From The Archives: NINJA ASSASSIN (2009).

 Something I wrote way back when.  I’m prouder of this than I probably ought to admit.

Ninja Assassin crept inconspicuously onto DVD shelves today.  No, it’s not all that good, but how much good do you expect?  If you keep your expectations at a rational level, you’ll have a good time.  It should be noted that there’s not exactly a precedent for overly impressive quantities of cinematic quality in the ninja genre.  Ninja movies are probably my favorite genre of movie where you couldn’t name a single legitimately “good” one and you don’t need to care about the distinction anyway.  There are good movies and there are fun movies, and sometimes the two overlap and sometimes they don’t.  In the past twenty years, movies like The English Patient, Titanic, Shakespeare In Love, American Beauty, A Beautiful Mind, and Chicago have been deemed worthy of the awarded title “Best Picture” – but add them all up and they still can’t match the number of times I’ve seen Shogun Assassin.  (That’s Shogun Assassin, not Ninja Assassin – but it’s an understandable mistake.  These movies do tend to overlap in the naming.)

 

Ninja Assassin is a movie without much common sense, and one that is boldly meaningless when it comes to matters of theme or emotion, but it kept me thoroughly entertained throughout its admirably efficient running time.  There are ninja-on-ninja fights and ninja-on-cop fights, ninja stars and ninja swords, ninja jumping and ninja grunting, explosions and rain and rivers of blood and one very pretty girl (the lovely Naomie Harris.)  You really only need the one pretty girl when she’s THAT pretty, and surrounded by ninjas.  The French film director Jean-Luc Godard said, “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.”  Well, all I personally need to like a movie is ninjas and Naomie Harris.  By that barometer, Ninja Assassin succeeds by a wide margin.

The story is pretty standard and pretty forgettable by ninja standards.  One ninja develops a conscience and tries to break from his ninja assassin clan, so the ninja assassin master sends all of his ninja brothers after him for some ninja reckoning.  The ninja clan is technically evil so they’re into some real-world criminal activity, which is how Interpol gets into the story.  Naomie Harris, who I’ve appreciated very much in movies like 28 Days Later and Miami Vice, is a low-level agent who picks up on the case and has trouble convincing her supervisors that the European ninja threat is real.  To be fair, the ninjas in this movie can literally blend into the shadows and become invisible, so they’re even a little less believable than the average every-day ninja.

 

The movie’s main character is generally ridiculous.  He’s played by a single-named Korean pop star named Rain, who can at least be complimented on his commitment to doing sit-ups, if not his acting.  Brotherman definitely has some impressive abs – which the movie repeatedly hones in on – but I’m not impressed by abs.  The movie heroes I respect are guys like Gene Hackman, guys with faces full of character and hard-lived life, who might be a little paunchy but who – even now – could use guys like Rain for toothpicks.  This Rain kid looks more like a sad puppy – like that old cartoon character Droopy, if someone had taken away his ice cream.  Let’s see where you are in a couple decades, Rain.  If I’m wrong, feel free to track me down in the old folks’ home and make me eat my words.  (Just be sure to remind me to also take my prunes with those words, please – I’m so forgetful sometimes…)

Anyway, whether this guy is a convincing bad-ass or not is actually irrelevant, because it’s all about the stunt teams enlisted to carry out the ninja action, and those guys are phenomenal.  Ninja Assassin was a Joel Silver production, and he knows the right guys to hire.  The fights in the movie are uncommonly quick-moving but still coherent and fun (and remarkably, almost supernaturally brutal.)  The director was James McTeigue, the AD on the Matrix movies, and he brings all the best fight choreography from those movies to this one.  J. Michael Straczynski did a quick rewrite on the final script – comic book fans might know him best as a guy who wrote Amazing Spider-Man for a while there, but I know him best as the guy who finally defeated the unparalleled spelling abilities of both myself and Microsoft Word.

But probably the most valuable contribution to Ninja Assassin comes from Sho Kosugi, the veteran star of many ninja movies from the 1980s, who has aged into a pretty mean-looking bastard.  He plays the villainous ninja master, and he scowls and bellows just beautifully.  Casting Sho Kosugi gives the movie a ninja street cred that it might not have otherwise had.  Ninja fans know Sho Kosugi as a convincing heavy from classic non-classics such as Enter The Ninja, where Italian film star Franco Nero dons a white ninja suit and prowls through the jungle (surely one of the greatest camouflage failures ever enacted by a great white ninja.)  Really, I wish I could take more time to dissect Enter The Ninja because it’s pretty spectacular and has one of the more unintentionally hilarious villains ever seen in a 1980s movie – which is saying plenty!

 

 

But today is Ninja Assassin’s day, and while its day may pass quickly, its makers can rest easy, knowing that they have made an entertaining addition to the canon of ninja movies, a canon that doesn’t require much more than the aforementioned amended-Godardian elements to be perfectly enjoyable.  In other words:  If you like ninja movies, probably you’ll like this ninja movie.  I do, and I did.  In other words, then:  If you like ninja movies, there may be something wrong with you, but at least you’re in good company.

Peace out.

   

   

Now On DVD: HALL PASS.

 

Hall Pass is actually pretty funny, for a movie that has to be described as a thematic failure dipped in a fast-drying shell of conceptual bullshit.  Hall Pass has a great cast and a fair amount of genuine laughs, but the movie is (and will be) ultimately forgettable because its main premise is fumbled so badly.

Owen Wilson and SNL‘s Jason Sudeikis play Rick and Fred, two suburban husbands just beginning the long slouch into middle age. Jenna Fischer (The Office) and Christina Applegate play their wives, respectively, who get so fed up with their husbands’ constant ogling of every strange woman in a three-mile radius that they make the eyebrow-raising decision to give the guys one week off from marriage – the titular “hall pass” – to do whatever and whomever they please.

In my opinion, you could hardly have a more likable cast.  I’ve been a huge Owen Wilson fan as far back as Bottle Rocket, Cable Guy, and Anaconda, and Sudeikis is an affable enough presence on Saturday Night Live and everywhere else he goes. Jenna Fischer is the picture of sweetness on The Office and she does far more than can be expected with the roughest, most under-written role in Hall Pass.  (More on that in a minute.)  She also gets to dress up a little more colorfully.  It’s nice.

And Christina Applegate holds a special place in my heart for contributing mightily to the raging bonfire that was my pubescent phase.  She has always been a defter comedic actress than she ever got credit, and the only reason I can figure that she hasn’t had Jennifer Aniston’s career is that the image she emblazoned as of Married With Children’s Kelly Bundy was imprinted too strongly in America’s mind.  (It sure was on mine, though I would like to see her in more Anchorman-type roles that play just as well to her strengths.)  Applegate is funny and pretty and refreshingly mean in Hall Pass (everyone else is way too sweet for that premise), and it kinda kills me that she’s now being ushered into playing hot-mom roles, but this movie would have been far worse without her.

But have you seen any of the press interviews for this film?  Everybody’s bending over backwards to make excuses for the premise.  Paraphrasing loosely:  “Crazy idea, right?  Don’t worry, it’s okay though, the wives are okay with it, in fact it was their idea, the wives get a hall pass too, etc..”  Great.  Sounds like fun.  Who’s this movie for, again?  Because it’s not depraved enough for horny young single guys, and it’s not nearly as female-friendly as all this equivocating would have you believe.

Hall Pass backtracks at every conceivable juncture.  The wives are the ones who get the original idea.  (Which is presented to them by a one-scene character played by Joy Behar of The View, the most prominent femme-centric TV show that doesn’t have Oprah in it.  This shit is not subtle.)  In the toughest role in the film, Jenna Fischer just barely squeaks out the notion that her character becomes convinced that a hall pass is in any way a good idea.  Owen’s character doesn’t even want to do it.  She insists that he needs it, that they both need it.  She doesn’t seem to believe that at all, and he seems reluctant to agree, but of course, if she doesn’t say it and he doesn’t agree, there’s no movie.  So the plot wins out.

But here’s a question:  If the main character (Owen) doesn’t want the hall pass adventure, why should an audience want to see it?  If we feel guilty about it by proxy, our license to enjoy it has been revoked before we even get started.  No, it doesn’t help that Sudeikis is enthusiastic about the hall pass by comparison, since as scripted and played, he seems ultimately harmless, like a fourteen-year-old hoping to get a peek at his older brother’s Playboys.  (Again, Sudeikis is very winning, but not the Belushi-esque presence that would make this movie more dangerous.)  And once the guys get the hall pass, their first act is to load up on food and miss valuable single-dude time.  It’s a funny idea, but it’s also evading the main story.  Same deal with an extended sequence where the guys drop hallucinogenics on a golf course: it’s funny (particularly whenever  the great Stephen Merchant or Curb Your Enthusiasm’s JB Smoove get scenes to steal), but it has nothing to do with the damn hall pass!  How can there be any suspense as to whether the guys are going to cheat or not, if the outcome is never in doubt?

This should be Comedy 101:  Nearly every classic film comedy that has ever worked (Some Like It Hot, Young Frankenstein, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Raising Arizona, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Observe & Report, etc.) has had protagonists that tried to do something, once that something was defined and laid on the table.  They can fail hilariously, or be thwarted, but if they avoid their comedic calling, the comedy begins to feel false.

With two days to spare, Owen’s character finally gets around to courting a beautiful young barista at his local coffee shop (played by Nicky Whelan), and that’s where the movie really started to bother me.  The character is convincingly lovely, both on the page and on the screen.  She looks terrific but there’s also a real sweetness there.  Any straight male in the audience will probably be able to understand why Owen’s character is tempted.  But in the end (mild spoiler) he ends up being pretty honest with her, and since she seems pretty smart this far, it’s something of a surprise when she takes off her top and offers him sex anyway.  This is a storytelling problem for two reasons:  A) Here is a picture of Nicky Whelan…

…It’s impossible for me personally as a moviegoer to believe that any guy who took a hall pass in the first place would pass that up when confronted by her immaculate nudity.

And B) It feels more than a little sleazy.  Up until this moment, we’re led to see that this girl isn’t just a sex object, that she has a family and a background and hopes and dreams, and this is why Owen is tempted, because she has a great personality beyond her awesome looks.  But the way it plays is, “Well, we kept promising sluttiness all movie, and it’s almost done now, so have Nicky’s agent persuade her to whip her tits out.”  It plays like an awkward afterthought, sacrificing what character development Hall Pass has established so far in order to justify an unrated DVD.  Somehow this movie achieved the unprecedented:  It showed me a beautiful naked woman with a perfect body and made me feel bad about it.

So no, I would not hold this movie up as a genuine feminist document.  Sorry.

How could Hall Pass have worked?  Hard to say.  The premise was a problem from the outset.  It’s just too unbelievable, and this coming from a guy who cited movies about dancing Frankenstein monsters and giant marshmallow men as examples of effective scriptwriting.  One thing that could have helped is if Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis were allowed to play much less likable throughout the film.  The likability doesn’t need to be in the script:  The casting covers that.  If these guys were more dickish from the start, then their decisions would mean more.  Turning down a naked Nicky Whelan would have real emotional weight.  As it stands, that climactic moment feels rushed and sloppy.  When a decent guy makes a moral decision, it’s not unexpected.  But when a real asshole makes a moral decision, it’s kind of a big deal.  You know where I learned that cinematic concept?  Movies like Dumb & Dumber.  Kingpin.  There’s Something About Mary.  Stuck On You.  And who made those movies?  Would you believe it was the same guys who made Hall Pass?

To be fair, this movie is hardly a waste of time.  As long as one doesn’t delude himself with notions of gender equality here, one can appreciate the extended Alyssa Milano cameo (looking conspicuously ample and provoking the hetero-outburst that sets the plot in motion),

 

the way that a one-week vacation agrees with Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate (they go to Cape Cod and suddenly everyone’s mega-tan),

and of course, the unfairly-treated but phenomenally-apportioned Nicky Whelan.

There’s also a great surprise performance from a well-known character actor whose identity I won’t spoil, and a legitimately brilliant post-credits sequence with the underused Stephen Merchant.

I laughed plenty.  I’m not taking that away.  But there’s a difference between a one-and-doner, and a comedy that people want to revisit.  I certainly won’t return to watch Hall Pass again, and besides Mr. Skin, I can’t think of anyone else who would want to either.

Just to underline the point, take a look at the difference between the American and European posters for Hall Pass to see what a more honest treatment of this premise could have looked like:

 

You’re bound for disappointment on either side of the pond.

_________________________________________

For better satisfaction, find me on Twitter!: @jonnyabomb

PRINCE BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE: Vanity!

 

In honor of Prince’s birthday, here’s another Prince-related article that I once wrote. And yes, I’m going to keep on using purple font liberally. If you don’t like it, you may need to go purify yourself.

 

 

 

My absolute favorite Prince protégé of all time is Vanity. 

(Sure I have an opinion on a subject that obscure – doesn’t everybody?) 

 

I’m a fan of Prince, so it follows that I am a fan of his beauteous protégés. And of all of them, I rank Vanity the highest.

 

Before I get into that specifically in depth, let me qualify that a distant second place goes to Apollonia, and in third, of course, is Carmen Electra. 

 

 

Carmen’s wonderfulness is slipping away from us by the day, due to her association with all those laugh-free parody movies.  [With one 15-minute glance at Epic Movie, I saw the worst of which humanity is capable.] But I will always love her for the musical ambitions and the sporadic dancing and the whole striptease aerobics idea – unintentional-comedy brilliance. She’s also, for the record, so much prettier in real life.

 

 

Apollonia was in Purple Rain. There you go – the alpha and the omega of her glory. Apollonia has been purified in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. That’s true bravery. I also heavily recommend a song called “Number Nine” by the Twilight Singers, on which Apollonia provides backing vocals. [Look for it here.] One of my favorite tunes of ever – it’s killer.

 

 

But Vanity is still the number one. To me at least. She’s got the body of work behind her. She’s got the strange sweetness and the complete wackadoo. For me, it was always all about Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, surely the only Motown kung-fu musical ever made. 

 

 

In that flick, Vanity plays Laura Charles, the VJ whose big hair is threatened by cartoonish gangsters and recruits Harlem Bruce Lee acolyte Leroy Green Jr. (a.k.a. Bruce Leroy) to be her bodyguard, you know, to guard her body. This makes Leroy’s younger brother Richie very jealous, but now I’m getting too much into recounting the elaborate plot and I want you to see this movie if you haven’t already. Just know that Richie is my favorite character because he dresses like Shalamar and riffs like Jackie Mason.

 

Anyway, as I mentioned, The Last Dragon is strangely sweet and Vanity is strangely sweet in it. This is one of those movies that I feel weirdly proprietary about – I know I have to share favorite movies like Ghostbusters and Stripes with the world, but The Last Dragon? That’s only for me and my brothers Jason and Anthony. One day soon I will write a lengthier discourse on the value of this cinematic trinket, but at the moment I have to keep moving, because that’s what Vanity did.

 

 

She actually made several movies in the 1980s, all worth seeing for reasons of quality or shlockiness, or both. Never Too Young To Die is an unbelievably ridiculous piece of shit that you absolutely must treat yourself to, if you haven’t already done. [I wrote on that one at length in an earlier posting.] 

 

 

 

 

After The Last Dragon, Action Jackson was fairly traumatic for me – Vanity is depicted in a bad way in this movie, playing a strung-out heroin addict who needs Action Jackson’s help, but that initial trauma was offset significantly by the part where she shows her boobs. Action Jackson is no lost classic, but I was always a fan of Joel Silver productions, and I LOVE Carl Weathers as every red-blooded American man should – the man was Apollo Creed (and Dillon), for Carl’s sake! 

 

It should also be noted that Vanity’s group, Vanity 6, with their semi-hit “Nasty Girl”, provided the score for two significant scenes for me in 1980s films – 1) when Betsy Russell shakes her thang in Private School and 2) when Axel Foley takes Taggart and Rosewood to the strip club in Beverly Hills Cop. She also sang in most of the above films.

 

Most significantly, and certainly most overlooked, is 52 Pick-Up. 

 

 

Golan-Globus produced the movie. Golan-Globus were Israeli producers who made a remarkable amount of garbage in the early to mid-1980s. 52 Pick-Up is definitely the best Golan-Globus production I have ever seen, and I’ve seen several more than I ought to have. Before now, the best Golan-Globus production I have seen would be either Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, or Enter The Ninja starring Franco Nero and a lot of ninjas.

 

This one has a higher pedigree than usual, due to the script by Elmore Leonard (!) and the direction by John Frankenheimer. Paul Verhoeven’s sometime cinematographer Jost Vacano supplies the smooth camera moves, and everybody in front of the camera (almost) does their typical best. It’s still no lost classic, but it’s worth another look.

 

Roy Scheider is not playing the best guy in the world in this one, but he’s Roy Scheider – always sympathetic and working-class smart. He plays a successful business owner who gets involved with a twenty-something Kelly Preston (who wouldn’t?), although that means he’s cheating on his wife, played by Ann-Margret (giving the rare good reason to question that decision.) As one could expect from the Leonard imprimatur, this affair rapidly becomes a blackmail attempt on Scheider, levied by a gang of unusual criminals. The bug-eyed John Glover is their leader, but it’s Clarence Williams III, best known to my generation as Samson Simpson from Half Baked (and Prince’s dad from Purple Rain!), who makes the most intimidating impression as Bobby Shy, the methodical enforcer.

 

That’s a lot of set-up. Still with me? Next up: Boobs! 

 

Vanity plays Preston’s confidante, also Williams’ girl, also some kind of stripper. She’s got the smaller supporting part of all these other better-known names, but she’s effective and believable, even sad, in the few scenes she has. It almost suggests a legitimate acting career would have been possible, but as history would have it, that was not to happen.

 

It turns out that Vanity had more than her share of demons. One of them was Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue. His recent book The Heroin Diaries, details, along with much other debauchery, their dangerous relationship– intriguingly, with present-day “director’s” commentary from the participants, including Vanity herself, who has for the last several years been known as Evangelist Denise Matthews. In her passages, Vanity sounds happy and enthusiastic and, um, exactly like an evangelist. She’s apparently working on her own book, and probably wouldn’t much appreciate an article like this one, dedicated to the Vanity persona, because she vastly prefers her current incarnation. I hope that it’s true, that she is that happy. 

 

I hope it’s not a front for a judgemental world. We should all wish happiness and peace of mind for the entertainers we’ve enjoyed over the years. For me, it’s all about this moment, from her “best” film … It’s all about The Glow….

 

 

 

Stone Classics: PURPLE RAIN (1984).

Prince turns 53 today.  53!  Try looking for signs.  An aging Prince feels like a geometric impossibility.  He’s still working, still recording and performing, and while we can debate whether or not his best work is behind him, we cannot debate that his best work still sounds as vivid as it ever did.  I can’t begin to encapsulate Prince’s entire career, but I can reduce my appreciation to a single instant, and the instant I keep coming back to is Purple Rain.  

I love everything about Purple Rain, and I really recommend seeing it any way you can, at one of LA or New York’s many midnight screenings, or at home with friends.  I’ve written about Purple Rain before, and I’d like to look at that piece again today.  (That’s what she said.)  The following is what I wrote about Purple Rain on June 25^th, 2009.  That’s right – the day Michael Jackson died.

What a weird, stupid, [for-better-or-worse] memorable day this one was.  The only rational place my mind can go to, really, is comedy.  Chris Rock has a routine which goes, and I’m paraphrasing up until the punchline, “Remember how back in the ‘eighties, you used to have all those arguments with your friends about who was better, Michael Jackson or Prince?  PRINCE WON!”

Chris Rock is something of a prophet, I guess, because today Michael Jackson is dead and Prince celebrates the 25^th anniversary of his signature album, Purple Rain.
Seriously, how weird is that?  Not that the two were necessarily rivals, but no other individual musicians dominated an era like those two did.  In the minds of many, Prince and MJ are forever linked, the same way that the Stones and the Beatles, or Britney and Christina, are.  (CHRISTINA WON!)  Every force has its equal.  In this case, every Thriller has its Purple Rain.  So now, on the date of the release of Purple Rain, when I’m all geared up to remember that album in writing, MJ up and dies?  What’s happening here?  One final shot across the bow from MJ?  The universe itself struggling to achieve balance?

I can’t even think about it anymore.  My mind is boggled.  Let’s recalibrate our dials pointing towards the positive and try to get back to the matter at hand:

Purple Rain.

Purple Rain is one of the top ten albums of all time.  On some days I’d call it the single best.  The debate can continue on the other nine, but that tenth slot probably needs to go to Purple Rain.  It’s got a unique, singular vision behind it, a vision so intense that it actually laid claim to an entire color of the rainbow.  It’s very definitely the greatest strip club record of all time.  (Suck on that, Nikki Sixx!)  I could back up THAT argument all day, but probably shouldn’t.  And besides that, there is nothing I can say about Purple Rain, the album, that hasn’t been said better elsewhere, most likely by ?uestlove.

Meanwhile, Purple Rain, the movie, isn’t on anybody’s top five MOVIES of all time (except maybe Jellybean Johnson’s), but in its own wonderful way, it’s a terrific viewing experience any time of day.  You can get the DVD for cheap just about anywhere, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t.  It sports the legitimate hilarity of Morris Day, the beauteosity of Appolonia, the scariness of Clarence Williams III, the greatest soundtrack of all time (excepting only The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly), and a truly bizarre self-revelatory performance by Prince which may or may not have anything to do with his actual inner life or personal history.  We may never know.  Prince don’t talk much.

This month’s SPIN Magazine has a cover story in oral-history format about the making of the movie – pretty much all the critical players are featured, besides the Purple One himself and arch-foe Morris Day.  It’s not nearly long enough for me, but it’s still pretty great.  Check it out on the newsstands or at www.SPIN.com, where you can also download a free nine-track tribute album which is more than solid.

So maybe this weekend, while you’re listening and re-listening to Thriller on loop, throw some Purple Rain in there, just to liven things up again.

And also, if the elevator tries to break you down, you can always go crazy.

 

 

 

http://twitter.com/jonnyabomb

TRAILER: Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.   Technically, that title actually makes some sense, even though it sure looks like it doesn’t.  Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.   Huh.  Well, I guess a simple ”Rise Of The Apes“ would say the same damn thing.  Obviously the point is to restart the franchise with a Batman Begins, day-one approach.

Or maybe the point is to remake Link, with Freida Pinto subbing for Elisabeth Shue.  That’s a pretty fair swap.  I’d watch that.  That really is the vibe I get from the Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes trailer, Link 2.0, but if you click through to my review of Link, you’ll see that I find that on its own to be an exciting prospect and not at all an insult.

Really what they’re doing, though, is a bigger-budget, wider-screen action-heavy take, which is supercool with me.  I trust James Franco to bring just the right amount of humor to the movie, and I trust Brian Cox to make all of his scenes awesome.  I also trust John Lithgow to overact, but hey – chimps!  If you think I’m going to sit here in my lonely room and be skeptical about a movie whose main draw is a chimpanzee army, you’ve got the wrong guy. 

Now On DVD: DRIVE ANGRY 3D (2011).

Drive Angry 3D is like a Rob Zombie remake of Vanishing Point.  I guess that’s not a compliment.  I was looking forward to this, too!  (Proof here and here.)  Ultimately, it was like hooking up with a beautiful girl you’ve been crushing on for months, only to discover that she’s a sloppy kisser.  You’re still happy to be there, but it could have been so perfect, and it’s not.

The main problem with Drive Angry, in which Nic Cage commandeers some hot-ass cars and a hot-ass lady sidekick on his road to vengeance, is that it’s been sold and set up in every way as a car movie, and it badly wants to be one.  But there’s hardly any car action in the movie!  And when a car chase does happen, it’s fairly standard (even the one that involves a Winnebago, which has been done before, as far back as Race With The Devil).  A whole lot of business happens in this movie which has nothing to do with cars.  There are a lot of walking scenes.  There are a lot of shootouts.  There’s even a shootout that takes place in the middle of a fucking scene, and it’s scored to a great song by the Raveonettes, which I appreciated, but still, no cars.

The other problem is that Drive Angry’s promotional campaign and many trailers made no secret of the movie’s premise, the supernatural element that makes possible Cage’s quest.  I’m not sure why I won’t ruin that here, since if you’ve heard of the movie you definitely know what I’m talking about, but in light of that plot twist it’s a major disconnect that two-thirds of the movie goes by before it gets revealed.  Every character in the movie keeps asking Cage where he’s from, but us guys in the audience, we already know.  It actually doesn’t feel good to be one step ahead of the movie we’re watching.

Okay, but what does work about the movie?  Easy answer:  Amber Heard.  This girl is like Scarlett Johansson 2.0, all smoky voice and arched smile, but arguably even more fun to look at.  She’s also got a great screen presence beyond those looks:  Her character’s immediately-formed loyalty to Cage’s skeezy character makes no sense, but her triumph as an actor is to almost keep you from noticing.  In my humble opinion, this girl is two or three movies away from being as big a movie star as she wants to be.  And yes, I’m fairly sure that in real life Amber Heard wouldn’t give me the time of day, but that’s not what movie-crushes have ever been about, have they?  I’ll conclude this review early, with a little Amber-Heard-in-Drive–Angry slideshow, and then you can decide for yourself whether you want to rent it or not.

Find me on Twitter!: @jonnyabomb

What I Watched: LADY ICE (1974).

 

This was an impulse-watch off of my Netflix queue.  I thought seeing this movie might be interesting because it came out no long after The Godfather (actually right around The Godfather Part II) and it has a major supporting role from Robert Duvall.  It’s not totally worthless, but it’s not all that interesting either.  It’s The Tourist of its day.  That’s a little harsh.  Maybe it’s more like Stanley Donen’s Charade, only de-carbonated and watered-down.

Lady Ice stars Donald Sutherland, in one of his bizarrely common romantic lead roles from that period, as a crafty insurance agent on the trail of a beautiful jewel thief, played by Jennifer O’Neill.

Jennifer O’Neill was an actress probably more famous at that time as a fashion model.  I remember her (as the nicely-named Shasta Delaney) from Rio Lobo with John Wayne, and many more film fans probably know her as Kim Obrist from Cronenberg’s Scanners, but most of the country remembers her as the long-term face of Cover Girl.  So says the internet.  That latter acting background is more of what’s on display in Lady Ice — she’s excellent to look at but kind of dull as a career criminal.  Here’s a clip:

That’s about as exciting as it gets.  (I couldn’t even find a trailer — this must not be a fondly-remembered movie by anyone.)  I’m not sorry I checked it out, because the idea of a female criminal mastermind is always more interesting to me than the standard male version, but ultimately, there’s not much here to recommend.

Onward with the queue….

 

@jonnyabomb

What I Watched 5.26.11: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969).

Time to pretty up this here website…

   

Not to knock the guys in the cast, but I’m in a Claudia Cardinale kind of mood today.  Hopefully y’all can understand the sentiment.

COLOMBIANA Looks Pretty, Good.

 

Zoe Saldana. Guns. Explosions. Sharks. Lollipops.

I really can’t think of what else a movie needs for me to be ready and willing to see it, like yesterday.

Movie Review: FAST FIVE (2011).

   

What would it look like if Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to remake Michael Mann’s Heat? 

Hopefully, we’ll never know. 

But try this on for size:  What if somebody remade Bad Boys 2, only they took out all the yelling and the weird racism and swapped in a likable multicultural cast? 

Now we’re getting a little closer.

Fast Five is the fifth action film in the car-happy series that started with 2001’s The Fast And The Furious, which introduced Vin Diesel as a car thief and outlaw, Paul Walker as the undercover agent assigned to bring him in, and Jordana Brewster as Diesel’s sister (suspension-of-disbelief casting there), who becomes Walker’s love interest. 

Fast Five is kind of an all-star game, collecting characters from the four previous films – the underrated Matt Schulze (also seen in Torque and Extract) from the first movie, the scene-stealing Tyrese Gibson and Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges from 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious (which had no Diesel and no Brewster but much Eva Mendes), the slyly charismatic Sung Kang from 2006’s The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift (which took place in Japan and had none of the recurring characters besides a belated, uncredited cameo from Diesel), and the just-a-little-bit-insanely-attractive Gal Gadot from 2009’s Fast & Furious.

Everybody getting all this so far? 

Don’t sweat it if you aren’t.  Yeah, I’ve seen all these movies.  But you don’t have to.  Whatever else you think of their work in Fast Five, you’d have to concede that three-time series writer Chris Morgan and three-time series director Justin Lin do an excellent, economical job of re-introducing all of the above characters, and giving them just enough inter-character interactions to indicate that these are all people with shared personal histories.  Which is good, because there are a bunch of new characters in here also.  More on them in a minute.  Let’s ease in with some recap:

Fast Five picks up exactly where the previous movie, Fast & Furious, left off – Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto was being carted off to prison on a bus, and Jordana Brewster’s Mia Toretto and Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner were bearing down on the bus in hot sportscars, ready to spring him.  That, they do.  Then the movie, and the two lovebirds (Brian & Mia), abruptly skip off to Rio, in what I temporarily hoped was going to be a crossover with that movie about the animated birds.

Brian and Mia crash with Vince, Matt Schulze’s character, who has long been set up in Rio with a local wife and a new baby.  Vince sets them up with a job to steal some rare cars from a moving train.  Even with Dom’s practiced helping hand, that job becomes a bit of a mess when some DEA agents on board the train are killed.  (Considering the fact that an entire humvee gets driven into the train, it’s hard to imagine that only those three guys were killed in the fiasco, but you kinda have to go with some heavy suspension of disbelief here.  As far as we know, none of the spectacular car crashes end in any deaths unless the characters mention it.)

Basically, by stealing these cars, and one in particular, Dom, Brian, and Mia have run afoul of a crimelord named Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), a Latino Gordon Gekko type who we’re told essentially runs Rio.  The trio has an even bigger problem, though:  Even though it was Reyes’s thugs who killed the three DEA agents, Dom and Brian are being tagged with the crime.  That puts the FBI on their trail, singularly personified in the form of a man named Hobbs, who the rest of us know as Dwayne Johnson, the artist formerly known as “The Rock.” 

Dwayne Johnson plays this role as Tommy Lee Jones (in unreasonable Fugitive mode) multiplied by the Juggernaut from Marvel Comics.  He has no discernible character traits outside of “chase puny humans.”  His head shaved to match Vin Diesel’s, his goatee grown out to match Blackstone the Magician’s, Dwayne Johnson is admittedly one weird- and intimidating-looking human being, maybe never moreseo than in this movie.  He’s got a team of little army guys with him, including one who looks like a deflated Patrick Warburton and another who looks like an evil Fred Durst, but he looms over them all by two or three feet.  I do think that Fast Five is yet another action movie (see: The Expendables) that suffers a little from not having a villain to match its heroes – Joaquim de Almeida is adequately slimy but not too scary – but whenever Hobbs is onscreen, the threat feels as real as it’s ever gonna.  Vin Diesel can get pretty sleepy in these movies, but when Dwayne Johnson is around, he steps up to compete.

So with this level of police heat/ starpower on their tail, the Fast/Furious kids hatch a plan to pull the fabled “one last job” – ripping off Reyes’s private vault and walking away quietly with ten million dollars.  To do that, they assemble their dream team: drivers Roman (Tyrese) and Han (Sung Kang), techno-guy Tej (Ludacris), distraction Gisele (Gal Gadot), and two new characters, a constantly-bickering odd couple played by reggaeton music stars Don Omar and Tego Calderon.  Calderon is a dead ringer for baseball star Manny Ramirez, and Don Omar is a little less descript by comparison, but they both bring a fun bilingual banter to the movie that adds some much needed humor to the proceedings.  Even funnier is Tyrese, who gets all the best wisecracks, and even when they’re not so funny on the page, he brings an enthusiasm that is completely winning, no matter how reluctant I may be to praise anyone who signed up for more than one Transformers movie.  Tyrese is fun when he’s busting Walker’s and Ludacris’s balls, and speaks for the audience when some of the truly impressive speed stunts are going on.

Maybe my favorite character (as expected) is Sung Kang’s Han, who appeared in the previous two Fast/Furious movies even though he was killed in the third one.  In a wonderfully bizarre chronological re-shuffling, both Fast & Furious and Fast Five are technically prequels to Tokyo Drift, exclusively so that Han could be resurrected.  It was worth doing.  It shouldn’t have to be pointed out, but it’s rare that  American action movies give us Asian characters who are this straight-up cool.  It’s not that Han gets all that much to do, but Sung Kang does some nice underplaying when all the aforementioned comedic ball-busting and muscle-flexing bombastics are going on, and he gets to strike up a little flirtation with Gal Gadot (who’s like a hotter version of Natalie Portman), that brings just a subtle undercurrent of pathos to the movie, when you consider that as longtime viewers of this series we know his ultimate fate.

It sounds like I’m giving a ton away already, but I’m really not – this movie is ultra-loaded with characters and business that I’ve only really begun to cover.  At over two hours, it’s unnecessarily long for a summer diversion, but to the credit of Lin and Morgan and the ensemble cast, Fast Five is never boring.  People are freaking out over this movie already, and I had a fun time too, but I’d caution against overpraise.  I can’t imagine wanting to see Fast Five more than once, for instance.  Also, as a grown-ass man (emphasis on the “ass”), I don’t love the PG-13 rating.  Like all the movies in the series, it has a Maxim Magazine ogle-first approach to women and sexuality, but ultimately a puritanical depiction of sex.  Even the ladies who count drug money in warehouses (a la New Jack City) wear bras and cover up when the action starts.  And like the majority of American movies, Fast Five may be scared off by the female body but has no problem giving us a scene where an exploded bathroom is streaked everywhere with shit.  (Long story; running out of space.)  There’s absolutely nothing deep or serious going on here. 

But that’s okay.  Sometimes I want to read a great novel, and sometimes I want to watch a baseball game.  Fast Five has a sophomoric energy that is infectious – assuming, of course, that you’re the kind of person who was willing to sit for a movie like this in the first place.  My best hope for Fast Five is that it becomes a huge success and enables Justin Lin to make whatever movies he wants.  Then, hopefully, what he wants is to come up with a badass star vehicle for Sung Kang, either by moving him into the lead of this franchise, following his character into his own adventure, or coming up with an all-new story idea.  The best thing about the Fast/Furious series is that they bring us a pan-racial culture where all characters are equally capable and equally likable.  So why not use it as a springboard to bring us the next great non-white action character?

In the meantime, I can enjoy the simpler pleasures.  Fast cars, pretty women, big stupid guns, purple dialogue, explosions, stolen police cars, crashed police cars, the return of the Predator handshake, and quite possibly my favorite post-credits cameo ever (but only if you’re me) – Fast Five has all of these things and much more.  So while my brain might yearn for smarter, I must flex my biceps in approval.  And they’re mightier than you think, so watch it punk.