Three Films Make A Post: Vengeance for the right price

The Duel at Silver Creek (1952): This was the first western Don Siegel directed, and in its first act, it does feel somewhat insecure. How much of this is Siegel or just the curiously structured script by Gerald Drayson Adams and Joseph Hoffman that goes through plot and character set-ups with maximum awkwardness isn’t quite clear. Once the film has set into its groove, and every character is actually where they need to be for the real plot to start, things improve markedly. The tale of men’s friendship (between Stephen McNally and Audie Murphy), an evil brother-sister pair (Gerald Mohr and Faith Domergue) pretending to be extremely upstanding or into marshals, and other complications isn’t terribly original by western standards of the time, but Siegel and the cast provide the whole affair with a lot of energy.

Dead for a Dollar (2022): Energy is rather what this new attempt by the great Walter Hill to get back to his old form lacks; the storytelling meanders enough to rob the film of much of its potential drive, and certainly of any actual tension. There’s still quite a bit to like here, though. The cast, particularly Rachel Brosnahan and Christoph Waltz (as well as Willem Dafoe when he’s actually in the movie), do sink their teeth into characters of a type that doesn’t make one wonder why Hill dedicates this one to the late, great western director Budd Boetticher. And while the action isn’t much to write home about (in a Hill movie!), the final shoot-out sees the man regaining some of his old powers in this area.

Mr. Vampire Part 3 aka 靈幻先生 (1987): If you’re looking for much new in the third entry into the deservedly classic Mister Vampire series from Hong Kong, you might be disappointed. If you come for Lam Ching-Ying’s monobrow, and an incredible amount of stunts, slapstick and slapstick stunts and more throw-away visual gags in any given scene than most movies pack into their full runtimes, director Ricky Lau has you covered again, zipping through jokes and fights with abandon and enthusiasm. And hey, we’re fighting a wildwoman style sorceress this time instead of hopping vampires, so there’s that as well.

Bullet to the Head (2012)

New Orleans. After a hit, someone who we will later learn is a big bad mercenary named Keegan (Jason Momoa) murders the partner of freelance killer James Bonomo aka (delightfully) Jimmy Bobo (Sylvester Stallone) in a bar. Jimmy barely escapes with his life and decides to do what killers in movies do when they are sure their employers have fucked them over. There’s a little killing spree in the making, but first point of business is to actually find out who hired him because the hitperson business usually works through middlemen. To complicate matters, Jimmy has to team up with a cop (spit). Said cop, one Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang) owns a cell phone. Which, in combination with his job, is more than enough reason for Jimmy to come up with some awkward and ill-fitting racist jibes, him being the kind of racist who can’t even get the races he’s against straight. However, the script declares they’ve gotta team up and do the old buddy thing, so they do.

There’s much violence, some business with Jimmy’s daughter (a sadly underutilized Sarah Shahi), and then some more violence.

For my tastes, it has been a decade or two since Walter Hill, once one of the best directors of stylized action movies (and more) in the USA, has made a really great film (not to be confused with Great Films, in which I don’t believe). It’s still nice to see him working regularly as a director again, though, and while Bullet to the Head certainly isn’t a masterpiece, it is a very entertaining minor work by an old master. It is not as weirdly – and to my eyes pointlessly – experimental as his newest film The Assignment but on the other hand it is pleasantly straightforward, its plot never coming to a screeching halt for scenes of Sigourney Weaver (bless her) rambling without point or end.

Here Hill does get back to the old buddy action movie formula, though the script (apparently based on a graphic novel) isn’t terribly funny or interested in doing anything of note with the old formula. Sung Kang and Stallone are perfectly serviceable as bickering tough guy couple but there’s little chemistry between them, and their dialogue just isn’t terribly interesting. Of course, Stallone does look like the avantgarde project with painted-on eyebrows of a slightly mad sculptor, so chemistry probably isn’t in the cards between him and any even vaguely human looking member of our species. This doesn’t mean Stallone isn’t fun to watch here – he still has screen presence but it has grown pretty damn weird in his old age and really doesn’t lend itself to any kind of nuance beyond presenting him as some sort of force of nature or mad science, which actually work in his favour in the film at hand.

Hill somewhat makes up for that by giving nominal big bad Adewale Akinnuyoe-Agbaje a lot of scenery to chew, providing Jason Momoa with many an opportunity to glare (he even gets into a glaring duel with Stallone later on), and having Christian Slater pop in for a visit.

Otherwise, it’s classic American action directed by a classic American action director, who still edits circles around some of the young guns. Bullet to the Head is a fun flick, is what I’m saying, and while I am a bit sad that it isn’t more than that, I’m not going to complain about merely being entertained by ten or so well-done action scenes.

In short: The Long Riders (1980)

There’s something peculiar about the fact that various groups of what most certainly were deeply unpleasant men of the Old American West have become folk heroes. But then, there seems to be a strain in US culture that values independence far more than any moral or ethical values. Of course, in the case of the James-Younger Gang, history did make things quite easy for folklore by involving the even more unpleasant boot of the rich and equally lawless in form of the Pinkertons on the other side, and including the taste of betrayal.

Where folklore went, Hollywood followed very early on, so Walter Hill’s film about the rise and fall of the James and the Youngers is only one particularly fine film about these dubious people among many. And a very, very fine film it is, perhaps one of the best – und certainly one of the more underrated – revisionist Westerns ever made. It’s a film that does little wrong, starting out leisurely in a tone of highly stylized authenticity - which of course isn’t authenticity at all, but a way to make the world a film takes place in feel believable and lived in by real people – that slowly but surely turns darker, culminating in the most surreal Great Northfield Minnesota Raid ever put on screen, as far as I know.

In between, the film walks the line of treating its robber heroes as its heroes without ever turning them completely into the folkloric heroes, nor treating them as mere psychopaths. The James’s and Younger’s exploits are also located in a very specific kind of post-US-Civil-War resentment of poor Southern whites towards the Union, not a place I find particularly comfortable to sympathize with (because, d’oh, slavery) but again something that adds complexity to the characters and positions them in a believable social milieu, something Hill is – to my surprise – just as adept at showing as he is at the violence and the underplayed male friendships. And even though this is quite the male dominated film, Hill also finds room to show women with agency and minds of their own; it just doesn’t help them much.

It’s a humanizing effort that is further supported by some fine acting by the collected Keachs, Carradines, and Quaids that make up its cast in what sounds like stunt casting but really does work out very fine in this case, with the various siblings playing siblings with not exactly surprising sibling chemistry. Ironically, at least for me, for once letting actual relations play relations does feel a bit strange in a movie, because I – and I do imagine I’m not the only one – have so gotten used to see siblings on my screen not looking similar at all, the film’s gesture of particular naturalism does feel weird rather than natural. Which, come to think of it, is quite a trick of Hill to play on his audience.

But then, The Long Riders does play quite a few tricks on its audience, subverting expectations and making things much more messy than they appear at first; that the film is also just a fantastic revisionist western might be one of these tricks.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,western,walter hill,david carradine,keith carradine,robert carradine,james keach,stacy keach,dennis quaid,randy quaid

In short: The Driver (1978)

A nameless man, let's call him The Driver (Ryan O'Neal), works as a highly successful hired-gun escape car driver for various criminals, if he deigns those criminals to be professional enough for him. The Driver doesn't like guns much, or rather, the people he works for actually shooting their guns, he's big on punctuality, as well as his prospective partners not being fools that'll get him killed or caught. In exchange for reasonable manners and a rather exorbitant fee, the Driver provides his business partners with near-miraculous escape driving that is too controlled to be called crazy, and highly successful.

So successful that a police Detective (Bruce Dern) has become rather obsessed with Driver, whom he dubs "Cowboy", and is willing to use highly unorthodox - even for a policeman who conducts all of his business, even interrogations, in a bar and a security van - methods to catch his prey. The Detective is even willing to press a small-time robber (Joseph Walsh) and his small gang consisting of exactly the kind of people Driver doesn't like to work with into organizing a bank robbery with Driver as the prospective escape driver.

Things get complicated and violent soon for Driver.

Walter Hill directed The Driver, his second feature film, in the middle of that phase of his career - ending after 1985's Streets of Fire - when he could do no wrong, and every film he made came out as some kind of classic.

In The Driver's case, it's a crime movie that pares every element of its plot down to its archetypal form, with characters that are nameless representation of their functions with no actual backstory even suggested (Hill often seems to prefer archetypes to characters). In this context, a film like The Driver actually looks like the Platonic Ideal of an 80s movie despite being made at the tail end of the 70s. Here, the hyper-realism and conscious grittiness of the older era turns into cool stylisation and a filmic language so composed (highly fitting for a main character who is always in control of himself when he is behind the wheel of a car) even the film's most chaotic car chases never look chaotic.

There's a distance between Hill's camera - and with it the audience - and the things it depicts that could - and later on, in different films, did - kill a film through its sheer lack of emotionality but here, this distance is exactly the point, as it mirrors Driver's cold, possibly sociopathic (really, he's closer to Westlake's Stark than most of the characters in actual Stark adaptations are) distance that enables him to live the life he leads in the way he leads it. The audience does share in Driver's emotions, it's just that he doesn't have many.

Ryan O'Neal is quite a clever bit of stuntcasting for a role that turns his weaknesses, an aura of professionalism and emptiness and the inability to emote convincingly, into the central points of his performance. And say what you will against O'Neal, he does hold his void-like ground against Dern and Isabelle Adjani, both much more classically able actors.

Oh yeah, the night car chases under neon lights are pretty great, too.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,crime,action,walter hill,ryan o'neal,isabelle adjani,bruce dern