Spider-Man: No Way Home [12]

Dir: Jon Watts 

There have been many tries at adapting Spider-Man to the screen. Most have strengths, but all have their weaknesses. Sam Raimi’s films got Peter entirely right, with Tobey Maguire perfectly cast, but Spider-Man’s wisecracking wit got left behind somewhat. While Kirsten Dunst was good, the screenplays sanded off Mary Jane’s edges, and often leaned into cheese. The second of Raimi’s trilogy remains a hugely entertaining blockbuster, but even that one suffers from the wider problems of its franchise. I hate the Amazing Spider-Man films. Andrew Garfield clearly earnestly wanted to do the character justice, but only a couple of scenes throughout his tenure capture the character properly, and the problems are legion (reviews here and here). 

The Marvel Cinematic Universe initially couldn’t use Spider-Man but, with rights issues negotiated, he finally showed up, in the form of Tom Holland, for Captain America: Civil War, before the MCU embarked on what has become the Home trilogy of films. Like the other franchises centering on the character, it’s had its ups and downs. The first film, Homecoming, confirms what Civil War suggested: Tom Holland is a great choice, and this time not just as Peter Parker. For the first time, that film consistently nails down the persona of Peter’s Spider-Man; a witty kid who has a quip ready for every occasion. We get the sense here that the Spider-Man costume empowers him to that end, drawing a better-defined distinction between Peter in and out of costume than ever before. However, it’s not entirely a Spider-Man film. Far too much time is spent in service of the larger MCU, especially of featuring Iron Man. The film is at its best when Peter is doing his ‘friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man’ thing, and particularly when he’s in his own costume. The suit that Tony Stark made for him undermines Peter’s trademark intellect and ingenuity by, first of all, having to be something he got from another brilliant scientist, and secondly by doing too much for him. The sequel, Far From Home, doubles down on these problems while also stripping out much of Spidey’s wit. The use of Mysterio’s illusions is fantastic in a couple of late action scenes, but otherwise, it’s a weak film. 

That brings us to No Way Home. The marketing had me worried, the reliance on Dr Strange, the use of the Multiverse, which suggested nothing so much as a desperate attempt to make a live action version of Into The Spiderverse (still, hands down, the greatest Spider-Man film). Happily, this is easily the best of the MCU’s Spider-Man series, and probably one of the best films to feature the character. 

No Way Home picks up directly after the ending of Far From Home. Peter’s secret identity has been revealed to the world by J. Jonah Jameson (JK Simmons, reprising the role from the Raimi series, only this time as an Alex Jones style ranting commentator). This has major repercussions, as Spider-Man is thought by many to have murdered Mysterio, and the effects reverberate onto Peter’s friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), and his aunt May (Marisa Tomei). Most consequentially, the controversy means that Peter, Ned and MJ are all rejected from what should have been almost sure thing places at MIT. Wanting to set things right, Peter goes to Dr Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to ask him to cast a spell that will make people forget that he is Spider-Man. In his haste, he makes Strange change the spell so many times as it is in progress that it goes wrong, creating a crack in the multiverse that lets in anyone who knows, in any universe, that Peter is Spider-Man. 

I’m sorry for that long introduction, but it was important to set the pieces here, because that crack in the Multiverse pulls in many of the villains from the earlier Spider-Man franchises. No Way Home is soaked in Spider-Man lore, both from the earlier films and from the comics (often drawing the earlier versions of the characters much closer to their source material). There is no way to cover this without spoilers, so if you’ve not seen the film yet, beware. 

The first 40 minutes of No Way Home are MCU Spider-Man as we’ve come to expect, in both good and bad ways. I struggled with the point of Ned in the first film in the trilogy. The writers struggled with the point of him in the second, saddling him with a romance so prosaic they wrote it out at the end of the film. Here though, the dynamic between Peter, Ned and MJ feels much more balanced. They’re not well established as a trio in the first two films, but this film depicts them as much closer. It’s a little clumsy, but well played. There’s a sense that an offscreen friendship is bleeding into the film, and we do get a little invested in them all going to college together. The consequences of Peter’s identity being discovered could have been heavier (perhaps an alternate version would have leaned into a certain cameo and given us a trial of Spider-Man narrative), but what does weigh on Peter feels authentically life-altering for a teenager. I buy into the idea of Peter, used to fixing things with superpowers, looking first for that kind of solution. As ever, the points at which the film has to service the expansion of the MCU are its weakest. Worse, you can barely tell a difference in tone between the writing of Dr Strange (or many other characters) and Peter, when it comes to wisecracking, which is a perennial problem for the series. Overall, the first act is fine, but nothing new. 

The bridge scene is when things kick into gear, with the appearance of Alfred Molina’s Dr. Octopus. Molina positively relishes the part, and Jon Watts stages an imaginative action scene, with the fact that Doc Ock’s tentacles are now fully CG giving them somewhat greater freedom. It’s also a well-written scene when it comes to Peter’s character; he’s curious about why this man has suddenly appeared and attacked him, but it also incorporates some of Spidey’s humour, especially in his delight when he discovers how the nanotech of the Iron Spider suit interacts with the tentacles. It’s a tremendously entertaining sequence that combines all the best qualities of Spider-Man. 

Bringing the old villains in one by one allows Watts and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers the chance to do a soft reboot on them, fixing some issues that fans had with the original cinematic incarnations. Jamie Foxx still plays Electro, but he’s no longer the Edward Nygma knockoff of Amazing Spider-Man 2; his powers have given him a swagger that Foxx is much more comfortable with, while a late change in look gives hints of the original comic character’s lightning bolt mask, without going for the full silliness of that look. Similarly, the Green Goblin of the Raimi films is retconned a little. Willem Dafoe continues to play him with the same glee he had in 2002, but the Power Ranger mask is smashed early on, and Norman takes on a look much closer to the classic John Romita design, purple cowl intact. For someone who has always loved the character, it’s a near perfect mix of something credible within its world and preserving the comic book look. 

What works best about the film though is that while the fanservice is present and correct, it’s not what the film is about. With great power, every Spidey series tells us, comes great responsibility, and even before that phrase has been uttered in this continuity, that’s what this film has Peter embracing. It’s also worth noting that the twist on how that maxim is delivered here works well. It hit me emotionally, both because of an affection for the characters its between and how it pays indirect tribute to the way it’s usually shown. The villains Peter encounters may have been teleported in from other dimensions, but he feels a responsibility to them and to the other people in those dimensions not to simply kill these people, but to cure them: to send them back as the decent people they once were. It’s a great encapsulation of the main lesson of Spider-Man and just one of the ways that this—finally—is an MCU movie about Spidey himself. Dr Strange may facilitate the mechanics of the plot here, but this isn’t about Peter’s relationship to him, or his place in The Avengers the way the other films in this series are. This is a film about finally becoming the hero that his powers make it possible to be, whatever the consequences. It’s also a film about connection: to friends who are essentially family, to a parent like May and, of course, to the only people Peter knows who share his experience. 

Even though Andrew Garfield denied it repeatedly, it was always clear that he and Tobey Maguire would be reprising their roles, playing alternate Peter Parkers (Peters Parker?) What was a pleasing surprise to me was how substantial their roles are in terms of screentime and what they contribute. If the reclaiming of the old characters and the moving of them closer to the established lore is largely subtext, one scene with Garfield makes it supertext. In a pep talk the others comfort Garfield’s Parker as he does himself down—clearly a reference to the Amazing series' critical and fan reception. Garfield is great here, it seems that this is everything he ever wanted his Peter to be, and there are some lovely moments as he relates to older and younger versions of ‘himself’. His excitement at being along for this ride is both palpable and contagious. No, it doesn’t mean the  Amazing series is suddenly good. Maguire seems a little less sure about being back, but that works for his older and more reflective Peter. It makes me wonder if he’s still doing the superhero thing in his part of the multiverse. The reference to his MJ is sweet, but I do wish we’d seen Kirsten Dunst reprise her role. 

Pulling three Spideys and something close to a full Sinister Six together for the final action sequence does mean the film’s ending is busy, but it’s also pretty exciting and surprisingly easy to follow. Watts and team break the sequence into a series of mini setpieces, and the costumes and styles are distinctive enough that it doesn’t get lost which Spider-Man we’re following at any given time. The theme of responsibility, and of the cost Peter was trying to avoid, comes full circle with the ending (which also has one image that nods poignantly to the ending of Raimi’s first film). It’s here that I really felt the point of spending so much time with Ned in the two previous films. While Homecoming was a teen movie, the ending makes this one feel like a true coming of age story for Holland’s Peter. There’s an innocence the character used to have that we’ll likely never see again. 

No Way Home has many of the flaws familiar in MCU films. Ultimately it’s just as anonymous looking as any of them, and I don’t doubt that any of the Marvel directors could have delivered much the same movie, given the same second units. That said, this was never intended to be auteur cinema. If the MCU delivers films almost as a mechanical process, this one feels like it’s been delivered by a machine that has been tinkered with, retooled to work at its highest potential. It’s the MCU Spider-Man film I’d been hoping for, and while it’s not perfect (and hasn’t a single image as indelible as Spiderverse’s ‘falling upwards’ shot), that feels like as much as I could have asked of it. 

★★★★

24FPS @ LFF: Cop Secret

Dir: Hannes Thór Halldórsson

Not all filmmakers have always been in cinema. Some come from visual art, others from criticism, still others from completely different areas, but I have to say, a film directed by the goalkeeper for the Icelandic national football team isn’t something I saw coming. Nor, if I’d thought about it, would I necessarily have expected that film to be a spoof of 80s and 90s buddy cop actioners.

Cop Secret is, in the tradition of the best spoofs, a loving homage to the genre it’s riffing on. You’ve got the rival cops who have to become partners. In this case that’s loose canon Bussi (Auðunn Blöndal) and wealthy former model Hörður (Egill Einarsson). You’ve got the flamboyant villain with the diabolical plan; Björn Hlynur Haraldsson as Rikki and you’ve got supporting players like the boss who communicates almost entirely by shouting. The plot is drawn together from bits and pieces of earlier films, notably Die Hard With a Vengeance and Lethal Weapon, among others. The twist here, aside from the general absurdity, is that Bussi and Hörður are not just partners as cops, drawn together, they end up in a relationship. It’s important to note that, while Bussi has to come to terms with his sexuality, the fact of this relationship is never played for laughs. The film is absolutely sex-positive, embracing the sexuality of its characters without question. This isn’t to say that there isn’t fun to be had with their attraction, especially at the moment in the middle of a gunfight when the two brush hands; the first moment of electricity between them.

The performances are all entertaining, the whole cast going for the tone, but Björn Hlynur Haraldsson has a wonderful time as Rikki. He speaks almost entirely in English, which gives his performance the feel of a slightly low rent direct to video bad guy, offset by the fact his attempts at menacing dialogue become ever more convoluted, to the point that even his henchmen barely know what he’s saying. He also plays on villain clichés. When he threatens one henchman another reminds him that he can’t just start killing people “oh, just this one?”, comes the reply.

The action scenes, despite some terrible CGI, are a lot of fun, especially the kinetic car chase that opens the film (and which has a great gag midway through) and the aforementioned bank shootout. Unfortunately, that comes midway through, and the third act doesn’t quite have anything to match it. The parody may keep the bad guy’s plot from mattering too much, but given that this isn’t quite pitched at Naked Gun levels of silliness, it’s a shame it doesn’t engage a bit more on that level. Still, Cop Secret is a knowingly and mostly winningly ridiculous good time.

★★★½

Kate

Dir: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has been trained as an assassin since she was a child. During a job in Osaka, she kills a man in front of his teenage daughter. Feeling guilty, she tells her handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson) that she wants out, but there’s one more job to finish. During that job, Kate is poisoned by the yakuza and, with less than a day to live, goes looking for vengeance.

I like Die Hard 4.0 [aka: Live Free or Die Hard] more than most, sure, it’s barely a Die Hard movie, but I like it on its own merits as a big, stupid action film. Since I first saw it though, I’ve always thought it could have done more with Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s fierce performance as Lucy McClane. Happily, in the past couple of years, Winstead has started to capitalise on the potential I thought she showed as an action star, first in Gemini Man, then as Huntress in Birds of Prey and now as Joan Wick… sorry, Kate.

Kate is a patchwork of old ideas. The story takes classic noir DOA’s premise of a person investigating their own murder and ties it to a revenge actioner, with shades of Leon in the relationship that eventually develops between Kate and the mobster’s niece (Miku Martineau) she kidnaps for blackmail purposes. It’s all extremely obvious and pretty much the entire audience will be able to call the final villain from very early on but, as with so much of the genre, the story is really just a skeleton on which to hang the action.

To his credit, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) delivers a kinetic and colourful film that keeps you on board through sheer momentum, never really giving you time, in the moment at least, to care that the plot is threadbare and that Kate has approximately two traits where you’d hope a character would be. While it’s clearly shot on location, the Tokyo setting is largely set dressing rather than something the film feels particularly embedded in, but that set dressing often looks pretty spectacular, from a geisha house that hosts the film’s first, and probably best, fight to the car that Kate steals which, the second she turns it on, lights up with neon and blasts out Japanese rock band Band Maid’s Blooming (the band also appear, playing a different song, in a concert scene). 

Most of the action is very good, which shouldn’t be a surprise with John Wick 3 and Birds of Prey stunt coordinator Jonathan Eusebio playing the same role here and serving as second unit director. Though Winstead is clearly doing a good amount of her own fighting, and is largely excellent at it, credit should also go to her double, Elisabeth P. Carpenter. The action, for the most part, is dynamic and bloody. The aforementioned geisha house sequence sees Winstead ploughing through an array of yakuza, largely with knives. It feels indebted to John Wick and The Raid, but also, in the way it uses blood splatter, particularly at the end of the sequence, to Japanese action films. The only exception to this trend of good action sequences is a glaring one; a penthouse set fight in which everything appears to have gone wrong. Japanese musician and actor Miyavi cameos in this sequence, and I can only wonder if they simply didn’t have the time to rehearse or do as many takes as were needed with him. Much of the time, this fight feels as though it is moving at three-quarter speed. Throughout, there are shockingly obvious missed and pulled impacts. In the background, there’s equally misguided and poorly shot comic business with Miku Martineau trying to load a gun. It’s a genuinely terrible scene in the middle of a film that otherwise has solid action throughout.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is, whatever she’s in, one of those actors who makes the film around her better. She digs in here and, despite not having much to play, and the writing never making the relationship between her and Martineau’s often grating Ani convincing, she delivers on the physicality of the role. For most of the film, and increasingly as it goes on, Kate is a wreck. From Winstead we get a performance of a woman trying desperately (and, to be fair, often wildly implausibly), to extend her last gasp. Through it all, Winstead holds the camera with her customary charisma, seldom more so than walking in for the final confrontation; shades on, cigarette dangling from her mouth, backed by a phalanx of machine gun-wielding yakuza. In a way it’s a shame that we know from the beginning that Kate can’t be saved, because Winstead makes enough of an impression that I’d happily watch another film with this character, certainly much more so than the franchise threatened at the end of Kate Beckinsale’s similar, but far worse, Jolt.

So, why not a higher grade? For as fun as it can be, there’s not much to Kate. There’s nothing to really invest in. Ani, the one character we might have an investment in is, unfortunately, written to be an irritant. Equally while the Japanese cast, including Tadanobu Asano and Jun Kunimura, make what they can of the material, there isn't much depth to the villains, or to the depiction of Japanese characters on the whole. That all being the case, and all aspects of the ending being obvious from the off, it’s difficult to get much more out of the action sequences than an occasional ‘that was cool’. While the action is good, it’s not quite of the very top rank. Jonathan Eusebio and his stunt team do some sterling work, but clearly former effects artist Cedric Nicolas-Troyan doesn’t have the same innate understanding of action that John Wick director and former stuntman Chad Stahelski seems to. Overall then, Kate is a fun time, but one that only lingers until the credits run.

★★★

2021 Catch Up: Mortal Kombat and Wrong Turn

Mortal Kombat [2021]

Dir: Simon McQuoid

When I was a kid, there was a series of TV adverts for a wood varnish called Ronseal. They were very simple, saying that the product “Does what it says on the tin”. Mortal Kombat is cinematic Ronseal. I don’t mean that as a bad thing.

The last Mortal Kombat game I played was probably the third; the series’ last 16 Bit venture, and I saw Paul WS Anderson’s 1995 film once, and have never felt the need to revisit it, so I am not at all versed in the lore, but the story here is perfectly accessible to newcomers. MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is at the tail end of his career, but after a fight he’s told by Jax (Mehcad Brooks) that  his dragon shaped birthmark means he has been chosen as one of the champions of Earth for the upcoming Mortal Kombat championship. However, Shang Tsung (Chin Han) has dispatched his fighters—including Sub Zero (Joe Taslim)—to kill as many of Earth’s champions as possible, to win the tournament before it can start.

It is an odd choice, with a game as packed with characters to choose from as this one (the latest edition has 32, discounting some characters from other franchises) to create an entirely new character to act as the audience surrogate. That said, Lewis Tan, like the rest of the actors here, does what he can with fairly basic material. Where character should be, Cole has a wife and daughter (Laura Brent and Matilda Kimber) to protect. This does provide a link to Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), whose family Sub Zero murders in the prologue, but there’s not much more there than a couple of walking plot devices. The rest of the writing is largely functional, though Kano’s constant f bomb heavy quips, and casual misogyny towards Sonya (Jessica McNamee) get to be wearing pretty quickly. That said, this is Mortal Kombat. I suspect there is a deeper and richer backstory that fans might want to see, but as a casual viewer, I’m not really looking for great emotional depth here… I just want to see some good, bloody, fights.

On an action level, Mortal Kombat delivers. The fight the fans want to see is between Sub Zero and Scorpion, and we get one of those at either end of the film. Joe Taslim, though almost always masked, makes for a pretty menacing villain—it helps that the costume design is more intricate and less primary coloured than in the previous films—and his throwdowns with Sanada are fast, furious, and brutal. There is a little overcutting but the sequences aren’t just a blur of fists and feet. Director Simon McQuoid pulls back fairly frequently to allow us to see sequences of martial arts and emphasises the right moments, particularly the solidly impressive effects used to realise Sub Zero’s powers (a dagger frozen out of his opponent’s blood is the film’s single coolest image)  If anything, the film has bigger editing problems in its dramatic scenes, which indicate large chunks having been cut out, than during its fights. Each fighter has their own style, with Ludi Lin and Max Huang as Liu Kang and Kung Lao much more graceful than the pure brute force of Kano (Josh Lawson) and Jax. Sonya Blade is a little underused, and it’s strange to have her not be one of the chosen fighters in the beginning. The subplot of the fighters having to discover their special abilities isn’t a bad idea, but it’s underexplored and few of those abilities have any connection to even the loose sense we have of who they are. On the other hand, the effects do generally look cool, and they aren’t overused to the point that they become what the fights revolve around.

Mortal Kombat is no masterpiece; the action has its moments, but it doesn’t get close to some of the best work being done in the genre right now, whether that’s the John Wick’s of the world, the films Taslim was making back in Indonesia or even some of Scott Adkins’ DTV work and the threadbare story and characters don’t give us a lot to invest in. What it is, though, is fun. It ticks the boxes it needs to tick, it’s solidly entertaining and at 109 minutes including credits it doesn’t outstay its welcome. In this case, I’m perfectly happy with a bit of Ronseal filmmaking.

★★★

Wrong Turn [2021] 

Dir: Mike P. Nelson

There is an inherent challenge with remakes. Stick closely to the original film and that’s all people will see and comment on; either it’s too close and you might as well not have bothered, or every little change will be nitpicked and compared to the previous film. On the other hand, if you depart wildly from what has gone before then all you’re perceived to be doing is cashing in on a title, without delivering on the promises inherent in it. Wrong Turn, whatever its other qualities, does genuinely do its best to square this vicious little circle.

It no doubt helps that I have no investment in Wrong Turn. I saw the 2003 film when it came out on DVD and, while I liked it well enough, probably haven’t watched it more than once more in the following 16 plus years. I’ve also never seen any of the sequels, so I can’t claim any affection for it as a franchise. That said, the first 40 minutes or so of this version (written by original screenwriter Alan McElroy) feel pretty familiar. A group of six friends (on a hiking trip this time, rather than being waylaid by a car accident) find themselves lost in the Virginia woods and having to survive when they are threatened by a family of sorts living in the forest. The details have changed somewhat—particularly with the addition of a framing story about Scott (Matthew Modine), the father of our lead, Jen (Charlotte Vega), looking for his daughter six weeks after she has dropped off the map—but the basic shape of the film is similar enough that it makes some sense as a remake. The second hour, however, is very different and seems to have divided fans of the original film.  

In its second half the film takes a sharp diversion from the backwoods slasher it’s been hinting it would be, turning more to folk and survival horror, though with a generous helping of gore. Bill Sage plays a patriarch who still leads a family of sorts that one could call inbred, but both the society and the individuals within it are very different from those in the original. I can see how this bait and switch could be seen as a negative for fans of the franchise, but credit to McElroy and director Mike P. Nelson for trying something very different from the original, if not so much in its own right.

The character writing isn’t the strong suit here. Bill Sage’s performance; more restrained than you might expect, and more effective for it, is the standout. He also gets the best material McElroy has to offer. Jen is a fairly bland lead/final girl, there’s a potentially interesting turn involving her boyfriend Darius (Adain Bradley), but it happens out of the blue, with some development this element might have been much more effective. The friend group is filled out with the asshole (Dylan McTee as Adam), the brain (Emma Dumont as Milla) and a gay couple (Vardaan Arora and Adrian Favela as Gary and Luis). These performances, and Matthew Modine’s, are fine and a more diverse cast where that diversity is treated largely as a given rather than a plot point is welcome, but that’s not to say that any of the characters has much of a personality. Like the small plot turn with Darius, Jen’s switch to badass for the film’s final act isn’t very well developed, and there’s no reason that two or three minutes couldn’t be spent to build up her sudden Lara Croft level prowess with a bow and arrow.

Behind the camera, Mike P Nelson delivers what's needed. An early sequence with a tree trunk rolling down a hill is well-executed, and the violence is made to feel brutal without always dwelling on detail that might betray what was likely not the biggest of budgets. The aftermath, however, particularly a couple of wince-inducing caved-in heads, is appropriately nasty. Like the screenplay, the direction doesn’t do anything wildly original, but it at least subverts a few expectations an audience might have of this film, and supplies the ingredients demanded of it in a way that is somewhat filling, if not especially nutritious.

Overall, Wrong Turn 2021 is probably the beneficiary of my floor level expectations. It’s at least trying to do something new; sure, it’s just remixing a bunch of elements we’ve seen before, but it has chosen elements we wouldn’t expect from this series. In a lot of ways, it does exactly what it sets out to do; injecting new impetus into a franchise by bringing some different ideas and elements to it. With deeper characterisation and a bit more motivation for the way certain things proceed I might have gone for a higher grade, but this is a perfectly entertaining way for a horror fan to pass some time, no more, but certainly no less.

★★★

2021 Catch Up: Chloe Grace Moretz [Shadow in the Cloud and Tom & Jerry]

Shadow in the Cloud

Dir: Roseanne Liang

1942. Just as their mission is about to take off, the crew of an armed supply plane is joined by Maude (Chloe Grace Moretz), a female flyer with a mysterious package that has to be kept safe. Made to sit in the turret under the plane, without her package, Maude becomes trapped, and that’s before she spots a ‘gremlin’ on the wing and an enemy fighter in pursuit.

Shadow in the Cloud is, it’s fair to say, a lot. It tries to roll several genres; claustrophobic thriller, creature feature, wilfully ludicrous action movie together, while also folding in a big helping of social commentary, and do it all in 83 minutes including credits. That director and co-writer (unfortunately with Max Landis) Roseanne Liang manages it, and only occasionally drops one of the many balls she’s juggling, is pretty remarkable. As Maude gets on the plane, and while she is locked in the turret and communicating via the radio, the characters are understandably broadly drawn. It has to be said a lot of the dialogue, most of it unreconstructed sexism directed towards her, is interchangeable between them. However, the long scenes that are just Moretz trapped inside this tiny pod are extremely claustrophobic, especially once she’s trapped with the gremlin able to attack from the outside.

The creature feature aspects also work well. The design of the gremlin is fairly familiar; a bat-like monster with sharp claws, but it’s well-rendered for the most part and there’s a sense of its presence and of the pain it can inflict in the first attack scene. Later we get to see it more fully, and again it's impressive. The effects in the big fight are well done enough that, even with a small budget, we don’t have any sense of Moretz trying to punch an empty space where the CG will be filled in.

This is only Roseanne Liang’s second feature. Her first, 2011’s My Wedding and Other Secrets, sounds like a pretty conventional rom-com, but it has my attention both on the basis of this one and featuring the great Cheng Pei-pei. Shadow in the Cloud is a big swing, and Liang pulls together all the elements, wedding them to strong images. The use of red and green light is striking, especially when it’s used over close-ups that identify the plane’s crew as we first hear them on the radio. Married to the synth score by Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper and inspired choice of end credits song, it’s an aspect that identifies the film as looking back more to B-Movies of the 80s than strictly to its world war two setting. 

Chloe Moretz is clearly having a great time as Maude, especially in the third act as she embraces her first action role since Hit Girl. She continues to project the toughness and resourcefulness that has always been part of her screen persona (and that made her such a terrible fit as Carrie). That we have any emotional investment in the McGuffin, the big reveal of which doesn’t quite resonate as powerfully as it might if there were a little more setup behind it, but undeniably raises the stakes, is down to her investment in the role and in that rushed backstory. The fact she treats the material seriously grounds it just enough for there to be tension even as it ramps up the ludicrousness.

This turn into the third act is where Shadow in the Cloud might lose some people. But others will find as I did, its full embrace and recognition of its own ridiculousness, while not winking at us, an audacious turn into a third act that has some spectacular action for a film of this budget level. For all its silliness though, this last part of the film does also bring the film’s politics front and centre, the idea seems to be that Liang is showing Maude as a woman embracing but not limited by traditional roles; that she can do what the men on the crew do, even best them at it, but still be more than just a ‘badass female character’. It’s all wrapped up in the film’s triumphant final image.

As I’ve noted, Shadow in the Cloud is trying to do a lot in a short time, and sometimes that means it short changes some elements (the male characters are as lightly sketched as the backstory), but it also means that it is a relentless entertainment. You do, at a certain point—probably when an explosion catapults Maude back into the plane—have to just decide to go with it, but if you do, I can’t imagine you not having enormous fun with it.

★★★★

Tom & Jerry [2021]

Dir: Tim Story

Tom and Jerry cartoons might be the first piece of filmmaking, of media, that I remember really loving. The Hanna Barbera shorts may be simple in premise—cat chases mouse, slapstick violence ensues—but the endless invention of the gags and the malleability of the animation, stretching and squashing its characters into strange new shapes, gets incredible mileage out of it.

The problem with taking Tom and Jerry from seven minutes to over ninety is easy to see; there’s no plot, no characters to speak of, and an hour and a half is long time to spend just stringing together gags without any real connective tissue. The 1993 film didn’t manage to square this circle, and committed the sacrilege of having Tom and Jerry talking for most of the running time. This version gets closer, but still fumbles.

The film is set in the real world, but for the apparently accepted fact that all animals are animated. We pick up with Kayla (a game Chloe Grace Moretz), just fired from her delivery rider job, she manages to pass off another woman’s CV as her own and get a job at a fancy New York hotel helping to organise the wedding of famous couple Preeta and Ben (Pallavi Sharda and Colin Jost). When Jerry moves into the hotel, Kayla volunteers to get rid of him, with the help of Tom. This doesn’t seem like a bad hook on which to hang the film’s slapstick sequences, but far too much screen time is taken up not by Tom and Jerry (or even Kayla and the rest of the hotel staff, including Rob Delaney, Michael Peña, Jordan Bolger and Patsy Ferran) getting into physically impossible comedic scrapes but by a story about Preeta not wanting Ben to go so big with their wedding and not listening to her about it. This is a kids movie, so it’s hardly an issue how shallow this story is, and Sharda and Jost are perfectly fine in their parts, it’s just that nothing about it is either funny or interesting, and it keeps the film’s main attractions off-screen for long periods at a time.

When it is focused on the cat and mouse duel, Tom and Jerry captures the essence of the original shorts beautifully (down to referencing a lot of classic gags). The Rube Goldberg like practicalities of shooting the plates for the animation to go over must have been fun, because the real world mayhem appears largely practical, but stays faithful to cartoon physics. The animation isn’t always brilliantly integrated, but the style, a sort of pseudo-3D look that has the flavour of classic Tom and Jerry, but doesn’t feel entirely flat, works well once you adjust to it. 

The film’s first half-hour is easily its strongest passage, with pure slapstick routines like Tom and Jerry fighting while Tom is playing keyboards in the park and Tom trying to get into the hotel, walking across power lines with predictable results, capturing the energy and look of the shorts perfectly and scoring some big laughs. As the film runs on though, there is less focus on these sorts of sequences, and the laughs dissipate. 

The live-action segments, to be fair, do have a couple of gags that hit. Peña taking a joke Moretz makes about a fish being in charge of aquatic activities at the hotel literally is very funny, as is a throwaway line from one of the spectators watching Tom play in the park, and British actress Patsy Ferran has a weird energy as Joy the bell girl that made me laugh a few times. On the whole though, whenever the titular pair are off-screen, the film’s energy dips disastrously. Moretz, strangely, plays better off the animation than she does most of her human co-stars, especially Jordan Bolger, who I think is meant to be a love interest of sorts, but the chemistry is absent to the point that the intent isn’t even clear. This is a real problem when it’s her job to hold together the human story of the film, such as it is.

There are good things here, and moments in which Tim Story and his team capture exactly what made Tom and Jerry brilliant, but there is also a sense that part of what made them brilliant is also the reason they don’t work at this running time. The surrounding padding that has to be there to facilitate some sort of story is often dull, and the balance is off, with the pure slapstick making up perhaps only 20% of the screen-time. It’s a big improvement on the last Tom and Jerry film, but that only goes so far.

★★

Vanguard [15]

Dir: Stanley Tong

Vanguard is a personal protection agency run by Tang Huating (Jackie Chan). Their client Qin Guoli (Jackson Lou) and his daughter Fareeda (Ruohan Xu) have been kidnapped by Omar (Eyad Hourani), the son of an arms dealer that Qin had previously worked with. Tang and his young team of mercenaries must rescue Qin and Fareeda.

Jackie Chan is a workhorse. This year, as he turns 67, it will be 60 years since he entered Yu Jim Yuen’s chinese opera school, where much of the greatest generation of martial arts actors and directors was forged. For the last 50 years Chan has been making film after film, and since the release of Drunken Master in 1978 he has been essentially uncontested as the biggest star in Asian action cinema. In that time he’s broken just about every bone in his body doing stunts. He has a permanent hole in his head from one that very nearly killed him. In short, you can forgive him for appearing tired.

The last twenty years or so haven’t been the greatest time to be a Jackie Chan fan. There might be the occasional flash of inspiration (among them the rollerskate suit in Chinese Zodiac; creditable dramatic performances in the remake of The Karate Kid and The Foreigner, and the overall surprisingly solid Railroad Tigers) but even the films that have a couple of great moments can be a chore to plod through. It’s also been clear for a while that he’s been using doubles more and had greater CGI assists. Combine all that with the fact that plot, acting and character have never been his strong suits as a filmmaker, and you get the recipe for garbage like Kung Fu Yoga and Bleeding Steel.

There is some promise to Vanguard. Firstly, it reunites Jackie with Stanley Tong, who directed Police Story 3 and First Strike, as well as Rumble in the Bronx (and, ahem, Kung Fu Yoga). Secondly, it appears that Chan has begun to recognise some of his limitations. He’s billed first here of course, but largely takes a supporting role and cedes the spotlight to a younger team of Yang Yang, Lun Ai and Miya Muqi as some of Vanguard’s best protection officers. Initially, this seems like a decent idea, but whether it’s the perfunctory writing (the bromance between Yang Yang and Lun Ai is very forced) or Tong’s direction, none of the younger leads makes much of an impact. The screenplay here doesn't give them much to work with, but the essential thing they lack is anything unique about any of their screen presence, something Jackie always had in spades. None of them establish much personality, neither do they particularly stand out in the action sequences. Unfortunately, Chan can’t save the film on this score, never the most gifted actor, he’s got a poorly defined character and gives little expression to any of his dialogue, while also spending most of his time in the action sequences very much in the background, firing a gun. We probably see less than a minute of actual martial arts technique from him, perhaps half of that in the foreground of the frame.

In their first three collaborations, Stanley Tong brought out the best in Jackie. It may have been that, having directed many of his own films between the late 70s and early 90s, Chan was taking a stronger hand behind the camera, but Tong’s style both in shooting and editing seemed a perfect match for his star. Whether it’s because he remains in thrall to what is becoming an outdated action style or because he is trying to hide limitations in his cast, Tong opts for a choppier style of action here; not full Bourne perhaps, but certainly much shakier and faster cut than his work used to be. This is the worst possible decision because Jackie’s action is uniquely his own style, and in Vanguard it looks like it could come out of any other action film. There’s not even a signature stunt, though a gag excusing that is one of the film’s only proper laughs. Add woeful CGI (the lion) and green screen work, and you’ve got a film that fails on a lot of technical levels.

Vanguard isn’t Jackie Chan’s worst film, but it’s another sign that his place in the future is probably behind the camera. I would love to see him bring his old style and rhythm to films starring a new generation of action actors, but if that’s what Vanguard was going for, it’s a dismal failure.

★ 

The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud [12A]

Dir: Martin Owen

Max Cloud (Scott Adkins) has crash-landed on an unfamiliar planet. His ship is in need of repair, but he’s also got to survive attacks from the inhabitants of an intergalactic prison that is also housed on the planet. That’s the plot of the videogame being played by Sarah (Isabelle Allen) in Brooklyn in 1990. One night, she finds herself sucked in to the world of the game and, with the help of her friend Cowboy (Franz Drameh), controlling her game character from the outside, she must complete the game in order to escape.

From the trailer, The Intergalactic Adventures Of Max Cloud looked like fun; a tongue in cheek action movie with Adkins poking fun at his persona in a cross between Last Action Hero and the recent Jumanji films. That’s definitely the idea here, but the execution leaves much to be desired. Where all of the aforementioned films work is in excluding the outside world. We assume that when the credits roll on Jack Slater IV in the real world, the world of the movie still exists, and the Jumanji films smartly excluded the idea of anyone outside the game world controlling the characters. This is one of the most fundamental ways in which Max Cloud fails to work at the most basic level. 

Having Cowboy at the controls throws all sorts of questions up as to how the mechanics of what is happening work. Sarah ends up in the body of an apparently useless character, Jake (Elliot James Langridge) a cook on Max’s ship, who we’re told nobody would choose to play as. We do see Cowboy control her avatar. A mildly amusing gag has ‘Jake’ uncontrollably walking into a wall because Cowboy has set the controller down to go to the bathroom, but there also long periods in which ‘Jake’ is either standing around talking with Max or one of the other NPCs (most often Rexy, played by co-writer Sally Collett) or just walking from place to place. By including Cowboy in the game, and sometimes showing him simply walking the characters through empty screens, we have to wonder how this game plays in the real world. Fights are so infrequent that it appears deathly dull. On screen, Max Cloud the game looks like a side scrolling beat ‘em up from an early 16-bit console, but those games were generally jam-packed with enemies, allowing you few opportunities to rest. They were also full of power-ups; health bonuses in whatever form, special moves for characters to execute and occasionally extra lives. None of these things appear to be available (but for in one sequence at the end) within the world of Max Cloud.

Only on a couple of occasions does the film find interesting ways to exploit the video game mechanics. A mid-film end of level boss battle works quite well, with Sarah figuring out the pattern of attack and exploiting it to beat the boss, just as she’d have to back home with the controller. Easily the film’s best sequence is Scott Adkins’ first fight (of far too few). It’s only in this fight that Adkins gets to have fun with the martial arts choreography. He deliberately makes his movements staccato, as if rendered in limited animation, and strikes the kinds of poses you’d expect to see from a sprite in a 90s game, but does so while also delivering a tremendously fun fight. 

On the whole, Adkins is clearly trying something here. He gives Max an over the top American accent and heroic bearing, the bearing shifts later in the film, as Sarah seems to make the game characters a little more human, and it might have been fun if he’d lost the accent too, as it feels like there’s some idea that even Max might, by the third act, have some awareness of how over the top his character is. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t dig into that idea, or any others really. Even Jumanji, in a comedic way, used the avatars to expand its human characters, Max Cloud never even appears to aspire to that and Isabelle Allen and Franz Drameh are saddled with dull characters who don’t achieve or change much during the film. Among the supporting cast, Sally Collett reserves many of her screenplay’s best lines for her own character, and the parade of underdeveloped characters continues with John Hannah’s bad guy, Revengor and Lashana Lynch, who is wasted as his sidekick Sheee.

Though the film is named for Max Cloud, Scott Adkins doesn’t have enough to do here, he’s a supporting character in his own movie and too much of what he does is off-screen, notably a couple of fights which could have been fun, but director Martin Owen leaves us stuck with ‘Jake’ and other characters while they hide and Max does the ass kicking (again, what does this suggest about the game mechanics? What is Cowboy doing at this point?) Some of this is surely down to a visibly low budget. The sets often appear cramped and the costume design, particularly that for Revengor, looks rather cheap. Disappointingly, there’s not much ingenuity on display to solve the budgetary problems, it would be easy enough to fold in gags about game design or limited graphics to paper over the cracks and provide some laughs, but this is just another way that neither the game world nor the situation that Sarah finds herself in really convince.

There is potential in The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud. The idea of Scott Adkins getting his own Last Action Hero is a fun one at heart but this, sadly, is another project that fails to use him, or the ideas surrounding him, to its best advantage. How is his comic timing? It works in that one fight scene, but otherwise, the screenplay doesn’t give him enough jokes to stretch his range much, so it’s hard to tell. Overall this is a disappointment; a couple of fun moments marooned in a film the central conceit of which is too glitchy to be functional.

★½

Martial Arts Monday: Armour of God 2: Operation Condor

Dir: Jackie Chan

Jackie Chan has never shied away from using other filmmakers work as inspiration, indeed his entire persona is heavily influenced by silent comedians, to the degree that he has paid direct homage to stunts by Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, among others. The Armour of God series is his riff on Indiana Jones. This second entry (confusingly released in the US simply as Operation Condor, with Armour of God later released as Operation Condor 2), whether by design or accident, sticks most closely to the template laid out by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

In typical Indy fashion, the film begins with what feels like the end of an adventure we didn’t see. In this case, Jackie (as the character is called in the restored extended version I watched for this) is taking gems from a cave but is attacked by the tribe that lives there when he drinks the holy water. It’s all a lot of nonsense to lead into a pretty spectacular sequence of the character zorbing down a cliff and sets the tone pretty well.

At 117 minutes in this cut (extended from 107 in the original Hong Kong release, and just 80 minutes in its US version), Operation Condor takes a while to set up its story, which eventually finds Jackie sent to locate Nazi gold buried in the Sahara desert with three women (Eva Cobo, Carol ‘DoDo’ Cheng and Shôko Ikeda) in tow, who all have some connection either to the hunt or to the people who stole the gold. Aside from the set pieces (an exceptional car and bike chase and a slapstick break in and fight at Cobo’s house), the first hour of the film is a slog, especially because Chan and co-writer Edward Tang, in their cribbing from Spielberg, have decided to give all three of the female co-stars the Willie Scott role. This means that rather than just one perma-screaming damsel in endless distress we have an entire chorus of them. Along with the several times that their (mostly implied) nudity is used as a distraction in fights and the amount of times each of them gets hit, it all feels pretty retrograde, as do the racial politics, with a bunch of white stuntmen playing mujahideen fighters (better that though than putting them in brownface).

What keeps the whole thing afloat during the first two acts is twofold. First, there are just about enough setpieces to paper over the cracks and secondly, when those moments come, Chan attacks them with all his customary energy and precision. Operation Condor took 18 months to make and was the most expensive film made in Hong Kong up to that time and Jackie and co-director Frankie Chan put it all up on screen. The mid-film set piece that ranges all across the desert hotel where Jackie and the women are staying is a highlight, with agile and funny martial arts mixing with stunt work and an epic amount of squibs laying waste to the set when Eva Cobo fires a machine gun she can’t control.

As a fan of martial arts cinema, I always know broadly that what we’re waiting for is the last act of the movie. The action beats up until then are all well and good, but it’s all prologue. This being a long film, Jackie and his stunt team have a lot saved up for what is a roughly half-hour finale that moves from fight to fight, from overblown set to overblown set, and from stunt to stunt with breathless energy. Once we get to the base where the gold is held, the film is on rails (much like Temple of Doom when it finally gets to its own underground finale). Happily, he finally throws his leading ladies (all of whom, annoying though their characters can be, are very game and look like they’re having a great time), allowing them some inventiveness in a great little comic action beat. 

Operation Condor came in the middle of an all but unprecedented 18 year run between The Young Master and Who Am I in which, at least in the Hong Kong films he was top-billed in, Jackie barely put a foot wrong—figuratively speaking. It’s in this last half hour that this film finally kicks fully into gear to stand alongside exalted company like the Police Story and Project A films. The fight that runs through the first room in the base, with Jackie winding his way through railings and into and out of vents as he fights, is reminiscent, at a time when they had fallen out, of Sammo Hung’s masterful Eastern Condors. Jackie, if never as hard-hitting as his bigger brother, inevitably goes bigger. First there is a fight across two massive seesawing platforms, and then the grand finale in a wind tunnel. This sequence is everything Jackie Chan does well: it is grandiose in its silliness, but also allows him to play to all of his physical comedy strengths as well as achieve some unique action beats. 

This sequence, along with the end of first act chase and the last half hour as a whole, are where Operation Condor best captures the sheer joy of watching Jackie Chan work at his best. The film as a whole may be inconsistent, but in its best moments it soars like Jackie as he uses the turbine to fly at an opponent, gleefully yelling “Superman”.

★★★½

2020 Catch Up: Vol 2

Madness in the Method

Dir: Jason Mewes

It’s probably fair to say that Jason Mewes largely lucked into his 25-year career as an actor. When Kevin Smith made Clerks, he cast his friend as Jay simply because Mewes made him laugh. While Mewes has done plenty of other acting work, he’s never really escaped the character of Jay (playing him again in the upcoming Twilight of the Mallrats) and that is the jumping-off point for this, his feature directorial debut.

The screenplay, by Dominic Burns and Chris Anastasi has Mewes playing himself as an actor who wants to break out of playing Jay and other assorted stoner roles by landing the lead role in The Odyssey, an Oscar-tipped production that will be the directorial debut of Clerks actor Brian O’Halloran (just go with it). To that end, he’s introduced to a book on method acting, but as he goes ever more method he descends into madness.

The idea of an actor getting too into a part has been mined for chills before, but Mewes tries to lean into the comedy of the idea. To be fair, he finds a handful of laughs. A scene with former TV Superman Dean Cain is pretty funny; Cain is portrayed as always fearful of fans coming up to him and being disappointed that he’s not actually Superman, there are a few amusing lines here and Cain seems to be on board with poking fun at himself. Unfortunately, the funny moments are few and far between, otherwise largely confined to scenes of loose, possibly improvised, banter between Mewes and Kevin Smith (also playing a version of himself).

The problem is largely that Mewes doesn’t exactly have the A list to choose from in his casting. Vinnie Jones is as charisma-free as ever, even when playing himself; Gina Carano is wasted, not even getting to fight as Mewes’ girlfriend, despite the fact that there’s a scene late on where her doing so could be pretty funny and Blake Harrison is woefully unfunny as a stereotypically gay entertainment reporter. Most of the rest of the cast are restricted to cameos, clearly working just a day or two and seemingly putting in all the effort that would suggest, Teri Hatcher’s scene, for instance, looks like it could have been tossed off in a few minutes in her home office.

Mewes’ direction and performance are both perfunctory. It’s ironic that by playing an actor desperate to break character he ends up showing that he’s a bland presence outside that character. He doesn’t convince in the scenes where he’s going mad. This might have played if he was able to start out that way and then evolve to become more convincing as his character kept reading about the method, but Mewes simply doesn’t appear versatile enough for this. Directorially the film is largely flat looking, with daytime scenes like the Hollywood party he finds Smith at being especially televisual. When Mewes gets more ambitious things hardly improve, with a couple of nonsensical musical fantasy interludes (happily Mewes doesn’t sing) being the nadir, at least until Danny Trejo shows up in a feather boa, perpetrating another awful gay stereotype because he too has gone method. 

Madness in the Method isn’t a terrible idea, but sadly it doesn’t reveal any untapped potential in Jason Mewes and without doing that it should lean much harder into the essential ludicrousness of its central premise for most of its gags to land. As it is, this hits neither humour nor chills and fails to point to an interesting directorial career for its star.

★

Mulan [2020]

Dir: Niki Caro

The Disney renaissance started at the right time for me, I was 8 when The Little Mermaid came out, 10 for Beauty and the Beast, but by the time Mulan rolled around in 1998 I was 17 and probably thought I was too much of a sophisticated cinephile for another Disney princess movie, and I still haven't got around to filling that gap in my viewing. Coincidentally, right around the time the animated Mulan was coming out, I was just starting to discover martial arts movies, which remain one of my great loves. It was this that drew me to this live action take on the material, not only because of the trailer, which suggested a definite leaning in to the action side of the story, but also the casting, including legends of martial arts cinema like Donnie Yen, Jet Li and Cheng Pei-pei.

I've not been a great lover of Disney's recent run of live-action versions of their animated classics. Up until now only Pete's Dragon has struck me as much more than a very expensive form of karaoke. For the most part, Mulan squares the circle of being both a traditional Disney fairytale and a martial arts action film well. The first act is focused on building the themes of family, self-belief and exceeding the expectations set out for you. We see Mulan as a little girl being mischevious, energetic and showing promise in martial arts, but her father (Tzi Ma) and Mother (Rosalind Chao) make it clear to her that, as a girl, she is not meant to fight and her role is to find a suitable match (facilitated by a matchmaker played by Cheng Pei-pei). When, years later, the Emperor's army comes looking for recruits, Mulan (now played by Yifei Liu) sneaks away to take the place of her father, disgusing herself as a boy so that she can join the regiment led by Commander Tung (Yen) and fight against the rebellion led by Bori Khan (Jason Scott Lee) and his sorceress Xianniang (Gong Li)

The sections with Mulan training and bonding with her fellow recruits are fun, combining a playful sense of growing camaraderie, especially with Chen Honghui (Yoson An) with a real sense of them being prepared for battle in martial arts training montages led by Yen. However, it's when the war starts that the film takes off. Caro and her stunt team marshall some great battle scenes. The large scale sequences are an excellent synthesis of real stunts and high quality CGI, with a strong enough sense of space and flow that we never lose the detail of what's going on. When we zoom in on individual moments, fight coordinators Nuo Sun and Heidi Moneymaker deliver action that can stand comparison with pure martial arts films. The fights may not be as hard-hitting as some, and clearly there is never any blood, but neither do they come off as cartoony. This Mulan, with animal sidekicks and songs stricken from the adaptation, definitely has a somewhat harder edge than I might have expected.

This also comes through in the villains, with Jason Scott Lee forceful as Bori Khan. His story is fairly one-dimensional; he's the bad guy out for revenge on Jet Li's Emperor. A version of this film from another studio might have dug more effectively into the moral ambiguity of the history between the two, but Disney does like its morals painted in black and white. A more effective villain storyline comes from Gong Li and how her attack on Mulan brings out the courage in her to reveal her identity to Tung and the other recruits and step up as a leader in the film's third act. The scenes between Gong Li and Yifei Liu bring out the most nuance we see in Liu's leading performance, which can be a bit flat, as she seems to be the only member of main cast who struggles with her English. These sequences are also some of the most visually impressive, thanks both to the settings and to the striking design of Li's makeup. The message delivered in their last scene together is a little rushed and rather predictable, but it does knit the film's themes together well.

On the whole, Mulan delivers. It serves up some simple but effective morals for the family audience, but it's also visually interesting, with beautiful scenery and design throughout. The action is what marks the film out as different from many other Disney efforts, it wears its influences on its sleeve, nodding especially at the martial arts films of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou. It may never hit those heights, but Niki Caro and the stunt and fight teams deliver consistently thrilling, good looking, action that flows well both narratively and visually. Along with Pete's Dragon this is, flaws and all, one of the high watermarks of Disney's live action remake era.

★★★½

2020 Catch Up: Vol 1

As this long, generally awful, and for cinema notably strange year starts drawing to a close, I come to a familiar part of my process: list time. Each year around Christmas I put out my personal best of the year, and each year I try to play catch up with some of the releases I either missed or need to revisit before finalizing the Top 10 or 20 (probably 20 this year), so here is the first of what should be a series of short(ish) reviews of some of those catch up screenings.

Legacy of Lies
Dir: Adrian Bol

I'm not going to pretend that Scott Adkins the actor can do the kind of emotionally heavyweight work that, say, a Michael Shannon can. On the other hand, in his niche of direct to video action films, he's one of the best. He's got more acting range than a Jason Statham and is considerably more accomplished in the action scenes, he really should be a more mainstream name. That's not to say Legacy of Lies is the best argument for that idea.

The plot, on the vanishingly small off chance that you care, is the usual guff about the bad guys (Russians and/or the CIA in this case) wanting 'the files' that Adkins' Martin, a secret agent turned MMA fighter/bouncer was tasked with protecting 12 years previously. On that mission, Martin's partner was killed, which has left him with a now 12-year-old daughter, Lisa (Honor Kneafsey), who is kidnapped by Suzanne (Andrea Vasiliou), in order to bribe him to get the files.

Shot in Ukraine, Dutch director Adrian Bol's second feature doesn't appear to have the budget to elevate itself much beyond typical DTV fare, though some location shooting does at least give us a bit of a sense of place for Kyiv (the same is not true of any attempt to convince us we're in London in the first act). Adkins doesn't stretch his acting muscles much here, but Honor Kneafsey, so good in the lead voice role in the forthcoming Wolfwalkers, is pretty good as Lisa and she brings a little more emotion out of him in some of their scenes. The bad guys, and Yuliia Sobol, as the daughter of another of Martin's former fellow spies, don't have much opportunity to do more than advance the plot with Bol's generic dialogue.

All this said, Legacy of Lies is still a fun watch. Adkins is seldom less than an engaging presence, and he carries this nonsense fairly well. What matters though, is the action. Fights pepper the movie throughout, with a decent mix of gunplay and martial arts, but definitely more emphasis on the latter, playing to Adkins' strengths. An early MMA bout serves little plot purpose but is one of the film's better punch ups and a mid-film set piece pitting him against (I think) one of the CIA guys is also particularly solid. The editing could be a little more sedate, but the fights are generally well shot; punches and kicks feel like they land hard, and we can generally see what's going on.

When it comes to a film like this, I'm not overly demanding. Legacy of Lies doesn't have the most riveting plot, but it's well enough acted not to be risible, has enough action that it's never dull and is shot proficiently enough that watching the fights is fun. That's doesn't put it up with the Ninja films, Avengement or the peerless among DTV actioners Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning among Adkins' best, but it's enough to recommend it to his fans.

★★½

Blackpink: Light Up The Sky

Dir: Caroline Suh

It's fair to say that in the last couple of years, having had a brief flirtation with the mainstream back in 2012 with Psy's huge hit Gangnam Style, K-Pop has become a massive force in global pop culture. This can largely be put down to the massive crossover success of the boyband BTS, whose fans apparently sabotaged one of Donald Trump's rallies earlier this year by booking tickets en masse, making him humiliatingly take down an 'overflow' stage outside the venue. No other group seems to have achieved this sort of cultural crossover—at least to someone like me, who hasn't followed mainstream pop music closely in at least 15 years—except possibly Blackpink.

Caroline Suh's documentary catches Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé and Lisa on the cusp of and during their 2019 world tour, but also takes a look back, filling in the background of each of the girls and their training under the YG Entertainment system, as well as capturing the relationship between them as bandmates and friends.

Glimpses of the girls auditions, their stories of the gruelling training regime at YG, with 14 hour days spent drilling the same routines and songs prior to a monthly ranking, and the archive footage showing their development over as much as six years before Blackpink's debut is the most interesting content here. It's the point at which we sense the least filter, and yet it still feels as though these sequences only scratch the surface of the story behind the factory-like atmosphere at YG and other talent agencies like it. Several of the girls talk about having felt lonely, or sad at knocking their friends out of the process, but there is definitely a whole film to be made diving more deeply into this world.

The rest of the film is really for fans. Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé and Lisa all come across well, their friendship shines through in all of their interactions, with each of them often running into the others as they finish each others sentences. The bits on their background give some insight into why they might have bonded so quickly, with Rosé and Lisa both coming from overseas (New Zealand and Thailand respectively) and Jennie having lived and gone to school in New Zealand for five years, giving them an international makeup that apparently isn't common among K-Pop bands. It's also clear that they work ridiculously hard, which shows in the footage from their accomplished live shows, and particularly the one at Coachella; their first in the US.

At 79 minutes, Light Up The Sky is brisk and breezy. There are glimpses beneath the surface, but there is definitely a feeling that this is argely a PR product. The girls talk about beng tired and having to make sacrifices to work so hard, but little is allowed to puncture what is a very light and sunny tone. I wonder if, some years down the line, we will see a more warts and all portrait of what goes in to making Blackpink the hugely successful machine it is. Still, this film will be enough of a look into their world to delight fans and perhaps to win them a few more, if what relatively little of their music we hear grabs a few casual viewers.

★★½

Martial Arts Month: Day 3

The Way of the Dragon

Dir: Bruce Lee

I’ve never been the biggest Bruce Lee fan. Obviously, he changed martial arts cinema for all time and arguably, more than 45 years after his sadly early passing, remains its best known name, but I’ve always enjoyed the stars who followed just in his wake more. The Way of the Dragon is a pretty good encapsulation of why.

Lee was coming off the wild and widespread success of Fist of Fury, so he had a lot of sway, and was able to cash it in to make his writing and directorial debut. The results suggest that, while a charismatic star and the most talented martial artist of his generation, he had a way to go as a filmmaker. Lee’s screenplay is basic and dull. It sees him coming to Italy to help protect a Chinese restaurant under threat of takeover from the mob. Lee never manages to establish larger stakes, nor much connection between himself and co-star Nora Miao or the staff of the restaurant, who have been training in karate. The fish out of water comedy of the first half is, to put it mildly, not Lee’s gift as an actor, and makes an already uneventful build up feel grindingly slow.

There are two great scenes in The Way of the Dragon. The fight with Lee wielding dual nunchaku and the finale, with Lee facing off against a young, clean shaven, Chuck Norris. Both sequences deliver the hard hitting action we expect of Lee and are brilliantly choreographed by the star and Unicorn Chan. The direction isn’t always as successful, for instance, Lee’s repeated cutaways to a kitten during the finale are much less funny than he may have imagined. Still, for these blessed minutes, the film delivers what we’re looking for from it. Even the rest of the action sometimes disappoints, never more so than when Hwang Jang Lee steps up, only to be so soundly beaten by Lee that he barely gets a chance to show his abilities (look at his films with Jackie Chan for a far better showcase).

On the whole, I found The Way of the Dragon disappointing. There are isolated moments that explain why Lee was and is so revered, but the film as a whole is largely tedious, not especially well made, and plods its way to those moments.

★★

Martial Arts Month: Days 1 and 2

Invincible Super Chan

Dir: Yang Sun

This was one of the titles requested for this series of reviews, and it turns out to be an ideal place to start. Invincible Super Chan is essentially what I thought all martial arts movies were before I discovered martial arts movies.

Chan is angry because his master was murdered. He seeks revenge, and is then a target himself because of his newfound reputation.

The version I was sent to watch is 81 minutes long, which is nine minutes shorter than the running time quoted on Imdb. It shows. The editing is haphazard beyond belief. Apparently, this film attracted some controversy on release and was nearly banned (this may be hyperbole, it’s hard to tell), but it definitely seems to be censored, with many images of blades showing everything but the strike, so we get the often disorienting spectacle of cutting straight from knives just flying through the air with no discernible target to people writhing on the ground, stabbed. This isn’t to say Chan needs to stab people, indeed patting them lightly on the back makes them go flying, such is his strength. His jumps are also hilarious, less wuxia wirework and more like something out of MST3K subject, Pumaman.

The violence is non stop and pretty inventive (ramming a stone down someone’s throat is fairly novel, as is the use of an exploding flag as a weapon), but even though it’s endearingly bonkers, hilariously badly dubbed and entertaining for its rickety production values, you’d never mistake Invincible Super Chan for a good film. An entertaining one though… that’s another matter.

★★

Iron Fisted Monk

Dir: Sammo Hung

I’ve never felt that, at least in the West, Sammo Hung has entirely got his dues. He’s one of the greatest martial arts stars, choreographers and directors of all time and Iron Fisted Monk, his 1977 directorial debut, shows that talent in nascent form.

The plot isn’t the tightest Hung ever put to screen, but it sees him training at Shaolin Temple, where he went after his uncle, whose noodle shop he worked in, was murdered by the Manchu. He leaves the temple early, along with a monk who is his senior (Chen Sing) and they end up pursuing a Manchu official (Hung’s frequent co-star and here co-choreographer, Fung Hak On) who has been leaving a trail of rape and murder in his wake.

In contrast to his opera school brother and frequent collaborator Jackie Chan, Hung’s films have always been notable for their hard edges. That’s more true of Iron Fisted Monk than even Hung’s own later work. The choreography is big and classical, but it’s also hard hitting, with plenty of bloody injuries depicted. More surprising is the level of exploitation content, particularly a very nasty and fairly violent rape scene that had to be cut by over a minute for the first UK DVD release (the recent Blu Ray, which I watched for this, is uncut).

What shows through is Hung’s directorial talent. He never quite balances the slapstick of early scenes with the nastiness that runs through the rest of the film, but both are well captured. One particular match cut in the rape scene, from Dean Shek raising his hand to one woman to Fung Hak On slapping the rape victim is especially (if disgustingly) effective. The action is plentiful and flows beautifully. In this respect Hung is already a master of his craft and while he gets many of the best moments he’s not above ceding the spotlight to Chen Sing. The finale shows off the best filmmaking, with Hung’s fluid camera often gliding between the two fights taking place in the same room.

Sammo Hung would make better films than Iron Fisted Monk, but as a statement of intent and a demonstration of his skills both in front of and behind the camera, this was an excellent start. 

★★★★