Election (2005); Triad Election (2006)
Election and its sequel, Triad Election, have been playing in various festivals over the last few years, the buzz around them and their director, the prolific Johnny To, being considerably strong. The buzz is justified. Both films are tight, mean little gangster movies, and the now obligatory Faustian morality of the genre (still so overwhelmingly powerful in the first two Godfathers) works here too, because To isn’t trying to outdo Coppola in the Shakespearean grandeur department. To, like David Chase of The Sopranos, sees things more matter of factly.
The characters sell their souls for money and power, but it’s seen here as part of an inevitable process, an organic governing of society that involves the actual government, the triad (like our mafia) and assorted big businesses. The extinguishing of morality is viewed as evolutionary rather than tragic. To paraphrase a masterpiece that also happens to deal in inescapable corruption, To sees the future, though his films are quick to point out that the future, the past, and the present are inseparable.
At around 90 minutes and change each, you should just go for it and watch the Election films in a double bill, the majority of the stuff I just mentioned doesn’t come into play until the second, better, deeper film. Election is, inescapably, concerned with character introduction, we meet our various organizations and figure out the lay of the land as the forthcoming election for the Chairman of the Wo Sing Triad reaches its conclusion.
The election is meant to prevent violent upheavals in leadership, but I imagine you know how effective that turns out to be. The election of this first film is a close race between Lam Lok (Simon Yam), cold, calm, middle class, suburban looking, and Big D (Tony Leung Ka Fai) a dangerous hot head who resents the likelihood of finishing in second place. If you know your gangster movies, then you know Lok is the more dangerous, and this is confirmed beyond a shadow in the film’s abrupt, savage ending.
Election is a bit too dense for its own good. I hate to penalize films that make you work for the plot but I feel that it ultimately doesn’t benefit this film, particularly when compared to Triad Election. Election has a middle act that bogs down in the hunt for a relic that you don’t really care about, with convoluted loyalties that don’t ultimately add up to a whole lot; Triad Election is almost a horror film, following Jimmy (Louis Koo), a secondary character from the first film, as he takes on Lok for control of the triad. Where the first film feels cluttered, Triad Election is confident and more personal, detailing one person’s disintegrating integrity at a hushed, haunting distance. I know “distance” and “personal” don’t normally go hand in hand, but such is the strange tone that To works so well here.
This second film is also more violent and over the top, the lurid set pieces contributing to an escalating sense of a society reaching the brink of collapse, and being reigned back in by a larger structure of deeper corruption. Tradition, again, still turns out to be about who has the biggest stick. Several scenes should be mentioned, but let’s leave it at just one, that of several gangsters, in bizarre animal and clown masks that recall Kubrick’s The Killing, burying someone alive, the steady hum of a vent the only soundtrack. The broad arcs of gangster films are usually the same, it’s the bits of “business” in between that make or break them. Triad Election has enough great little vignettes of inhumanity for five pictures, but I’m going to let you discover the others for yourself.
Election : ★★★
Triad Election : ★★★½
Shooter (2007)
Shooter is a return to the kind of meat and potatoes action that was more fashionable in the 1980s. The film, true to its title, is content to blow people and squibs up in a number of ways. Yes, I said squibs. Blood actually squirts out of the wounds that are inflicted upon the various goons, henchmen and more goons that are at the disposal of Evil Republican (Ned Beatty) and Vague Evil Republican Military Colonel (Danny Glover). E.R. and V.E.R.M.C. recruit the Shooter, aka Bobby Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg, and yes, that character name was dreamed up by a Pulitzer Prize winning film critic) to do something that has something to do with preventing an assassination of the president by providing them with the perfect way to assassinate the president. Forgive Shooter. He’s been in the Middle East and hasn’t seen as many of these movies as we have.
But I’m losing sight of the true appeal of the film. Shooter, unlike the majority of clutter that gets passed off as action, is content to have people shoot at one another in a number of ways. This, by itself, is enough to qualify the film as a minor relief. Huge trucks don’t collide into one another in front of the Empire State building. There are no superheroes. No robots. No aliens. There are no attempts to dress Shooter up as something more legitimate with a handheld camera. The film is simply about a guy who shoots people in their heads, retires after a screw up (of course), and, upon being fucked over again, resumes shooting people in the heads. If Shooter had been made in 1985, it would have starred Schwarzenegger and had a now off putting swinging big dick, glad to be killing people again vibe going on. Shooter updates the formula (slightly), and casts those same big dicks as the villians. Swagger, true to the new politically correct man, is (slightly) more thoughtful and hesitant.
Shooter is fine for what it is. It’s a little sluggish and jargon heavy, and it could use a bit more Beatty and Glover, but it gets the job done as these things go. There is a climax involving snowbound sniping that’s pretty nifty. The film is also an important evolutionary step for star Mark Wahlberg, who is generally only as good as his material. He’s fine if the film is good or the part is juicy (Fear, Boogie Nights, I Heart Huckabees) but he’s usually on shakier ground in the bigger, boring paycheck pictures (Planet of the Apes, The Italian Job). Here he takes the paycheck and does a dutiful job of the connect the dots masculine performance, thus ensuring that the dogs will keep eating until Paul Thomas Anderson or David O. Russell come calling again.
*And, yes, I know that I never mentioned the shotgun, the girl, or the bra that happen to appear in the picture that I’ve chosen to headline the post. I would just relax and trust that that image does eventually appear in the film, and is thus fair game.
★★½
Beowulf (2007)
For about thirty minutes, Beowulf is exactly what you secretly hope it to be: swaggering, absurd, atmospheric, over the top, a burly big budget macho cover of just about every horror and sword and sandal cliche in the playbook. The pleasures are fleeting though, and soon give way to a schizophrenic film that seems to be aiming for about ten different things at once, and missing on all ten counts. Is the film an exploration of the dark heart that lies in every man, particularly great men? Is it a political intrigue film, detailing the jostling of power and ruffling of feathers that occur when an outsider is brought in? Is the film about the sexual hypocrisy of the time? Or the religious hypocrisy? Sadly, Beowulf is all of those things, and none of those things.
The film does have moments, and the reason that you should maybe see Beowulf despite my reservations is Grendel. Let’s talk about Grendel. Grendel, as performed by professional hipster curiosity Crispin Glover, is a legitimately memorable movie monster. Tortured, charred, cancerous, with a hyper sensitive ear drum that beats like a tell-tale tumor, Grendel is the broken heart of Beowulf. Some have compared this take on Grendel to the Gollum of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, and that comparison isn’t entirely unfair to either party, though to me Grendel bears a greater resemblance to the Frankenstein monster: both born of self-absorption, both just as flippantly discarded, and both denied the kind of basic understanding of their existence that we take for granted. This lack of understanding is channeled, rather inconveniently for the citizens of Hrothgar’s (Anthony Hopkins) kingdom, into destructive, all consuming rage. Cue Beowulf (Ray Winstone), the only warrior who can stop the beast.
So, yes, Beowulf is a mishmash, but it does have moments of true fly by the seat of your pants kineticism, the kind of stuff that hasn’t graced a Zemeckis film since his underrated Death Becomes Her. The film also has Angelina Jolie in the first film since Pushing Tin (not kidding) that has any idea what to do with her. After killing Grendel (disappointingly soon), Beowulf must confront the creature’s mother, a water demon (it’s true form is seen in eerily elusive reflections) who morphs into Jolie at her fleshiest for both Beowulf’s and our benefit. Their big scene is largely one absurd phallic double entendre after another, but it underlines what’s right about this movie when it isn’t suffocating under all the the extraneous hugger mugger: it’s GLORIOUSLY absurd. GLORIOUSLY reveling in big, grand emotions like self-loathing or, in this sequence, the kind of pure, overheated lust that you probably haven’t felt since you were thirteen and looking at your English teacher in a certain way.
Oh, what the big directors of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s could’ve done with this creature. Picture Angelina Jolie in a Kim Novak role in a (good) Hitchcock movie. Or working with Otto Preminger in his down and dirty noir period, or with Nicolas Roeg, or with the Godard of Contempt, or anything from the French New Wave. Jolie has the presence, and even the talent, for such a filmography, but she’s been ridiculously squandered so far. Are there no American directors with even the slightest hint of erotic imagination? The answer is apparently no, which leaves Jolie stranded in either bloodless sell out B pictures, or pompous Oscar prestige films. Her entrance here, a golden carmel kissed siren with cloved feet and a snake’s tail, seemingly floating out of the water, leaves one hoping that other directors will get the idea.
Unfortunately, Ms. Jolie returns to the sidelines after a too short sequence with Beowulf, and it’s back to the half-formed subplots. A character who looks and sounds a lot like John Malkovich doubts Beowulf then makes peace and gives him his sword (this is actually before the Jolie scene but who cares). Beowulf inherits bedly rights to the Queen who looks and sounds a little like Robin Wright Penn. Beowulf trades a few “what is it to be a moral, manly man” pensees with his second in command Brendan Gleeson, etc. Another problem with Zemeckis’s aim here is the technology. No matter how much Zemeckis may insist to the contrary, the animation here is weird, and I have a hard time giving a damn whether a marionette who looks a little like Ray Winstone gives in to his inner bad boy or not.
Eventually a dragon, another bastard child of sexual gluttony, arrives, and the film unleashes another hellfire sequence that can best be appreciated on a big screen with those nifty 3-D goggles. The film then calms down for an ending that briefly connects all of the other half baked dots that made the second act so slow to begin with. I did like the final image, a number that recalls Polanski’s Macbeth in its implication of continued bloodshed, but it’s too little too late.
★★½
The Kingdom (2007)
When you boil The Kingdom down to its essentials, paring away the name actors and the contemporary, showy in its lack of blocking choreography, you basically have a Rambo movie. A movie where one (or several) person/people are allowed to go to a foreign land and risk years of carefully maintained, vague civility in the name of justice (aka vengeance aka ensuring you’re still the biggest dick in the room.)
I’m generally not a logic person in an action film, but The Kingdom seems to think it takes contemporary issues seriously, so its fair game, and, in this case, pretty insulting to even the laziest follower of current events. What the FBI does to bully its way onto Saudi ground is absurd. What happens once they get onto Saudi ground is absurd. The brutal firefight that finally picks things up in Act three is awesome, but even more absurd, in that the global implications of such a free for all aren’t considered in the slightest bit.
I’ll confess. I’m part of what’s wrong with the American population in terms of current events, especially our never ending, impossible to decipher issues over seas. I don’t watch much news (although as biased, sensationalistic and ad oriented as it is, I don’t think I’m missing much). I don’t follow politics closely. I don’t, particularly, give a shit. I think things are fucked up, but I’m not interested in shouldering the responsibility to fix it.
Neither is The Kingdom, but at least I didn’t make a movie glorifying the American sense of entitlement that represents one of the core reasons that most nations hate us. The deck is unreasonably stacked here: we see the Jamie Foxx character at school with his son for no other reason than to excuse his gung ho fervor later on, we are given a Saudi who is (kinda) sympathatic to our cause so the film can’t be accused of racism. The top inner government brass are presented as the typical, candy asses that know nothing of the ass that needs to be kicked in order to preserve our, well, you get the idea.
If The Kingdom wasn’t boring, I’d probably forgive most of what I just said. Morality should not be strictly considered in pulpy action thrillers, id should be given free reign somewhere, and movies is a safe somewhere. But the film, until the last thirty minutes, is largely boring, a by the book procedural with little surprise and a lot of tedious governmental jargon.
Peter Berg, a character actor, and now director, has, up until this point, made a career in making films that were always better than you’d expect (Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights). For once, I went into a Berg film with decent expectations, and I got mildly burned with a self-righteous, hypocritical ass kicker. Very Bad Things was immoral and exhilarating because it knew it. The Kingdom is frustrating, and a little more dangerous, because it presents an equally florid situation as a right to bear arms.
Trespass (1992)
Trespass utlilizes the talents of alot of folks whom you’ve most certainly heard of, but may not appreciate quite as much as you should. First of which, there are the leads, Bill Paxton and William Sadler, who play firemen who get in way over their heads here after indulging in the titular act.
Bill Paxton has become a bit more famous, he’s headlining HBO’s Big Love now, but he remains underrated. Paxton is one of the best “straight men” in the last two decades, grounding far out premises and characters in an unshowy, ego-free realism that gets better upon each viewing. I’m talking A Simple Plan, Frailty, One False Move, Apollo 13 and Tombstone among others.
The definitive Paxton straight man performance would be either A Simple Plan or the brilliant One False Move (both happen to feature career best work from co-star Billy Bob Thornton as well.) It should also be noted that Paxton can steal the show when he wants to too, and I’m noting his work with James Cameron and his performance in Near Dark as exhibits A-D in support of this.
William Sadler has popped up in Tales From the Crypt (both show and movie), The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and made a particular impression as a sexual deviate in Bill Condon’s Kinsey a few years past, but in general he’s never really graduated from the minors in audience recognition. Sadler has a great no bullshit voice, and lined, craggy prescence; he can seem friendly, accomodating and completely feral within seconds of one another.
So yeah, the idea of these two guys mixing it up in an abandoned factory in the middle of a deadly gang territory presided over by Ices T and Cube pushes more than one B movie heaven pressure point. It also happens that Trespass was directed by Walter Hill, the third person you should be familiar with, who does unapologetic, high throttle machismo like no one else I can think of who is still living or working. I’ve listed enough, but what the hell: 48 Hrs, The Long Riders (underrated), The Warriors, Undisputed, Southern Comfort.
I had watched Trespass in the early nineties while on a WalterHill binge, and liked it and forgotten it. I caught it again a few days ago. The film is, like much of Hill’s work, remarkably lean and devoid of extraneous crap. Paxton and Sadler find the treasure map five minutes into the picture, they’re at the factory maybe another five minutes after that. They’ve witnessed a murder at the hands of King James (Ice T) maybe five minutes after that. Obligatory talk of wives and other expostion isn’t exchanged in the kitchen in one of the men’s homes the night before leaving, its tossed off in Sadler’s SUV on the way to said factory. Hill (and writers Robert Zemickis (!) and Bob Gale) are pros here.
Trespass would appear to be a hybrid of The Treasure of the Sierre Madre and a more urban us against them action picture like Assault on Precinct 13. This film is canny in blending the genres, and divides our sympathies effectively. Ice T is quite good as the gangster King James, and the character has been imagined as more than just a representation of all that middle class white guys fear. Refreshingly, the villian here is actually smarter than the protaganists.
But neither are the smartest. That honor would go to Art Evans’ Bradlee, a man who happens to be squatting in the factory, and who turns out, much to our amusement, to be a loose approximation of the Walter Huston character in Madre. Evans gets the film’s very satifying final image, which refutes the annoying cliche that no one can actually get the money or treasure in a feuding over money or treasure picture.
My only real problem with Trespass is a needless visual gimmick where we occassionally see from the POV of a home video camera (this may have been a little more controversial at the time, being how close this film’s release was to the Rodney King incident) but otherwise Hill keeps all the various elements of the story up in the air, and flowing with ease and finesse. Trespass is unassuming, taut and tasty.
Shoot Em’ Up (2007)
To list the various bits of mayhem that occassionally occur in Shoot ‘Em Up is to imply a much crazier and more subversive film than director Michael Davis actually made. I normally find it bad form to work other critics’ opinions into a film post, but I can’t help it here. Why all the buzz for such a forgettable bit of bargain basement pulp? Why the great cast? As a film, Shoot ’Em Up at least sports an engagingly sleazy Paul Giamatti performance and a few bits of just okay gunplay. As a script I would imagine it to be barely readable, self-congratulatory trash.
It’s the self satisfaction that sinks Shoot ’Em Up (starting right up front with that obnoxious title), nothing is less cool than trying to be cool, and sadly, this contaminates the usually reliable Clive Owen as well, though, to be fair, I can’t imagine any other actor acquiting himself better. I generally dislike this sort of post-modern thing anyway, but it helps if your self-aware action satire is actually funny, or exciting, or sporting an observation of the genre that hasn’t become just as tired as the genre in question. Shoot ‘Em Up is rife with lame one liners, and the action, with the exception of a few bits of tongue and cheekiness, is redundant and lifeless.
And honestly, if you want tongue in cheek that actually bothers to tell an engaging story, re-watch Evil Dead or, more recently and more genre appropriate, the infinitely superior Hot Fuzz. Let the snobs who are too pretentious to admit they want a real action movie have this one, they deserve it.
Review: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Jason Bourne goes home this time, as the tagline for
The Bourne Ultimatum promises. Does that mean that this new film differs in any significant way from what Jason Bourne did or found out in the prior installments of the series:
The Bourne Identity or
The Bourne Supremacy? The answer is, as you’re suspecting, a resolute no. And it doesn’t matter, because the Bourne films, while essentially remakes of one another, have grown more and more superb in execution: fast, breathless and aware of exactly what they are. The appeal of the series is very meat and potatoes and very no bullshit. These things don’t have a bunch of creatures and illusions of grandeur that stretch out over running times that Kurosawa would’ve found intimidating.
I rewatched the first two films earlier this week, and, while I remembered preferring Supremacy in the theatre, I found the first film appealingly small and cozy in the living room, with action scenes that are thrilling in their matter of fact approachability. The Bourne Supremacy is directed by Paul Greengrass (of United 93 and now Ultimatum) in an exceptional all media speed demon style, but it wears out its welcome a little before it ends, the technical virtuosity overpowering the already slim story.
The story is just as slim in Ultimatum (the big revelation is one of the big no shits of the year, essentially boiling down to a famous actor telling Bourne that he’s a super agent) but the story and the action aren’t at odds with one another this time around. There’s no story. action. story. action template here. The film is one large tapestry of pursuit, ass kicking and sometimes, when absolutely necessary, corny exposition.
There are three sequences in Ultimatum that I’m cofident will go down in the history books of action filmmaking. The first involves Bourne helping a too eager reporter (Paddy Considine, terrific, but I’m disappointed he wasn’t recruited to play an assassin, excuse me, an asset) elude various governemental surveillance that plays like the younger, more inventive, brother of a similar scene in Minority Report. The second and third are entertwined: the best chase of the series that morphs into the best hand to hand combat scene of the series.
The actors have improved all around, and they were already formidable. Matt Damon was a bit dull early in his career, but now, as he’s closer to forty than thirty, he’s beginning to look the part of a superhuman spook, the lines of his face lending a pathos the script doesn’t have time to provide. Damon is a remarkably unindulgent actor for his generation, he refuses to court the audiences’ sympathy (see the underrated The Good Shephard) and, resultingly, receives our sympathy anyway. David Strathairn, Joan Allen, and Scott Glenn, as govermental brass of varying moralities, do wonders with the typical jargon laced ops discussions that offer periodic breaks from the mayhem.
The Bourne Ultimatum is virtually plotless, has no real characters and tells you nothing you didn’t already know, but the film epitomizes what Roger Ebert has said in the past: what a film is about is unimportant, its how its about it that matters. The Bourne Ultimatum is a head rush, one of the most purely exciting movies in some time, a truly 21st century Hitchcock picture.
Review: The Marine (2006)
There are some among you that will rent the Vince McMahon produced “The Marine” on the off chance that it will rekindle the magic of the laughably super violent, macho, politically incorrect, racist, sexist 1980s action thrillers such as “Commando”. Don’t fall for it though. “The Marine” is the worst of both worlds, managing to combine the ineptitude of ’80s action with the defanged/PC/PG horeshit that plagues current wanna sell you a Happy Meal action. It’s soft core porn without the porn.
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