End of Days (1999)

It’s 1999, and instead of going to a proper party, Satan possesses the body of Gabriel Byrne and goes out to rape a particular young woman named Christine (Robin Tunney) – because thusly, the world is going to end, and Satan would win his game of cosmic whatever against God.

Some rogue (the film takes great pains to show the Pope disagrees) Catholics are trying to get in Satan’s way by simply murdering Christine. This, however, is not actually as easy as it sounds, particularly since mercenary bodyguard Jericho Cane (Arnold Schwarzenegger), an alcoholic with a tragic dead family past, becomes involved, and starts protecting Christine from both sides. How centrist of him. So its’s Schwarzenegger against Satan and his gang and the churchy murder people, hooray.

Alas, poor Arnold. In a film like this bizarre mix of millennial horror and action movie, you really need to be able to utter the portentously idiotic lines Andrew W. Marlowe’s script offers with the proper dramatic weight. Schwarzenegger doesn’t appear to even understand what the hell he is saying most of the time, so all he’s left with are old action movie poses, an air of the overly chiselled slowly going to seed and utter confusion. Which isn’t enough when a movie demands actual acting from one to only be somewhat silly instead of completely ridiculous.

Everyone around Arnold knows what kind of film they are in, so Gabriel Byrne, Robin Tunney and even Kevin Pollak chew the scenery to various appropriate degrees, leaving our supposed star in the dust in a manner I found almost cruel.

House favourite director Peter Hyams doesn’t seem to be able to draw Schwarzenegger’s old limited yet effective charisma out either, and he’s clearly either not willing or not able to get the rest of the cast to make the poor guy look any better. Where’s Carl Weather’s when you need him? Because Hyams is Hyams, the action sequences are effective, efficient and absolutely competent, though they certainly aren’t the least bit inspired.

So as a viewer, all one is left with is the whole affair’s utter ridiculousness, the stupid but very funny dialogue, the confused mythology, Byrne’s absolutely shameless performance, and a lot of explosions.

Which certainly doesn’t make End of Days any kind of hidden gem, but a rather entertaining bit of nonsense despite of itself.

In short: Total Recall (1990)

Truth be told, I’ve never been the greatest admirer of Paul Verhoeven’s US films. Sure, there are Robocop and Flesh & Blood, but even those I respect rather more than I do love them. My problem with this phase is its excessiveness, or rather, its excessiveness in exactly those aspects I least enjoy in a movie: camp so thick and aggressive it is basically weaponized, sledgehammer satire loud and shrill and aimed at all the easiest targets, usually paired with some of the old ultra-violence and the sleaze I do enjoy to just shout down anything about the films that might be subtle. The problem with this kind of excess for me is how tiresome it quickly becomes. Sure, the first half hour of Verhoeven shouting incessantly into my face is entertaining in a freakshow kind of way but afterwards my mind and attention start to wander, and after an hour, I find myself actually bored by all the noise.

Despite probably being the most controlled of Verhoeven’s film of this time, I can’t say I feel terribly differently about this adaptation of a (very) short Philip K. Dick story. For my taste, the film’s Dickian moments are drowned out by Verhoeven’s excess, the tendency to shout plot beats instead of simply hitting them, the terrible action movie one-liners Schwarzenegger spouts (like the constructed everyman he’s supposed to be, right?). There is, to be fair, a lot of imagination on screen when it comes to production design and worldbuilding, and the SF action movie meets spy conspiracy thriller plot is well enough constructed, it is just all drowned out by the soup of visual and aural noise Verhoeven builds up. That situation is of course not improved when what should be the film’s human anchor is represented by Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of an actor. Schwarzenegger’s line delivery is at its worst here, and his attempts at presenting as a human are deeply unconvincing.

The action is of course as competently realized as possible, but I can’t say I ever felt emotionally or viscerally involved (re-)watching any of it.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sf,action,paul verhoeven,arnold schwarzenegger,michael ironside,sharon stone,ronny cox

In short: Terminator Genisys (2015)

Given that I’m not an admirer of contemporary Hollywood’s REBOOT EVERYTHING motto (we all know how Uncle Ben died by now, right?), I didn’t go into Alan Taylor’s reboot of the Terminator franchise with too much hope; of course, seeing as this would be a stupid intro if I wasn’t positively surprised by the film, nobody’ll be surprised to hear I was indeed positively surprised by it. Surprise.

Thinking about it, the Terminator movies were actually one case where a reboot made sense, it being a franchise whose entries beyond the first two movies and some of the comics were not very good anyway. Furthermore the last two films have pretty much stuffed the meta-plot with so much nonsense burning down what came before was probably the best option.

The film doesn’t just reboot though, but actually remixes and remodels parts of the first two films in clever and surprising ways that can also keep the good parts of what came before canonical thanks to the vagaries of time travel. The film’s first half in particular is blockbuster action cinema at its most playful, breaking up the big dumb (and rather fun) action scenes with often delightful twists on scenes we knew know from earlier films without letting the film become a mere series of ironic quotations. Taylor keeps the pace up nicely, and while some of the CGI looks a bit shoddy to my eyes, he manages to keep the increasingly silly action (the helicopter chase really is too dumb to believe) fun despite its rampant stupidity. The film’s second half isn’t quite as successful with the self-referentiality and awesome time-travel nonsense but it stays a seriously effective spectacle that knows how to keep small bits of humanity in play in between the explosions. There’s nothing deep here, yet Genisys never has that Michael Bay air of utter loathing for the intelligence of its audience; and it actually knows how to time silly one-liners.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sf,action,alan taylor,arnold schwarzenegger,emilia clarke,jai courtney,jason clarke

Three Films Make A Post: How does it feel to be next?

3 A.M. 3D (2012): It's been a while since I enjoyed one of these Thai horror anthology movies where every tale is directed by a different director. In 3 A.M.'s case, I actually enjoyed only two thirds of the film, because the last story is a typical horror comedy bit, which is to say, it's neither funny nor horrifying. Star of the show is Kirati Nakintanon's middle story "The Corpse Bride", a charmingly macabre tale about necrophilia, misunderstandings and the vagaries of love that is creepy, beautifully shot and very, very strange, and so good I had already forgotten the absolutely serviceable cursed hair story the film begins with five minutes in.

Spiders 3D (2013): Too much mediocre conspiracy thriller, too little giant spider carnage. Sorry, Tibor.

The Last Stand (2013): It's a long and sad tradition for great directors from all parts of Asia to try their luck in Hollywood and don't really produce anything up to the standards they're capable of. The great Kim Ji-woon is, alas, no exception to the rule, and here delivers a Schwarzenegger vehicle best described with terms like "workmanlike" and "serviceable", the sort of thing any competent filmmaker could have delivered in exactly the same way. It doesn't help that Andrew Knauer's script goes through all the expected action movie clichés without a single interesting idea or a hint of charm.

The resulting movie is an okay Hollywood mainstream action concoction I will remember nothing about next week that wastes a hugely talented director.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,thai movies,american movies,horror,action,kirati nakintanon,tibor takács,arnold schwarzenegger

Three Films Make A Post: THE FRENCH FILM BANNED IN FRANCE!

Raw Deal (1986): Welcome to the mid-80s, when action movie heroes looked like gorillas, Schwarzenegger wasn't too awkward in front of the camera (though I find the man's tendency to fondle his own biceps rather disturbing), and women's hair looked like artificial weed. John Irvin's movie is your archetypal bread and butter Schwarzenegger vehicle of the era, lacking the insanity of Commando and the brilliance of Predator. It's fun enough if you need to fill up on shoot-outs and explosions, but it lacks that certain something (be it good or bad) that makes an action movie memorable.

The Parasite Doctor Suzune: Evolution (2011): Despite both films probably having been shot back to back, I enjoyed part two of this parasite-based exploitation romps quite a bit less than the first one. It's probably because it has less of everything except maid costumes: less action, less nudity, less crazy nonsense, fewer locations. Okay, there's more walking through an empty warehouse while nothing is happening, and certainly more flashbacks to the first film and the flashbacks from the first film, but that's the kind of more I'd have preferred less of.

Plunder Road (1957): Now this is quite more like it. Hubert Cornfield's laconic 50s heist movie that knows that the heist is only a success when you actually get away with your loot only doesn't get its own full-length piece from me because it's oh so very laconic and matter-of-fact that writing about the film would become an act of reproduction, for everything here is visible in the film's surface; even what you'd generally call the subtext concerning the relationship between humans and machines standing which represent a cruelly indifferent universe is on the surface in Plunder Road.

In that sense, it's a film trying and succeeding at turning rather complicated notions into a straightforward (and cheap) crime movie, treating some of the philosophical ideas at work in the much more chaotic film noir in a different manner.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,action,exploitation,sf,crime,arnold schwarzenegger,hubert cornfield,in short

Universal Van Damme (sort of): The Expendables 2 (2012)

Shady CIA person Church (Bruce Willis) presses Barney Ross's (Sylvester Stallone) team of biker mercenaries (Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture and newbie Liam Hemsworth) into service to catch him a McGuffin out of a safe inside a crashed plane. Because you wouldn't let these guys attempt to crack a safe when you want to keep the things inside it un-exploded, he loans them…a GIRL(!) named Maggie (Yu Nan) with expertise in safecracking, not doing shitty one-liners, and killing people.

Alas, once our heroes have acquired the McGuffin - that turns out to be a computer map showing where the Russians hid a lot of weapons-grade plutonium during the cold war - bad guy Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and his sidekick Hector (Scott "Totally Russian" Adkins) take it away from them, killing the newbie Expendable who had "guy who will soon die to motivate the heroes' killing spree(s)" tattooed on his face, in the process.

Obviously, the rest of the gang swears vengeance, but there are quite a few people to kill and cameos by Arnold "Couldn't Deliver A Joke If His Life Depended On It" Schwarzenegger and Chuck "Racist Homophobic Prick Whose Comedic Line Delivery Is Even Worse Than Schwarzenegger's If You Can Believe That" Norris to survive before the manly happy end.

Simon West's The Expendables 2 shares a lot of flaws with the first movie: the competent yet curiously indifferent action (a problem that is exacerbated because the film has to convince us of things like Statham being able to beat Adkins in a martial arts fight, Schwarzenegger actually hitting someone when he vaguely points his gun in a direction and wobbles around like an old man way past his prime, that sort of thing), the stupidity of its smugly winking humour, the inability to do anything with Jet Li (whose role is reduced to a mere cameo here anyway), the banking on nostalgia as the film's only reason to exist.

West's film even adds even more problems to these. The film is treating its main bad guy Van Damme as a cameo character who isn't actually in the movie much, which - oh the surprise - turns out not to be something that improves a movie's dramatic weight. For if the film doesn't give a shit about its bad guy, why should the audience care if the good guys can kill him or not? Even when he's on screen fighting, Van Damme is quite underused, an really not allowed to do a move which isn't THAT KICK during his fight (see also indifferent action).

The cameos - and the nostalgia that goes with them - are another of The Expendables 2's problems, because they are handled so badly: the film really is just stopping to pop in Schwarzenegger and Norris (as if anyone wanted the latter) without even attempting to integrate their appearance properly into what little plot there is, and without a care this method kills any tension that might have been left. It's clearly more important to West and his film to have Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Willis exchange old catch phrases and Norris (yuck) make a Chuck Norris joke than to make an action movie with these guys that is actually exciting.

That's a bit of a shame too, for there's a much better (and more entertaining) movie hinted at whenever Stallone, Statham, Lundgren, Crews and Nan Yu (Couture might as well not be there, and I'm honestly not sure if he actually is in much of the film) are allowed a little leeway to just relax, trade comradely jokes and shoot some people in an off-handed manner. Of course, that would be an actual movie and not just boring nostalgia and "irony", and therefore nothing West, Stallone, and co. are interested in.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,action,comedy,sylvester stallone,jason statham,jean-claude van damme,dolph lundgren,bruce willis,arnold schwarzenegger,yu nan,terry crews