Sinners and Saints (2010)

Post-Katrina New Orleans. Policeman Sean Riley (Johnny Strong) is in about as bad a shape as is his city. His little son died a couple of years ago from an illness, his wife left him, and he’s a husk of a man drawn ever further into cycles of violence. Consequently, we find him straight-up murder the man who just shot his partner (a cameo by good old Kim Coates in one of his few non-gangster stints as an honest cop). Things will go even downhill from here, for Sean soon finds himself invited into a particularly horrible homicide investigation. Detective Will Glanz (Kevin Phillips) is the lucky bastard tasked with solving a series of killings whose victims are set on fire, then doused with a fire extinguisher, then set on fire again, and so on. Sean’s supposed to be his street crime expert.

As luck will have it, Colin (Sean Patrick Flanery), an old army buddy of Sean’s seems to be involved in the whole messy affair, though it’ll take some time to clear up if he’s working for the guy leading the killers (Costas Mandylor), is a direct part of the crimes, or what. What’s clear early on is that Sean’s nearly suicidal violent tendencies – and his efficacy as a killer – might actually be the appropriate tools to solve this particular case.

William Kaufman is one of the good handful of truly great, individual voices doing direct to video action films in the USA during the last fifteen or twenty years. In Kaufman’s films, there are little if any of the writing and acting short cuts you usually find in these affairs, nor are these films that can’t afford to show any actual action.

Sure, the more up-market actors here – among them Tom Berenger, Jürgen Prochnow, Jolene Blalock and the inevitable Method Man – are only on screen in a few scenes in what amounts to cameos but unlike the typical way direct to video action often operates where certain characters are only in a film because the filmmakers have Dolph or Jean-Claude for a shooting day, here these actors are cast in roles that are actually part of the plot; well, the Prochnow character might not have been absolutely necessary, but what the hey. Kaufman – who co-wrote the script with Jay Moses – clearly knows how to construct his action film as something with an actual plot, and while it is certainly one full of clichés, it uses its clichés with the kind of conviction that turns them into something a little more satisfying than you’d expect. There’s also the plain fact that Kaufman in general uses standards character types and tropes with a great degree of intelligence and care, putting the decisive bit more thought into standard character arcs and actually writing characters instead of character types. Why, Sean Riley often feels like a person as much as he does the Cop on the Edge.

Interestingly enough, the film even has some ethical concerns about what the things its main character does so well say about him as a human being, or rather, what parts of his humanity they might destroy. At the same time – which makes rather a lot of sense for an action flick – Sinners and Saints is also very specifically interested in how abhorrent acts of violence may or may not be justified depending on one’s position. It’s certainly a more thoughtful approach than you usual find in direct to video action, and it leads to a film which features certain Cop on the Edge movie standard scenes it can approach from a somewhat different angle.

On the acting side, Johnny Strong isn’t quite as, well, strong as I would have wished for the role. He’s not terribly good at acting out the more nuanced emotional beats, though he’s certainly not phoning things in, nor does he ever feel like robot or inadvertently funny. He’s just not quite there. He’s certainly a fine action performer, though, which goes a long way in this context. Costas Mandylor for his part does some fine scenery chewing (but not too much), a weird accent, and is believable as a guy who does truly horrible things as a matter of course.


Last but not least, the action is pretty terrific, with various violent shoot-outs, as well as a few more acrobatic bits, all staged by Kaufman with a sort of casual surety that really sells them as gritty and exciting.

In short: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

An army of Milla Jovovichs (realized surprisingly badly for a film made in 2010) attacks the headquarters of the Evil Umbrella Corp in Tokyo to finally take her (their) revenge on her arch enemy Wesker (Shawn Roberts). After laying waste to half of Tokyo, possibly killing Wesker in a plane crash and losing her superpowers (not that the film seems to want to remember that for much of its running time), the original Milla (or Alice, if you need character names in a film without characterization) tries to follow her companions from the last movie into a paradise known as Arcadia, supposedly located somewhere in Alaska. Upon arrival in the North, our heroine finds only a bunch of abandoned planes and helicopters, and her friend Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) who must have been lying on the ground, outside, in Alaska, in the snow, for a few months but is only suffering from PCA (short for plot-convenient amnesia).

Together they fight crime fly to an unnamed (I think; going by Resident Evil naming conventions it's probably called Squirrel) Big City, because that's the place where you want to be during the zombie apocalypse. The two women manage to hook up with another handful of survivors (Boris Kodjoe, Kim Coates and some other people sure to be eaten soon) who hide in a prison, and keep Claire's brother Chris (Wentworth Miller) prisoner there for reasons that will never make much sense (what a surprise), staring longingly at a ship anchored outside the city. A ship named Arcadia. Obviously, the zombies and their friends will soon get into the prison, but Chris knows a way out.

As someone who more than just sort of digs survival horror games as one of the few console-centric videogame genres close to his PC gamer heart, I do of course have my experiences with the Resident Evil games, which are the most low-brow and (alas) most successful series of their genre. I'm not madly in love with the series (that's what Silent Hill and Fatal Frame/Project Zero are for, after all), but I do respect its peculiar mixture of baroquely ridiculous and stupid plots and senseless violence. Although every new iteration of the series' movie adaptations has less to do with the games it is supposedly based on, their "writer" and (sometimes) director Paul W.S. Anderson uses all his powers of stupidity to keep his work as much in the dumb but bizarre spirit of the games as a Brit adapting a Japanese source can.

Still, stupidity and all, the first three Resident Evils didn't manage to charm me. There was always something artificial about their dumbness that managed to keep the films less fun than they should have been. This tragic state of affairs ends with this fourth film. Finally, the dumbness (as demonstrated by the idiotic plot - if you want to call it that, the non-characters non-acted by people who could act a little if they wanted to, the unbelievably absurd dialogue, and the mind-blowingly stupid use of slow motion and freeze effects as if The Matrix had never gone out of style) reaches critical mass and transforms what could be just another crap film by Anderson (whose Event Horizon I'll always cherish as actually nearly very good) into a movie so enthusiastically bad yet aiming to please that only those most soulless of creatures known as mainstream film critics could not appreciate its spirit of fun.

Needless to say, I sort of love it.

 

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