Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Warning: contains dolphin-related spoilers!

This write-up is based on the clearly superior Japanese cut of the movie. Why is it superior? Because it features more of Takeshi Kitano and Dolph Lundgren and its third act vaguely makes sense, if you squint.

The close cyberpunk future of 1995+whatever. Okay, it’s 2021, but really and of course, it’s 1995’s 2021. Johnny (Keanu Reeves) works as a data courier, which is to say, he has replaced the part of his long term memory used for his childhood memories with sensational 80GB of data so he can literally carry data around in his head. He’s even upgrading to humungous 160GB right at the start of the movie, so take that, SanDisk!

Alas, the super secret and extra dangerous data his middle-man Ralfi (Udo Kier) has lined up for him that is supposed to pay for getting Johnny's childhood memories back, is much larger than that, which leads to dangerous side effects the longer the data is in Johnny’s head. In two days or so, his head will – figuratively or actually, we don’t know – explode.

That’s not even the biggest of Johnny’s problems. The data is hardly in his head when a team of Yakuza doing the dirty work for an evil pharma corporation ambush him and his clients. Johnny barely manages to escape – he’s luckier there than his clients are – but only has one third of the codes needed to encrypt the data – the only way to get it out of his head.

Hunted by the Yakuza, – we regularly pop in with their boss Takahashi (Takeshi Kitano) who is going through the early stages of grief for the loss of his child – and the corp, and betrayed by Ralfi, our hero’s quest for getting rid of the data is supported by street samurai/bodyguard Jane (Dina Meyer) and the anti-corporate resistance whose leader isn’t actually Ice-T like we might at first think but a damn dolphin. Also involved are a crazy, evil, cybernetic street preacher (Dolph Lundgren dressed up as post-apocalyptic Moses), and barely coherent, yet awesome, monologues during which Johnny wrestles with his conscience as well as the importance of room service.

Some movies don’t age gracefully; others, like Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic get better – well, immensely more entertaining – once they’ve got a couple of decades behind them. Today, it is easy to enjoy this as an intensely 90s movie, whereas during the 90s, it was exactly its extreme 90s-ness that made it practically unwatchable.

Today, when we have reached a state of practical corporate ownership (he said, using a Google site to post this on) that just doesn’t look as sexy and absurd as the one portrayed in the movie, the film’s bad future seems incredibly attractive. It is, after all full of hot people dressed up like extras from an Italian post-apocalyptic movie, contains a cyberspace that looks like a digital psychedelic light show instead of being the place where crazy people shout at each other for all eternity, and has 160GB of RAM in its head (and very little else).

I respect the hell out of Johnny Mnemonic as a bizarre high-ish budget cyberpunk as pulp movie as well: the brazen absurdity of its awesome, nonsensical production design, the straight-up nuttiness and glorious dumbness of its action set pieces, William Gibson’s deep if you’ve imbibed enough, otherwise nonsensical  philosophical monologues poor Reeves has to get through, the willingness to go with silly, “cool” ideas instead of aiming for boring depth – it’s all good in a “how did they manage to get a budget for this” way, and great as popular cinema no populace in its right mind actually watches gets.

To really draw in an audience of me, the film features a wish list of cult movie favourites in roles large and small: Keanu is at that point in his career when he has learned enough basic acting skills to get through scenes without falling over his own feet and shows the awesome ability to keep a straight face even when he shares a scene with Moses Lundgren and a dolphin, or when Henry Rollins rants into his face. He’s also young enough to be agile and fast in action sequences without too much help from the editing room. I very much suspect his back hurts less, as well. Then we get Kitano (who has something of a plausible character arc in the Japanese cut) being Kitano, Kier as ready for anything as he ever was, Dolph looking as if he really enjoys himself, Ice-T doing his usual shtick for non-cop roles, Meyer aiming for intense and dangerous but often only hitting cute, Barbara Sukowa as an AI (don’t ask)… It’s pretty fantastic.

In other words, this one really is in dire need of a reassessment from the larger cult movie audience, because it is a wonderfully entertaining piece of bizarro nonsense that’s also a time capsule of an in hindsight simpler, quieter, and certainly more hopeful even in its dystopias time.

Past Misdeeds: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)

aka Universal Soldier IV

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Even after the positive buzz by people whose opinions I respect, I did expect this new addition to the Universal Soldier franchise to be at best a decent bit of cheap-o US action cinema with one or two hints that director John Hyams has seen Apocalypse Now in it. However, what I actually got was so much more.

This is another movie with themes quite close to the spirit of Philip K. Dick. One should probably wish filmmakers to be inspired by more contemporary SF too, but then I'm already happy when filmmakers read anything at all. It's an amnesiac's (Scott Adkins, stuntman/martial artist turned actually rather good actor) attempt to understand why a certain Luc Devereaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme at his most disquieting) brutally murdered his wife and kid during a home invasion, and his subsequent quest to take vengeance. This rather typical plotline is permanently enhanced and deconstructed by twists, turns, and ideas concerning the nature of our hero, free will, the uses of memory, and the killing of fathers/gods, all told in a visual style that reminded me most of Beyond the Black Rainbow and Driver (films this one does actually see eye to eye with) in the way it suggests wrongness and disturbed subjectivity with every colour and framing choice.

The whole film has the feel of a paranoid's nightmare full of bleak colours, grimy instead of adrenaline-pushing violence, and a feeling of claustrophobia - all not exactly things you'd expect in an US action movie belonging to a mildly successful franchise that generally always avoided to actually delve into the thematic mire of conspiracy theory and identity horror its basic ideas are so ideally suited to. Reckoning, on the other hand, delves in without ever looking back, pulling the part of its audience willing to go into nasty and confusing places with it, and leaving the kind of people who need to have the plot explained to them afterwards behind on the IMDB where they belong.

It's not only Hyams's ambition to go where Universal Soldier hasn't gone before I admire here, it's that he actually fulfils it, making one of the most off-beat and unexpectedly disturbing action films with a side-line in existential horror I've ever seen.

In short: Altitude (2017)

FBI hostage negotiator Gretchen (Denise Richards) has just been demoted to a desk job in Washington for preventing a bloodbath. Her flight to Washington isn’t going too great, either: her nice/slimy seat neighbour Terry (Kirk Barker) has stolen rather a lot of money from his backstabbing partners, said partners being his ex Sadie (Greer Grammar) and one Sharpe (Dolph Lundgren). And wouldn’t you believe it, these two are not only on the plane too, but have brought a couple of feckless henchmen and a pretty insane plan that’ll turn out to include mass murder.

I’d suggest retitling – if only in one’s head – to “Dolph on a Plane”, with Dolph Lundgren as (motherfucking) Dolph (on this motherfucking plane) and Denise Richards as Samuel L. Jackson to get into the right spirit for Alex Merkin’s very silly, pretty cheap, sometimes funny and generally entertaining action movie. For if you go into this one wanting to take it straightforwardly serious, you’ll not come out of it a happy person.

Despite quite a few dead bodies the film’s tone is light but not parodic or exactly comedic. It’s just very much in tune with its own silliness, unwilling to apologize for it, while on the other hand perfectly willing to wallow in it. So there’s a great amount of nonsense about the ways planes, hostage negotiation, parachutes, the FBI, guns, and gravity work, because how could you ever set an action film on a plane otherwise? As someone not going into cheap action movies hoping for realism (or even plain veracity), I’m perfectly fine with it. And once you’re willing to accept Denise Richards as FBI hostage negotiator and budding action heroine you’re all set to actually enjoy this thing.

Richards obviously isn’t exactly the ideal choice for the whole action business, but she’s certainly game for any stupid crap the script needs her to say or do, her stunt double’s game for the action, and while she still hasn’t been kissed by the Great Goddess of Thespians, she does deliver her lines convincing enough, as far as that goes with these particular lines. Which isn’t something I’d say about all action movie leads. Dolph, as is his wont these days, spends most of the film in the same (cockpit) set but Merkin did obviously have him for enough shooting days to actually have him interact with most of the main cast and place him inside the film’s actual plot, which isn’t a given with the big guy’s movies these says. And if you ever wanted to watch Dolph hum the “Ride of the Valkyries” while piloting an aircraft, this is the film for you. He seems to have fun with it, at least.

The rest of the cast is solid, too, while the special effects are cheap in a likeable manner. Merkin’s direction does lack a bit of clarity during some of the action, but he never gets the film bogged down in boring nonsense like characterisation or other filler, keeping things moving and going from one cheap-o nonsense set piece to the next. So Altitude’s a fun little piece of direct-to-video fodder.

Don’t Kill It (2016)

Like it happens to all peaceful, unpleasantly religious small towns in the USA on screen, a peaceful, unpleasantly religious small town (indeed situated in the USA) is hit by a series of very curious murders, or rather a kind of relay killing spree, where the person who shoots the killer in self defence then continues the murders. And what’s with the black eyes and the strange shouty noises the killers make?
Well, it’s a demon, of course, possessing the person who killed its last host. The FBI sends Agent Evelyn Pierce (Kristina Klebe) to town to make sure this isn’t a case of domestic terrorism. She’s quite familiar with the place, because she spent part of her childhood there, earning herself the charming and not particularly fitting nickname of “Evil Lynn”.

Evelyn will quickly team up with the only guy (and he is such a guy) who knows what’s actually going on in town: demon hunter Jebediah Woodley (Dolph Lundgren, totally a Jebediah). Together, they not only fight crime, they just might have a chance at getting rid of an enemy you really shouldn’t kill lest you become him. Or is it he becomes you? Boy, identity is difficult.

Mike Mendez’s Don’t Kill It is the sort of film you’ll either loathe completely or enjoy quite a bit. I don’t think there’s any middle ground of vague detachment when it comes to appreciating its bloody comedy and its comical violence. I had a heck of a time watching it, starting with the gleefully bloody intro, continuing with Jebediah’s introduction via a pretty damn hilarious (and rather violent, would you believe?) lecture about consent in a bar (hopefully coming to a YouTube near you soon), and so on and so forth to the bloody finale.

Mendez certainly is a director who knows how to make the best out of a small budget, shooting - and particularly editing - the action sequences with verve, style and imagination. The pleasantly – and sometimes hilariously – bloody effects courtesy of Robert Kurtzman’s shop are a fine mix of the practical and the digital (only whenever that makes more sense), and have a wonderful gleeful kid in a candy store made of intestines vibe. This is very clearly a film that approaches cartoonishly exaggerated violence with glee and a sense of fun, and I for one found myself rather infected by both while watching it.

Don’t Kill It is also excellently paced, keeping the running time at lean eighty minutes that prevent the film from ever overstaying its welcome. Exposition happens quick and fast, the character moments are better written than you’d usually find them in a gory comedy – though certainly not original – and before things can ever become boring, the next bit of carnage or genuinely funny business happens.

Klebe turns out to be a perfect straight woman, while Lundgren really lets out the dry sardonic comedian a lot of his semi-cameo action movie appearances in the last decade or so have suggested, showing excellent timing saying absurd things with a very straight face - which, admittedly, is the only facial expression he has.

All this leaves Don’t Kill It as a film that knows exactly what it wants to accomplish and how, and then proceeds to do it to the joy and delight of everyone who likes their horror comedy bloody yet sardonic.

In short: Shark Lake (2015)

Clint Gray (Dolph Lundgren) is smuggling rare, dangerous and endangered animals for some gangster boss (Don Barnes). On the night when the local sheriff’s department finally catches up to him, he and his truck take a nosedive into a lake, freeing a pregnant shark. Nobody will notice that little problem until five years later, though.

Right about the time when Clint gets out of prison, a series of killings begins which most of the local police at first ascribe to bears. Most, that is, but Meredith Hernandez (Sara Malakul Lane), not only the only competent copper in town, but also the officer who arrested Clint, and the woman who took in his daughter Carly (Lily Brooks O’Briant).

She’ll soon be proven right, too, for it’s not bears, it’s (spoiler!) sharks. Because sharks alone supposedly don’t make a movie, there’s of course also a sub-plot about Meredith’s unwillingness to let Clint see his daughter again as well as another completely pointless one – taking up ninety percent of the meagre screen time Lundgren gets hired for these days even if he is supposedly a movie’s star – concerning the gangster boss pressing Clint into his service again to catch his damn shark. Also appearing are an oceanographer and would-be love interest for Meredith, a big shot BBC shark hunter (of course coming to a sticky end), and a lot of other people who couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag.

In fact, the only people on screen who have their act together as thespians are Lundgren (don’t laugh, he’s a pro at this semi-cameo business by now), the actual lead Lane (putting in a ridiculous amount of effort the script neither asks for nor deserves, winning hearts and minds – well, mine at least – in the process), and Lily Brooks O’Briant (even though we all know by now how much I dislike child acting as a whole). The rest of the cast is all sorts of embarrassing: some painfully so, some in a funny way.

Otherwise, this is the most SyFy Original movie ever made that isn’t actually a SyFy Original, though the melodramatic sub-plot is so treacly I don’t think the SyFy Channel would actually go with it for reasons of artistic standards. Lundgren is as always first listed in the credits but actually just popping in for two or three days of shooting at best, while the rest of this thing plays out nearly exactly as you’ll think it will.

Jerry Dugan’s direction for its part makes no impression whatsoever, so this one’s mainly for the Dolph completists (poor souls that we are), the habitual watcher of shark movies (again, poor souls we), and people who like to hope for better gigs for clearly overqualified lead actresses.

In short: Storm Catcher (1999)

Major Jack Holloway (Dolph Lundgren), one of only two men able to fly a new-fangled experimental super stealth jet, is framed for the theft of said jet in the most ridiculous manner possible. When the people actually responsible for the deed violently break him out of a prison transport only to attempt to kill him afterwards themselves, Jack reacts a bit violently himself. Hunted by the authorities (not that they ever play much of role) and the bad guys, our hero tries to find out what’s really going on by shooting a lot of people.

Turns out, the whole thing is part of a planned military coup masterminded by Jack’s superior General Jacobs (Robert Miano), a guy evil enough to threaten the life of Jack’s little daughter. Clearly, violence is the answer to this one too.

As should be obvious, Storm Catcher isn’t the most clever of movies, but when the last Dolph Lundgren film one has seen was Agent Red (a film that just happens to cannibalize one of the scenes of this one), even the bad guys’ pretty fucking nonsensical plan to take control of the USA here sounds somewhat sensible, even though the whole “let’s frame Dolph!” angle seems rather pointless, particularly once they start to send out totally unsuspicious squads of well-armed soldiers to take him down. But hey, at least the film’s houses look like houses, its stealth jet is a stealth jet, and so on.

Plus, unlike Damien Lee and Jim Wynorski, Storm Catcher’s Anthony Hickox is a low budget movie pro who is at least always trying to make decent movie with the possibilities at hand. Given the script and the film’s budgetary limitations, Hickox does quite a fine job here too, putting more thought into adding something memorable to most of the film’s dramatic scenes (just look at the lighting and the not-throne our bad guy sits on in the final verbal confrontation between Dolph and Miano!). Of course, there’s also a bit of the mandatory low budget action movie weirdness, some dubious yet entertaining acting in the minor roles (the people playing the CIA agents are rather…special), as well as some moments when Hickox over-directs to near hilarity. In particular, the scene when Dolph brings his wife to the hospital is rather hilarious/cringe-inducing in its editing and sheer overblown camera work, but then, it certainly isn’t boring.

The action’s pretty okay too, with little that really sticks out. There’s a lot of serviceable, solid action that might not blow anyone away yet did satisfy me alright. Which is not the worst thing that can happen when you encounter a film starring The Dolph made during the 90s.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,action,in short,anthony hickox,dolph lundgren,mystro clark,robert miano

Agent Red (2000)

For security reasons the Russians want to return a dangerous US-developed virus the Soviets once stole from its rightful, mass-murdering creators. Because that’s the way you do this sort of thing, a US submarine commanded by a skipper on his last mission before retirement is to transport the virus to US shores. Alas, a group of terrorists have infiltrated the sub, murder the crew, and are planning to release the virus on New York via the sub’s missiles, all as part of their protest against weapons of mass destruction. Seriously.

Fortunately, two Americans have survived the attack, and now it is up to them – marine badass Captain Matt Hendricks (Dolph “What, I’m not playing a Russian!?” Lundgren) and his ex-and-soon-to-be-non-ex-again fiancée Lt. Dr. Linda Christian (Meilani Paul who is, to say it politely, the worst actor in a film full of horrible performances) – to save the day. Well, at least Matt’s carrying a rather convenient antidote to the horrible, horrible virus nobody actually understands (or so the film says) around.

Well, sort of beloved Swedish scientist and actor Dolph Lundgren has been in quite a few crap films, but among connoisseurs, this one is generally taken to be the absolute low point in his career, which says something given some of the films he put an appearance in. I mean, that means worse than the The Expendables films, after all.

Going by what the Internet tells me, the original state Agent Red was in when director Damian Lee delivered it was so bad, even producer Andrew Stevens wasn’t willing to put that one out, so, after some useless attempts by one Steve Latshaw to rescue the film without having to do any reshoots, he hired that well-known artist, Jim Wynorski for three days of hasty reshoots that resulted – if I can believe what I read – in 40 minutes of new footage. To nobody’s surprise this, as well as the film’s now rather humungous use of footage taken from slightly higher budget productions Stevens could cannibalize (in a way even I see the continuity errors, like the incredibly shrinking Dolph early on), does not for a very good, or even only a basically coherent film make. Indeed, even by the standards of cheap direct-to-video action the film makes little sense with its lack of coherence even when it comes to very basic things like the way the virus it is all about works on human beings. Needless to say, characterization and plot are rote, yet where other action movies of this type make up for that kind of deficiency with crazy ideas and fun nonsense, Agent Red drags its feet.

Sure, there is the large, large, absurdly large number of dumb one-liners, and sexual innuendo of the most painful type (example: “Ow!” – “That’s what you said the last time I put it in.”), and that’s good for a laugh now and then, but the film commits the most horrible sin a movie of its type can commit: it is just plain boring, with minute upon minute of guys in uniform just talking nonsense at each other, surprisingly little happening for something supposedly being an action film, and little in it that’s actually enjoyable.

What there is of actual action scenes is pretty bad too, thanks to the awesome directorial decision (probably one by Lee, not by Wynorski, who is bad and most probably hates his audience but isn’t quite this stupid a director) to film the action exclusively in shots so close to the actors you see as little of what is going on as if the film were shot in shaky-cam and lightning edit mode. It’s impressive in a way, if impressive means a horribly bad idea executed terribly. Sure, it’s probably an attempt to disguise that the interior of the submarine doesn’t look at all like the interior of a submarine but rather like that one badly lit warehouse set 99 percent of all cheap action movies are shot on, but you know what? It doesn’t work and makes the film a chore to watch, so one can’t say the attempt was successful.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,canadian movies,reviews,action,damian lee,jim wynorski,dolph lundgren,meilani paul

Three Films Make A Post: YOUNG AMERICANS in the SHADOW of DEATH!

Dragonwolf (2013): I quite enjoyed director Raimund Huber's earlier movie Kill 'em All as the kind low budget production not overstaying its welcome and realizing what it can do on its budget, and what not. Dragonwolf on the other hand, is an ill-advised attempt at creating some sort of comic book style martial arts epic. Consequently, the terrible acting becomes a problem, as does the horrible dialogue, the idiotic plot, and the fact that there's barely anything happening on screen that is either stupid or badly executed. Most of the time, it's even both.

Add to this the film's just as ill-advised length of two terrible, painful hours, and find me crying in a corner.

The Cater Street Hangman (1998): This adaptation of Anne Perry's first Inspector Pitt Mystery, on the other hand, knows quite well what it's doing. If I were in a complaining mood, I'd probably argue that director Sarah Helling does overemphasise the source's melodramatic elements a bit, and the script by T.R. Bowen slightly underemphasises some of the book's seedier elements, but the film gets Perry's anger at all kinds of social injustice as right as it does her moments of compassion even with some of the people complicit in these injustices, so I'd be complaining about something very minor here.

Keeley Hawes and Eoin McCarthy make a very fine Charlotte Ellison and Thomas Pitt, respectively, too, so there's little about the film that's not to like.

Direct Contact (2009): And here I thought I had developed a high tolerance for contemporary direct-to-DVD action films. Turns out, it's only a high tolerance for contemporary direct-to-DVD action films that are actually any good. The saddest thing about the Dolph Lundgren vehicle at hand is that it has some production values: there's a helicopter, a tank, and quite a few henchmen wobbling around in diverse locations; there's even a plot that could be vaguely interesting. Unfortunately, director Danny Lerner is rather terrible, managing to make everyone involved look just as terrible: Dolph is as stiff as he hasn't been in decades, Michael Paré looks bored, and the rest of the cast give the impression of people waiting on instructions that just don't come. Worse, for this sort of movie, while Lerner doesn't go for the lame show-off editing and staging style of action I hate with a passion, he demonstrates that you produce just as crappy action scenes while holding the camera still. There's no heft to any of the action, the editing makes everyone look slow, and even worse, it's so sloppily shot there's barely an action scene not ruined by continuity problems that rob the action of all rhythm; the direction’s additional attempts at “style” are just laughable.

Technorati-Markierungen: thai movies,british movies,british tv,american movies,bulgarian movies,action,fantasy,mystery,raimund huber,sarah helling,keeley hawes,eoin mccarthy,danny lerner,dolph lundgren,michael paré,in short

In short: Bridge of Dragons (1999)

In some sort of geographically and temporally unsound place and time that enables the good people of NuImage to wildly throw various costumes and props they found squirreled away somewhere together without any care for coherence or unity of mood and theme. Evil warlord General Ruechang (the inevitable Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) has been reigning over an unnamed kingdom for years now, just waiting for Princess Halo (Valerie “Rachel Shane” Chow) to get old enough for him to marry her.

Of course, Ruechang is responsible for the “accident” that killed Halo’s parents, and of course, she only learns about this shortly before her marriage. Not that she wanted to marry the crazy military dictator before, but now she’s so pissed she rides off on her wedding day. Ruechang sends Warchild (Dolph Lundgren), his best man, after Halo. Yet, while retrieving Halo and rescuing the kidnapping-prone woman from rapists and kidnappers, Warchild finds himself soon with divided loyalties, for he and the princess fall in love.

For a film directed by the saintly champion of awesome low budget action Isaac Florentine, and starring the paragon of Dolphness, Dolph Lundgren, Bridge of Dragons (I have, by the way, not the faintest idea why the film’s called this, nor is the film telling) is a rather mild pleasure.

It’s neither the fault of Florentine’s handling of the action, which is impressive as always, nor of Dolph, who had a rather good month when shooting this and has seldom looked more mobile in his fight scenes. The problem lies with a script that really doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing nor what it wants to do, slowly shuffling Warchild and Halo (and seriously, what’s with the names?) to one place only to take them back to a different place one or two scenes later, with little that’s a proper or useful set-up for the action sequences. For most of the film’s running time, the script is dithering, introducing a lame rebel army only to slaughter it in a minor assault five minutes later, introducing Halo as a secret stick fighting badass only to find her kidnapped four to six – depending on your count – times, and always making one step forward and one step back, presenting itself as utterly unable to give Florentine a frame on which to hang the things he does best.

I would like to blame Dolph and Chow for the tepid and anti-septic air of their Great Romantic Love but again, the script doesn’t provide much – if anything – for them to work with; but what do I expect of a movie that doesn’t even properly use Tagawa’s well-known scenery-chewing abilities as it should?

Usually, I’d argue that an action movie doesn’t need that deep a script, particularly not when the action is in the right hands. Bridge of Dragons, however, truly suffers from the failings of its writing, with hardly a scene going by where something potentially awesome isn’t wasted through an improper set-up or through feet-dragging of a kind I’ve seen in no other Florentine film. I don’t care much that the film is dumb, but I care a lot about the fact it seems to sabotage everything that could be fun in it, never deciding on a tone or a theme it isn’t going to ignore at least two scenes later completely.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,isaac florentine,dolph lundgren,action,cary-hiroyuki tagawa,valerie chow,gary hudson

In short: Silent Trigger (1996)

A sniper (Dolph Lundgren) working as an assassin for The Agency and a spotter (Gina Bellman) he once worked with during her first assignment that ended in a right clusterfuck reunite for another assassination in a weird empty apartment building.

While the two are preparing their hit, the film clues the audience in on the way their first bad work together went down via flashbacks. In the present, the sniper and the spotter find themselves facing various problems, namely that one of the building’s security guards (Christopher Heyerdahl) is a cocaine-addled crazy rapist, and the other (Conrad Dunn) is so by the book it becomes slightly surreal, which is not conducive to a good working environment for professional killers. Then there’s the little fact the sniper is sure his own agency is out to get him, and suspects the spotter might just be meant to clean him up after the hit.

Russell Mulcahy’s Silent Trigger is one of the finest films I’ve seen Dolph Lundgren in. It may have a rather thin plot, a weird structure, and only tenuous connections to outside reality, but it’s the sort of film where these are strengths rather than weaknesses; not a film that’s trying to convince its audience of the physical reality of what’s happening in it but rather one working hard to induce a dream-like mental state in a viewer.

This does of course play to Mulcahy’s strengths as a director who traded in a curiously individual video clip inspired aesthetic at least since Razorback, sometimes with great success, sometimes with very little of it. If Mulcahy is good at one thing it’s using bizarre, unreal set design, moody and highly artificial looking lighting and all manner of slo-mo effects to turn everything he touches into a dream.

Consequently, Silent Trigger is all about building a slightly unreal mood where the characters’ archetypal yet ambiguous dance of distrust, attraction and violence can play out in. This also just happens to be pretty much the only environment where I can imagine the script’s experimental (some might think it’s just shoddy but I disagree) start-and-stop structure as well as a pacing that (like the film’s characters) only seems to know standstill and high octane and doesn’t believe in switching slowly between them, actually working. At least, here it does work.

If I step away from the film’s mood for a moment, I also see some real creativity in action scenes that blow-up some very simple set-ups (and at its core very little production values beyond Mulcahy’s aesthetic obsessions) into moments of excitement and disquietude.

You might also be surprised at the quality of the four core performances with Dolph’s typical disillusioned assassin (how often has he played one of these?) seeming quite believable brittle around the edges, and Bellman projecting a confounding mix of sexiness and ambiguity. Or you might hate Silent Trigger for doing weird things to the direct-to-DVD action formula, but then that’s the thing one may love the film for just as much.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,british movies,in short,action,dolph lundgren,gina bellman,conrad dunn,christopher heyerdahl,russell mulcahy

Hidden Assassin (1995)

aka The Shooter

(This write-up is based on the shorter US cut of the movie that excises about ten minutes of scenes meant to deepen characterization and make the plot clearer).

US Marshal Michael Dane (Dolph Lundgren), one of those people who abduct foreign nationals from countries the USA don’t have extradition treaties with, is doing a small favour for his old friend, CIA agent Alex Reed (John Ashton) and Reed’s boss Dick Powell (Gavan O’Herlihy). The CIA thinks that professional assassin Simone Rosset (Maruschka Detmers) has already killed a Cuban ambassador for kicks, and is now planning to slaughter the participants of a historic peace conference between the US and Cuba in Prague, so they’d be very thankful if Dane could catch her and bring her to the US.

Catching Simone turns out to be quite difficult for Dane, and catching and keeping her even more so, because she is just the decisive bit more competent at the whole cat and mouse game. Consequently, it takes quite some time and effort, and some rather unpleasant lies to Simone’s girlfriend Marta (Assumpta Serna) for Dane to reach this goal. Not that he’s all that happy about it – he neither likes the CIA way of going about things, nor does he seem to like to morally compromise himself; he has also taken quite a shine to Simone until his head and his penis are pulling into very different directions when it comes to her.

At least on an ethical level, Dane’s life becomes easier when people probably working for the CIA are trying to kill Simone before he can bring her out of the Czech Republic.

Ted Kotcheff’s Hidden Assassin is one of the more surprising vehicles for that loveable lug, Dolph Lundgren. As we all know, while Lundgren is one of the more likeable action specialists of his generation (which automatically puts him in a higher league than Seagal and Norris), his thespian skills have their limits mostly in glowering, looking like the nicest guy ever to bash your head in, and two kinds of smiles, which results in a limited repertoire of roles, so much so that most of his films aren’t even trying to get anything else out of him.

Even though Kotcheff’s film isn’t going against the trend completely, its script (by Yves André Martin) does provide Lundgren with a slightly more complex character than usual, as well as with a backstory that is actually connected to what’s going on in the rest of the film on a thematic level. Given his acting limits, Dolph really does comport himself very well here, not exactly giving a subtle performance but a convincing one; that he’s doing his usual good job in the action sequences is a given anyway.

It’s quite interesting to see how well the script’s slightly slicker execution (why, there’s actually a reason for people to do what they do, and it even makes sense in context) turns your generic Lundgren vehicle into, well, an actual movie, the sort of film where the action becomes more exciting because it carries meaning beyond going through the action movie motions. Not that Kotcheff is bad at directing the action sequences – there are some fun cheap chases through the mean streets of Prague (prettier as Sofia - there, I said it), a simple yet pretty great final rooftop chase, as well as some of the always entertaining train top shenanigans (though none including a motorbike), and other moments of the kind of joyful anti-gravitational nonsense that make action cinema so delightful, all of them done with great competence and providing thrills big enough I’m not even going to call them mandatory thrills.

On the other hand, I don’t want to oversell the script’s depth or perceived depth. This is – at least in the shorter US version – still very much an action movie and not a character study, and certainly also not on the level of the rarefied kind of action movie where the action is part of the character study, too. It just knows how to enable the action better. Plus, there’s no hilariously earnest scene where a hallucinatory George Clooney holds a ridiculous pep talk, so it’s already better than Gravity.

Adding to this, there are also all kinds of nice little touches giving Hidden Assassin a distinct personality of its own. I particularly enjoyed Gavan O’Herlihy’s and some of the minor actors’ shameless scenery chewing, as if they had drunkenly stumbled in from one of Lundgren’s later direct-to-DVD films; or how much more competent at the whole action hero business Detmers’s Simone seems to be, at least until the film feels the need to get out the refrigerator.

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In short: Legendary: Tomb of the Dragon (2013)

A dam building project somewhere in China is disturbed by attacks of a mysterious giant animal. Lawyer Doug McConnell (James Lance), working for a mysterious money source, hires cryptozoologist Travis Preston (Scott Adkins) to catch whatever the creature may be. Despite his last expedition having ended in something of a catastrophe, Travis and his partners Katie (Lydia Leonard) and Brandon (Nathan Lee) soon make their way to beautiful China.

Once there, they not only have to cope with a generally hungry and rude giant amphibian but also Harker (Dolph Lundgren), a former partner of Preston who has turned against him after what we will call the giant bear fiasco (that happened in the movie’s intro). Harker, never the sanest of men, is now clearly fully living the evil mastermind fantasy version of the Great White Hunter, which makes him just as dangerous as the giant animal he of course doesn't want to catch but to kill. One can't help but ask oneself how these people ever worked together.

I can't help but think that Eric Styles's UK/Chinese co-production made a bit of a tactical error by casting action specialists Scott Adkins and Dolph Lundgren in Legendary's lead roles, for fans of the two going in expecting an action fest will surely be sorely disappointed, while the actual audience for a (mostly) family friendly adventure movie with a giant monster might be turned off by the same expectations.

Me, I'll watch whatever people put in front of me, though, and I'm certainly not going to complain about actors broadening their horizons slightly. Particularly not since Adkins makes for a perfectly decent white-bread hero, while Lundgren seems to relish the opportunity to utter dialogue containing every Evil Great White Hunter cliché ever written (including, of course, multiple variations of the old hit "does the lion care for the fate of the lamb?"), and playing his bad guy as the king of smug self-satisfaction. It's certainly not deep stuff, but the two are fun to watch and nicely supported by a decent international supporting cast.

The rest of Legendary also isn't deep stuff yet fun enough to watch: the production makes good use of its actual Chinese locations (the glory of international co-productions strikes yet again), the action scenes are competent, and the dialogue is generally funny enough when it wants to be. The giant monster, on the other hand, is a bit of not very good CGI that emphasises the feeling that what you're watching is a slightly up-market version of a SyFy Channel movie without a bizarre explanation for the existence of its monster. That's of course fine by me, because I happen to like SyFy Channel movies, and more of them (or really, any of them) should star Scott Adkins or Dolph.

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Three Films Make A Post: KARLOFF TURNS KILLER IN A HORROR-CRAMMED THRILLER!

V/H/S/2 (2013): I was less than enthusiastic about the first part of this horror anthology but the second beats the first one easily and with style, forgoing the attempts to look as fugly as possible for more reasonable POV techniques, and doing much better work telling its very simple genre stories. Then there's the film's absolute highlight, Gareth Evans's (of The Raid fame) and Timo Tjahjanto's (of The Mo Brothers fame) segment "Safe Haven", which goes from mildly creepy, to heavily creepy, to insane what-the-fuckery during the course of half an hour or so, and left me actually slightly breathless. Saying it alone is worth the price of admission is putting it mildly.

Ambushed aka Hard Rush (2013): One thing to keep in mind when making a movie in a genre as rich as the gangster film is that you really need to bring something original or something of your own to the table when making one, because there will already be dozens of movies in existence who did the standards better than you did. Giorgio Serafini's Ambushed really doesn't, and instead tries its luck at squeezing as many worn out tropes into the movie as possible, without achieving any other effect than that of disjointedness and an inability to focus on any one theme or character. Instead, the film is a series of barely explored clichés that is made even less consistent by being the kind of Anchor Bay production that has to feature larger than a cameo but smaller than a substantial role parts for Dolph Lundgren, professional racist Vinnie Jones, and Randy Coutoure (another in a long line of acting ex-wrestlers who can't act for shit), instead of casting actors actually fit for their roles and available for enough shooting days to actually be effective as parts of a movie.

Needless to say, Ambushed is not a movie that stays in mind.

Kiss the Abyss (2010): I'm often rather down on "indie horror" as a genre but Ken Winkler's film avoids most of the pitfalls of what has become a style. So the narrative is rather concentrated without needless digressions, the acting - particularly by leads Nicole Moore and Scott Wilson - solid, and the film is clearly made with an idea of what can be achieved under the circumstances of its production and what can't. The story - boy loses girl to death, boy and rich father go to sorcerer for help, girl returns but develops socially unacceptable habits - isn't exactly original but told with conviction and an eye for the Weird, resulting in a film that makes much out of little in the best possible way.

One in the Chamber (2012)

Welcome to beautiful Prague (at least in part played by beautiful Romania)! Ray Carver (Cuba Gooding Jr.) uses the city as base for his work as a professional killer. When Ray is not killing people, he's soliloquizing about his sinfulness, reading the bible, and stalking Janice Knowles (Claudia Bassols), the now grown daughter of one of his earlier victims, driven by a mixture of guilt and plain obsession he sells to himself as his wish to protect her from harm.

Right now, Ray's even doing his work in Prague, because he was hired by the resident Suverov crime family to wipe out the heads of the resident Tavanian crime family in one go. Unfortunately, Ray's strict "no innocent bystanders come to harm" policy gets in the way of his job, leaving the Tavanians with a not completely incompetent underboss in charge, and Prague in the grip of a gang war. Understandably, the Suverov's aren't at all happy with Ray's performance, so they fly in the near mythical hitman Aleksey Andreev aka "The Wolf" (Dolph Lundgren). Aleksey is a rather different kind of killer than Ray, clearly not driven by a guilty conscience, proclaiming his generally violently chipper mood by wearing loud Hawaii shirts, and given to a much more direct approach than Ray, though he does share Ray's ideas about killing civilians.

When Ray and his handler (Billy Murray) hear of the new man in town, they decide to change sides and work for the Tavanians now. Not surprisingly, Ray and Aleksey are headed for a collision course, and Janice just might get right in the middle of it.

One of the more peculiar developments in movies in the last few years is surely Cuba Gooding Jr.'s new career as a direct-to-DVD action hero; perhaps even more peculiar is how good Gooding is good at his new career, showing enough physicality to be basically believable as a man of violence, and obviously bringing more acting chops than he'd strictly need for the job, which pushes the scripts of the films he's in into slightly more complex directions than you find in something starring someone who wasn't even a decent enough actor for professional wrestling. That tends to make the characters Gooding plays more sympathetic than is the rule in direct-to-DVD action outside the body of work of Jean Claude Van Damme, too. It applies even to a character as much as a self-pitying fool as Ray is, the kind of guy who loves to moan about the guilt being a professional killer brings with it, yet never does anything about it, like stopping to murder people for money, for example.

Additionally, Gooding actually stars in the films he's supposed to star in, and doesn't go the slightly prolonged cameo route as Jean Claude Van Damme or his partner in this outing, Dolph Lundgren, often do. Consequently, there's much more Cuba than Dolph in One in the Chamber but the film's script handles the situation appropriately. In fact, it would make little sense if the two leads had more scenes together. When Lundgren is on screen, he takes on the violent and crazy yet likeable persona that he fills in many films at this point in his career. He's grown rather good at it by now, and is one of the few actors in action movies who can make the wholesale slaughter of a dozen other people somehow look good-natured. If that's always a good thing, I'm not always sure about.

It is a bit disappointing that One in the Chamber's script doesn't make as much out of the strange juxtaposition of its two main characters as I would have wished, but then, Cuba and Dolph (sounds like a sitcom title if ever I saw one) would need to interact more for it to work, which clearly was right out for the production. I'm also not really happy about the (non-)solution to the plotline between Ray and Janice, or rather, about the much too easy and straightforward way the film ends it, taking what should be emotionally heavy, and not a little creepy, stuff and trying to just wink it away.

On the positive side, there is enough complexity here to keep the very basic gang war plot lively, and what the script lacks in dramatic unity, it makes up for with a love for small and colourful details that don't exactly make the world it takes place in believable but protects it from feeling like the series of clichés it actually is. Which is more than I ask of this kind of film, and more than enough to keep me entertained throughout.

It helps that director William Kaufman aims for filming the kind of action scenes the human eye can actually comprehend, which also just happens to be the kind of action scene I find actually fun to watch. As a visual extra, Kaufman also doesn't dive too deeply into the colourless colour film rabbit hole, leaving my eyes delighted by the existence of other colours than yellow and blue, or, in the case of Lundgren's shirts, nearly blinded by them.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,action,william kaufman,cuba gooding jr.,dolph lundgren,claudia bassols

Three Films Make A Post: Don't Forget You're Lunch

Lost Voyage (2001): Ah, the early years of SyFy/Sci Fi movies, when there wasn't a little ecosystem of companies producing movies just for the Channel, and they mostly just bought independent productions that would otherwise have landed somewhere on the farthest shelves of video stores (remember those?).
Christian McIntire's film is one of the better outings of that era, telling its conventional story about a ghost ship in the Bermuda Triangle and the fools entering it for news, redemption, or salvage with the bare minimum of mood you can hope for.

It also features Judd Nelson as a parapsychologist making surprised bug eyes at everything and Lance Henriksen being perfectly wonderful, as is his wont. There's little else to say about this one. It's the sort of thing you can watch and feel mildly entertained by, and that's about all it aspires to as well as all it is good for.

Death Race (2008): I was all up and ready to hate Paul W.S. Anderson's remake of the much superior Death Race 2000 but once I had accepted that this is a much less politically interesting, less funny, and less imaginative film, and took it as the more normal kind of cheesy low budget action fodder it was meant to be, I started to enjoy myself quite a bit. There are some nice supporting performances, particularly Joan Allen's version of the "evil woman in a business suite" cliché, Jason Statham is as dependable for this kind of role as expected, and the writing, even though (or because) it is steeped in cheese and stupid conspiracy theories, does provide a nice forward moving piece of nonsense.

Ironically, the film's weakest point are the car racing scenes, which, though exciting in a videogame-y way, use way too much shaky-cam, random zooming, and quick editing. It's always a bit of a shame when you can't actually see the stunt work that presumably goes on. Still, I had a lot of fun with this one, and at least Anderson didn't show any of the races in backwards slow-motion.

Dark Angel aka I Come In Peace (1990): Speaking of films that are dumb but fun, this Dolph Lundgren vehicle directed by Craig R. Baxley during the height of the horror that is that buddy cop genre comes to mind. Dolph is of course the rule-breaking cop (who in these films are always right, because fuck cops who respect the law), while Brian Benben gives an uptight FBI agent. Together they fight crime in form of an alien drug dealer harvesting endorphin, and killing people with a flying CD despite owning an explodo gun, and in form of the FBI trying to harvest an alien.

It's worthwhile in that typical late 80s/early 90s US action cheese way, with many an explosion, decent stunts, and one-liners and "quips" always trying to out-stupid the earlier ones. The film's a lot like a hamburger, really: dumb, fattening, and a sign of all kinds of cultural deficits, but also pretty satisfying before it kills your digestion.

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Battle of the Damned (2013)

An evil corporation (aren't they all?) is responsible for an outbreak of rage zombie-ism in "a South-East Asian city" - the film was shot in Singapore and Malaysia (yes, with people running through empty streets and interesting locations instead of ninety minutes of the same warehouse), so take your pick. In response, the city is quarantined.

The boss of the corp hires a mercenary appropriately named Max Gatling (Dolph Lundgren) and his men to rescue his daughter Jude (Melanie Zanetti). The city's supposed to be harmless now, but of course, in truth it's full of zombies. Alas, Max is the only one in his gang with an action hero name, so he's the last man standing up to the running and snarling menace even before the ending of the film's credits. Max is really tenacious, though, and goes his merry way through the zombie hordes until he accidentally stumbles upon Jude on a solo plundering trip. Jude belongs to a small group of survivors under the dubious leadership of a certain Duke (David Field). Max, being your typical action movie hero, doesn't care about the people he hasn't been hired to rescue, and really only wants to grab Jude and go. Jude, on the other hand, has a mind of her own.

These minor internal struggles are our survivors' least problems: apart from the zombie horde, there's also the fact that the city is soon going to be destroyed by fire bombs, and the fact that Max doesn't have any transportation, either. There also seems to be no way to actually get out of the city, quite independent if its six people or two. Oh, and Jude is pregnant by one of her co-survivors (Matt Doran) to give her a little more motivation to actually want to get out.

Still, things look rather bleak until Max meets and befriends a squad of battle robots roaming the streets.

It's Dolph Lundgren and robots versus zombies! 'nuff said!

But seriously, the way Christopher Hatton's Battle of the Damned plays its cards, this really is an excellent selling point for the film. The first two thirds of Battle's running time are spent on your usual low budget rage zombie standards, just with an added "but what if a Dolph Lundgren character were caught up in the zombie apocalypse", which really would be enough to make for a rather entertaining, if not very original film. At one point during the writing process, director and writer Hatton must have realized that the zombie apocalypse genre is rather bleak, and that, really, even a Dolph Lundgren type action hero won't make it through it alive. Dolph will need help, and what better help could there be than letting him team up with some of the robots who went crazy in Hatton's last movie, Robotropolis. It's a plan brilliant in its simplicity. Plus, it adds zombies versus robot action to the whole affair.

Hatton is also clever enough to realize that, once you have your hero team up with robots, the (mostly) earnest tone with "funny" one-liners Battle of the Damned had until then is impossible to maintain, so the film's last half hour turns into the sort of crazy, silly, nonsense the idea really needs to not become annoying. The robots may still be a bit underused (that CGI doesn't come cheap, you know) but Hatton manages to make the Dolph and survivors and robots versus zombies thing as entertainingly silly as one might hope for.

However, there's also a lot to like about the parts of the movie that aren't based on being slightly insane, when you may still think you're watching a standard decent low budget flick. The film's action choreography by Jen Kuo Sung aka Jen Sung Outerbridge (a man who seems to do a bit of everything from stunts to acting to voice acting, and who also plays a sword-swinging survivor named Elvis here) is in part responsible for this. Sure, there's a bit too much shaky cam in these scenes for their own good, but they are also quite inventive and tense, not something you can find in all cheap action movies. A particular high point finds Lundgren fighting off a bunch of ragers (among them one former colleague, though Dolph isn't the kind of guy who even blinks before killing infected he knows, so there's no melodrama about it) while he's hand-cuffed to a lamp post, which really isn't something you get to see every day.

It's always lovely to encounter a piece of direct to DVD low budget filmmaking that is so obviously going out of its way to entertain, with nothing half-assed about. So what if it's silly? Battle of the Damned can play in my home cinema any time.

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In short: Command Performance (2009)

Seeing how much I enjoyed the Dolph Lundgren-directed The Mechanik, I was hoping to have as much fun with his Command Performance. The plot at least promises pleasant silliness: Dolph is an American rock drummer named Joe drumming for a (horrible, though the film doesn't seem to realize) Russian rock band. Joe and the guys are taking part in a big arena charity concert organized by the Russian President (Hristo Shopov) who may or may not misuse his position to give his two teenage daughters a good look at their favourite horrible pop star, Venus (Melissa Molinaro). There's also some nonsense about Venus leering at "cute" Dolph (a further inferred attribute of the big lug is "he's a very good drummer") whose band will be the new warm-up act in her coming tour, because you always open concerts of a manufactured pop star with bad "modern rock" bands. Anyhow, Dolph is totally hot.

Fortunately, the audience is saved from our hero's possible cradle robbing by the brutal attack of a band of terrorists led by Oleg Kazov (Dave Legeno). Oleg and his men massacre large part of the concert audience and take the President, his daughters, Venus and various other people hostage, supposedly to get a high ransom. What neither the soon arriving Russian authorities nor Kazov's men know is that he has rather more personal reasons to catch himself a president, and really no intention at all to let the man or his daughters live; don't ask me why he doesn't just kill them on sight, though.

But don't worry, Dolph is not only a drummer, he is also a former violent biker and suddenly it's Die Hard in a Rock Arena™.

Now, obviously Command Performance's set-up is plenty stupid enough to result in a highly entertaining movie. It's full of embarrassing little moments where other people tell us how awesome our writer/director/lead character is, frighteningly bad acting by Molinaro, and indifferent acting by everyone else; it even has a scene where Dolph stabs a bad guy to death with a guitar, after having stunned him first with a bit of shredding (he's a drummer, not a guitar player, obviously). The film's problem is that for most of its running time, it's standing directly between the consciously campy (a position that would have its own pitfalls, of course, see The Expendables) and a more serious action movie, yet isn't very good at being either.

For the camp variation, there's just too little nonsense like Dolph escaping a massacre because he's on the toilet smoking pot or stabbing guys with a guitar, while the more serious action movie suffers from the mediocrity of said action. The action isn't bad, but it's lacking a certain wow factor, or just the kind of tight pacing that could make the thousandth movie about Lundgren shooting and stabbing people in a set that may or may not be a warehouse exciting. The action, and the whole of Command Performance is just okay, yet okay never really is quite what I look for in a film.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,action,dolph lundgren,melissa molinaro

The Package (2012)

Former special forces something or other Tommy Wick (Steve Austin) works as a thug and bouncer for moneylender and gangster Big Doug (Eric Keenleyside). Tommy doesn't enjoy his work much, but his brother - right now a convict - owes Big Doug so much money it's either Tommy working off his brother's debt or a dead brother.

Consequently, it's quite an exciting development for big meathead when Doug proposes a job that will wipe his brother's slate clean in one go. Tommy will just have to deliver a Kindle-sized package to a man only known as the German (Dolph "I'm from Sweden, damn it!" Lundgren) in Vancouver. Despite knowing the German from his black ops times, and not having parted ways from him on the best of terms, Tommy takes on the mission.

Of course, the small delivery job is more dangerous than Doug told our hero, so Tommy soon has his meaty fists full with various slightly freakish guys trying to kill him and steal the package. The way to Vancouver is long.

It'll come as no surprise to anyone even slightly acquainted with the field of contemporary direct-to-DVD action movies that second-billed and cover-sharing Dolph Lundgren is only playing a small-ish guest role in The Package, until the finale only popping in for a handful of scenes barely connected with the already quite episodically structured main plot. Fortunately, these few scenes are pretty great, at least if you like watching Lundgren (or a not always well-substituted stunt double) knifing guys, holding forth about vegetables to a guy who is bleeding to death or explaining the history of the martini to William B. "Cigarette Smoking Man" Davis. Seriously, what more could you want from Dolph Lundgren?

Surprisingly enough, director Jesse V. Johnson actually has even more to offer than just the opportunity of seeing Dolph do the same sort of thing his old colleague Jean-Claude Van Damme now earns his money with, just more bizarrely.

I'm not much of an admirer of Steve Austin. I don't like the meat-head type he embodies all that much, and - worse - I think he tends to dreg better action actors down when he's paired up with them with generally deeply mediocre performances in any and all non-wrestling based action scenes. It's also not very endearing that each and every one of his films has him sprouting some "patriotic" bullshit in at least one scene. So it's saying a lot that I not only enjoyed Austin's physical performance here, but actually sort of sympathized with his character, probably because the script does its best to make him vulnerable beyond "tough guy has a family". There's even a scene where our hero calls his boss and tries to just get out of the job like a real human being confronted with insane killers in his path would. It also helps that Johnson does actually know how to stage the scenes of people not killing one another quite effectively. Sure, the film won't ever win awards as a drama, but this is not one of those action movies where "dialogue scene" equals a reason to fast forward to the next shoot-out.

The action is frequent and entertaining, too. Johnson has a steady and straight-forward directing style that tends to put the emphasis on showing stunts instead of cutting to and fro so fast the audience can only assume there's some kind of stunt work or fighting going on, an old-fashioned and very satisfying way of filming the action.

The Package's secret weapon, and the main reason I truly enjoyed it, is its slight yet steady and utterly unrepentant weirdness. There's even a completely silly (and strange) idea making up the reason for Austin's travel towards Vancouver, though I'm not going to spoil that here. Yet even ignoring that very special element, and ignoring the perfectly strange scenes with Dolph, we learn a lot of remarkable stuff about the world and how it functions. Did you, for example, know that Steve Austin and his movie wife prefer to have sex to the lover's rock of Erik Satie?

There's a spirit of generosity running through The Package that is uncommon in the generally very stingy direct-to-DVD action genre. It's as if Johnson were some kind of action Santa Claus who just can't stop himself and not only pulls a decent number of good action scenes from his sack but then proceeds to add the weird humour and the technically accomplished filmmaking and a larger than usual number of locations and sets and some drama to try to ground everything. It might not be Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (what is?) but it sure is a fun film.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,action,jesse v. johnson,steve austin,dolph lundgren

The Mechanik (2005)

aka The Russian Specialist

After taking bloody vengeance on the men who killed his wife and son, former Speznaz soldier Nikolai Cherenko (Dolph Lundgren) leaves Russia to illegally work in the US as a mechanic. After years, a clearly very rich family seeks Nikolai out to convince him to return to Russia and rescue their daughter Julia (Olivia Lee) from the hands of kidnappers. At first, Nikolai isn't interested in doing this kind of thing anymore, but once he is told the leader of the kidnappers is Sasha Popov (Ivan Petrushinov), the guy mainly responsible for his family's death whom Nikolai left for dead in his vengeance spree, he's all in.

Nikolai hires British expatriate William Burton (Ben Cross) for information and organization purposes, grudgingly takes on a group of Russian redshirts as helpers, and off he goes to the rescue.

As it turns out, rescuing Julia isn't that dangerous (unless you're a redshirt) but then getting her over the border to Finland (rural Russia of course being played by Bulgaria) is quite a bit more difficult, particularly with Sasha and his men hot on our heroes' trail.

I'm rather often making fun of Dolph Lundgren but leave it to the often fake-Russian Swede to make a cheap yet excellent little action movie with himself in the leading role like a rather more likeable Kenneth Brannagh (I think I may have mentioned my loathing for that particular one-man-show once or twice, too). As a director, Lundgren isn't particularly showy when it comes to the action sequences. They're all shot with surprising restraint, and few attempts to show off by overusing stupid post-production effects. Lundgren seems to prefer a more direct and straightforward approach to action direction I generally prefer too, with a certain scruffiness in choreography and approach that reminded me of nothing so much as of certain US b-westerns.

That isn't to say Lundgren doesn't do anything beyond pointing the camera in the direction of the action. It's rather the case that Lundgren puts his direction in the service of his (maybe minimal yet pretty effective) plot and not the other way round. From time to time, he even does something subtle (nothing you see every day in a low budget action film) - I particularly liked the contrasting use of the usual bleached out colour scheme all films made after 2002 are bound by law to use and something slightly more colourful to enhance certain emotional moments.

Staying with the theme of subtlety, the director/actor's approach to emotional scenes is also more controlled than you can expect in a cheap action movie. While the film hits the expected emotional beats, it doesn't feel the need to hammer them home, in the clear knowledge that the audience has seen characters and narrative structures like this before and will be able to understand them even if you don't turn your melodrama to eleven. From time to time, I even had the impression the film mildly criticized the rituals of male violence and the dead women following them, though that might be me reading a bit much into a simple and straightforward film. At the very least, this is a film that doesn't go the "kidnap victim falls in love with her rescuer so that we can include a sex scene" road, and prefers a rather more believable moment of basic tenderness between the characters.

Anyway, if Lundgren ever directed a film not about Lundgren killing a lot of people (though he doesn't kill that many here: this is a movie where surviving a one to five shootout is seen as impressive badassery, which is good for the film's budget as well as its believability, really, and keeps the grand finale actually more tense because our heroes feel more human), I'd actually be quite excited to see it.

Until that day, I'll probably keep myself happy re-watching The Mechanik.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,german movies,reviews,action,dolph lundgren,ben cross,olivia lee,ivan petrushinov

Universal Van Damme: Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009)

Let's just pretend Universal Soldier: The Return never happened or was a long dream sequence created by Luc Deveraux's addled mind. It's easier than you think.

In this new, improved timeline, a Russian terrorist group led by a guy named Boris (Aki Avni) kidnaps the children of the Russian Prime Minister, and holes up with them and his small private army right next to Chernobyl reactor number three, wiring the reactor to blow if his demands are not met. To make a bad situation worse, Boris has acquired the services of mad scientist Dr. Colin (Kerry Shale), one of the core developers of a new, improved for the age of cloning and genetic restructuring UniSol project. Colin has brought one of the new UniSol prototypes (Andrei Arlovski) he stole when the project got shattered because of the psychological unpredictability of its subjects with him, providing the Russian with a rather effective one-man defence perimeter for his radioactive base.

Because the Americans are at least half responsible for this little problem, they bring in a bunch of troops and the four last first generation UniSols to take Boris down. Unfortunately, the old UniSols turn out to be no match for the new model, and after they are slaughtered, the remaining soldiers turn out to be even less of a problem for the unstoppable killing machine.

The only chance to disarm the explosives and rescue the kids is now good old Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) who has been in experimental psychological treatment with a Dr Flemming (Emily Joyce). Flemming's attempts to de-program Luc and turn him into a complete human being again are not very successful. Luc is disoriented, depressed, and still prone to violent outbreaks at mild provocations; one might even think he was happier as a mind-controlled killing machine, or at the very least more at one with himself. Of course, the military-industrial complex has no qualms using him again, if he wants to or not, so his opinion really doesn't matter all that much.

While Luc is being prepared for slaughter, tensions between Colin and Boris lead to the activation of Colin's fail-safe device, a clone of Luc's old enemy Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren). Alas, Clone-Scott is in the middle of an existential crisis himself, and we all remember what happens when he starts to think, so the level of chaos and violence when Luc finally becomes whole (that is, a monster) again will be rather higher than expected.

My, John Hyams really is a rather good and clever director of what by all rights should be low-rent, low budget action movies. His UniSol: Regeneration trades in the slight silliness of the first movie and the ridiculous cheese of the second for a somewhat more thoughtful treatment of the whole undead, genetically modified clone warrior business, using the necessary breaks between the ultra-violent punch-outs and shoot-outs to actually try and imagine its psychological effects on said warriors. The film does clearly realize that there's a bitter irony in the fact that Luc, the most fully human UniSol we meet, is much more himself when he leaves his humanity behind; there's already the hint of the UniSols becoming a species different from humanity Day of Reckoning (more about that one at a later date) would go on to deliver lurking in the shades.

Regeneration does not yet crawl as deep down the rabbit hole as the later film does. The comparative thematic complexity in Regeneration is used to enhance the impact of its action scenes, and not the other way round like in Reckoning, but as with most action movies that actually use themes and characterisation (even Boris has actual motives and an implied history to explain his actions), the film does become all the better for it, proving again that carnage is much more interesting when a movie provides the audience with a reason to care. On the negative side, Regeneration's plot is a bit unfocused from time to time, the script clearly working around the fact that Van Damme and Lundgren weren't available (or not cheap enough?) for all that many days of shooting but the film needed to get to length. However, the film's more flabby moments do at least always connect with its thematic interests, so there's never that horrible moment so typical of the way low budget movies have to be produced when scenes have no reason to exist in a given movie at all.

Van Damme gives one of his better performances here, selling Deveraux as a killing machine (no surprise there) as well as an existentially confused human being with the appropriate degree of subtlety. Even Lundgren, generally the weakest actor on this level of US action cinema (unless you count Seagal and Norris, but I've always found it better to ignore those two completely, for moral and political reasons) for my tastes, does rather well in his relatively minor appearance, even using a bit of subtlety in his approach I honestly didn't think think him capable of. The rest of the cast is appropriately good - physically menacing in the case of Arlovski (who actually takes part in more fights than anyone else on screen), scenery-chewing in that of Shale, and so on.

But what, the impatient may ask themselves about the action in this action movie? Well, Hyams is pretty great at staging that too, using the film's industrial building locations and grimy corridors (there are a few equally grimy outside locations too) as creatively as possible under the circumstances, and even finding money for a neat little car chase at the film's beginning. The numerous fights and shoot-outs here are too bloody to be pretty (the director obviously likes a good bit of gore), but are impeccably edited and staged with all the physicality and tempo one can wish for.

If you're like me, and you sometimes start to drink heavily when thinking about the sad state of contemporary low budget action cinema, a film like Universal Soldier: Regeneration comes as a fine antidote for the blues, for its ambition as well as its ability to turn its few resources into something nearly spectacular.

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