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Sicario (2015)

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threehalfstar

One of the initial reasons I wanted to check out Sicario while it was still in the theaters was that during the film’s early press a lot was made about the fact that Emily Blunt’s protagonist was almost replaced with a male lead due to pressure from nervous producers, presumably because they believed that alteration would sell more tickets. I caught a clip of Blunt promoting the film on Stephen Colbert’s talk show where she quoted a producer as saying “If you make her a dude, we’ll up the budget,” a fucked up sentiment the actress backed up with, “Welcome to Hollywood.” This gross line of thinking gets more & more outdated every year, especially when you consider the recent success of female-led action properties like The Hunger Games, Mad Max: Fury Road, Divergent, Lucy, and the list goes on. Hell, even Blunt herself outshone Tom Frickin’ Cruise with her action star prowess in last year’s Edge of Tomorrow. I initially had very little interest in Sicario based on its trailers, due to its drug cartel-busting subject matter & the promise of a relentlessly bleak tone, but I resented the idea that the film’s lead was once potentially going to be genderswapped to supposedly make more money. I resented it so much that I decided to support the film while it was still in the theater in the simple act of buying a ticket.

It turns out that the film is actually pretty good. I don’t have any particular fascination with the subject of drug cartels & border control outside of what I read about it in the news, so I’d usually be much more likely to seek out a trashier, goofier take on the topic like, say, the recent, grotesque Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Sabotage. Sicario is a lot more realistic than that ugly affair, following a multi-agency operation (mostly between the FBI & the DOJ) that seeks to shake up the status quo of typical drug raid protocol in an attempt to dethrone a couple of kingpin brothers wreaking havoc in Phoenix, AZ & Juárez, Mexico. The “war on drugs” becomes quite literal as Blunt’s law-abiding SWAT member goes on a Training Day-style tour of how much more effective it is for drug enforcement agents to break the rules entirely. In an attempt to get a leg up in an ongoing power struggle, the United States government essentially becomes a well-funded rival cartel, resorting to acts of kidnapping, torture, and assassination to get the results that the by-the-books drug raids simply aren’t. When Blunt’s protagonist pleads “What the fuck are we doing?” & “I’m not a soldier,” in protest of their far from legal war tactics, her helplessness as a pawn in the shakeup is alarming. Questionable authority figures played by Benicio del Toro & Josh Brolin intentionally keep her in the dark as they put her life in danger & overtly manipulate her into participating in human rights violations. At one point del Toro snarls, “Nothing will make sense to your American ears and you will doubt everything we do. But in the end, you will understand.” That last part may be true, but understanding is not the same as approving.

What Sicario does best is establishing a claustrophobic threat of violence. Early in the film a shootout in a tiny drug house reveals walls lined with dozens of corpses. Bombs go off unexpectedly. Dismembered bodies are strung under overpasses as warnings. Shootouts in traffic jams & underground tunnels cramp the audience into inescapable spaces riddled with gunfire. A tense, ominous soundtrack makes visual cues like night vision, Western landscapes, and blood running thin in shower water look impossibly alien. Much like how the recent Johnny Depp vehicle Black Mass gets by purely on the strength of its acting, Sicario might be a mostly predictable film in terms of narrative, but it creates such a violent, foreboding atmosphere, that some scenes make you want to step out in the lobby for a breath of fresh air (or to puke, as the cops who discovered the early scenes’ in-the-wall corpses couldn’t help doing).

One thing’s for sure: no matter what your mileage with a serious action film centered on US/Mexican border drug cartels may be in general, Sicario would not have been at all improved by replacing Emily Blunt’s character with a male lead, no matter what a scumbag Hollywood producer would like you to believe. The few supporting roles played by men within the film are pitch perfect, especially in small character details like the way Josh Brolin turns the simple acts of whistling & chewing gum into unbearable grotesqueries or in Benicio del Toro’s delivery of cinema’s all-time most violent wet willy (that’s one for the ages, right there), but it’s Blunt’s performance that provides the film with the bulk of its pathos. Sicario is a fine film, but Blunt is a damn fine actor. It’s a testament to the characters of Sicario‘s director & writer, Denis Villeneuve & Taylor Sheridan, that they stuck with Blunt & didn’t opt for that promise of a bigger budget. The results were certainly worthwhile & hopefully it’ll help lead to idiotic propositions like that dying away forever.

-Brandon Ledet

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Re-Edit (2001)

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Science fiction fans are a notoriously easily-riled bunch. This year’s Hugo Awards–the speculative fiction equivalent of the Oscars–was an unequivocal debacle, as a contingent of MRAs and their acolytes, impotently infuriated by what they perceived to be a rise in “SJW issues” in their genre literature, attempted to rig the voting system to prevent any work with pro-women, pro-minority, or LGBTQIA issues from being awarded the prestigious award. Considering that SF is the genre that has always been at the forefront of exploring issues of oppression and intersectionality, this is completely absurd. The machinations of these ignorant folk, who can best be referred to as “fake geek guys,” resulted in five separate categories receiving “No Award” this year, including Best Short Story and both long and short form Best Editor categories. And this was just the contentious babblings of a vocal minority of cisgender, white, heterosexual males who apparently have no concept of sci-fi history.

Much less controversial was the near-universal hatred for the first of the Star Wars prequels, The Phantom Menace. Although that hatred has died down in the sixteen years since the film was released (in no small part due to the fact that anyone born after 1994 doesn’t remember a world where there were only three near-perfect Star Wars movies instead of a mixed bag of six), The Phantom Menace is still widely regarded as a failure on both an artistic and a fandom level. The complaints about the film are endless, and I could never hope to create as in-depth and exhaustive exploration of the film’s flaws as RedLetterMedia did, but here’s a short summation of issues that fans and mainstream film-goers despised:

  • (Most notoriously) the introduction of original character Jar Jar Binks, a person-sized CGI space rabbit that engaged in presumably child-pleasing comedy antics throughout the film.
  • The racist caricature of Jar Jar as an ignorant simpleton who spoke in a conglomeration of Jamaican slang and antebellum slave dialects, as well as the Jewish stereotypes applied to hook-nosed greedy slave owner Watto and the Asian stereotypes (largely embodied in an accent that confuses “l” and “r” sounds) represented by the Trade Federation.
  • The pacing of the film is terrible: characters spend seemingly endless time in needlessly complicated and redundant political debate; other than in action sequences, characters simply wander around aimlessly in a (vain) attempt to give dialogue scenes some sense of motion.
  • The revelation that the mystical Force that binds all life together was caused by germs known as midi-chlorians.

I never really had much of a horse in that race; I was twelve the summer that the movie came out, and I thought it was mediocre at best then. I was always more of a Star Trek fan, and although I think the rivalry between the fandoms of those two franchises is exaggerated and instigated by the aforementioned Fake Geek Guys, I was young enough to be less discerning than others. I didn’t like Jar Jar, but I also didn’t think of Star Wars as an unimpeachable work of staggering genius the way that so many sad middle aged men with basements full of memorabilia do. I appreciate the franchise much more now than I did as a kid, although I pity people whose lives revolve around it. I mean, come on, the original trilogy is a lot of fun and has some really great ideas, but it’s still a fairy tale at its core: a farm boy meets a wizard who tells him he has a magical destiny, and he then teams with a pirate to rescue a princess from an evil wizard.

The problem of Jar Jar was expressed almost immediately, as was fan frustration regarding the Midi-chlorian concept, with complaints about the film’s pacing problems coming later. So it’s no surprise that fans of the era immediately set to work trying to “fix” it. The Phantom Edit, initially credited to “The Phantom Editor” who later revealed himself to be film editor Mike J. Nichols, was not the first fan edit of an established work, but it was one of the first to be noteworthy for its popularity in the mainstream, receiving coverage from news outlets as varied as Salon, NPR, PBS, and the BBC in 2000 and 2001. Notable changes to the source material included reduction and deletion of dialogue from the annoying battle droids, removal of the more immature dialogue from Anakin’s scenes, reduction of expository and political dialogue, and the severe trimming of Jar Jar’s appearances on screen, removing his slapstick elements. Also removed were all references to the midi-chlorians.

The Phantom Edit was later edited even further, into the more streamlined The Phantom Re-Edit, which also circulated as a bootleg tape or download; the earliest reference to it that I can find is a review released in June of 2001, meaning that it was created no later than May of that year. This edit also extensively alters other problematic features of Menace, most notably by getting rid of the English dialogue for Jar Jar and his people as well as the Trade Federation, and many conversations between characters on Tatooine are also altered to sound alien; this dialogue is then subtitled. To a large degree, this works strongly in the film’s favor. The Trade Federation are no longer as stereotypical and actually seem threatening in this version, the racist accents of Jar Jar and the other Gungans is also done away with, and the replacement subtitle dialogue presents them as being competent and politically savvy. Moreover, Jar Jar’s dialogue has been replaced completely, making him a character who is surprisingly wise and sage (although the cartoonish hand movements are still present in many scenes–can’t get around that).

So, is Star Wars: The Phantom Re-Edit a good movie? Well… not really. To use an apropos cliche, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Menace was still full of stilted dialogue and wooden acting, and no amount of editing will magically turn those dreary performances into something more watchable. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon still spend a lot of time expositing to each other over the phone in scenes that now remind me of all the times Don Draper called Betty and told her he would be late coming home. The scene in which Qui-Gon takes a blood sample from young Anakin is still present for no real reason, simply cutting away before the infamous midi-chlorian conversation. The edits are necessarily abrupt, but that doesn’t mean they’re not jarring and alienating. All told, it’s a better movie than Menace, but that’s not saying much. Hardcore fans who are still mad, fifteen years later, that George Lucas “ruined their childhood” might get some satisfaction from the re-edit, but that’s about it.

The Phantom Edit and The Phantom Re-Edit fail to address the larger problems of how the prequel trilogy relates to the franchise as a whole. In Star Wars (I’m not about that “A New Hope” nonsense), Ben Kenobi wears robes because he lives in a desert, not because that’s some kind of Jedi uniform like the prequel trilogy reinterprets it to be. Darth Vader is a lonely weirdo without much real clout; the members of the imperial military treat him with deference only because of his relationship with the Emperor, all while making fun of his religion behind his back and to his face. Vader even goes out and flies around in a tiny little fighter ship like all the cannon fodder pilots; he could have been killed pretty easily out there–which doesn’t make any sense if he was supposed to be some kind of prophesied Force savior. The glorification of his character in the prequel trilogy exists for one purpose: brand name recognition (and thus a higher profit margin).

I have no doubt that this is the reason that Vader’s corpse gets a cameo in the trailer for The Force Awakens, due out this Christmas. I have to confess my overwhelming excitement for the film, but I also hope there’s no nonsensical revisitation (or, Force forbid, a revitalization) of his character. I have my doubts; it’s been a decade and a half since we stood on the precipice of new Star Wars movies, and it remains to be seen whether or not Episode VII will also demand a fan edit. Here’s hoping the answer is “no,” but we’ll find out soon enough.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

12 Rounds 3: Lockdown (2015)

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twohalfstar

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In the first two 12 Rounds films, disgruntled domestic terrorists set up convoluted twelve round scavenger hunts (very similar to the one in Die Hard: With a Vengeance) as a means to teach lessons about perceived wrongs from the past. In the first film pro wrestler John Cena plays a police officer whose journey through the twelve round gauntlet works as a makeshift guided tour through New Orleans’ vast sea of tourist traps. In 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded pro wrestler Randy Orton plays an EMT whose scavenger hunt experience functions as an elaborate anti-drunk driving PSA, one with a bodycount. Curiously, 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown discards the twelve round scavenger hunt concept completely. Pro wrestler Dean Ambrose stars as the film’s good cop protagonist, John Shaw, who finds himself locked inside his own precinct with a gang of crooked narcs looking to end his life before he can expose evidence of their illegal deeds to the proper authorities. In this scenario, the “12 rounds” of the title refers to the dozen bullets in the sole gun Ambrose’s cop has to protect himself with as he faces an armed to the teeth gang of officers who are somewhat similar in character to the gang of DEA scumbags Arnold Schwarzenegger helms in Sabotage.

Removing the high concept silliness of the twelve round scavenger hunt was a huge mistake for 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown. Limiting the action to a single space & replacing the first two films’ mind games with a periodic reminder of how many of Shaw’s twelve bullets are left in the clip (“9 rounds left,” he vocally reminds himself, completely for our benefit) makes the film to be somewhat of a bore. All that’s left to distinguish the film, then is Dean Ambrose’s disappointingly underwhelming screen presence & an unusuallly large stockpile of dead cops. After the guided tour of New Orleans in the first film & the anti-drunk driving diatribe of the second, it’s interesting that 12 Rounds 3 tries to make up for its own narrative shortcomings with an onslaught of bloodshed & gunfights that result in a slew of deceased police officers. Shaw is surprisingly crafty in his cop-killing ways, careful not to waste a single one of his precious twelve rounds. In one scene he beats an officer to death with weights in the presinct’s gym. In another he ends a fight with a vicious head-stabbing. Other kills make thrifty use of electically charged doorknobs & his enemy’s own grenades. My personal favorite moment is when Shaw uses a taser to activate the body of an already dead cop to squeeze the trigger of an assault rifle resting his lifeless hand, creating enough cover fire for Shaw to escape through a comically small air vent. As much as these MacGyver shenanigans can be amusing, it never becomes clear why Shaw doesn’t collect guns or ammo from the crooked cops he kills & instead relies so heavily on those precious twelve bullets of the title.

Dean Ambrose has recently established himself as somewhat of a fan favorite in his run at the WWE. Posed as a sort of pretty boy Stone Cold Steve Austin, Ambrose is a chaotic nuetral element in “sports entertainment”. His character is a whirlwind of bad boy chaos that (heterosexual) female fans seem to find irresistibly attractive, despite the slight hint of a comb-over meant to mask not only the beginnings of male pattern baldness, but also the damage to his forehead left over from his history of extreme, hardcore “death matches” in minor wrestling promotions. Lockdown only makes minimal use of Ambrose’s wrestling background, which (like the disregard for the original 12 Rounds concept) is a damn shame. It is funny, as a fan, that women are the only characters who are nice to his down-on-his-luck cop Shaw in the film and during a boyfight in the precinct’s locker-room there’s a shot of him bodyslamming an opponent through a wooden bench that almost had me chanting “We want tables!,” but otherwise there aren’t nearly enough references to his wrestling career here. Who do they think is watching this movie?

Ambrose’s performance is a calm, brooding sort of good guy bravado that makes little use of the explosive, rebellious personality that makes him so compelling in the ring. Also, although these pro wrestlers are always understandably adept at selling pain during their martial arts sequences, it always surprises me that no use is made of their signature wrestling moves in their motion picture vehicles. The only time I can remember ever seeing that done was The Rock delivering a Rock Bottom to Jason Statham in Furious 7 earlier this year. Why couldn’t Lockdown find a way to work in an Dirty Deeds for Ambrose? It certainly bent over backwards to make its ludicrous locked-inside-a-precinct concept work. Even an elbow drop would’ve been nice, preferably with Ambrose taking out ten opponents at once, as he is known to do. Watching him conserve bullets, hack into the mainframe, and search for a cellphone signal aren’t nearly as entertaining as a little old elbow drop could’ve been. In fact, the film’s villain (Roger R. Cross) is far more exciting than Shaw, providing a full-form example of Roger Ebert’s Talking Killer trope to an often hilarious degree (favorite line: [after punching Shaw] “That was my good cop. Wait til you see my bad cop.”). That’s not to say that Ambrose is entirely underwhelming in Lockdown. At the very least he’s far more compelling than Randy Orton was in12 Rounds 2. It’s just that the film’s muted, stardard action movie concept & his protagonist’s restrictions as a consummate “good guy” make for an overall dull combo that all the dead cops in the world can’t seem to overcome, whether or not their corpses are being tased or exploded.

-Brandon Ledet

D.E.B.S. (2004)

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three star

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I wish that I could have really, really loved this movie. D.E.B.S. is a perennial IFC favorite, and even though there was a period of time where this movie seemed to be on several times a week, I never managed to catch it. It’s a quirky movie with a great cast and a smart concept, and although it has a great stride once it hits it, it takes so long to get there that I can’t give it 4 stars based on the last act alone.

The premise of the film is that there is a secret test within the SATs that measures a person’s aptitude for espionage. Women who pass the hidden aptitude test are recruited into the D.E.B.S. (Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength), a clandestine spy academy where everyone dresses like Catholic schoolgirls and learn to be superheroes. Amy Bradshaw (Sara Foster) is the posterchild of the D.E.B.S., as she made the “perfect score” on the D.E.B.S. test, but she dreams of going to art school in Barcelona. Max Brewer (Meagan Good) is the trigger-happy leader of their quartet, joined by chain-smoking French sexpot Dominique (Devon Aoki) and perpetually ditzy Janet, who has yet to earn her stripes. Amy has recently broken up with her boyfriend, Homeland Security agent Bobby (Geoff Stults), a bro who refuses to accept that it’s over, when the D.E.B.S.’s handler Mr. Phipps (Michael Clarke Duncan) assigns the squad to surveil notorious supervillain Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), in whom Amy has an academic interest.

Lucy is a criminal mastermind, the last scion of a syndicate family who loves to steal, with diamonds, naturally, being her speciality. She’s back in the states and meeting with “former KGB” assassin Ninotchka Kaprova (Jessica Cauffiel); unbeknownst to the federal agencies tracking her, Lucy’s rendezvous is actually a blind date engineered by her bodyguard and adorably-devoted BFF Scud (Jimmi Simpson). When Bobby’s pettiness accidentally reveals the D.E.B.S. and other agencies to Lucy, a shootout ensues and she escapes, running into a warehouse where she and Amy have a pistol standoff/meet cute. Amy lets Lucy get away, and the latter realizes she’s falling for the enemy. After a few more encounters, Lucy stages a bank heist to meet Amy again, and the two abscond to be together. The rest of the D.E.B.S. organization (minus Janet, who knows Amy went willingly and begins a cyber-friendship with Scud) goes into scorched earth mode scouring the world for Amy, who’s happily shacked up; when they eventually discover the two and retrieve Amy, the D.E.B.S. Boss (Holland Taylor) agrees to cover up the incident to maintain the agency’s reputation, forcing Amy to denounce Lucy publicly at the senior prom, er, “Endgame.” Meanwhile, Lucy realizes she would rather live without crime than Amy, and sets to righting her wrongs and winning her back.

D.E.B.S. is often described as a spoof of Charlie’s Angels, but that comparison doesn’t track very well for me. The Angels were more like private detectives than spies, for one thing (at least in the original show). D.E.B.S. has more in common with Austin Powers than either the 70s Angels TV series or the godawful 2000 film adaptation (or its somehow-worse 2003 sequel) and, despite having a cast full of beautiful women, never feels like it was made with the male gaze in mind. The relationship between Amy and Lucy feels organic, if a little corny, and is never played for titillation or exploitation. There’s also a little bit of Josie and the Pussycats thrown in for good measure, with lots of colorful visuals and the third-act-squad-breakup plot development that was so popular from roughly the mid-nineties through the early-aughts, although it lacks that film’s subtlety and social commentary. As much as I enjoyed the movie once the romantic plot got rolling, overall, the film is ultimately too inconsistent to really leave a mark. As it turns out, combining clunky gags (there’s a callback joke about what Max and Amy said to each other on the first day of training as well that really thuds, as well as a one-liner about Amy going off book in her final speech) with sublime ones (Lucy and Scud lip-synching to Erasure’s “A Little Respect” over a montage of them returning stolen goods is a treasure, and the D.E.B.S.’s house’s security field having the same tartan pattern as their uniforms is a good visual joke) doesn’t work. And that’s not even getting into the inexplicably odd things that happen in this movie. Why do the D.E.B.S. top brass teleport in and out of every scene? Are they teleporting, or are they holograms?

The movie performed abysmally, making less at the box office than the average twentysomething owes in student loans. It didn’t even break six figures! But what can you really expect when you release a film that’s this uneven? Still, it’s definitely worth a watch. The soundtrack is great (there’s even a Postal Service track playing when Lucy decides to give up her life of diamond theft and doomsday lasering), which is always a plus. Brewster and Simpson make a really great on-screen pair with believable chemistry and comic timing, even if the D.E.B.S. (Amy included) are one-dimensional and kind of bleh. If you can get past some of the worst CGI gun sparks ever committed to film, this is a refreshing twist on the indie-tinged lesbian love story that was such a big draw ten years ago, just make sure you see it through to the cliché but cute conclusion.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

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fourstar

I’m not sure exactly why Guy Ritchie’s latest foray into highly stylized action cinema, a big screen adaptation of the 1960s television show The Man from U.N.C.L.E., has more or less flopped at the box office. Personally, I might at least be able to attribute my own reluctance to catch up with the picture to a little bit of superspy fatigue. So far this year the cinemas have been bombarded from the superspy likes of Kingsman: Secret Service, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, American Ultra, and a spoof of the genre simply called Spy. That’s not even taking into account the upcoming Stephen Spieldberg/Tom Hanks collab Bridge of Spies & the latest James Bond feature Spectre. If 2014 was the Year of the Doppelgänger, 2015 is certainly the Year of the Spy & The Man from U.N.C.L.E.‘s returns may have suffered somewhat from a crowded market. It’s by no means been a devastating financial blow like Ritchie’s disastrous Madonna vehicle Swept Away, but it has struggled to earn back its $75 million budget, earning less than half of that sum in its U.S. theater run. What’s even more difficult to account for, however, is it the film’s middling reviews. I’m no Guy Ritchie fanboy, having seen less than half of the films that he’s released, but U.N.C.L.E. was easily the most fun I’ve ever had with the director’s sleek action movie aesthetic, however delayed my trip to the theater may have been.

Opening with a traditional James Bond credits sequence populated with sultry soul music, harsh red hues, and Cold War/Atomic Age stock footage, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. maintains a distinct sense of 60s-tinged, smart mouthed swank throughout its entire runtime. Sometimes its modernizing of the 60s superspy genre feels true to its sources. CGI-aided car chases work similarly to the manually sped-up action scenes of yesteryear. The classy noir lighting of 60s fare is brought into the 2010s with rainbow-colored lens flairs. Throwaway lines about “Hitler’s favorite rocket scientist”, enriched uranium, and smuggled Nazi gold all feel native to the era it’s evoking. At other times this modernization can work a little too much like borrowed Tarantino cool, especially in small details like the yellow grindhouse subtitles and the pop music & whistling on the film’s soundtrack, but even Tarantino borrowed those elements from older sources, so the similarities are more than forgiveable. What most distinguishes The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from, say, an Inglourious Basterds, is its calmly restrained chase of a smarmy, handsome aesthetic instead of Tarantino’s cartoonishly over-the-top tendency towards excess (which, of course, has its own distinct set of charms).

Speaking of calm restraint, just as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. remains poised & smugly handsome throughout its runtime, its American spy lead Solo (expertly played by Henry “Man of Steel” Cavill) prides himself on never losing his cool. As the CIA operative/international playboy Solo butts heads with quick-tempered KGB agent Illya (Armie “Winklevoss Twins” Hammer) & sexy German mechanic Gaby (Alicia “Ex Machina” Vikander) on a multinational mission to prevent a Nuclear Holocaust, he tries his damnedest to remain as coolly suave as if he were simply enjoying cocktail hour. A lot of humor is derived from watching Solo & Illya try to out-macho each other in activities as disparate as fistfights in restrooms to arguing over women’s fashion. Most of the film’s comedy, however, is dependent upon the sexual tension between all three leads & their escaped Nazi enemies (including a young married couple who look like an evil combination of Jason Schwartzman & Freddie Mercury and a character Tilda Swinton could play in her sleep). There’s an onslaught of innuendo in the film’s script, like when the art thief Solo offers to “fill the gaps” in a woman’s collection or to “take bottom” when divvying up which locks he & Illya will pick. By the time characters are nonchalantly delivering lines like “Want to have a go?” & “I wish I could stay to finish you off myself” the film’s earned enough goodwill to evoke full belly laughs instead of the light chuckles the first couple sexual quips elicit. Armie Hammer also gets great comedic mileage from the KGB hothead Illya, especially in the way he sweetly refers to mechanic Gaby as his “little chop shop girl” & the comically American Solo as “cowboy.”

No matter what the reasons for The Man from U.N.C.L.E.‘s muted reception, I do feel the film has been a little shortchanged & I regret waiting so long to catch it in the theater. It has a distinct sense of smart, sexy glamour to it that suggests an alternate universe where Mad Men was an action-packed world of superspies instead of a slowburn of an existential crisis. The film’s sexual quips, use of wrestling as foreplay, gender reversal of the damsel in distress trope, and genre-faithful plot riddled with doublecrossings & double-doublecrossings all make for a fun, sleek picture that I’m sure will have a second life on Netflix & the like even if it’s not currently doing so hot in the theater. On top of these surface pleasures, Guy Ritchie makes some satisfyingly unique visual choices such as mounting cameras to the bows of boats, the fronts of safes, and car door mirrors for a effect that feels highly stylized, but genuinely earned. He’s also confident enough in his screenplay to imply offscreen action instead of showing every little explosive detail & to allow certain scenes to breathe for maximum effect, such as a particularly sublime moment when Solo is enjoying a picnic as his partner fends for his life in the background. As far as 60s throwback action & Nazi-killing revenge fantasies go, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is about as handsome & as confident as they come. If you’re like me & have been putting it off due to superspy fatigue, I’d suggest giving it a shot somewhere down the road. It has enough universal appeal that you’re likely to enjoy yourself.

-Brandon Ledet

White God (2015)

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fourhalfstar

White God opens with an immediate delivery of its basic hook: a canine revolution. Our young teen protagonist Lili is shown biking down empty city streets, passing the same vacant cars & eerie urban voids that begin 28 Days Later. Before you can piece together an answer to “What happened here?” Lili meets a canine flood. Hundreds of real-life pups chase her down the road, suggesting some kind of Dogpocalypse. Even in these opening minutes you’re overwhelmed with the feeling that White God is an instant classic or, at the very least, something you’re not likely to see too many times in your life. The trick is once it has you on the hook with a taste of what’s to come, it has to earn the grand scale lunacy of that moment, which the film backtracks to accomplish with an intense tale of (somewhat supernatural) revenge.

Although Lili is first shown bracing the Dogpocalypse by herself, she’s far from alone in this world. Her pet mutt Hagen is Lili’s right hand dog, forming a strong sense of solidarity with her as the pair is passed off to her meat inspector father for a three month visit. Lili’s father is not fond of the dog, to say the least, and at first it’s tough to see his tenderness for his own daughter as well. The parallels between Lili & Hagen are established as early as when they’re being passed off to the nonplussed meat inspector at his slaughterhouse workplace. As they’re walked to his car, two cows are literally marched to the slaughter, hammering home the metaphor as much as possible in visual shorthand. As Hagen is shouted at, dragged by the collar, isolated, and abused throughout the film, Lili is similarly pushed around by the cops, teachers, and parental figures of her life. Her coming of age story poses a teenage girl’s lack of autonomy to be just as miserable & vulnerable as that of an abused street dog. As Hagen hurts his paw, Lili injures her leg. As Hagen’s filmed galloping down city streets, Lili prowls the very same locations on her bicycle, etc.

As similar as their troubled paths may be, however, it’s difficult to argue that Lili’s struggles with authority figures & indifferent older crushes are nearly as devastating as the indignities Hagen suffers. A mixed-breed street dog, Hagen is cruelly treated by every human being in his life in a gradually escalating gauntlet of abuse. After the cold beratement he suffers from Lili’s father, Hagen is abandoned roadside & left to fend for himself. A large part of the movie’s narrative takes a dog’s POV in a style that’s much more akin to the harsh realities of Baxter than it is to Homeward Bound. The confusing chaos of ducking through traffic, scavenging for puddles to drink & garbage to eat, and curiously pawing at roadkill are only the start to Hagen’s perilous journey. He initially makes enemies with animal control, a villain the film holds common with Shaun the Sheep & Babe 2: Pig in the City, but then his growing list of wrongdoers escalates to include butcher shop employees, desperate & homeless fiends, and heartless animal shelter brutes. Worst of all is an organized dogfighting ring (portrayed here in disturbing detail) that systematically abuses Hagen into becoming a trained killer instead of the sappy sweetheart he was in Lili’s protection. Speaking of Lili, even she becomes culpable in Hagen’s abuse as she gets so distracted with her own life that she gives up looking for her best friend, who’d been left to survive alone.

The good news is that as much as White God tests the strength & patience of animal lovers’ hearts (that dogfighting ring sequence is particularly brutal), it also delivers the immense sweetness of abused dogs’ revenge in a way so satisfying & so calculated that it approaches the supernatural. The final half hour of the film, which features extended sequences of Dogpocalypse mayhem & very precise acts of revenge on Hagen’s list of enemies, reaches a grand scale crescendo of chaos that rivals anything you’d see in a more well-funded natural horror film, like a Godzilla or a King Kong. White God pulls a surprising amount of pathos out of a dog’s dialogue-free journey through various forms of cruel captivity, whether he’s displaying the unbridled freedom of a leashless run, assembling a gang of dogpound miscreants (in curiously butsniffing-free exchanges), or, sadly, transforming from a kind soul to a hardened killer. Dogs really do just want to please us. They want to make us proud, asking only for love & attention in return. Even if you can see where the movie is going in its final minutes as Lili answers for her own participation in Hagen’s abandonment & resulting abuse, the climax still hits hard. Both in the sheer joy of beholding seemingly all of the world’s abused dogs exact their revenge on us human scum & in the tender intimacy of watching two wounded animals, Hagen & Lili, facing off & reconciling their pasts, White God makes every ounce of suffering that came before the climax well worth it. It’s a rare, satisfying conclusion of a genuinely strange film that gratifies both in its willingness to go over the top & in its ability to touch you emotionally.

-Brandon Ledet

12 Rounds 2: Reloaded (2013)

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twostar

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In my review for the first 12 Rounds entry I found myself asking if I would’ve enjoyed the film at all if it weren’t for its New Orleans setting. There were a couple cheap, but entertaining action movie thrills here or there, but for the most part the ludicrous ways the John Cena vehicle interacted with its local setting were the highlights of the film. That movie’s sequel, 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded strips almost everything enjoyable from its predecessor in favor of an endless slow drip of hopelessly generic action movie tropes. WWE Studios’ decisions to downgrade its star pro wrestler attraction from John Cena to Randy Orton (I like him okay in the ring, but he cannot carry a film on his own the way Cena can), to swap out its theatrical-release budget for a straight-to-DVD distribution, and to disregard any specificity in setting (this could’ve been filmed in any major city, unlike the first 12 Rounds, which is intrinsically tied to New Orleans) all sink the ship here, leaving very little of interest in the way of entrainment, mindless or otherwise.

Very little has changed in the set-up of this “reloaded” version of the 12 Rounds concept. Orton plays an buff EMT instead of a buff supercop, but he still gets wrapped up in a terrorist-conceived scavenger hunt that drags him all over the city (whatever city that may be) in an effort to rescue his potential-victim wife. Where did this concept of the 12 round scavenger hunt originate? Do terrorists collab on this kind of stuff? No matter. It’s a yawn of a journey with very few bright spots, none of which touch the heights of the first film’s silliness. Even the film’s villain is a downgrade from legit-actor Aiden Gillen’s turn in the first 12 Rounds; this time we’re being threatened by a much more generic bald dude with a leather fetish who has very specific ideas about drunk driving & political corruption.

The villain, no matter how typical, is at the very least a interesting oddity in an otherwise dull proceeding. His determination to turn the film into an anti-drunk driving PSA is at the very least not something I’m used to in my action movie dreck. There’s also some interesting cheapening of the general vibe, including some sleazy, nude hotel sex that felt wildly out of place in such a tame picture & a makeshift stoner sidekick that turns out to be more than he initially seems. The only true kickass moment in the film’s entire runtime, however, is a brief gag in which Orton employs some of his pro wrestling acumen & body slams a cop onto the hood of a car. That’s a two second clip I would’ve much rather experienced as a .gif, though, whereas I got many more small moments of light amusement from the first entry in the franchise. 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded should be reserved solely for Randy Orton’s most rabid fans & generic action movie buffs who really, really hate drunk driving. Otherwise, you’re better off avoiding it entirely.

-Brandon Ledet

12 Rounds (2009)

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three star

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Generic Action Movie #8 (I counted!) from WWE Studios was a (surprise!) John Cena vehicle meant to follow up his acting debut in The Marine. When considered outside of time & cultural context, 12 Rounds has very little going for it as a genre film. Its villain, played by (The Wire & Game of Thrones vet) Aidan Gillen, is mildly interesting in his playful scavenger hunt that he uses to keep Cena’s supercop off his trail, but the plot isn’t anything we haven’t seen done better in the past, particularly in Die Hard 3: Die Hard with a Vengeance. There are explosions (!!!) and helpless wives used as collatoral/potential victims (!!!), but nothing too exceptional to be found therein. No, what makes 12 Rounds distinct is the place & time of its setting.

Filmed in post-Katrina New Orleans on the back of those sweet, sweet Louisiana film tax credits, 12 Rounds is a potentially fun watch for locals looking to roll their eyes at an action movie determined to cram every possible New Orleanian cliché (short of maybe beignets & gumbo) into a single picture that honestly has nothing to do with the city outside of its setting. Our tour guide for this trip is NOPD officer John Cena (God, I love the way that sounds), who shows us through such great landmarks as “The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway”, Algiers Point, Decatur, a brief glimpse of The Saturn Bar, Bourbon Street (of course), etc. Sometimes the movie accidentally gets New Orleans right, especially while stumbling through the French Quarter’s drunks & street performers, but it’s most entertaining when it gets the city horribly wrong.

For instance, there’s a scene where Cena’s potential-victim wife boards the ferry at Algiers Point & he can’t reach her in time, so he steals a car, drives down the levy an somehow crosses the Crescent City Connection before the ferry reaches the other side. Incredible. There’s also some silliness involving using Katrina X-code markings (which are gravely serious business) as clues on the scavenger hunt that felt particularly tasteless. The most ludicrous detail of all, however, is an effort in which supercop Cena has to stop a runaway streetcar on Canal before it “smashes through” the end of the line. The strained effort to make the streetcar look fast & dangerous might be the height of the film’s New Orleanian silliness.

It’s difficult to tell if non-locals will find any enjoyment in this inaccurate foolishness, but there are a couple non-New Orleans moments of camp to be found here or there in 12 Rounds. The way Cena talks shit about punching Gillen’s mad terrorist in the face feels like a goofy extension of his pro wrestling promo work. There’s a scene in which he has to drive a bomb to the Mississippi River before it destroys “three city blocks”, but once he tosses it underwater, it barely makes a splash. In the grand finale, as Cena’s supercop & his wife are exiting a helicopter, she shouts “You land it, bitch” & the couple jump without parachutes into a rooftop pool as the sky rains money & fire around them. These moments may be mildly amusing, but they are by no means the height of action movie hijinks. Because of the exaggerated use of its setting, 12 Rounds‘ best chance for entertainment is in perplexing New Orleanian action movie fans looking for an incredulous chuckle or two as a uniformed John Cena takes them on an impossible city tour.

-Brandon Ledet

Hitman: Agent 47 (2015)

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three star

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Just as I found myself oddly won over by the generic action movie cheapness of 2007’s video game adaptation Hitman, I was equally tickled with its seven years late sequel. Almost more of a reboot than a proper sequential follow-up, Htman: Agent 47 makes no perceptible reference to the first Hitman film either in its narrative or in its much more stylish visual palette of crisp white walls & television static blues. The first Hitman film was amusing in its lack of its ambition or specificity. It kept its superhuman assassin protagonist’s origins vague, attributing his existence to some blanket collective called The Organization, a super-secret conglomerate with “ties to every government”. As a follow-up, Hitman: Agent 47 seemingly tries to correct the perceived wrongs of the past, bending over backwards to nail down the details of its titular assassin’s origins & to please the action movie marks in the audience with its ludicrous CGI spectacle. Struggle as it might for legitimacy, it’s just as much of a cheap action movie romp as the first film, just with a bigger budget as well as more of a willingness to go big & go silly. As with the first go-round, it kinda works.

Choosing to go the dreaded Origin Story route, Hitman: Agent 47 explains that The Organization’s assassin farm where they raised, balded, and barcoded trained killers has been shut down for moral grounds, even though the assassins are still assigned missions, presumably also by the very same Organization. Or maybe it was The Organization’s evil twin company Syndicate International that ran the assassin farm. The details are a little fuzzy, but I do know that Syndicate International is supposed to be bad & they’re looking to start creating “Agents” again, which is also supposed to be very, very bad. But, don’t worry, our titular killing machine assassin, simply named 47, is very, very good. Along with the daughter of the scientist who spearheaded the Agents program, 47 looks to put a stop to Syndicate International’s evil plan to reinstate a program that “engineered human beings by selecting & enhancing certain genes” & “eliminating” weaknesses like pain & love. Along the way, 47 helps release the methodical murderer inside of his newfound Scientist’s Daughter partner & also battles a seemingly invincible Zachary Quinto (who you can tell is bad news from the get go, thanks to his diabolical eyebrows), playing a kind of Wolverine knock-off who has been, I swear to God, reinforced with “subdermal titanium body armor” that makes him impervious to stab wounds & bullets. When that bit of silliness is first revealed, even Quinto has to call for a time out and ask, “Pretty crazy, huh?”

You know what? Forget everything I just told you, because absolutely none of it matters. Hitman: Agent 47 survives solely on the strength of its ludicrous action sequences, which are admittedly a half step above the adequate proceedings of the 2007 original. Sure, 47 falls back on the mechanical choreography of the first film where he calmly spins in circles and shoots a slew of targets (mostly faceless baddies not even worthy of his glance) one at a time, never missing. That aspect hasn’t changed much (despite 47 been switched out for a second bald-headed actor for unexplained reasons between films), but it has been enhanced by an even sillier set of action movie stunts. Characters bounce off the top of a speeding train without wincing, then duck under the next one as it passes, safely nestled between the tracks. The Agent-in-training Scientist’s Daughter is tested for her survival skills by being tied up in front of a running jet engine to see how quickly she can Houdini herself to safety. Later, a few faceless goons are thrown into the engine just for a sense of completion. 47 also beats down some goons with a hotel Bible & crashes a helicopter into an office building without starting a fire, the blades still spinning long after they’ve collided with desks, walls, and ceilings. Each action set piece is more laughably preposterous than the last, like something you’d expect in, say, a video game. By the time Agent 47 & Scientist’s Daughter are killing in unison to a surf rock soundtrack in a moment of borrowed Tarantino cool, the film has pretty much exhausted every possible way it could acheive a cheap action movie dreck aesthetic (complete with the CGI-aided POV of a flying bullet straight out of that one KoRn video). Enjoying the film for the trashy fluff that it is will depend on your personal mileage for those kinds of shenanigans. I found myself a little dumbstruck, but thoroughly amused.

Bonus points: As I mentioned with the first film, I think one of the more unique aspects of this franchise is that it sticks to the lead’s asexuality as a central character trait. Lesser action movie fare certainly would’ve abandoned that peculiarity in favor of a romance plot. It was a detail tested a lot more strongly in the first film considering that 47’s female sidekick was a runaway sex worker instead of the sequel’s choice to negate the issue by giving its central pair a familial tie (Her Scientist Dad is basically his dad too? In a weird way?), but it’s still a striking choice for a franchise so generic & so silly in almost every other way.

-Brandon Ledet

American Ultra (2015)

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fourstar

It’s not exactly accurate to say that the bloody stoner action comedy American Ultra is completely without precedent. It’s at the very least possible to see echoes of the film telegraphed in properties as wide in range as Pineapple Express, Hot Fuzz, Hitman, Spy, Clerks, MacGruber, and the Borne franchise. What we have here instead of a wildly idiosyncratic picture without predecessor is the distinct sense that director Nima Nourizadeh & writer Max Landis have a deep love & appreciation for movies, especially for the violent action comedy as a genre. American Ultra currently isn’t doing so hot in terms of ticket sales or critical reception, but it has the makings of a future cult classic (like a Near Dark or a John Dies at the End) written all over it, because that love for irreverent action cinema shines through so brightly. Although Landis has been recently been making an ass of himself on Twitter complaining about the lack of immediate returns on a screenplay he’s obviously proud of, he can at least take solace in the fact that future blood-thirsty stoners will be greedily streaming his film on loop as they reach for the nearest bong & nod off in their respective piles of empty two liter bottles & Cheetos.

Plotted over just three event-filled days, American Ultra follows the panic attack stricken stoner/amateur cartoonist Mike Howell as he transforms from a pathetic loser to an inhumanly capable killing machine assassin. Played by Jesse Eisenberg with the exact neurotic fragility you’d expect from a performance from Jesse Eisenberg, Mike is a pitiable weakling who relies on the emotional strength of his partner-in-crime stoner girlfriend Phoebe Larson (played by Kristen Stewart, of whom I’m becoming a not-so-secret dedicated fan) for any & all basic life functions. What Mike doesn’t know is that his frailty is actually a safeguard invented by the government to protect his well-being (and potential danger to others) as a discarded “asset” (read: killing machine assassin). Once Mike is re-activated by a well-meaning CIA agent gone rogue he finds himself capable of killing even the most menacing of threats (including other “assets”) with items as ordinary as dust pans, cookware, extension chords, and spoons, when he was just minutes ago not capable of doing much more than rolling joints & tending a corner store cash register.

What’s so unique about American Ultra is its ability to avoid the more pedestrian lines of thought you’d expect from that kind of plot. For instance, Phoebe is much, much more than the girlfriend accessory you’d expect from a male-helmed action film. Her role is constantly active & vital to the surprisingly layered plot, making for a deeply engaging love story once the full details of her relationship with Mike is revealed. Besides Phoebe’s active role & the satisfying romance narrative, the film also surprises in its distinct style of comedy. Although there’s no shortage of glib jokes on hand, most of the successful humor is anchored in its over-the-top violence. American Ultra is shockingly violent, completely giddy in its comic blood lust. It’s likely that audiences’ mileage may vary depending on the viewer’s love of action movie gore, but I personally had a really fun time with the film’s outrageous brutality.

The movie’s standard action movie palette of G-men, satellite surveillance, and drone strikes may not scream the height of creativity, but there’s plenty to play with between the lines to make it a unique property (besides propensity for violence & an active female lead). American Ultra‘s very specific world of CGI pot smoke, black light dungeons, illegal fireworks, bruised & beaten leads (despite action films’ tendency to show their battered heroes with only the lightest of scratches), and refreshing ability to shoot extended sequences in grocery stores without succumbing to grotesque product placement all pose it as the kind of distinctive property destined to gain a cult audience likely to overshadow the narrative of its lackluster theater run. Max Landis might be squirming (or, more accurately, throwing a temper tantrum) over what’s currently perceived as a commercial (and critically middling) failure, but I believe a little patience will eventually lead to American Ultra finding its proper (drug-addled, gore-loving) audience, who are perhaps currently a little too intoxicated to make the trek to the cinema.

-Brandon Ledet