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
Dir: Adrian Bol
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
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