to a much more popular 1993 film of the same name, to which it has no narrative relation. Chen Kuan-tai directs and stars as a frivolous, drunken gambler with a rebel father who is—you guessed it—assassinated by a fascist government. He cleans up his act at a Shaolin temple and trains for revenge, which he eventually gets hands-on against the General that killed his father at the movie’s climax. Given the stark-white backdrop of its pop-art opening credits and its genre-dutiful training sequences you might suspect that it was a cheap knockoff of The 36th Chamber . . . until you realize that it was released an entire year earlier.
The Iron Monkey is a standard-issue kung-fu revenger with nothing especially noteworthy about it except that the violence occasionally goes way overboard, especially in the opening sequence where an actual monkey & eagle are forced to fight as symbols of the “Monkey Fist” vs. “Eagle Claw” combat choreography of its central hero & villain. There’s also a scene where the bad guys show they mean business by choking a child to death, which makes for two pretty alarming choices on when to color outside the lines. My used DVD copy was a digital scan of a dubbed & scratched film print, which feels indicative of its significance in the larger kung-fu landscape. I couldn’t tell if the off-screen impact sounds of punches & kicks that are heard but not seen were added by an American distributor hoping to keep the audience’s pulse up or were included in the original mix as a cost-cutting ploy, but the choice was something I had never encountered in a movie before. I’d rather indulge in that kind of novelty than watching a stressed-out monkey fight an eagle for my entertainment.
Return of the Tiger (1977)
Just because a martial arts film is cheap doesn’t mean it’s worthless. I was much more enthused by the Brucesploitation novelty Return of Tiger, which starred “Bruce Li” as yet another wronged son avenging the murder of his father. Supposedly a sequel to a film called Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger (which starred Li as an entirely different character), Return of the Tiger skips the hero’s training montage to instead detail the training of his enemies. Bruce Li and “special guest star” Angela Mao show up ready to do battle, but their Enemy No. 1 (Paul L. Smith, Altman’s Bluto) is continuously training a kung-fu army of underlings to protect his empire. As a result, the film has incredibly athletic martial arts sequences, but most of them are confined to the relatively drab setting of an Olympic training gym — including Li’s intro in the music video style opening credits. Mao’s intro is also literally gymnastic, in that she initially fights off the gang leader’s nameless goons while jumping on a trampoline and launching herself off a balance beam. As her special credit suggests, she steals the show.
While Return of the Tiger follows a familiar wronging-training-avenging story template, it does distinguish itself from the other films on this list in its contemporary setting. The main Bad Guy in the film is not some empirical warlord of the 18th Century; he’s a heroin dealer who runs a shipyard. My English-dub DVD copy (“digitally mastered” by the fine folks at Reel Entertainment in Digital, which cannot be a real company) not only overdubs the dialogue but also replaces the soundtrack with incredibly baffling song choices, including a nightclub scene set to Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music” while a lounge singer mouths lyrics to an entirely different song. It’s a nice change of setting for the genre, and the fights staged there are accomplished in their precision & brutality.
The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)
The first-act wronging of The One-Armed Swordsman is two-fold, which doubles the amount of training sequences the film gets to indulge in. First, a young child watches his father get slaughtered (go figure), then is raised by a kung-fu master to become the formidable Hong Kong action hero Jimmy Wang. Only, the fellow students at his temple are jealous of his skills and spiteful of having to be equals with the son of a (dead) servant, so in an overboard schoolyard bullying incident they cut off his sword-carrying arm. Wang survives, improbably, and then trains again to re-learn how to fight with just one arm before local bandits get out of hand and harm untrained villagers who need protection. Despite this doubling down on its training-for-revenge sequences, much of the runtime involves debates between our titular hero and his wife about whether he should relearn his fighting skills at all, since it’s a like he’s inviting violence into the family home — like how gun owners are statistically more likely to be killed by guns. The title & premise make it sound like a gimmicky wuxia novelty, but in practice it’s a surprisingly classy drama set inside of a series of illustrated postcards . . . with some occasional swordfight gore.
What I mostly learned from this loose group of titles is that the Dragon Dynasty-label DVDs of classic Shaw Brother titles are a sign of quality & class, and they’re worth picking up any time you stumble across one at a Goodwill. The best special feature included on this particular disc was a short career-retrospective documentary on its director, Chang Cheh, which added at least a dozen titles to my ever-expanding Letterboxd watchlist. I’ll likely never get to them all unless they fall into my lap as used media, where tangibility means accountability and quality varies wildly.
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