The Package (1989)

In what now looks like an alternative version of 1989, the USA and the USSR have decided on complete nuclear disarmament and an official end to the Cold War. Veteran Green Beret Sergeant Johnny Gallagher (Gene Hackman) belongs to the mass of soldiers running security at the final negotiations concerning the matter. Or in his case, securing an outer perimeter.

After he and his men stumble into the assassination of a US officer by what the audience already knows is a conspiracy between Soviet and US hardliners to stop the peace process at any cost, he is very suddenly ordered to transport a military prisoner, one supposed Walter Henke (Tommy Lee Jones), to the US. Once arrived on US soil, Gallagher is attacked and knocked out while his charge absconds. Gallagher, being old, stubborn, and Gene Hackman, is smelling bullshit, and soon teams up with his also military ex-wife (Joanna Cassidy), and later a Chicago vice cop (Dennis Franz) to find his prisoner. Since he quickly realizes the man he brought to the US isn’t actually Walter Henke, and finds himself framed for murder to boot, Gallagher’s soon concentrating on finding out what the hell’s actually going on, perhaps saving world peace in the process. That’ll teach conspirators to screw with old school sergeants, I suppose.

The plot of Andrew Davis’s conspiracy/action thriller The Package is actually a bit more complicated than that, but thanks to a clear presentation by Davis and a script by John Bishop that usually focuses on providing the audience with the right information at the right time, it actually feels rather straightforward, in a good way. Now, you might argue that the conspiracy seems needlessly complicated, actually includes too many people who need to get killed for it to work, and really stops working as a plan at all once the public shoot-outs start, but its execution on screen works fine and never feels terribly preposterous even when it should.

The film’s plausibility is certainly increased by the resonances it has with the greatest hits of violent US politics like the Kennedy assassination and the nasty stuff US intelligence services have gotten up to throughout their existence. The cast helps there, too, with Hackman probably playing this sort of thing in his sleep yet still providing Gallagher with enough personality and sheer stubbornness to absolutely make him the guy to root for here; it’s also fascinating to watch a late 80s action movie whose hero isn’t a violent asshole but only ever kills in absolutely self-defence. The rest of the actors are as dependable and convincing as expected, with Cassidy, Jones, Franz, John Heard and Pam Grier in a way too small role all fleshing out what are at their core pretty plot functional roles.

From time to time, the film does look a little like an enhanced TV movie. As a rule – and for my tastes – Davis is a competent and effective but also somewhat too functional kind of director, absolutely able to direct this sort of thing effectively but keeping things a bit too tidy and controlled when a bit more chaos might make things more exciting or simply more interesting.


Still, The Package is a well done film that moves through its particular genre space with a degree of intelligence while providing a healthy dose of excitement. Which may sound like me damning with faint praise again, but is actually me complimenting a movie on a job well done.

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The Furies (2019): Women are kidnapped and then trapped in a picturesque patch of Australian wilderness, together with a bunch of beefy guys in creepy masks who go about murdering them. But there’s something slightly more going on, for this is all part of some sort of live stream game for rich perverts, so there are a couple of rules for the women to find out.

So yeah, Tony D’Aquino’s film does mix a couple of popular sub-genres in not terribly original but also definitely not boring ways, throws some decent acting by Airlie Dodds, Linda Ngo and the rest of the cast in, provides some nice practical gore (if you’re a fan of eye mutilation, you will have a hell of a time), and adds the usual stuff about how people in extreme situations pretty much suck. It looks pretty good, and is well paced and competently written in any case, so there’s ninety minutes of good, icky fun to be had.

Peppermint (2018): One morning, a Hollywood studio executive stumbled upon a script about a vengeance seeking urban vigilante in the Punisher style meant for Liam Neeson, and found Taken director Pierre Morel tied to a radiator too. The only problem: Neeson had just given another one of those interviews where he says he’s not making action films anymore for at least the next couple of weeks. Fortunately, the exec’s favourite intern had an idea, so they hired Jennifer Garner for the Neeson role. Well, at least that’s what I imagine the origin story of Morel’s film to be, and it is pretty much the film you’ll imagine it to be. The set-up in this one feels particularly cartoonish, but otherwise, it’s a professional, competently done entry into this sub-genre, with a lead actress who is usually good with the more physical stuff, and a totally by the numbers script by Chad St. John that still manages to be entertaining enough, if one is in the mood for this dubious kind of revenge fantasy.


The Fugitive (1993): But let’s finish on a blast from the just as competent past, when Harrison Ford was an action star, people wanted to work with Tommy Lee Jones, and director Andrew Davis was semi-hot as an action and action thriller director. The script by David Twohy and Jeb Stuart is – despite a running time of over two hours – efficient and economical, which does provide the film with a breathless pace that’s exactly right for Davis’s particular talents. However, the writing is so stripped down that what little actual plot there is feels rather undercooked, the identity of the killer’s boss obvious simply by that character being the only one on screen who has enough lines to be a traitor to Harrison-Ford kind, and while everything’s certainly very exciting, it’s never surprising or particularly interesting. Though, to be fair, if you’re looking for an ultra-efficient rollercoaster without any ambition apart from that, this is pretty much your perfect film.

Under Siege (1992)

The US Missouri – a battleship carrying nuclear armaments – is on its final trip before being decommissioned. A bunch of evildoers under the leadership of one William Strannix (Tommy Lee Jones dressed like Bruce Springsteen circa 1985) has decided this is the best moment to hijack the ship, steal the missiles and sell them to the highest bidder. Because they have the ship’s XO Commander Krill (Gary Busey) – yes, that’s really his name – on their side, the pirates manage to get on board posing as entertainers for the Captain’s surprise birthday party and are so able to ambush the ship’s crew completely unawares and lock them up quite well.

All of the crew, that is, but chief cook Casey Ryback (Steven Seagal). As it happens, Ryback is not just an apparently great cook and a smug bastard but also a badass marine, so before anyone can say “Die Hard on a battleship”, he’s already teaming up with the playmate (Erika Eleniak) the bad guys brought with them for no good reason whatsoever, and starts to solve the little situation.

Ah, the times when some people in Hollywood thought they could turn Steven Seagal into a big budget action movie carrying star instead of the guy not even cutting it in direct to home video films he turned out to be. The positive side of this foolhardy endeavour for Under Siege is that Seagal is teamed with a whole bunch of people who are actually good at their jobs. While repeat-Seagal director Andrew Davis surely will never be confused with a great artist, he was at the time a more than decent director for this sort of bread and potatoes studio action movie, able to stage convincing and fun action sequences, keeping the explosions in focus, and certainly knowledgeable of enough of the tricks of his trade to make a highly entertaining bit of action cinema that looks and feels slick and flows well.

Add to that Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey apparently trying to outdo each other with their expressions of cheesy action movie villainy, as well as the horrors the costume department comes up for them - Busey outdoing Jones’s Boss-style with a bit of cross-dressing that isn’t embarrassing and uncomfortable to watch at all, oh no - and the fun factor heightens considerably.

Topping off the good parts of the film is an absolutely shameless script whose silliness only begins with having the villains act as undercover entertainers like the good guys in a 70s Bollywood masala infiltrating a villain’s lair. There is also many an absurd dialogue scene to witness (Wallace’s bizarre phone conversations with the prospective buyers of the missiles need to be heard to be believed), more ridiculous plotting than one could reasonably expect from a single movie, and bonus scenes supposedly taking place in the Pentagon so hokey, the 50s are embarrassed.


The film’s only problem is Seagal. He is, as we all know, a terrible actor with a tendency to exclusively project unfounded smugness, his martial arts skills look worse than anything the actors in the film who don’t pretend they have a martial arts background present, and his line delivery is so wooden as to make Chuck Norris look like an actor. He’s even out-thesped by Eleniak, and the poor woman’s really only in the movie to show off her implants. Seagal just doesn’t work as an actor, an action hero or even just a plain heroic figure, but thanks to the efforts of everyone else involved, he’s not as painful to watch as in most of his other films. Which, given that he’s the nominal lead of the piece, is quite an achievement by Davis and co.

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The Final Terror (1983): This slasher tries to enliven the usual genre slaughter by also being a survivalist thriller. It’s quite successful at that, with future mainstream director Andrew Davis demonstrating quite a hand for the action parts, a very decent cast full of people who’d go on to have something of a career later on, and some very photogenic woods shot with an eye for atmosphere by Davis himself. Of course, the script is a bit silly and the characters not much to talk about but then, that sort of thing generally isn’t what keeps a slasher from being enjoyable. Consequently, I had quite a bit of fun with this one.

Death of a Ghost Hunter (2007): Despite it suffering from two typical “indie horror” problems, namely sometimes particularly awkward acting and an inability to end the film (this could really use to lose about twenty minutes running time not just at the end), I can recommend Sean Tretta’s film to anyone with the required patience for these things. The script has as many clever moments as it has crude ones (just don’t bring your fundamentalist Christian family members), and Tretta does at times work wonders with his miniscule budget in creating the proper creepy atmosphere for his haunted house. As an added bonus, this is one among the brave number of haunted house films whose hauntings make thematic sense instead of just presenting a revue of random jump scares (a technique Tretta commendably avoids). That makes it well worth getting through the film’s flaws.

Gangs of Wasseypur (2012): As much as I appreciate Anurag Kashyap’s attempt to apply the stylistic techniques of Martin Scorsese circa Goodfellas to an Indian gangster tale that clearly knows its Godfather movies too but that’s also deeply embedded in its own country’s history and popular culture, I can’t say the resulting film really does a lot for me. Technically, Gangs is beyond any reproach, yet still, watching it left me utterly cold. I never connected with a single member of the film’s cast of millions, nor did I find myself caring at all about the its central conflict between two crime families. The former can be easily explained by the flatness of characterization that never gives us any inside view of motivations beyond the most obvious and one-dimensional ones; the latter as a result of the former, and of the old problem of making an audience care about people killing each other on screen when everyone’s a piece of shit. The film’s decision to be this self-indulgently long and show us dozens of barely distinguished assholes killing one another instead of just three or four that are actually drawn with more than the most basic of brushes only makes the problem worse for me.

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