Marlowe (2023)

1939. Bay City/Los Angeles. Morally upright private eye Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is feeling his age quite a bit, but he’s still working a job that involves getting shot at, conked on the head, used by the police and clients to do their dirty work, and so on.

This week – one must not assume but knows this sort of thing happens to Marlowe regularly – ravishing Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) hires Marlowe to find her lover Nico Peterson (François Arnaud) who has apparently disappeared without even a goodbye, which simply isn’t a thing that happens to the lady, or so she explains. Marlowe soon enough finds out that Nico is supposed to be dead, his head smashed by a car at the back of a club; eventually his client discloses that she knows about this, but has seen Nico after his supposed death, looking rather chipper for a zombie.

That is of course not the final omission or outright lie Marlowe is going to hear from his client. Cavendish does at least tend to soften her lies and obfuscations by quite a bit of spirited flirting. Other members of the lying persuasion Marlowe encounters in the following days do tend to prefer violence to sweettalk. And, this being Los Angeles in the late 30s, there are a lot of shady people trying to lie to a private eye who is soon up to his eyebrows in liars, killers, pimps and drug pushers – among other charming people. Every single one of them is played by someone like Jessica Lange, Danny Huston or Patrick Muldoon.

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is based on John Banville, not Raymond Chandler, but the film is very much clued into Chandler’s idea of what the private detective of the hard-boiled model is supposed to be and do, so expect this version of Marlowe to be a knight in somewhat aged armour, manoeuvring the corrupt world of Hollywood and surroundings while doing his utmost not to be corrupt himself and leave a positive footprint, for someone at least.

Jordan as a director is at his most playful here. His approach to the film’s stylized but often incredibly fun dialogue is to emphasize the artificiality of what characters say and how they speak, which fits nicely into a film that does a rather nice job at pretending Spain is Los Angeles. While this certainly isn’t anything to make the friends of naturalism happy, I do find an ironic joy in a film all about characters to whom pretence and lying has become second nature – again, this is set in Hollywood – pretending to take place where it certainly isn’t with a wink and a smile.

It’s the nature of this particular beast that Jordan pays homage to classic noir and hard-boiled material rather a lot, with many a shot that stands in direct dialogue – let’s say, instead of borrowed - with comparable shots in the classics, but also by drenching this material not in black and white, but rather the colours of 90s neo noir. This does put further emphasis on the artificiality of the whole affair, but it’s a kind of artificiality I found engaging throughout – joyful even.

Past Misdeeds: Legionnaire (1998)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

1925. Thanks to a combination of bad luck and bad planning, boxer Alain's (Jean-Claude Van Damme) attempt to flee to America with the abused girlfriend (Ana Sofrenovic) - who also happens to be the woman Alain once left standing at the altar - of a Parisian gangster ends with Alain's best friend as well as the gangster's right hand man/brother/I'm not sure dead, the girl back in the gangster's hand, and the gangster in a very vengeful mood.

Alain sees joining the French Foreign Legion very very quickly as his only way out, so he soon ends up in beautiful Morocco, going through the usual trials and tribulations of basic training, including malevolent Germans (the film really doesn't seem to like us much), before he can even begin to do imperialism's dirty deeds. During training, Alain grows close to African-American Luther (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a man foolishly hoping for less racism in the Legion, former British officer and owner of a gambling problem Mackintosh (Nicholas Farrell), and Italian Guido (Daniel Caltagirone), a character whose propensity to show around a photo of his fiancé whenever he can dooms him from the start.

Together, the friends try to survive incompetent officers, Berber attacks, and the vagaries of their own psychological damages; and these are just the problems they have before some of the gangster's men arrive, at which point betrayal might become an additional problem, though one that might be less important than it seems once our heroes (or what's left of them) have to survive actual military action, something the French Legion - the one of this film at least - does not look particularly well prepared for.

If you go into Peter MacDonald's Legionnaire expecting your typical Jean-Claude Van Damme action vehicle (not that there's anything wrong with them), you'll probably be sorely disappointed, for the only thing the film at hand shares with one of those apart from Van Damme is its love for the "redemption by having everyone you care about getting slaughtered" plotline, though even this comes in a variation that doesn't care for or about the usually ensuing vengeance of the hero at the end; if you think about it, it's actually a morally superior kind of redemption. What we have here instead is a movie that goes back to style, form, and plot of the legionnaire films of decades earlier, with a lot of emphasis on the melodrama of male friendship, and, this being a JCVD film, our hero's naked ass and buff chest. By now, I'm pretty sure I've seen JCVD's behind as often and closely as the breasts of a lot of female exploitation movie actresses, which, despite my general disinterest in male anatomy, seems like a very good and inclusive thing to me. But I digress.

MacDonald and writer Sheldon Lettich (well, and supposed story co-author Van Damme, but you know how it goes with co-writing and producer credits for lead actors) actually take the old-fashioned sub-genre they are working in here quite seriously, making no attempts to squeeze in ways for Van Damme to do the splits or use THAT KICK that just wouldn't fit into the film at all, but instead take Van Damme seriously as an actor of limited range but some experience and charisma perfectly able to play his role straight without a need to distract us with more than his bum. JCVD uses the opportunity well, turning Alain into a guy to root for, which is all I ever ask of my movies, and is often not what I get from action movies (a genre that still applies to Legionnaire in the broadest sense). He is of course helped by some good performances by Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Farrell and Caltagirone, whose efforts keep him away from the slight stiffness Van Damme's performances often tend to slip into.

Despite neither the characters nor their fates being any kind of surprise, MacDonald manages to interest an audience (well, at least me) by virtue of a natural feel to the clichés they are made from; there's a degree of actual human warmth in the scenes establishing the friendship of the main characters that gives their expected demise a degree of emotional resonance I found rather unexpected. As always, it pays off if a film cares enough about its characters to make its audience care too. It also - always and in this particular case - pays off when a film in the business of dramatizing men throwing their lives away for "honour" interprets "honour" as "acting like a decent human being in situations not conducive to it".

Larger amounts of violence only arrive in the film's final third, once the characters stumble into one of those siege situations you'll nearly always get in a legionnaire movie. Once the action starts, it becomes quite clear that MacDonald (also responsible for Rambo 3, by the way) knows what he's doing in this regard too. While there's no ultra-spectacular set piece, Legionnaire is very good at making its few battles short, chaotic, and violent without confusing its audience about what's going on; these scenes fulfil their function in the plot well, yet are also staged in a way making it clear they are not meant to be the core or heart of the movie they are in.

There is, of course, something deeply problematic about even the movie's slight glorification of an institution like the Foreign Legion, an organization I find practically impossible not to describe with a phrase like "crushing boot of imperialism". The film contains some slight nods towards the idea that, you know, perhaps the "rebelling" Berbers are just protecting themselves from brutal oppression, and even allow them to be the enablers of what little of a happy end there is by virtue of actually having virtues. For most of the time, however, the film is making its life a little too easy for my tastes by just ignoring the politics of the situation and only looking at the personal of its legionnaire heroes without truly connecting both things.


Still, despite these slight misgivings, Legionnaire is not just an excellent example of what Jean-Claude Van Damme is capable of in the right environment but a fruitful and effective exploration of a more melodramatic and emotionally complex style of male friendship based movies (surely, there must be a better word for this than the horrible "bromance"?) than the usual buddy movie style you get in US action films.

Bullet to the Head (2012)

New Orleans. After a hit, someone who we will later learn is a big bad mercenary named Keegan (Jason Momoa) murders the partner of freelance killer James Bonomo aka (delightfully) Jimmy Bobo (Sylvester Stallone) in a bar. Jimmy barely escapes with his life and decides to do what killers in movies do when they are sure their employers have fucked them over. There’s a little killing spree in the making, but first point of business is to actually find out who hired him because the hitperson business usually works through middlemen. To complicate matters, Jimmy has to team up with a cop (spit). Said cop, one Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang) owns a cell phone. Which, in combination with his job, is more than enough reason for Jimmy to come up with some awkward and ill-fitting racist jibes, him being the kind of racist who can’t even get the races he’s against straight. However, the script declares they’ve gotta team up and do the old buddy thing, so they do.

There’s much violence, some business with Jimmy’s daughter (a sadly underutilized Sarah Shahi), and then some more violence.

For my tastes, it has been a decade or two since Walter Hill, once one of the best directors of stylized action movies (and more) in the USA, has made a really great film (not to be confused with Great Films, in which I don’t believe). It’s still nice to see him working regularly as a director again, though, and while Bullet to the Head certainly isn’t a masterpiece, it is a very entertaining minor work by an old master. It is not as weirdly – and to my eyes pointlessly – experimental as his newest film The Assignment but on the other hand it is pleasantly straightforward, its plot never coming to a screeching halt for scenes of Sigourney Weaver (bless her) rambling without point or end.

Here Hill does get back to the old buddy action movie formula, though the script (apparently based on a graphic novel) isn’t terribly funny or interested in doing anything of note with the old formula. Sung Kang and Stallone are perfectly serviceable as bickering tough guy couple but there’s little chemistry between them, and their dialogue just isn’t terribly interesting. Of course, Stallone does look like the avantgarde project with painted-on eyebrows of a slightly mad sculptor, so chemistry probably isn’t in the cards between him and any even vaguely human looking member of our species. This doesn’t mean Stallone isn’t fun to watch here – he still has screen presence but it has grown pretty damn weird in his old age and really doesn’t lend itself to any kind of nuance beyond presenting him as some sort of force of nature or mad science, which actually work in his favour in the film at hand.

Hill somewhat makes up for that by giving nominal big bad Adewale Akinnuyoe-Agbaje a lot of scenery to chew, providing Jason Momoa with many an opportunity to glare (he even gets into a glaring duel with Stallone later on), and having Christian Slater pop in for a visit.

Otherwise, it’s classic American action directed by a classic American action director, who still edits circles around some of the young guns. Bullet to the Head is a fun flick, is what I’m saying, and while I am a bit sad that it isn’t more than that, I’m not going to complain about merely being entertained by ten or so well-done action scenes.

In short: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

US soldiers Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) and their team are transporting some frightfully effective new nano weapons made by the company of one McCullen (Christopher Eccleston armed with the Scottish accent to end all Scottish accents) when they are ambushed by a group of masked, futuristically armed soldiers lead by Ana (Sienna Miller) the woman Duke would have married if not for Traumatic Flashback happenings, though for practical reasons, it’s best to call Ana the Baroness from now on.

Fortunately, another group of futuristically armed soldiers – hey, it’s our heroes of G.I. Joe (among them Rachel Nichols, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Ray “Snake Eyes” Park) – swoops in to the rescue at the last moment and manage to keep the Baroness and her men from getting the nanomites (I’m so sorry, I didn’t write the script, though). Duke and Ripcord are eager to join up with the group, and they’ll have important contributions to make once it turns out that McCullen himself is actually behind the attempted theft of his own merchandise, the bad guys attack the Joes secret headquarters, and a lot of things explode while also ninja stuff and mad science happens.

Yes, yes, yes, I know, Stephen Sommers, the worst, did something unpleasant to my childhood, and so on and so forth but honestly, despite my general loathing for most of the films the man has made, I had quite a good time with what was the best movie adaptation of a toy I knew before I watched the sequel, though the film of course generally doesn’t come close to the mad awesomeness of Larry Hama’s classic comics.

Given the film’s toy pedigree and Sommers’s usual modus operandi, it should come as no surprise that G.I. Joe isn’t exactly on the clever side, but then it is based on the adventures of a oh so secret group of soldiers calling themselves G.I. Joe fighting an evil terrorist organization that’ll get official embassies once it has provoked the Joes into accidentally bombing them an island to annex, so I don’t think that’s something I want to blame Sommers for. For a single movie, it’s clearly best to stick with the whole franchise as a delivery system for loud action, explosions, ninjas, bad jokes, and random weirdness, and as such, it’s pretty effective, though I don’t think any of the actual changes the film makes to franchise canon is one for the better.

Sure, the action is not very convincing for most of the time but at least it’s crazy, and unlike the sort of stuff you see in a Michael Bay film, shot in a way that’s actually meant to provide its audience with the appropriate amount of eye candy. Plus, things explode and there are ninjas, underwater bases, mini-mech suites and stuff, so my inner twelve-year-old (and he’s the guy this was made for, I’m positive) was pretty satisfied with the proceedings.

Because why not, the film’s basically infested with actors who are utterly overqualified for the material (apart from those already mentioned, there are also Lee Byung-hun, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Arnold Vosloo and Dennis Quaid doing their respective things), most of them seeming perfectly willing to pretend it’s all perfectly dramatic and exciting, some chewing scenery like champs, some doing horrible accents, everyone buying into the silliness around them with perfect dignity, as it should be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,action,sf,adewale akinnuoye-agbaje,christopher eccleston,joseph gordon-levitt,lee byung-hun,rachel nichols,dennis quaid,sienna miller

On Exploder Button: Universal Van Damme: Legionnaire (1998)

Delving into the catalogue of somebody like Jean-Claude Van Damme can be a somewhat monotonous proposition, what with so much face-kicking and shouty-facing, so it's nice you're getting something a little different from time to time.

Legionnaire is one of these somewhat different movies in JCVD's career, as I'll explain over at Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,melodrama,action,peter macdonald,jean-claude van damme,adewale akinnuoye-agbaje,nicholas farrell,other places