Author: Jim McLennan

Taken: The Search for Sophie Parker

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★★½
“Taken-ish.”

For a Lifetime Original Movie, this is actually close to the best of its kind I’ve seen., but it is surely docked points for being a thoroughly shameless knock-off of a certain Liam Neeson movie, all the way down to the title. As there, we have an American abroad, searching for a teenage daughter who has been kidnapped by even more foreign sex-traffickers. They will stop at nothing – nothing, I tell ya! – to recover their child, be that personal danger or interference from local corrupt police. The main difference is it’s a heroine, NYPD detective Stevie Parker (Benz), with the location being shifted from Paris to Moscow – though under current circumstances, the location has not aged well.

Certainly, letting your daughter Sophie (Battrick) now go by herself to Russia, even if she is friends with the ambassador’s daughter,  would feel like utterly irresponsible parenting. Even a decade ago when this was made, it seems questionable, and concerns prove justified. Despite the presence of lurking CIA minder Nadia (Bailey), it’s not long before Sophie and her pal have snuck out, gone to a nightclub, been roofied, and are on their way to becoming the playthings for some rich tycoon, courtesy of the Chechen mafia. Mama Parker is not happy. She’s on the first plane to Moscow, where she teams with Nadia and reluctant local cop Mikhail (Byron, who’s English, though his IMDb credits are littered with Eastern Europeans!) to work her way up the chain and rescue the girls.

It’s never less than glaringly obvious, and the first thirty minutes are especially excruciating in this department, not least due to a shoehorned romance for Stevie: it is Lifetime, after all. Once she arrives in Russia – actually, Bulgaria standing in for it – while things don’t get any less predictable, the energy level ramps up several degrees, and this becomes considerably more watchable. Benz has the necessary intensity to be the unstoppable force she needs to be, and pairing her with another woman is an additional wrinkle that works nicely. The action is a bit limited, with the only real sequence of note at the end, when the pair storm the hotel where Sophie is being held before her departure, followed by a chase back to US sovereign territory at the embassy.

There’s no denying a major case of American saviour complex here, with the locals being portrayed as useless or actively evil, and needing the help of the USA in order for any action to be taken. Chris noted the presence of a large Stars and Stripes in the film’s final shot, and it seems entirely deliberate, reminding viewers that they are now back on safe, i.e. American soil. Yet there is surprising darkness, not least in the  uncompromising fate meted out to the corrupt official. After a start where this struggled to hold my attention, by the end I was being just about adequately entertained. Given the source, that’s high praise indeed. 

Dir: Don Michael Paul
Star: Julie Benz, Amy Bailey, Andrew Byron, Naomi Battrick

Scorned

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★★★½
“Hell hath no fury, like…”

RIP James Caan. I mention his passing, because by coincidence I watched this the same day, and there are a couple of nods to Misery, one of Caan’s most famous works. There’s a character called Mrs. Wilkes, and we also get an explicitly acknowledged re-enactment of that scene. You know the one. That aside, I’d be hard pushed to call this a good film, yet I can’t deny I largely enjoyed it. It feels like an influence on Knock Knock, and if perhaps not quite coming up to that mark, it’s only marginal below, and I’m still a sucker for a full on, scenery chewing psycho bitch. In Sadie (McCord), we certainly get one.

She and boyfriend Kevin (Zane) are starting a romantic getaway in a remote cabin. Well, that’s his plan. Sadie’s is rather different, having found incriminating text messages on his phone – worse still, to her best friend, Jennifer (Bianca). Not helping matter: Sadie recently discovered she was pregnant, and out of concern for her unborn child, stopped taking her lithium and anti-psychotic meds. Kevin wakes to find himself tied to a chair, with some very awkward explaining to do, and Jennifer is being lured to the cabin with a not-so-genuine text message saying Kevin had split up from Sadie. Adding to the mix, a scary looking convict (Drucker) has just escaped from the prison just down the road, and is headed in their direction.

There’s one scene where I fell… well, I won’t say in love with the movie, but I’d not mind a one-night stand with it. It’s when Sadie has Jennifer and Kevin tied to the bed. She drags a microwave in there too, slaps Sadie’s pet in there and demands Kevin go down on his other woman, “or I will start this microwave, and her little doggie will cook from the inside out.” No, seriously. It’s clear that this film is not to be taken seriously, and the three performances at the core are perfect for that, with Zane and Bianca dead-panning their way through the carnage, playing the straight man and woman to good effect, in contrast to McCord’s over the top, dramatic excesses. For she is going to make Kevin and Jennifer pay for their betrayal. PAY, I tell ya!

Turns out she was brought up in a mental facility and given electroshock therapy, after an incident when she was 12. She is, in essence, the poster child for “Don’t stick your dick in crazy.” Which makes it all more fun to watch her tormenting the errant couple for their sin. It all builds, inevitably, to a climax which is just as gloriously silly. I mean, who keeps a loaded spear-gun on their sideboard? Kevin, meanwhile, is moving with the agility of a gazelle, considering what happened to his ankle previously. All that said, I genuinely didn’t know who would survive at the end. I’ll say it again: I enjoyed this considerably more than I would necessarily recommend it, and the rating above reflects the former.

Dir: Mark Jones
Star: AnnaLynne McCord, Billy Zane, Viva Bianca, Doug Drucker 

Beautiful Weapon

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★★½
“The world’s laziest assassin.”

By that, I am referring to the unnamed heroine of this film, because she doesn’t have to leave the house. She works as a hitwoman for Yakuza boss Yasuhiro Kokubu (Katô), and he delivers the targets to the front-door of her rural home, on the pretext of her being their entertainment. She then gives them the Black Widow treatment, having sex with them, before a couple of post-coital shots. She barely has to get out of bed, literally. In some way this makes sense, since she’s blind – I guess it’s nice to see the disabled being given equal opportunities in the assassin field. But she’s not exactly happy with her lot; her cleaner and handler Masahiko Yoshizawa (Murai) is concerned about her spiralling into alcoholism.

Of more immediate concern though, is Kokubu’s paranoia, which has convinced him that his trio of killers need to be disposed of, before they become a liability. His sent one assassin to visit her, only for her to prevail. So he follows up by dispatching the other one, Kenji Sakagami (Kusakari), to finish the job. Except he had followed the first killer and knows all too well what’s going on. Unsurprisingly, he suspects that once he kills her, his name will be next on his boss’s list, and so makes other plans, which involve him escaping with his target. However, Yoshizawa will need to be handled, and Sakagami also needs to convince her of his genuinely good intentions.

As you can imagine, given her static nature, it’s not exactly action-packed, though does ramp up nicely down the stretch. Until then though, it’s of an angsty drama, with more than the normal amount of sex. The focus is perhaps more on Sakagami than anyone else, with the heroine being quite passive. While this is perhaps inevitable, given her particular set of circumstances, it doesn’t make for thrilling cinema. The director seems fond of depicting things in real time, which is a bit of a mixed blessing. I could have done without a lengthy depiction of Sakagami’s first journey out to her home, but when the love-making between them gets a similar treatment, it’s an interesting variation on the way such things are usually depicted.

This is the first of the series which would give us Beautiful Beast a couple of years later, but is a little lower key and, in general, less interesting. The elements are all reasonable enough in themselves, it’s just that they are combined in a way which occasionally borders on the soporific. Action is probably not a secondary consideration here, likely ranking below both the drama and the eroticism, and very much of the “blink and you’ll miss it” kind. The finish is strong, though this too seems over-extended beyond what it might merit. As a portrait of a damaged assassin, it just doesn’t convince, perhaps because we do not spend enough time with her, and even her blindness doesn’t matter much. 

Dir: Kazuo ‘Gaira’ Komizu
Star: Masumi Miyazaki, Masao Kosakari, Kunio Murai, Takeshi Katô
a.k.a. XX: Beautiful Weapon

Daisy’s Run by Scott Baron

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Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

By the time I reached the end of this, what stood out most is how far we had come from the initial scenario. We start way out in deep space, where the crew of the Váli are awoken from their cryo stasis after the ship suffers significant damage as a result of a hull breach. By the end, everything has changed dramatically. The situation back on Earth, the mission of the Váli, and the very nature of the heroine, 25-year-old comms and electronics specialist, Daisy Swathmore, are are all radically different from what they initially seem to be. It’s basically a dramatic arc for the entire human race.

It begins with Daisy adjusting the setting of her neuro-stim. It’s designed to allow learning while the wearer sleeps. But she disables the firewalls which are there to stop the brain being overloaded. She becomes a lot more knowledgeable and skilled – but also incredibly paranoid, believing the cyborgs and enhanced human colleagues are plotting… something. Daisy is already prejudiced against those who are not entirely human, but are her concerns the result of mental illness, or is there something genuinely going on? She eventually decides to go AWOL, hiding out in the bowels of the ship as she digs for the truth, becoming a one-woman human resistance, before leaving in a shuttle and making her own way back to Earth. Where things are certainly not as she expected to find them.

Baron does an excellent job of engaging the viewer from the very first page. The opening line is, “Should we wake them? I mean, the ship is on fire, after all,” and if that doesn’t get you interested in reading on, I don’t know what to say. It’s an interesting exercise in reverse world-building, in that it starts out at the small and personal level, only gradually opening up to reveal what’s going on in the universe at large. Getting there involves going along on the heroine’s paranoid journey, and in the middle I was increasingly convinced that her fears were justified. They are. And they aren’t. That’s a tricky task to pull off, but the author manages it.

The neuro-stim is a nice Macguffin, which allows Daisy to have the necessary talents for the plot, but Baron doesn’t just rely on that as a crutch. For example, this allows her to build a scanner that will tell her which crew-mates are human and which are cyborg. However, just as tricky is then having to get them to pass through it. The book occasionally feels like the text of a space-based adventure game, with a cycle of problem > solution > progress > problem. Yet this keeps the narrative moving forward, and we learn alongside Daisy the truth about the situation. While ut comes as much of a shock to this reader as it does to her, the facts seems to fit the preceding elements. Well done, Mr. Baron. I think we’ll be revisiting Daisy down the road.

Author: Scott Baron
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Clockwork Chimera series.

Divide & Conquer

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★½
“If this is empowerment…”

There are times where I regret my choice of pastime. It means I end up watching things for this site that I would never give the time of day, given the choice. This is one such, having endured the almost physically painful experience which was Hellfire, starring the same three lead actresses, and to which this appears a loose sequel. In this case, Mercedes also took over directorial duties, and… it’s actually somewhat of an improvement. Still not good, by any objective standards, let’s be clear. Yet there’s a punky and unrepentant attitude that clearly doesn’t care what I, or anyone else, thinks. Put it this way, if you want a film which includes close-up shot of the director having a pee, here you go. Offense is its raison d’etre.

The story has (loosely) Greek goddesses Lilith (Divine), Athena (Peach) and Toxie (Mercedes) roaming the blasted hellscape of Tromaville, taking on the evil forces of misogyny and white supremacy, mostly through the superpowers of really bad acting and highly deliberate offense, it would appear. This probably teaches its peak with a recreation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in a strip-club. It feels as if Mercedes simply threw every idea of questionable taste she could come up with into her script, and filmed the result, largely using her pals. If you want a puppet, voiced by Troma movies head honcho Lloyd Kaufman, sitting on the toilet and delivering a lecture on artistic freedom. Again: here you go.

There’s even stuff here I can’t describe, without getting down-ranked by Google for explicit content. Trust me. There is certainly an aesthetic here, and it’s one to which Mercedes is clearly 110% committed, and personally too. [Is it exploitation if you’re doing it yourself?] But it’s not a style which overlaps more than fractionally with my tastes. I’ve been a fan of Troma since back in the days of Toxic Avenger (its star Torgl has a supporting role as creepy motel owner N. Bates). That looks like a Christopher Nolan movie in comparison to Divide & Conquer. Philosophically, I tend to have a different view of empowerment. To me, it doesn’t mean women copying the worst of male behaviour, as seems too often the case here e.g. rape.

There are times when restraint is not necessarily a bad thing. If you drop F-bombs every second word, eventually people are going to tune you out, and this is pretty much the cinematic equivalent. About half way through, as the story meandered its way to, then past, a confrontation with a geriatric Adolf Hitler and his pet werewolf (there’s a phrase I didn’t expect to be writing today!), I simply lost interest. There’s only so much toilet humour, potty-mouthed dialogue and amateur acting I can take in one sitting. This provides an all-you-can-handle buffet of those things, with enough left over to feed your entire family the next day. I prefer something a little less in your face. Quite often here, literally.

Dir: Mercedes
Star: Irie Divine, Knotty Peach, Mercedes, Mark Torgl

Girls With Guns: Best of 2023

Gallery

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Over on our Facebook page, we regularly post girls with guns images. These are the photos which have been the most popular there over the past year – one for each month, and a couple of wild-card entries. We’re currently voting for the best pic of 2023 there, so come and cast your vote! Otherwise: enjoy; use the arrows at the bottom to scroll through the pics…

Miss January

Image 1 of 16

2024 in Action Heroine Films

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Let’s be completely clear. 2023 was a dismal year for the genre, probably the worst in the decade or so I’ve been doing these annual previews. Of all the films listed in last year’s piece, there was not a single one – of those which actually showed up – that was half-way decent. Mind you, I haven’t seen The Marvels yet. I kinda lost the will to live for that one, having failed to complete the necessary homework of all those TV series on Disney+. I’ll maybe get round to it… eventually. It was a dismal flop at the box-office, but still remains the closest thing to a hit for an action heroine this year, albeit barely reaching the year-end top thirty. After that? The holdover of Everything Everywhere All at Once was the only other in the top hundred. At #100.

Will 2024 be better? I think it might be, albeit partly because it would be hard pushed to be any worse. There is one obvious tent-pole entry, though I have some qualms about it, and below that, the usual slew of maybes and possibles. Let’s tear in, with the usual caveat that all release dates are vague, approximate and subject to change at a moment’s whim. I’ve also not included a few entries which are apparently scheduled for next year, but about which little or nothing is known, such as The Old Guard 2.

Ballerina (June 7)

Not to be confused with the Korean movie of the same name, this is the John Wick prequel, focusing on Eve, played by Ana de Armas. The storyline revealed so far seems largely boilerplate: “A young female assassin seeks revenge against the people who killed her family.” However, its presence in the Wick-iverse certainly elevates it, and the director is Len Wiseman, best known for his work on the Underworld franchise. So he clearly knows his way around an action heroine. Hell, he married one. :)

Breathe (TBA)

You had me at Milla Jovovich. “Air-supply is scarce in the near future, forcing a mother and daughter to fight to survive when two strangers arrive desperate for an oxygenated haven.” Neither mother nor daughter are actually Milla, however, so I’m going to presume she’s one of the strangers. While we’re on the topic of Jovovich, what happened to George R.R. Martin adaptation In the Lost Lands, starring her and Dave Bautista? It’s supposedly has been in post-production since last January, but the IMDb doesn’t even give it a year any more. Weird.

Christie the Movie (TBA)

This one is still listed as being in pre-production as of September, and the cast list on the IMDb doesn’t even mention the lead actress (which a still shows as Janessa A. Morgan). But what’s interesting is that this is based on cult series Get Christie Love! which originally aired on TV in the mid-seventies: we reviewed the pilot here. I’d certainly not mind seeing a movie version, but the general lack of information leaves me doubtful this will see the light of day next year.

Damsel (March 8)

Dieter brought this one to my attention, and after the trailer looked somewhat ho-hum for much of its running time, the end  – more or less, the still at the top of this article – did get my attention. It will star Netflix’s favourite young woman, Millie Bobby-Brown (of Enola Holmes), as “A dutiful damsel [who] agrees to marry a handsome prince, only to find the royal family has recruited her as a sacrifice to repay an ancient debt. Thrown into a cave with a fire-breathing dragon, she must rely on her wits and will to survive.” The last time we saw one of those subversive fairy tales, it was The Princess, and was great. So fingers crossed…

Echo 8 (TBA)

“An assassin flashes between a nightmarish dream and her reality at a secret underground organization. When her latest mission involves killing a grieving mother, she discovers her target is closer to home than she realizes-much closer.” This is a low-budget labour of love for star Maria Tran, who also co-directed (with her husband Takashi Hara), edited, produced and worked on the fight choreography.

Furiosa (May 24)

There it is. The prequel to the god-tier work which was Mad Max: Fury Road, though with Anya Taylor-Joy replacing Charlize Theron. The trailer for this came in for some criticism when it came out, in particular due to the shaky nature of some CGI elements. Given how the practical approach of Fury Road was one of its outstanding elements, this is understandable. Hopefully it’s something they can fix in post-production. My other concern is Taylor-Joy, who doesn’t have much pedigree in action, and based on the trailer, does not have the same physical presence as Theron. However, it is an origin story, and I would expect the character arc to reflect this. In George We Trust. This may end up being a rare cinema trip for us.

Griselda (January 25)

I’ve not typically included TV series in this feature, but feel this one deserves an exception. We’ve previously a number of films regarding drug-lord Griselda Blanco, both dramatizations of her life and documentaries. This is the former, being a Netflix miniseries, with Sofia Vergara in the lead role. This feels a bit of a double-edged sword. She’s Colombian, like Griselda. But she’ll always be Gloria from Modern Family to us. I think this one might be just a little more blood-spattered though, coming as it does from the makers of Narcos.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (February 2)

As with Griselda, the TV series remake of the 2005 movie of the same name deserves inclusion. Maya Erskine and Donald Glover star as the marriage couple who are also spies, though based on the trailer, it seems like it begins with them separate. The synopsis offers a different direction too: ” Two strangers land jobs with a spy agency that offers them a life of espionage, wealth, and travel. The catch: new identities in an arranged marriage.” Erskine isn’t exactly Angelina Jolie, so we’ll see.

Rebel Moon – Part 2: The Scargiver (April 19)

The follow-up to part one looks set to continue the story of Kota, who has now assembled her band of rebels to take on the evil empire of the Motherworld. I imagine we can expect more of the same as what we’ve seen so far. Which would be spiffy visuals, albeit accompanying a plot which could use rather more originality. The jury is likely still out on whether Zack Snyder will get his desired cinematic universe of this. Didn’t work out too well for Army of the Dead.

Seize Them! (UK April 5)

The synopsis sounds promising: “Queen Dagan is toppled by a revolution led by Humble Joan . The Queen becomes a fugitive in her own land, and must face hardship and danger as she embarks on a voyage to win back her throne.” However, it is a comedy – the cast include Nick Frost and Jessica Hynes, both out of the Edgar Wright nexus. So how much actual action will be involved here is uncertain: I’m still going to watch it.

The Street Avenger (December 24)

“When a young girl being raised by a single father loses him to gang violence, she tries to take the law into her own hands and finds out being a vigilante is nothing like she reads about in the comics… This is a raw, action-packed adventure that shows the inner strength of a young woman that will stop at nothing to avenge her father.” Okay, I am interested. But let’s see if the makers can deliver on everything the promised in that synopsis…

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft (TBA)

Another Netflix series, this will be an animated show, with Hayley Atwell voicing Lara. Not much information, beyond that the series “Follows heroine Lara Croft as she explores new territory.” There is a “First Look” video available, which is included as part of the watch-list below: the animations looks quite nice. Hopefully it’ll be an improvement over the underwhelming Alicia Vikander version of the character.

Trigger Warning (TBA)

Out of the “long in production” file comes this Jessica Alba vehicle, with the following synopsis: “A traumatized veteran who inherits her grandfather’s bar and faces a moral dilemma after learning the truth behind his untimely death.” Filming on this apparently wrapped back in October 2021, so quite what the hold-up, I don’t know. It’s supposed to be a Netflix release, but we’ll see.

As One

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★★★
“Ping-pong diplomacy.”

After the bombing of a South Korean jet by North Korean agents in 1987, relations between the two nations sank to perilously low levels. In an effort to help mend fences, the countries agreed to join forces and send a unified squad to the 1991 World Table Tennis Championship in Japan, to take on the all-powerful Chinese. The process was not without its bumps, as the South’s star player, Hyun Jung-hwa (Ha), and her counterpart in the North, Ri Bun-hui (Bae), struggle to overcome their differences and become a cohesive doubles partnership. Their respective coaches (Park and Kim) also have to learn to navigate shoals both sporting and political on the way to the gold medal match in Tokyo.

Since this is based on real events, it’s no spoiler (and certainly would not have been for the Korean audience) to say that the unified team triumphs in dramatic fashion. Indeed, the whole thing is more or less an exhibition of Sports Clichés 1 0.1, with moments which you feel have been needlessly juiced up for emotive purposes. For example, did the entire South Korean roster really kneel in the rain outside their hotel, after the North Korean players were withdrawn for breaches of the rules? Did Ri really collapse during the last few minutes of the final, before an inspirational speech from Hyun? I’ve been unable to confirm either incident and it feels like a case of the writers over-egging the pudding, dramatically speaking.

Fortunately, everything else is excellent, and it’s clear a lot of attention went into details, some of which may not be visible to a Western audience e.g. the North Korean players speaking with appropriate dialect and accents. What was impressive even to me, was that the actresses genuinely looked like they were professional table-tennis players. Months of training went into that, with the real Hyun being one of the coaches. Praise in particular to Bae, who had to learn how to play with her left-hand, to match the one used by Ri. Although CGI was used to “fill in” the ball during the actual tournament sequences, there were no doubles used for the actresses, and the results look close to impeccable – as good as any sports movie I’ve seen. 

Even away from the table, the performances are good, and if the melodrama is turned up little too high, the balance otherwise is nicely handled, with a mix of humour, human interest and patriotism which is effective. While the Chinese are depicted as the “villains” her – and it’s not exactly subtle! – there is very much a message of how sport can act as a unifying force for a country. That’s something I tend to agree with, which is why I have little time for those who use it in divisive ways, such as kneeling during the anthem. There’s no doubt the intent here is almost nationalistic, yet it still works well enough for non-Koreans – and for those who still call the game ping-pong.

Dir: Moon Hyun-sung
Star: Ha Ji-won, Bae Doona, Park Chul-min, Kim Eung-soo

Snowbound

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★★
“Snow up to much…”

Though not formally listed on the IMDb as a made for television movie, it has all the hallmarks of one, down to what look suspiciously like pauses into which commercial breaks could be inserted. It’s the story of work colleagues, Liz Bartlett (Schnarre) and Barbara Tate (Eleniak). The former is attacked in the company’s parking garage one night, and confesses to her friend that her former husband is stalking her. She fears for her life, having helped put him behind bars. So what is the most sensible thing for the pair to do in these circumstances? If your answer is, “Head off to a remote mountain cabin, in the middle on an impending blizzard”, give yourself two points.

Unsurprisingly, this does not work out well, and you can more or less tell where this is going, from the moment when the cabin’s host says “The owner was very specific about this: do not go into the gun cabinet, it’s in the lease.” Liz and Barbara will be getting a two-star review on their profile, because you should not be in the slightest bit shocked to hear, they do end up going into the gun cabinet. For it’s not long before sketchy characters start harassing Barbara in town, and we also learn that Liz was considerably less than forthcoming with the truth to her supposed BFF. This isn’t a surprise – at least, to the viewer – since we had previously seen her take a case of “camera equipment” on the trip, which we know actually contains a gun and a large amount of cash.

It’s all very much by the numbers, the overall vanilla flavour not helped by two leads who manage to look somewhat pretty, while creating almost nothing approaching memorable characters. Heck, I’d have settled for a depth roughly approximating the alleged snowfall. I say “alleged”, since considering there’s a supposed blizzard in action, sealing them off from the rest of civilization, I’m not sure I actually saw a single flake fall from the sky over the duration of the entire movie. It takes about an hour for Barbara to catch up to what we the audience already knows, and for the ex-husband to appear at the cabin.

Things do get at least somewhat interesting thereafter, with Barbara being forced into steps significantly outside of her comfort zone, in order to stay alive from those in pursuit of her. She’s helped by the fact that the pursuer may not exactly be the sharpest tool in the box, and engages in acts which certainly end up back-firing on them. It’s still all low-impact stuff generally, and not enough to distract you from Eleniak’s resemblance here to a slightly less wholesome version of Meg Ryan. Don’t expect anything along “those” lines either; again, I strongly suspect this was intended for Lifetime, rather than late-night on Cinemax. I’ve already forgotten about it, and feel no great sense of loss thereof.

Dir: Ruben Preuss
Star: Erika Eleniak, Monika Schnarre, Peter Dobson, Bill Mondy

Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire – Part One

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★★★
“Don’t call it Star Wars…”

Despite critical derision, this is actually perfectly serviceable pulp SF. Sure, it’s derivative as hell. But the critics getting all huffy about the similarities to Star Wars seem to have forgotten George Lucas only made his film, after failing to acquire the rights to Flash Gordon. This is Snyder’s equivalent to The Fifth Element, in that it’s a long-gestating SF idea, originally conceived well before he became a director. “The Dirty Dozen in space” was the high concept, although there is no denying the SW similarities, especially in the early going. I mean, young orphan on a backwater farming planet gets sucked in to galaxy-hopping adventures, joining a rebellion against an evil empire? Yeah, a little more originality would be welcome. 

It is a bit more “adult”, though the PG-13 certificate holds it back. I still want to see a hard-R take on the concept. Here, it’s limited to stiffer violence and a sprinkling of sexual assault. [An R-rated cut will follow: presumably with more blackjack and hookers.] The heroine is Kota (Boutella), rescued from a crashed spaceship and now living a quiet life on Veldt. That ends when Admiral Atticus Noble (Skrein) and his forces arrive, hunting rebels against the Motherworld. We know they’re the bad guys, because they shop for clothes at some kind of Nazi Outlet Mall. Soon, Kota and fellow farmer Gunnar (Huisman) are on galactic tour, seeking warriors who help defend Veldt, and joining up with the rebels.

If all fairly basic, that’s not a bad thing. I got significant Chronicles of Riddick vibes, though it had a stronger central character. This isn’t necessarily Boutella’s fault, more a result of there being so many to handle here. Editing would have helped: for example, there’s one lengthy animal training scene which feels like it wandered in from Avatar. As you would expect from Snyder, it looks very nice, certainly an improvement in this area over Army of the Dead. There is a similar theme – you could call it’s predecessor “The Dirty Dozen in Vegas, with zombies”. But outside of Kota, not many of the characters here make much impression. Save perhaps the regrettable Oirish accent sported by mercenary pilot Kai (Hunnam).

It does suffer from part-one-itis – the inevitable lack of any conclusion, with nothing of significance being decided. Even the apparent death of a major character ends up being a fake out. But it does rather better than, say, Dune, in terms of narrative division. The action is generally nifty too: Boutella has had her moments before, and gets to build on that experience here, especially in her final battle against Admiral Noble. Doona Bae makes a good impression as cyborg swordmistress Nemesis, not least in a hellacious fight against – and this is a phrase I did not expect 2023 to bring me – an arachnid Jena Malone. Bottom line is, I was entertained for two hours, and have enough interest in seeing part two in April. Good enough for me.

Dir: Zack Snyder
Star: Sofia Boutella, Ed Skrein,  Charlie Hunnam, Michiel Huisman

[This review originally appeared on Film Blitz]