In the Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

The Republic of Ireland, 1973. Finbar Murphy (Liam Neeson) has killed for money from his boss Robert McQue (Colm Meaney) and/or a cause for decades now, but is really getting tired of the killing and what it does to him and the world. An encounter with a particularly dignified victim closes the deal for him, and he decides to retire. McQue isn’t going to make trouble for him, and they’ve both kept their dirty work as far away from their homes in County Donegal as possible, so there’s little danger for anyone in the retirement.

Why, Finbar is even buddies with the local Garda man, O’Shea (Ciarán Hinds). Of course, men like Finbar never can truly get away from their pasts, and when he realizes the visiting uncle of a neighbour who is also clearly an IRA member is abusing a little girl he’s friendly with, he decides to straight up murder the guy.

The killing itself doesn’t go quite as slick as Finbar hoped – youngsters carrying knives now is a new one to him –, but that’s not going to be his main problem. Rather, his victim wasn’t just some IRA guy with particularly bad manners on a visit, but actually part of a cell hiding out after a bombing that went a bit too well. Worse still, leader of the cell is Doireann (Kerry Condon), who just happens to be the sister of Finbar’s victim. Doireann, capable of switching from friendly to disturbingly violent at the drop of a hat, is not a woman who takes kindly to the disappearance of her brother.

There are of course quite a few clichés about 70s Ireland in Robert Lorenz’s In the Land and rather a lot of the standard tropes of the Neesonsploitation genre as well. However, Lorenz and the script by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane handle most of these clichés – let’s just ignore the subplot around a junior killer played by Jack Gleeson in that regard - with some wit and a degree of delicacy, taking a bit more care with the characters than about half of your typical Neeson outings from the last few decades have done – and of the next decade will do.

While he’s still better at the violence than a man of his age would be, the film goes out of its way to keep him in the realm of the human, an opening Neeson of course uses to do some actual acting. Neither his character nor his development are particularly deep, but they are complicated enough to be engaging. Specifically the contrast between the actual kindness and consideration Finbar shows other human beings and the trained efficiency with which he commits violence when on the job works very well indeed.

In this approach to violence, Finbar stands in marked contrast to Doireann, who does have sudden outbreaks of humanity – this is not a film about supervillains - but also tends to be more brutal than she needs to be, and very much makes the impression of enjoying what Finbar has come to loathe (and probably always treated more as a duty than a pleasure). Condon is really rather wonderful in the role, selling the transition between whatever the Irish female version of a Good Old Boy is to someone who’d cut your throat without a second thought and like it, while also keeping Doireann human and likeable enough to make me a little uncomfortable for wanting to like her.

Marlowe (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short: The A-Team (2010)

I’m not sure this actually needs to be said, but Joe Carnahan is a weird director. Extremely talented and an able to turn his not inconsiderable budgets into true crowd pleasers (if for a very specific kind of crowd), most of what he does feels as individual and personal as any auteur-style movie you’d care to mention. Stylistically, he always uses state of the art and budget techniques of the Tony Scott school that’ll make many a critic automatically use the word “edgy”. I’d argue that, when Carnahan is on, he’s not “edgy” but a filmmaker whose films actually have an edge acquired by an uncommon mix of the ability to direct actors and use sometimes grating film techniques to often very intelligent effect. When he isn’t on, he’s making Boss Level instead of Narc.

This star-studded (Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Sharlto Copley and Patrick Wilson are certainly quite the 2010 cast list, and would still get quite a few behinds in seats ten years later) variation and prequel to many a nerd’s (including this writer’s) foundational action TV show is somewhere between the two. For my taste, the film’s at its best when it provides its cast with opportunities to play their characters outrageously larger than life or when it comes up with the silliest possible set-ups for action sequences (the thing with the flying tank wouldn’t cut realism muster in a Fast & Furious movie even today). It falters, whenever it tries to hitch the bigness or the silliness to moments of more traditional, semi-naturalistic character work, never really managing to connect the two modes properly. Which is a bit strange, since connecting the outrageous with proper, believable and serious character moments is often one of Carnahan’s biggest strengths.

Conceptually, The A-Team suffers a bit from its apparently unquenchable need to turn the strange innocence of the original series cynically violent. So this movie adaptation of a series where nobody ever died from being shot at with automatic weapons has a body count too large to calculate; in an even shittier move, it also feels the need to treat non-violence as something bad in a man that needs to be gotten rid of and disposed of while the score shits out triumphant music, turning the fun pretend violence surrounding it moment pretty sour for this viewer, and really not helping the film as a whole with its tonal difficulties.

Three Films Make A Post: Fear comes to the surface

The Ice Road (2021): Look, I don’t expect a movie about Liam Neeson doing dangerous ice road trucking to save some miners to have a deep, involving script, but the series of painfully obvious clichés and embarrassing “characterisation” writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh offers here really doesn’t cut it. The writing’s so needlessly bad, you won’t be surprised to realize Hensleigh’s one of the main writers of sodding Armageddon; and unlike J.J. Abrams, he has apparently learned nothing in the decades between.

Compared to the writing, the action sequences are downright decent, but not so good as to be able to make up for how crap and boring the script is. Neeson phoning the phoned in script in doesn’t help, but you only could help this one out by having a hundred minute Nicolas Cage-style freak-out – and not even Cage would be putting that amount of effort into a film this bad.

What Lies Below (2020): Fish people still want to inseminate human women. Spoiler, I suppose? Anyway, speaking of films with weak scripts by their directors, this one always threatens to become good or interesting and to explore any of the themes it just touches on the surface a little, before running away afraid of its own courage. So if you’re looking for a film that explores the horrific elements of budding sexuality, the rifts even in happy families, or the destructive abilities of a really hot guy, or even one that just tells its tale of theoretically fucked up interspecies sex in the appropriately sordid manner, this ain’t it. I’d love to say what Braden R. Duemmler’s movie actually is. Alas, the film itself doesn’t seem to know what to do with material rich in resonance and can’t even manage to get its easy (given the set-up) #metoo points in. Let’s not even speak of finding an identity beyond mishandled horror and suspense sequences, and a tendency to mess up scenes by showing too little. An extra raised eyebrow to casting a grown woman (Ema Horvath) closer to thirty than to sixteen as your sixteen year old lead.

Vampira and Me (2012): After the horrors of the first two movies in this entry, Ray Greene’s loving and exhaustive documentary about Maila Nurmi aka Vampira’s short time in the spotlight feels particularly wonderful: it’s a film made by a guy with great love and personal knowledge of his subject, with a great ability for digging out archive material as well as an eye for the use of found footage. Greene does great work putting his friend Nurmi into her proper historical context, arguing for her importance and import in a convincing and non-manipulative manner, and painting a picture of her life and times through rare interview footage of a very intelligent and charming elderly Nurmi and all those enticing and interesting details he managed to dig out. One could argue that Greene’s a bit too close to his subject but the film seems so driven by genuine compassion and love, critical distance just isn’t the point. Bonus points for avoiding the talking head effect.

The film’s only weakness is that the writing of Greene’s narration can tend to the overblown (“Midnight struck hard. And then it wouldn’t leave.”), but it doesn’t get quite this silly often enough this would threaten to overwhelm everything that’s great about the film.

In short: The Marksman (2021)

Denouncing illegals to the Border Patrol, losing his ranch to the bank and drinking too much is all in a day’s work for embittered ex-marine Jim (Liam Neeson). He is coming up for his spot on a redemption arc, though, when he encounters Rosa (Teresa Ruiz) and her son Miguel (Jacob Perez). He does his customary denouncing bit, but when some cartel soldiers from the other side of the border show up, he does defend the two. Rosa doesn’t make it, and asks the rancher to get her son to her family in Chicago with her dying breath, promising him all her earthly goods. At first, Jim doesn’t realize that said earthly goods include a sack full of dollars and hands Miguel over to his stepdaughter (an underused Katheryn Winnick) from the border patrol – his wife is of course dead because this is that kind of film.

On finding said sack and seeing a car full of cartel people waiting for Miguel to be transported away by the Border Patrol, Jim does change his mind about what to do about the child. As you can imagine, this isn’t going to stay about the money for him.

After the abomination that was Honest Thief, this unassumingly competent film directed by Robert Lorenz (better known as a producer for various Clint Eastwood films) is rather a step back up for our lead Liam Neeson, who here finds himself again in a film with an actual, mostly coherent script (by Lorenz, Danny Kravitz and Chris Charles). It’s also a script completely devoid of any surprises and full of well-worn clichés if you know the genre/have seen other films from Neeson’s Man of Violence career stage. But then, not every film needs to reinvent the wheel (or invent a new wheel), as long as it manages to actually cover its genre standards decently.

Which The Marksman does in an unhurried tempo, seemingly genuinely interested in its characters even though they aren’t original, and spending a lot of time with them before the shooting starts. Even though the chemistry between Neeson and Perez isn’t anything to write home about, the actors elderly and very young do put effort in, never letting the character building devolve into the film shuffling its feet.

Once the violent denouement arrives, it is shot with the same workmanlike craftsmanship, leaving The Marksman a perfectly watchable movie.

Three Films Make A Post: In the darkest hour, there is a light that shines on every human being...but ONE!

Rottentail (2018): As if anyone needed another example that going for the Instant Cult Movie thing is a very bad idea, here comes director Brian Skiba’s idiotic tale (apparently based on a graphic novel, for which I’ll just take the movie’s word) of a scientist (Corin Nemec at a career low) who turns into a human-rabbit monster thing after an unfortunate incident involving a genetically modified killer rabbit and an experimental fertility treatment. From then on out, it’s shrill acting, unfunny on purpose “funny” lines (because actual jokes are too hard, I can’t help but assume), hideous special effects, direction exclusively consisting of annoying tics, and winking at the camera non-stop, with nothing that suggests the point from where actual cult movies start: the wish to make an actual movie.

Darkman (1990): The film that looks now a bit like Sam Raimi’s weird dry-run for making his Spider-Man movies on the other hand, is an actual cult film, made by people who obviously care about the art of filmmaking even in the film’s strangest moments – perhaps even most then – with grace, style, cleverness and an actual sense of humour. Typical of Raimi at the time, the film’s a rollercoaster with at least one fun/clever/wonderful/crazy idea jumping onto the screen every thirty seconds, but also with enough of a heart and a brain to keep the tale about what amounts to the Phantom of the Opera as a superhero film just barely under control. Watching it for the twentieth time or so, I still had the feeling of seeing a film that just might go completely off the rails any second now, but never does, instead leaving me happily grinning for much of its running time, when not gasping at Liam Neeson’s huge hands (well, or his wondrous ability to play his role just as straight as it can be played) or Larry Drake’s gorgeous mugging.


Thelma (2017): Completely different in style and tone, but also rather wonderful, is Joachim Trier’s meticulous film about the kind of teenage lesbian awakening that includes psychokinetic powers that start with Carrie but end in the freedom of positive and hard-earned wish fulfilment. It’s filmed with a sense of poetry, of terror and at some points of an awe that raises this far above many a film that uses the supernatural as metaphor, and played by Eili Harboe with immense emotional weight and subtlety. All of this puts it far beyond the modernized re-tread of Carrie it at first threatens to be; it also should convince every feeling viewer that its happy end is perfectly deserved and proper for what came before it. Depending on one’s interpretation of what happened before, one might not even want to treat the happy end as one, but the film’s perfectly fine with not only portraying the suffering and crisis of becoming herself of a young woman but also daring to say that things might actually get better for her.

Under Suspicion (1991)

Warning: structural spoilers on the way!

Brighton, 1959. A couple of years ago, Tony Aaron (Liam Neeson) was a perhaps promising policeman. His stint in the police was cut short when his having an on-the-job affair with the wife (Maggie O’Neill) of a criminal he and a couple of other officers are supposed to watch leads to one of his colleagues getting killed by a shot that was meant for him. The scene is set up a bit more complicated than that, actually, but then, making things unnecessarily complicated is a bit of a trademark of this one.

Anyhow, civilian Tony is working as a shady, nearly penniless private eye mostly involved in helping people get a divorce, something that by the laws of the time is apparently only possible in cases of dire marital misconduct, like adultery. So Tony helps set men up with a fake girlfriend – the criminal’s wife of affair fame now married to Tony – photographs them, and secures enough witnesses for the whole thing. Let’s not ask why the courts aren’t becoming suspicious about the wife of the same private detective who comes up with the photos of the adultery regularly ending up publicly cheating on him with married men.

Tony’s newest “case” goes very wrong when he finds his wife and their newest client shot dead instead of in a compromising situation. The client, it turns out, was a famous painter, so there might be monetary reasons for the murders. Despite still being friends with Frank (Kenneth Cranham), the cop leading the following investigation, there are hints pointing to Tony’s involvement that can’t be overlooked. Consequently, Tony is starting an investigation of his own, soon getting into an affair with the dead guy’s possibly femme fatale mistress Angeline (Laura San Giacomo) as well as other trouble.

Simon Moore’s Under Suspicion is more an interesting effort than a truly effective and successful film.

In theory, there’s a lot to say for the film: the film’s first half makes some nice attempts at using an audience’s knowledge of noir and thriller tropes as well as clever casting to mislead the viewer. It also generally looks slick, from time to time even in a way that enhances what it is trying to do in a given scene quite nicely. The cast is certainly well put together, though the way the actors are used isn’t always convincing, particularly because the film – perhaps in a misguided attempt at aping classic noir – really wants them to go a degree bigger and more melodramatic than actually works for them or the story they are involved in. Particularly the film’s final third is a sheer endless sequence of Neeson and the rest hamming it up mercilessly while dramatic music never stops swelling and the script goes through great convulsions to come up with melodramatic twists.

The problem with this is that it reveals a film that at first feels like an interesting play on classic noir in a British setting with perhaps a bit of a Patricia Highsmith influence added for good measure to really not have much of anything to say about the tropes it plays with, or the word it takes place in. There are all the elements to make an interesting movie about a male femme fatale, but Moore buries them under too much needless melodrama, only ever showing interest in the surface level of things, which isn’t exactly a good choice in a film supposedly about depths.

I can’t say the melodrama ever worked for me either. There’s something emotionally abstract about it that keeps a viewer at arm’s length – and when it comes to melodrama, a film needs its audience to get emotionally involved. Otherwise, it’s just a lot of scenes of people shouting and making faces at the camera.


If you can live with its general emptiness, the film is an okay enough time. As I said, it certainly looks pretty, and at first indeed promises to do something interesting. There’s just no substance to Under Suspicion.

The Commuter (2018)

Cop turned insurance salesman Michael MacCauley (Liam Neeson) is having a very interesting day. He’s fired from his job, leaving him and his family apparently one step from losing their house and the ability to pay their son’s college tuition. Capitalism without a social net sucks, it turns out. This will only be a minor problem on this very special day our protagonist is having, though, for a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) chats him up on his final commuter train journey home and makes him a proposition, a perfectly theoretical one, she says. What if she’d offer him a hundred thousand dollar to find someone one the train going by the codename of “Prinn” (disappointingly not named after Ludwig, it turns out). The only thing to go on is that he or she is not a regular commuter, is planning to get out at a certain station, and is carrying some type of bag apparently containing something they stole. Why the woman would be looking for Prinn and what she wants to do with them stays open. Oh, and by the way, the proposal might not be theoretical at all.

When Michael picks up a twenty-five thousand down payment hidden in one of the train’s toilets, he is shortly tempted to actually do what is asked of him, but he changes his mind back to sanity quickly enough. Unfortunately, the woman and her associates are not at all willing to take no for an answer, so, this being a post-Taken Liam Neeson joint, they are threatening his family if he doesn’t comply. Now Michael has to hustle back and forth through (and sometimes down) the train, trying to identify Prinn, all the while attempting to come up with a way to save his family as well as Prinn and himself.

Yes, this is another highly (some might say too highly) constructed thriller starring Liam Neeson as an aging tough guy stumbling into a thriller plot and having to protect his family and his moral center through violence, and his moral centre in whatever way he can come up with. There’s nothing at all wrong with that for my taste, for while there’s certainly nothing original about The Commuter’s plot, and I could certainly could do with seeing Neeson playing a very different type of character from time to time, this is also a very typical Jaume Collet-Serra film. If you’ve read my opinions on most of his other films, you will know where the next paragraph is going. I like his work so much, I’ll even watch something based on a Disney theme park directed by him.

That is to say, The Commuter was made by a director who can usually (let’s pretend Non-Stop doesn’t exist) take a very standard, overly twisty script and turn it into something very much worth watching by filming even the most clichéd plot in a way that suggests he actually cares about it. So while there are moments of too convenient plotting, a bit of action movie physics (we all know that action scenes don’t care about how trains work, yet neither do I in this context), and a copious amount of clichés on display, they are presented with absolute willingness by the filmmaker to suck his audience in and entertain it in any way possible. There is nothing lazy about Collet-Serra’s treatment of any of the film’s copious suspense scenes, the staging is tight when it should be tight and loose when it needs to be loose, the whole affair doing whatever it can never to be boring for a second, without ever making the impression of trying to pressgang the audience (or, for that matter, of thinking it is stupid).

When it comes to this sort of action-y thriller, getting an audience to suspend its disbelief can be as important as in a film concerning the supernatural if a film wants its audience to care. Collet-Serra achieves this goal through moments of veracity. Michael’s money problems are of course ripped from the headlines but also ground the film in a believable reality, making it easy for an audience that knows this kind of problem well enough to care for him, yet also pulling extra work by making the film’s world more believable. The same goes for the other characters in the train. While all of them are certainly shorthand characters, they stand as shorthand for contemporary types one might actually encounter in real life, again suggesting the film inhabiting a believable world. Collet-Serra’s job here is made easier by the cast. While the bigger names in the cast - Farmiga, Patrick Wilson and his lone facial expression, Elizabeth McGovern and Sam Neill - apart from frequent Collet-Serra collaborator Neeson (who has this kind of role down pat without projecting bored routine) - are only in the film in what amounts to cameo role, the merry cast of character actors in the train does much to sell the story through small but important gestures, keeping the shorthand alive and lively.


As an added bonus, I found myself rather happy with the lack of cynicism in the film. In the end, this turns out to be a tale singing the praises of the decency of random people, even though it tells a tale of twists and betrayals, not exactly something you often find in thrillers about Liam Neeson protecting his family.

Run All Night (2015)

For a decade or some, Jimmy Conlon (Liam Neeson) worked as best friend and private hitman for New York gangster boss Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris), earning himself the charming nickname of “The Gravedigger”. Now, Jimmy’s old, frequently drunk and wracked with guilt for all the people he murdered. His job, and what he thinks his particular set of abilities says about him as a man and as a human being, also cost him the relationship with his son, Michael (Joel Kinnaman), and anyone else he ever loved apart from Shawn.

Michael – a failed boxer turned limousine driver – wants nothing whatsoever to do with his father. This state of affairs has to change when he witnesses Shawn’s son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) – just as violent as his father but clearly lacking all control and finesse – murdering an Albanian drug dealer. Despite Danny’s worst efforts of getting rid of the witness, Michael escapes with his life. When Shawn calls Jimmy to talk things out, things seem set to die down without any further corpses, but Danny goes over his father’s head to kill Michael anyway. Jimmy has no choice but to shoot him to protect his own son.

Shawn is very displeased, at once putting all his men on finding and murdering Michael and his family (preferably in front of Jimmy), and Jimmy himself. Things are particularly hairy because “among his men” also means quite a few cops. Shawn also manipulates the evidence for the dead dealers to point towards Michael, which takes care of the honest cops too. He’s his father’s son, after all, right? Well, there is the somewhat more thoughtful – and certainly absolutely honest as proven by his hounding Jimmy for years – Detective John Harding (Vincent D’Onofrio) who just might believe Michael’s story, but a policeman has to go where the evidence points him.

In the following hours, Jimmy will do anything to protect his son, perhaps finding a kind of redemption even though he has to fall back into his worst self.

The even mildly genre-savvy reader will obviously have noticed that Jaume Collet-Serra’s crime action thriller lacks any original bones, starting from a well-known set-up, with well-known character types, going through a well-known kind of plot without any developments that’ll surprise anyone. Even the lead characters seem rather obviously cast for their roles.

However – and this is a rather big “however” in my book – Collet-Serra hits all the expected plot beats with such good timing and trusts in his actors’ abilities to sell the clichés as true so effectively, that I found myself absolutely engrossed in the film, not caring the slightest that I’d seen this all before but in fact enjoying everything as if it were new; or at least new-ish.

It does surely help that Collet-Serra, despite being not much of a name director, is a fine all-rounder (if you ignore Non-Stop, his previous Neeson action movie), in this case demonstrating himself to be fully at home in cracking action sequences, the quick evocation of mood via wet city streets, and making space for old school presence actors like Neeson and Harris to show off their talents without things ever becoming showy.

Run All Night is probably not the sort of film anyone who doesn’t love genre movies as a whole as much as I do will find quite this entrancing but if you’ve a heart for tales of aging violent men and their emotional baggage (surprisingly enough in this case also including some clever mirroring of characters and their respective baggages in the script) you owe it to yourself to watch this. In keeping with most of Collet-Serra’s body of work, it’s a much better film than it strictly needs to be.

Two Men of Violence: A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) & The Equalizer (2014)

I was all prepped up to file A Walk Among the Tombstones, a Lawrence Block adaptation by Scott Frank, under “another film where Liam Neeson plays an aging Man of Violence™ who has to get back to his old ways again”, in other words, as something that’ll probably be decently entertaining but also something that I’ve seen before a few times too often. And sure, A Walk does belong into this particular genre of crime films but this one feels special and weighty all the way through, with the clichés feeling close again to the truths that once built these clichés.

The superiority of Scott Frank’s film becomes particularly clear in comparison with the same year’s Denzel Washington version of The Equalizer directed by Antoine Fuqua. Whereas the Equalizer makes a lot of gestures towards the horrificness of violence and the toll it takes on those performing it (not much about the victims, nor about the fact the borders between the role of victim and perpetrator might get rather fluid sometimes, though), by the end, it’s basically fist-pumping Washington’s character (a guy who stops the time he needs to kill a bunch of people on his watch), spouting all the usual vigilante movie crap, and simply ignoring much of what it has set up, A Walk is all made out of one piece, not turning away from the violence yet also never simply condoning it. In fact, there’s nothing simple in this film’s moral world except perhaps simple human compassion. Again, compare the way the Equalizer uses the compassionate acts of its hero as a basis to then cheer on his acts of horrible violence, where A Walk treats both things as standing in opposition to each other even when some of Scudder’s violence really – perversely - is a product of that compassion. The difference is that A Walk heads for the grey moral zones this sort of thing causes with open eyes and a headful of thoughts where The Equalizer is shouting “FUCK YEAH!” way too loud to have time for thoughts, particular once the film has reached its second half, when all promising suggestions the people involved might actually have realized that McCall isn’t an awesome badass but both an awesome badass and a monster, and that there just might be a problem with that, fly out the window.

Of course, Antoine Fuqua’s unpleasantly showy direction doesn’t help The Equalizer’s case much either, always using the wrong kinds of gestures, and always in a way that suggests it doesn’t really want to think about the nature of its protagonist despite having brought it up during its first hour (of more than two, which also makes a simple plot unnecessarily bloated) itself. A Walk’s Scott Frank, on the other hand, has a clear, calm, and controlled approach to direction that looks much simpler than Fuqua’s but really brings out much more subtlety, eschewing to hammer ever point it makes home, and building up a sense of place and atmosphere.

Now, I wasn’t really planning to come down quite as hard on The Equalizer just after I watched it, because I had a decent – if not un-annoyed - time with it, it’s just that I saw A Walk Among the Tombstones right the next evening, and really couldn’t help but notice how much better Frank’s film is, and how much worse the Fuqua outing becomes in direct comparison, not so much for reasons of it being catastrophically bad, but because it is a barely decent film compared to one I expect to return to again and again, and its thoughtlessness truly becomes clear in the contrast.

What’s undeniably good in both films is the acting, and in this regard, I’d probably even argue The Equalizer to be slightly superior: for where Liam Neeson et al actually have interesting and not unsubtle characterisation and focused direction to work from, Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz and so on do their best to make something out of a film that just doesn’t seem to know what it actually thinks about its main character and that surely doesn’t want to face any unpleasant implications of the way he acts when it comes down to it, because fuck yeah, slowly walking away from an explosion. So where Neeson gives a performance that gains a part of its considerable strength and authority from the possibilities the work around and behind him provides it with, every bit of Washington’s success is one all of his own. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure all the coherence McCall has as a character belongs to Washington and the way he and Moretz play off of each other in their scenes, the bizarre tacked on happy ending notwithstanding.

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Krull (1983)

The Beast, evil ruler of the galaxy, is aiming to add the low-tech, still clinging to the tenets of monarchism, world of Krull to his domain (and probably to push an old, vague prophecy into going his way, which, as pop culture tells us, never ends well). To achieve this lofty goal, our Beast has transported himself and his mobile teleporting fortress of Evil to Krull, and, for all we know, is kicking the planet’s ass.

The planet’s only chance to escape beastly domination is the unification of two – one presumes the biggest? – kingdoms via the marriage of strapping young Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall) of Whatever and Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony) of the other Whatever. Of course, the Beast’s soldiers interrupt the couple’s wedding, kill most everyone except for Colwyn, and abduct Lyssa so the Beast can marry her, and we don’t have to suffer from the possibility of a) an un-kidnapped princess and b) a woman potentially doing anything of import.

You know the rest: older guy instructing our hero, ragtag band of misfits (including Alun Armstrung and Robbie Coltrane and Liam Neeson before they were famous but doing pretty hilarious death scenes), various dangers, triumph of Good over Evil thanks to the actual flamethrower-like powers of Love.

Ah, for the heady days of the early 80s, when everyone and their mother was trying to follow the success of the first two Star Wars movies by trying their luck at various doomed big budget Science Fantasy productions in the spirit of the kind of tale you’d have found in Planet Stories decades earlier. Now, unlike that gentleman around the corner who’d poo-poo this choice of spiritual source because he only likes serious Science Fiction (don’t ask him about Stalker), I think that’s a perfectly reasonable approach to the genre if you have money to burn for spectacle. Unfortunately, most of the producers, writers and directors making these movies really had no business making them, showing little to no sense of what’s important in this sort of film, what’s bound to be successful, and what’s just stupid.

Case in point is the UK-lead Krull, directed by Peter Yates who made some fine crime films in the 70s but shows no flair for Krull’s material at all, leading to a film that often gets surprisingly little out of pretty awesome set-ups, and drags terribly in between. Of course, Stanford Sherman’s script doesn’t help there either, confusing the quest approach to a plot the film probably is supposed to take - you know the sort, where every seemingly disconnected encounter on the road actually leads the hero to wisdom and/or talks to us about the thematic concerns of a story and the world it takes place in – with a one damned thing after another approach that could only be really effective when directed with a sense of fun and swashbuckling flair. Both not things Yates shows here at all.

It’s a bit of a shame for Krull, too, because the production’s random and slightly confused approach to science fantasy and all things fantastic also leads to quite a bit of the sort of Weirdness I’d usually be all over. And it’s true, if you take some of the film’s random assemblages of episodes independently, there are worthwhile moments in it at least on the level of a very entertaining and dream-like peplum, like the Changeling attack or the Widow of the Web sequence. Unfortunately, they are also, even when they are supposedly the culmination of character arcs, never used with an eye on their connection to the rest of the film, and stay interesting but isolated from everything else that’s going on here. How badly is Krull disconnected? Why, it doesn’t even get the Evil conquered by the Power of Love stuff right, not because the Love as an actual lance of flame shooting out of somebody’s hand is inherently ridiculous (though it most certainly is) but because the film couldn’t be bothered to even establish the love between the Corwyn and Lyssa properly, in part because these two are as lacking in personality as the romantic leads in a classic Hammer horror film, in part because it just doesn’t seem to do the work necessary. See also Corwyn’s super weapon, the Glaive (confusingly enough, not an actual glaive but a star fish shaped throwing weapon), that is of use for about thirty seconds.

The production design in the spirit of European comics and a bit of the inevitable H.R. Giger when it comes to the Beast’s fortress is worth a look though, and when you’re in the mood for two hours of disconnected, sometimes weird, sometimes boring quest science fantasy that never coheres into an actual movie, you might not be too annoyed by Krull. Plus, if you have a bad memory like me, you’ll watch this thing every five years or so because you remembered the film’s weirdness but not how little it does with it.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,fantasy,peter yates,ken marshall,lysette anthony,alun armstrong,liam neeson,robbie coltrane

Three Films Make A Post: His acting will kill you.

Taken 3 (2014): You gotta hand it to Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton, they really went out of their way to make Liam Neeson’s third adventure as uninvolving as possible, with a plot as predictable as the sunrise, but much less interesting. On the positive side, this time around, Liam’s female movie relatives aren’t kidnapped. Too bad the film’s alternative is to kill off Famke Janssen and have someone attempt to frame Neeson for it. The expected series of mild action scenes, a bit of waterboarding, and random melodrama ensues with little that’s thrilling or interesting to watch. The formula has grown stale, and neither Besson nor Megaton seem to have any interest in finding something interesting to replace it with.

But hey, at least the words “IT ENDS HERE” are on the film’s poster.

Chastity Bites (2013): John V. Knowles’s “Liz Bathory visits an American small town campus while working in the pre-marital virginity business” horror comedy, might not have Liam Neeson, or all that much of a budget, but it’s lively and the fun and funny moments highly outnumber its annoying ones. Plus, while it’s not completely original, it’s a film clearly trying to look at the classic elements it uses from its own place in time and space, subverting what seems fitting while keeping others in place. Plus, leads Allison Scagliotti, Francia Raisa and Louise Griffiths are, quite unlike Neeson, clearly putting energy and enthusiasm into their performances. I’m not too fond of the film’s more satirical parts because they tend to be built on the thing I like least in comedy – turning the kinds and classes of people the comedy writer doesn’t like into stereotypes so as to have an easier time making fun of them without hitting that pesky empathy in an audience – but for more than its running time than not, this is a fine little horror comedy.

Some Dollars for Django aka Drango: A Bullet for You (1966): I would not have pegged Paul Naschy’s frequent partner León Klimovsky as a very good Paella Western director, but the film at hand, while certainly not in the top of the Euro Western genre class, is a perfectly entertaining little thing, well-paced and energetic - which might be explained by Enzo Castellari supposedly having had a hand in the direction, but I tend to be very careful when it comes to this sort of thing. The film belongs to that part of the European Westerns that skews more to the classic US model of how such a film has to play out – just with added dubious dubbing, a bit more violence and torture and a much better musical score, of course – and even concerns itself with two very clear redemption arcs for its main characters. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t reach the heights of the best US Westerns there but it’s still pretty entertaining as well as showing Anthony Steffen and Frank Wolff in a particularly good week, the former expressing more emotion than usual, the latter making the most of the opportunity to for once be a bit more of good guy.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,spanish movies,action,horror,comedy,spaghetti western,in short,olivier megaton,liam neeson,famke janssen,john v. knowles,allison scagliotti,francia raisa,louise griffiths,leon klimovsky,anthony steffen,frank wolff

Three Films Make A Post: PATHETIC EARTHLINGS...WHO CAN SAVE YOU NOW?

Fast Company (1938): I know, Edward Buzzell’s film is only an attempt to launch another detective couple like The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora Charles, but I really like the resulting mystery comedy a lot. Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice as our central couple have highly enjoyable chemistry, the dialogue’s fast and very funny, and the mystery plot goes by sprightly and without major hindrances to the enjoyment of the dialogue, so there’s little about the film that isn’t enjoyable and charming. It is not quite on the same level as the first Thin Man yet who’s making comparisons while he’s charmed?

As an added bonus for the bookish like me (and hopefully you), our heroes work as rare book traders and part-time book detectives, a fact I would probably make more of in my imagined remake where she is the more action oriented and he the one who stays behind, but it’s still the sort of thing that helps the movie become something a bit more than just an easy attempt to jump on a bandwagon.

Cut-Throat Struggle for an Invaluable Treasure aka 塞外奪寶 (1982): Despite beginning with a massacre of Shaolin monks and the ensuing theft of the Buddha’s teeth, this Hong Kong martial arts film directed by Hui Sin and Leung Wing-Tai is more of a comedy than anything else, if a comedy not prone to the outer heights and depths of martial arts slapstick. In its choreography, its sense of humour and its needle-dropped score, this is pretty much a typical second tier film of its time, and like a lot of these films, it’s damn entertaining while doing what it does with professionalism and style.

The fights are pleasantly varied in style and form, their execution is fine, and the film has a nice flow to it, even if the plot is just going through the motions to get from one fight to the next. As an added, and unexpected, pleasure, Cut-Throat Struggle is also full of very pretty location shots for its characters to fight in, adding the cheapest of all special effects.

Seraphim Falls (2006): David Von Ancken’s fascinating film starts as what looks like the final act of a modernist Western, but gradually turns into something much more surreal, the film’s outer landscapes mirroring those of the protagonists, until the difference between the metaphorical and the real becomes diffuse; people who like connections coming from Abrahamic religions will have particular fun here. In its own, peculiar way, Seraphim Falls does tell a very Western-like redemption story, even if it at first pretends to be more of a Spaghetti Western-like tale of vengeance; it’s just that the film’s concept of redemption is a bit different from that of many movies in the genre that came before it. While it is going on its way to redemption, the film plays with various audience expectations (like who the hero of the tale might be), and gives Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan, as well as a bunch of excellently cast minor characters, much space for performances that are at once real and as idiosyncratic as the film needs them to be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,hong kong movies,in short,mystery,comedy,martial arts,western,edward buzzell,melvyn douglas,florence rice,hui sin,leung wing-tai,david von ancken,liam neeson,pierce brosnan

Three Films Make A Post: Rabid, Drug-Infested Hippies on a Blood-Crazed KILLING RAMPAGE!

The Possession (2012): I was warned by other reviews that Ole Bornedal's movie loses much of its quality during its finale, but for my tastes, the whole thing jumped the shark at about the fifty minute mark when Jeffrey Dean Morgan does his short experiment in DIY exorcism (is there a column about that in Maker Magazine?). At least that's the point when all the film's increasingly loud and dumb attempts at scaring the audience only produced increasingly annoyed eye-rolling anymore. It's a bit of a shame, too, for the film's beginning promises a decent, subtextually loaded piece of nuclear family in dismay (oh noes!) horror, some of the horror sequences show promise, and the acting is rather good throughout. Alas, the longer The Possession goes, the dumber it becomes, turning loud when it should be silent and pompous when it should be subtle. Or maybe I'm just growing too old to appreciate a movie shouting at me throughout its running time as "horror"?

Taken 2 (2012): Speaking of disappointments, Olivier Megaton's sequel to what just may be the best among Europa Corps's endless assembly line churn-out of action movies does not hold up to the standards of the first film. Somebody must have talked Luc Besson into toning the violence down, and now we have an action movie that often seems afraid to show much of the action, even in the extended cut. There's some theoretically interesting subtext about the film's bad guy - whatever his name is - and Liam Neeson's character being mirror images of each other, but in good old Besson fashion, the script wastes that potential in its insistence on having the bad guy still being cliché-evil. This wouldn't be so bad if the rest of the movie would make a better effort distracting the audience from the film's failings, but there's really not enough going on for that at all.

On the positive side, this time around Famke Janssen and Maggie Grace are allowed a bit more screen-time and personality, though of course no actual agency. I'd also wish these films would stop casting nearly thirty year old Grace as a seventeen year old girl (one assumes) with the mental development of a twelve year old, but that might be just me.

Henge (2011): I was quite a bit more impressed by Hajime Ohata's short-ish (53 minutes) movie about a man (Kazunori Aizawa) who starts transforming into a monster, which does change the marital relations to his wife (Aki Morita) in various ways. Elements of Cronenbergian body horror, Hellraiser and finally kaiju cinema come together in a movie strong enough to transcend Aizawa's indifferent performance and the dubious quality of its special effects. There's some true conviction behind the filmmaking here that is a beautiful antidote to the half-assed-ness of the other films I looked at today.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,french movies,japanese movies,in short,horror,thriller,kaiju,ole bornedal,jeffrey dean morgan,olivier megaton,liam neeson,famke janssen,maggie grace,hajime ohata

Taken (2008)

Bryan (Liam Neeson) is a retired CIA covert operative now living in LA to get closer to his estranged daughter Kim (Maggie Grace; whose supposed to be seventeen is movie-magically looks a lot younger than in Lost) after years of ignoring her.

I guess this would be a lot easier if his job experience hadn't made him a bit paranoid. He's nearly freaking out when he hears that Kim (can it be a coincidence she shares the name of the useless-except-for-being-kidnapped character from 24?) is planning on travelling to that hotbed of danger, Baghdad Paris, but caves in after some time.

Of course our primitive continent turns out to be just as dangerous as the professional killer from the country with the much higher rate of violent crime prophesized and Kim and the friend she's travelling with are promptly kidnapped after their arrival. They are the victims of a not-very-bright gang of Albanian human traffickers that specializes in kidnapping foreign tourists in Paris and turning them into prostitutes. Kidnapping those young women who are going to be missed the most and can cause international pressure to be put on the local law enforcement has worked out perfectly fine for them, of course.

At least until Bryan arrives and turns Paris into his own private warzone. Neither the corrupt French authorities (I am rather surprised that this is actually a French film) nor lots and lots of thugs can stop him from getting his daughter back.

 

I wouldn't have expected Liam Neeson to be such a great action movie actor. It turns out he is the real secret weapon of the film and soon helped me forget the very stupid set-up for all the death and destruction. Neeson is of course not a martial artist, instead he's a real actor who is able to give Bryan a little more depth than the script provides, making him one of the more frightening anti-heroes of his type, all barely controlled rage and intensity and completely convincing violence.

Director Pierre Morel should be known through his excellent debut Banlieue 13. Taken isn't as grandly over the top intense and mad as the former film that turned the rather strange art of parcour into a perfect action movie base. This has nothing to do with Morel failing and a lot with Morel being able to make different movies in the same genre - an ability I wish more young directors had. Being less extreme doesn't make the action sequences here any less excellent than those in Banlieue 13, though. Morel goes for a different feel to the action here, something more gritty and theoretically realistic, which of course mostly means that the stunts and fights do look more like people hurting each other and less like dancing - as it should be in a movie with this type of storyline and such a remorseless "hero". Neeson (and his stunt doubles) seem to be game for anything that is thrown at them, giving everything a sheen of believability that is only further strengthened by the sort of old-fashioned sense of camera work and editing that shows more of the action than just a shaking camera.

So, if you like to see Liam Neeson playing something different or want to see a fine contemporary action film from Europe and are willing to suspend your disbelief for the first twenty minutes of a movie, I can highly recommend Taken to you.

 

Technorati-Tags: french movies,pierre morel,action,liam neeson,reviews