Johnny Handsome (1989)

Title: Johnny Handsome (1989)

Director: Walter Hill

Cast: Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Elizabeth McGovern, Morgan Freeman, Forest Whitaker, Lance Henriksen  

Review:

I did an article a while back called 16 of the Top ‘Revengiest’Revenge Movies; in it I included these films where something awful happens to the main character, but then things turn around and eventually the main character gets his or her revenge, usually in pretty gruesome ways. I didn’t include the film I’ll be reviewing today because I had not seen it in such a long time. When I first saw Johnny Handsome I must’ve been about 13; all I remembered about Johnny Handsome was its basic premise and the fact that I liked the story a lot. There’s something gratifying about revenge tales, they always start out with something awful happening to the good guy of the film, then in the end whamo! That sweet, sweet revenge. The bad guys get what they deserved and the good guy gets his revenge. Though in this sense, Walter Hill’s Johnny Handsome is a bit different than most revenge films, Johnny isn’t your typical good guy, he’s actually a crook.

In Johnny Handsome we meet John Sedley, moments before he pulls off a diamond heist. John is not just any crook though, he is a mastermind in pulling off robberies. Also, his face is severely disfigured due to an anomaly in his genes. His deformity doesn’t stop him from doing what he has to do. Johnny is pulling off this diamond heist with the help of two individuals. One is a tomboyish lady called Sunny Boyd (Ellen Barkin) and the other a low life called Rafe Garrett (Lance Henriksen).  The three stick up the diamond store, and as we might expect in this kind of movie, things get ugly. The cops are called upon and at the last minute Rafe and Sunny decide to double cross Johnny and shoot him and the owner of the store, their idea is to keep the loot to themselves. Rafe and Sunny leave John for dead, unfortunately for them, John doesn’t die. Instead, he is rescued by the police and taken to a hospital where he is given the opportunity to jumpstart his life. You see, the doctors want to perform a surgery on him that could give him a normal face again. Will he take this opportunity to begin again? Or will he go back to his old ways?

It occurred to me that Johnny Handsome plays out a lot like a ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ story where the main character has a duality about him. He has his good natured/kind side, and he’s got his evil side, which he is at battle with. Johnny used to be a crook, because his looks led him to become an outcast, ridiculed and made fun of all his life. But what happens when he gets his face back and he no longer looks like a monster?  What kind of battle will be waged with the demons inside of him? This is what is at the center of this story. Johnny is even given a chance to fall in love with a beautiful woman, and lead a normal life, unfortunately, his former life calls him. Revenge calls him. Should he heed its call?

This is a Walter Hill film, so it’s not just any director we’re talking about here. This is the guy behind such action packed 80’s classics as 48 Hours (1982), Extreme Prejudice (1987) and Red Heat (1988). Hill’s a director whose films are very male oriented, he makes films for guys to holler and cheer at, they are about tough dudes, shoot outs, guns and explosions; tough dudes and sexy ladies. This time around things are a bit different though; not that Johnny Handsome doesn’t have its fare share of action and shoot outs, but the story is told in a more film noir style. It’s darker, grittier, more character driven. The film starts with a shootout and ends with a shootout, the middle of the film is the whole process of Johnny going from looking like a monster, to looking like Mickey Rourke before he turned to boxing. Funny how in real life, Rourke know looks like Johnny before the operation, oh the irony of life!

Hill invests a good amount of time getting you to know Johnny, getting you to feel for him. Rourke does a good job here, he plays the tormented soul, you feel like he’s the Frankenstein monster or something; a misunderstood creature who’s just looking for some love. At first, when we first meet Johnny he looks like a deformed monster, similar to the character that Eric Stoltz played in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Mask (1985), someone deformed because of genetic defects.  The character of Johnny also reminded me of Marv, another beat up character that Rourke played in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005). During the first half of the film, Rourke plays his character through heavy amounts of makeup. But half way through the film, after the operation, he transforms, and then we get the real Mickey Rourke, the mind boggles at how much Rourke has changed through the years! The rest of the film is populated by an excellent cast of supporting characters. Ellen Barkin has always been great at playing these rough, tom boyish ladies, on this show she plays a woman with no moral values whatsoever, she hangs out in bars, being a whore, stealing, killing and double crossing. She hangs out with low lives like Henriksen’s Rafe Garrett. Henriksen has always been great at playing villains, here he plays the main baddy, not much of a stretch acting wise, but he gets the job done. Rounding things up are Morgan Freeman as a cop who knows Johnny’s true nature, and Forest Whitaker as the doctor who operates on Johnny. Whitaker plays the guy who wants to give Johnny that second chance to improve himself, the guy with hopes that we can all change.

Johnny Handsome is a very underrated Walter Hill film. The film didn’t hit it big in theaters, in fact, it was a downright flop. It cost 20 million to make but only raked in 7.2 at the box office. I guess the film really didn’t connect with audiences for some reason. A pity because the film is a good revenge tale, and it has an excellent cast, this is the kind of film that makes you wonder why exactly did it slip through the cracks? Maybe it was due to the fact that it had some hefty competition at the box office. Upon it’s release it went up against Ridley Scott’s Black Rain (1989), which by the way was the #1 film that week, and it also went up against Sea of Love (1989) which starred Al Pacino. Also a bunch of successful family comedies like Uncle Buck (1989) and Parenthood (1989), so I guess a dark, brooding film about a deformed dude wasn’t at the top of anybodies list that weekend. But whatever, those that know, know; and on my book, this is a solid revenge tale with good performances and a dark, grimy look. If you’re ever in the mood for something like that, then this is the film for you.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Red Heat (1988)

Title: Red Heat (1988)

Director: Walter Hill

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi, Peter Boyle, Ed O’Ross, Laurence Fishburne, Gina Gershon

Review:

Watching an action film from director Walter Hill is a special treat for any lover of action films. Hill’s specialty has always been tough dudes who shoot guns, spew one liners and blow things up good. His films are the epitome of testosterone fueled action films. In no decade was this displayed better then in the 80’s where Hill made films like 48 Hrs. (1982), Extreme Prejudice (1987), Johnny Handsome (1989) and the film I’ll be talking about today, Red Heat (1988). His affinity for guns probably comes from his love of Cowboy movies of which he has made a few, in fact, he has said that everyone of his films is a western in one way or another, which explains why there’s so many shootouts in his films. His love for guns and violence is still going strong to this day, his latest action film was called Bullet to the Head (2012)! Unfortunately, that films dismal box office performance (even while starring Stallone himself!) might prove that the time of the violence/gun filled action film is over, a time gone, but not forgotten. Yeah, there was a time when action films filled with violence and blood where king in cinemas!  And that time was the 80’s!

In Red Heat Walter Hill collaborated with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who at the time was making a pretty good name for himself as action film star. When he made Red Heat, Arnold had already made films like The Terminator (1984), Commando (1985), Predator (1987) and The Running Man (1987), back then audiences just couldn’t get enough of ‘The Governator’. In Red Heat Arnold plays Captain Ivan Danko a Russian police man who comes to the United States looking for Viktor, a Russian drug dealer who’s escaped his country and is trying to establish himself as a drug dealer in the U.S. Danko is asigned to come to America to aprehend Viktor, and when he does so he is assigned to Detective Sargeant Art Ridzik played by James Belushi. Ridzik is a messy dude who breaks the rules as often as possible, but it is now his job to take care of Danko while he is in America. In accordance to buddy cop rule #654, at first Ridzik and Danko don’t get along in the least, but they soon learn they’ll have to work together if they want to stop their mutual enemy and who knows, maybe they'll learn to appreciate each other.

The ‘buddy cop movie’ was alive and kicking back in the 80’s, thanks in no small part to the success of the Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop movies which were huge money makers back in those days. Back in the 80’s these movies strived! Usually in these films, one cop is a ‘by the rules’ type of guy while the other one is the wild card of the two. One is clean the other messy, sometimes they are of different ethnicities or even planets, or a combination of all of these. Sometimes one of the cops is alive and the other one is undead as was the case in Dead Heat (1988). Notable examples of these type of films are Alien Nation (1989), Tango and Cash (1989) and Black Rain (1989), to mention but a few of these films. In Red Heat the funny comes from the combination of having a tight ass Russian cop (Schwarzenegger) team up with a smart ass/loud mouth American cop played by Belushi. Gotta admit the combination worked like magic! There’s this one scene where the chief of police asks Danko how do Russian police men deal with all the stress and Danko replies dryly:  “Vodka”. So it’s the differences between these two guys that fuels the comedy. The formula used in Red Heat is nothing new for Hill. In fact, it’s not all that different from Walter Hill’s own 48 Hrs., on that one we have the same basic formula, two extremely different individuals having to work together to achieve a goal.

But aside from the comedy, a good body cop movie should always have good action or else the film risks losing its largely male audience, so does Red Heat deliver in this respect? Hell yeah, it’s Walter Hill at the helm what did you expect? The film starts out with this fight sequence in a Russian bath house, and Arnold kicks the living shit out of some dude while rolling around in the snow half naked. Then we move on to a shootout in the streets of Russia, a couple of more shoot outs when the film shifts to U.S., and finally, the film ends with this spectacular chase sequence through the streets of Chicago involving two Greyhound Buses! Now that scene must have taken a while to shoot because it’s pretty complex and extensive.  But speaking about this film partially being shot in Russia, it’s important to note that this was the first American production that shot some scenes in the famed Red Square. The story behind that is that the Russian cultural department didn't give them the permission to shoot there (actually they never even replied the request) so they just took a very small crew, dressed Arnold up as a Russian cop and shot the thing as if it was some sort of amateur film being made. The results are pretty cool and add authenticity to the scenes.

Red Heat is a film that comments on the slowly evolving sentiments between both countries. Here we have a film with a Russian coming to America; so we have one of the “Reds” among the Americans, and here’s what’s interesting about everything, he’s the good guy in the film! If you remember correctly, the Russians used to be the “bad guys”! Red Heat shows us that the way Americans were seeing Russians was starting to shift, the Russians were no longer the bad guys because during the last half of the 80’s, treaties were being signed between both countries that would put an end to the cold war, so in a way the film is a reflection of this new ideology that was on the horizon; in a couple of years, the Russians wouldnt be the enemies anymore. Soon the hatred would shift towards Saddam Hussein, and later towards Osama Bin Laden. Same as in Orwell’s 1984, the government keeps shifting their countries hatred towards something different; the importance being to always keep the profitable (for them anyways) state of war. Yes my friends, Red Heat is another film that reflects the realities of our lives. But I don’t want to make it sound like this film is all political; this is actually a very fun buddy cop film filled with action, comedy and lots of shoot outs, Walter Hill style! It won’t change your life, but it will entertain you for a while.

Rating:  4 out of 5

Streets of Fire (1984)

Title: Streets of Fire (1984)

Director: Walter Hill

Cast: Michael Pare, Diane Lane, Willem Dafoe, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, Bill Paxton

Review:

Streets of Fire isn’t all that different from director Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979), it’s an alternate world created by the filmmakers, the rules created by the screenwriter, the director and the actors. In The Warriors, Walter Hill mixed fantasy and reality into a world all its own. The first time I saw The Warriors, it struck me as strange because I asked myself, “who the hell dresses up like clown baseball players?” To me, that wasn’t real, gang members wouldn’t be caught dead in that attire, but then I realized, this is an exaggerated representation of reality. It was Walter Hill’s way of addressing his frustrations and thoughts on the whole gang scene that was destroying the lives of young people during the 60’s and 70’s. And so, if we take The Warriors as an exaggeration of reality, a comic book like fantasy world if you will, then it works. You just gotta let yourself go and dive deep into this cinematic world, suspend your disbelief and just go with it. The same can be said of Streets of Fire, it’s a world into itself, the characters and situations depicted here are not meant to be taken as “reality” but a mere exaggeration of it, a Rock and Roll Fable that takes place in “Another Time, Another Place”.

This is a world where cops allow street gangs to fight, a world in which a biker gang can walk into a rock and roll concert, kidnap the lead singer and terrorize concert goers in all sorts of violent ways. And they can get away with it just fine! This is the premise of Streets of Fire, a film in which we have two gangs of young kids that for whatever the reason hate each other. Willem Defoe and his gang of bikers, who all dress like they belonged in The Village People, kidnap Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) right smack in the middle of her concert and it’s up to Tom Cody (Michael Pare) to rescue her from the clutches of Rave Shaddock (Willem Dafoe) and his gang. The plot is that simple, but we need to keep in mind that Streets of Fire is the classic example of style over substance and I mean that in a good way! Streets of Fire is meant to be enjoyed from a purely visceral point of view, the film is clearly aimed to pleasure our senses and our instinct rather than our minds. Not that it’s a stupid movie; it’s just that its emphasis lies in sensory input because it’s a film about passion and violence, and getting things done. This is a film about action, not about talking. The sensory input comes in the form of enhanced colors, and the awesome Rock and Roll soundtrack, speaking of the soundtrack, this is part of the reason why I say that this is a film that creates its own rules because the film seems to take place during the 50’s but some of the music is very 80’s. I mean, some of the songs were written by the great Jim Steinman (from Meatloaf) and what’s more 80’s than his style of operatic rock and roll?

In a way, the whole story behind Streets of Fire reminds me of Homer’s The Iliad, in which a whole war is sparked by the abduction of a woman, Helen of Troy. In Streets of Fire everything starts because Rave Shaddock and his hoodlums abduct Ellen Aim, now that I think about it, Helena sounds a lot like Ellen,  maybe the similarities between Streets of Fire and The Iliad aren’t that far off, it looks to me as if the writers were partially inspired by ancient epic poem. And yeah, there’s some epicness to this film, there’s this really cool seen in which Tom starts shooting with a modified shotgun at all the bikers motorcycles and the motorcycles start blowing up in balls of flames! Awesome scene! The ending is this clash between two gangs, the evil bikers vs. Tom Cody and his friends, and the battle is like a battle between two rock and roll gods, they even battle with freaking metal hammers! I was like what? Metal hammers? Who thought that up?

The cast is excellent, Michael Pare is great as Tom Cody, he's the guy you don’t want to get mixed up with, he’s a loner, a rebel. Ellen the up and coming rock star, is his old flame; he broke up with her because he doesn’t consider himself the kind of guy who would tag along with her carrying her guitars. Nope, he’s too much of a loner for that. He talks very little, broods a lot and wears a trench coat. He’s a war hero that steals cars, fights for the love of his life, fires shotguns, fights with hammers, and rides motorcycles! This is the ultimate tough guy. Like Pee Wee Herman in Pee Wee's Big Adventure (1985) or Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Tom Cody is too much of a rebel to get tied down by a relationship. But he doesn’t mind a night of passion! Michael Pare’s career was starting to take off, he was apparently going to be the next big thing in Hollywood, unfortunately he filmed another Rock and Roll themed film called Eddie and the Cruisers (1983) and then he went and filmed Streets of Fire and they both tanked at the box office! Yet, the cinematic gods have smiled upon him! This double death at the box office didn’t kill his career completely, he’s continued his career making b-movies and even one or two studio films. And then there's Diane Lane, wow, she really portrayed a girl worth dying for! Every time she was singing on stage, I was transfixed by her persona, totally captivated. Seeing her on this movie is totally worth the price of admission. Rick Moranis is on this film as well, if you can believe it he plays Diane Lane’s agent/fiancée, and some feel he was miscast in the role. I have to admit he does stick out like a sore thumb amongst all the tough guys and gals. Super sexy Diane Lane with a nerdy dude like Moranis? I didn’t buy it, but whatever, it’s a minor flaw in the movie, plus Moranis is always entertaining.

One of the most interesting characters in the film was a girl named McCoy (Amy Madigan) a tomboy who has as much attitude as everyone else on the film. Willem Defoe is a cartoon of a villain, even his facial expressions are exaggerated emotions, he wears this leather bound attire that’s straight of an S&M magazine or something. My only gripe with the film is the motivations for kidnapping Ellen were not fleshed out , Raven Shaddock says that he’s kidnapped her simply to have his way with her for a couple of weeks, and that’s it. Is that enough to warrant an all out destructive war between two factions? Apparently it is. If a woman is good enough to start a war in The Iliad, then I guess it’s good enough of a reason in Streets of Fire as well and like I said earlier, she is to die for in this movie.

When it was released, Streets of Fire failed horribly at the box office. It didn’t manage to make its money back, so the sequels that were planned for Tom Cody were never made, still, when you watch it, look out for that open ending, they kind of hint at the idea of future films. But as it often happens with cool movies that pass unnoticed in theaters, audiences eventually discover them and so the film has garnered its cult following. Streets of Fire was a good Joel Silver production and you can tell a lot of work went into creating this world, which is why I recommend it, it’s a film that deserves to be seen. Walter Hill wanted to make a film that had all the things he considered cool when he was a kid. Cool cars, rock and roll, kisses in the rain, motorcycles, shotguns…basically, it’s an explosion of coolness tinged with a bit of nostalgia coming straight from Walter Hill’s memory banks. Closing statements: I highly recommend this overlooked Rock and Roll Fable; it is a film that aims to remind us what it means to be young and alive, gotta love it for that!       

Rating: 4 out of 5