In short: Cliffhanger (1993)

This is neither a particular highpoint in the career of America’s second best mainstream action movie director of its era, Renny Harlin, nor of its lead, the sometimes redoubtable Sylvester Stallone.

Whenever the film about a tough free-climbing mountain rescue manly man fighting gangsters led by John Lithgow making an hilarious attempt at what I assume is supposed to be an English upper class accent (though I could be wrong) actually concentrates on tight action sequences cleverly filmed to produce vertigo in its audience, it becomes downright riveting. Plus, Cliffhanger teaches one quite a bit about all the ways gravity can kill you (and that in a genre and film that has a rather dubious grasp on gravity and all other laws of physics you might care to mention, treating them more as suggestions of physics than strict laws), and warns of the dozens of ways a manly man mountain rescue dude can kill you with whatever objects or natural features are available at any given moment. It also relates the tragically tragic tale of Sly getting his best bud Michael Rooker rather miffed at him via a very tragic girlfriend dropping into an abyss incident, and warns of the dangers of teaming up with Evil John Lithgow.

However, the film leaves these natural roaming places of the US action movie a little too often. An obvious example is the introduction of two extreme sports dudes that make Beavis and Butthead look downright realistic only to get them killed later on in scenes that mostly seem to be in the film to make it lose momentum (which is totally what you want in your big dumb action movie), awakening my inner editor rather fiercely.


It’s a bit of a shame, really, for a twenty minute shorter version of Cliffhanger would probably have turned it into the nail biter its title promises instead of the decent enough action flick with only mildly interesting idiocy it is.

In short: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

If you’re looking for a counter-argument to the idea that the big commercial movie universes suppress all individual directorial expression, the Guardians movies are your most obvious starting point, seeing as their tone and style fit exactly into the oeuvre of James Gunn. Witness the way crude and blunt humour sometimes hide the rather more clever jokes the film makes; or just watch how cynical little asides so often glide into moments of actual human emotion that are just as important for the film as the big set pieces and explosions are. And these are pretty damn important to the film, it’s just that Gunn clearly sees no qualitative difference between the loud and the quiet, the goofy and the clever. Blockbuster cinema here means a film that sets out to fulfil all kinds of different expectations, not to be all things to all people, but because being a bit messy and complicated and rich is what this sort of filmmaking should be about.

One might argue that the film’s thematic concerns about families of choice, of blood and of chance are not the most original ones but I suspect very much most members of the film’s audience will have found themselves involved in one or more of these kinds of families, and can certainly connect to some of what’s going on under the loud, beautiful and bonkers surface; which is more than I can say about these “universal”, important films beloved by mid-brow criticism that are inevitably about the sex life of rich people or academics. Plus, Gunn really doubles down when he uses well-worn tropes – one just has to look at the shape, form and dimension the standard “killing of the father” takes on in this film. It’s big in the best way.


But what really does make this such a wonderful film is how much care Gunn takes with the small things. It’s not just the nearly absurd number of throwaway gags going on in the background (and certainly not stopping with the end credits), it’s how tiny dialogue moments from the first Guardians are given greater meaning (and ambiguity) through just as tiny throw-away lines here, how there’s always a little more going on in every scene than the most direct reading of it suggests.

The Dark Half (1993)

“Literary” writer Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton) has a little secret: under the pseudonym of George Stark he is writing a series of pretty nasty bestselling thrillers that sound a lot like what have happened if the Parker novels had been written by Mickey Spillane (one shudders to think). Thing is, Beaumont treats Stark very much like an independent personality, his own behaviour changing for the worse whenever he is writing one of the Stark novels, as his long-suffering wife Liz (a rather underused Amy Madigan) knows all too well. So it looks like an opportunity for improving Thad’s mental health when a shady guy (Robert Joy), who apparently found out the truth about Stark screwing someone working for the writer’s publisher, attempts to blackmail Thad with his knowledge about Stark’s true identity. Thad’s not happy, but he’s certainly not going to pay, and decides to go public with his being Stark and bury his pseudonym for good.

Alas, somebody starts killing off people involved in Stark’s “death” and the ensuing publicity stunts surrounding it. The killer is someone with Thad’s fingerprints who will turn out to look a lot like Thad badly costumed as a Southern tough guy. Sheriff Alan Pangborn (Michael Rooker) and his colleagues in New York at first seem to look at a rather clear-cut case of a writer losing it in murderous fashion (happens every day, right?), but some of Thad’s alibis work out much too well, and there are some aspects to the case that rather suggest the supernatural explanation of an imagined Stark having become very real and very angry about his own death.

George A. Romero’s adaptation of one of Stephen King’s more middling novels probably isn’t the film I should write about to say goodbye to one of the Great American Horror Directors (capitalization fully deserved). But we all know how brilliant Martin and the original Dead trilogy are (and I harbour a heretical love for Diary of the Dead, as well), and there really isn’t much to add to the acres of things written about these films, whereas The Dark Half is generally so ignored even talking a bit about what’s wrong and right with the film seems like a better use of time, and certainly something that makes me less sad than a look at Romero’s career as a whole, at all the films he never got to make, thinking about the opportunities of not being the zombie movie guy that didn’t come his way anymore much after this film - his next finished – and last not “Dead” – film came out seven years later.

Qualitywise, The Dark Half is not the sort of film that should have put anyone in director’s jail. It’s an at times effective, at times a little awkward outing that is never less than entertaining. Its worst aspects are certainly some dubious digital special effects and a bad guy that doesn’t work as well as he should. The problem with Stark as a character is that – particularly in the phases of the film when he’s still killing his way towards Thad – he’s just not that terrifying a guy, even with all the death and mutilation he causes. As a horror movie monster, he misses a hook beyond having a Southern accent and a love for Elvis and annoying with some particularly bad one-liners. He’s basically doing what a normal movie killer in a thriller would do, but in a sillier way, which is certainly not ideal if you want to freak me out. I also can’t help but feel that Hutton doesn’t have much of a grip on Stark (the Method certainly wasn’t invented to create a memorable pseudonym gone rogue), leaving the work of making the character threatening mostly to the stylists. Once Stark gets closer to Thad, these problems dissolve more or less, the increasing emphasis on Stark as a personified part of Thad (that twin business making no difference, really) leading to a handful of moments I found actually disquieting, Stark not so much representing Thad’s dark half than a potential (worse) direction his life could have taken. At that point, the film turns into a very American tale of a guy who can’t quite escape the place he came from, however much he pretends it doesn’t exist, the shadows of his working poor upbringing following him into suburbia and academia.

Which sounds very much like the sort of thing Romero as a writer and director was always interested in, using his monsters as a tool to talk about class, guilt and the way public happenings shape private lives in one way or the other (among many other things of course). If that meant having to turn a rather autobiographical Stephen King novel into a mild 90s style supernatural slasher or churning out another Dead movie, than that’s what Romero would do.


This doesn’t mean the guy didn’t clearly keep his gleeful enjoyment of the more typically brutal parts of his films throughout his career: the murders here certainly demonstrate Romero’s love (shared with King) for EC style violence, and he never falls into the trap of treating the supernatural exclusively as a metaphor, of not treating his horror serious as horror. Romero was just interested in also talking about other things.

Universal Van Damme: Replicant (2001)

A serial killer known as The Torch (Jean-Claude Van Damme in a stupid wig, and giving a surprisingly boring performance) has been working in beautiful Seattle for the past three years, punishing women for not being excellent to their children. Not that the police have actually gotten this far in understanding his motivation, for our protagonist, Detective Jake Riley (Michael Rooker, in his incarnation as a consummate professional who really doesn't care what crap a script throws at him, he'll pretend to take it seriously), might very well be the Worst Police Ever, what with his propensity for sudden, uncontrolled violence and his inability to catch a killer who even phones in regularly.

Fortunately for the public, Jake is retiring from his job; unfortunately, The Torch doesn't care and keeps on calling. But don't fret, people of Seattle, the government in form of something called the NSF (so not the infamous data sponge and hater of civil rights) is on the case. Well, actually, they just want to help out on the case to test out their newest program against terrorism, which consists of making clones of terrorists, or in this case our killer, building up a telepathic connection between the clones and the originals, and using the clones as some kind of human blood hounds. Because this isn't stupid enough, our NSF friends decide that the best man to play the replicant Torch's (also JCVD, but doing his puppy-eyed shtick, and gymnastics) handler is Jake Riley. At least it's keeping with the spirit of the rest of the program.

At first, Jake is - of course - abusing the child-like innocent killer clone even when he's not demonstrating a propensity for violence and near-rape (but don't worry, the prostitute falls in love and becomes part of the film's happy end, so there's nothing to see here, right? Right!?), but he is eventually won over by the power of buddy cop movies or of JCVD making puppy eyes at him. But will the RepliTorch still become like his original, or is the much superior nurture of getting abused by a (probably alcoholic) cop instead of getting abused by one's mother going to keep him on the path of angels?

So, let's not put too fine a point on it - as you will have realized, Replicant is not just rather on the stupid side (and I've left out more stupidity than I left in in the above, like the scene in which Rooker's mum basically tells him that he's a poophead, or the "humour" of Van Damme as the replicant trying to understand the guiding principles of toilet paper), it's also thematically and ethically confused like a dog trying to decide if it should dive into that tasty, tasty trash can or rather do what its master says and abstain. As far as I understand the film's morals, abuse is okay when you think your victim is evil, but when you later decide otherwise, the former abuse is no big deal (and your victim will become your best bud); attempted rape isn't so bad when you're a virginal clone (and your near victim will be really into you). Seriously, I don't even know what to say to that, much less how to criticize it in detail. So I won't.

On the other hand, if you go into Replicant and are - like me - somehow able to not find yourself provoked into angrily throwing food at the TV screen, nor into crawling into a corner to shake and whimper to yourself, you might actually have quite a good time with it. There's something very alluring about the film's desperate attempts to hit all the the plot beats of buddy cop movies, include all of the trademark elements of every Jean-Claude Van Damme film ever (the scene of random beefcake, the double role, the puppy eye tragedy, the gymnastics, the idiotic wig on the killer and so on, and so forth), add as many elements of serial killer movies, shake, stir, and look surprised when the audience's heads explode. At the very least, there's never a dull minute here, as director Ringo Lam (who really had better days in Hong Kong) puts out all the stops his tiny budget allows him to, resulting in entertainment. Even if it is entertainment through absurdity, anti-logic, and Jean-Claude looking at toilet paper with greatest confusion.

What there is of action is clearly cheap but good, with a highly localized fight between man and ambulance the clear high point. The fights between Van Damme and Van Damme are fast but not that great, probably because most of the time they have to be choreographed within the constraints of an actor fighting himself, and not in an Evil Dead 2 kind of way. Generally, though, the action still satisfies.

Though really, even if the action were barely watchable, I suspect Replicant would still be worth watching, if only to shout "what the hell!", "are they really going to…?" and "oh, come on!" at the film.

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