Category: Review

Colombiana

  By

★★★
“The revenge and hit-woman genres could cross-pollinate each other. Just not here.”

There are moments where this seems to have the potential to break out beyond its story, but once you get past the strong central core, the script has very little to offer. Cataleya (Saldana) narrowly escapes death when her parents are killed on the orders of their gangster employer, Don Luis. She flees from Colombia to Chicago and is raised by a family friend, but never forgets where she came from, and has revenge on her mind. Grown-up, she becomes a hit-woman, but has a side-project of payback. She has an occasional boyfriend (Vartan) who knows little about her, and a dogged FBI agent (James), intent on tracking down the mysterious, elusive killer. Y’know: all the usual baggage that goes along with being an assassin.

The action, however, is what rescues this, and when the heroine is in motion, it’s generally fluid and effective. There are two sequences in particular that stand out: Cataleya’s hit of a gangster in prison, and the final showdown where she goes to Don Luis’s headquarters, and takes on… Well, to borrow a famous line from another Besson script, “Everyone!” They are well-staged, with Saldana showing flexibility and athleticism of an impressive degree (Besson’s fondness for parkour also shows up). However, between these two, there isn’t much to speak of; a third sequence, involving a swimming-pool filled with sharks(!) fails, mostly because you’re wondering why the hell Cataleya opted to swim across said pool rather than – oh, I dunno – walking around it?

The background stuff doesn’t work either, particularly the efforts to give her a normal life, which seem both perfunctory and contrived, and Vartan’s role is entirely pointless in emotional terms. I suspect, going by past history, Besson would have been better off directing this himself, not giving it to the man who handled the eminently forgettable Red Siren and Transporter 3. This might be as close to a Leon sequel as we’ll ever get. However, a while back, probably nearly 15 years ago now, I came up with an idea for a film about a woman who witnessed her family being killed, and a decade later, came back for her revenge. I even got as far as starting on a script. While I’m probably biased, I’m pretty sure it was better than Colombiana.

Dir: Olivier Megaton
Star: Zoe Saldana, Lennie James, Michael Vartan, Jordi Molla

Sweet Karma

  By

★★★½
“Hang on: I thought revenge was sweet, not karma? Oh, well: never mind.”

After she gets word, back in their native Russia, that her sister has been killed in Toronto, Karma (Bechard) vows revenge on those responsible. This pulls her in to a seedy, dangerous world of sex trafficking, with women being lured from Eastern Europe to the West, with the promise of legitimate jobs, only to forced on arrival into working as strippers or worse, by the criminal elements who organize and run the business, with a fist of iron. As Karma stabs, shoots and bludgeons her way up the chain of command, those at the top grow increasingly restless. Initially, they think a rival gang is responsible, but the evidence eventually convinces them Karma is, indeed, a bitch,

This was better than I expected, with the obviously low budget working more for the film than against it, enhancing the ‘grindhouse’ feel that you have here – Karma is mute, which adds a definite resonance of Ms. 45 or Thriller: A Cruel Picture, though little more than that. It’s certainly not short on nudity and violence, but rarely topples over the edge into gratuitous, being largely necessary to bring out exactly how callous those are, treating the women as nothing more than slabs of meat, as in the scene where the girls “learn” pole-dancing.

After the initial death – an assault using office supplies, whose aftermath has Karma puking her guts out into a waste-paper basket – it does take a little while to get back to the nitty-gritty. There’s also a mis-step towards the end, where attention is diverted from the heroine, to an undercover cop (Tokatlidis) who is none too pleased to have his case threatened by an avenging angel. And some of the dialogue is a little too Tarantino-esque, e.g. burbling on about hockey. Well, it is Canadian, I guess.

However, the pluses generally outnumber the minutes, with some imaginative deaths, not least the pimp lured into a bathroom and offered “cocaine” by Karma. Bechard, despite her lack of dialogue, does a good job of putting across the determination she feels in pursuing her goal, and I liked the throbbing techno soundtrack which underscores proceedings. I’m also pleased to see it avoid the faux trappings of some recent genre entries, such as Machete. I was expecting something a good deal shinier, shallower and, well, shittier; instead, it’s a grubby and fairly serious look into a world which we probably would rather ignore.

Dir: Andrew Thomas Hunt
Star: Shera Bechard, John Tokatlidis, Frank J. Zupancic, Christian Bako

Memoirs of a Lady Ninja

  By

★½
“The world’s first Christian soft-porn ninja film. And probably the last.”

This one is so obscurist I couldn’t even find an IMDB entry for it, despite a fairly high-profile release from Tokyo Shock. I can perhaps see why. It’s more an excuse for a series of coupling, mostly involving Hara, who has gone on to greater fame in the 3-D Sex and Zen movie. She plays a blue-eyed ninja called Hijiri. She gets frames for the theft of a scroll which can be used to gain immortality, and ends up falling off a cliff. She is nursed back to health by a Christian named Seitaro (Yoshioka), but their peaceful existence is threatened, as the scroll’s previous owner sends out minions to retrieve it, and another religious sect also vows to convert adherents to the ‘heathen’ religion, by any means necessary.

So many problems here, not least that no-one involved in this can fight their way out of a paper-bag, in particular Hara, who manages to block full swings from samurai swords with something better suited for opening envelopes. There’s a whole subplot about her mother also being a ninja, and abandoning the heroine for her own protection, shortly before she was killed, which has left Hijiri with issues. It is not very interesting, and serves largely to provide the McGuffin necessary for the final battles, when she has to take on the “Saint” at the head of the rival sect, and defeat someone who has read the scroll of immortality.

It deserves some credit for the blue-eyed ninja idea – Hijiri’s father was a Portuguese trader – and it’s got an unusual take on both xenophobia and religion, unashamedly depicting Christians as the good guys [while I’m agnostic, I appreciate seeing something you rarely get, even in the West]. However, it’s executed with such a complete lack of skill, as to have me reaching for the fast-forward through significant chunks [and I confess to actually using it in the sex scenes]. Despite my summary up top, there is apparently a Part 2 of this knocking about. It’ll likely be quite some time before I can be bothered to review it.

Dir: Jiro Ishikawa
Star: Saori Hara, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Akari Hoshino

We Are The Night

  By

★★★★
“German vampires – but the polar opposite of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu.”

Lena (Herfurth) lives on the edge of society: stealing from other criminals, and running from the cops. But her life changes forever, when she comes to the attentions of Louise (Hoss), a rich socialite, who runs with her pack of friends. Louise is actually a centuries-old vampire, who sees something in Lena’s eyes, something for which Louise has been searching for many decades. She bites Lena, and her transformation into a creature of the night begins. It’s not without its issues: to force Lena to come to terms with her new-found strength and speed, she is handed over to a pimp, a scenario which turns into a blood-bath. While Lena does adapt, the police investigate the killings and Tom (Riemelt), who knew Lena from her street days, realizes there’s a connection between her and what happened.

While there’s precious little new here, in terms of content, it’s really a film where the style is probably more important, and the makers nail this impeccably. It’s a glossy, shiny movie, set in a world that looks like a car advert [and, as an aside, there are some very nice cars here!], where the streets are perpetually wet and the only light is neon, with a perpetually thumping techno beat as the soundtrack. Of course, your mileage may vary as to how that translates into a cinematic experience, but I loved the attitude on view, despite the short attention span and focus on distracting the viewer with shiny, pretty baub… Ooh! Sparkly things! Sorry, where was I?

It’s the moments that you’ll remember: Lena’s bath-tub transformation with her old life literally melting off her, or the restaurant scene where one of the immortals proves exactly how hard-core a smoker she is, by stubbing a cigarette out in her eye. And the radical feminist philosophy is engagingly confident, espoused here as, “We eat, drink, sniff coke, and fuck as much as we like. But we never get fat, pregnant, or hooked.” Louise helped kill off the male vampires because they were a waste of undeath, and has deliberately avoided turning men since. It is, if you like, a distaff version of The Lost Boys, crossed with Daughters of Darkness, with some fine action set-pieces thrown in, that I wish they’d extended a bit. When you contrast this with lame vampire updatings like T*w*l*ght, there’s no doubt which is superior.

Dir: Dennis Gansel
Star: Karoline Herfurth, Nina Hoss, Jennifer Ulrich, Max Riemelt

Backyard

  By

★★★
“The film that could only have been made in Mexico, where female life is cheap…”

The US border is all that separates El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, but the two cities’ ways of life are worlds apart. On the Mexican side, the bodies of women turn up, almost every week: sexually assaulted, with signs of torture and/or body parts missing. The police barely bother to investigate; the victims tend to be far from home, low-paid workers in the factories which drive Juarez’s employment. Into this comes police captain Blanca Bravo (de la Reguera), who vows to track down the perpetrators. But doing so pits her against the multinationals who could do without the bad publicity; against her commander, who says to her face that “women make good nurses, but lousy police officers”; and state politicians, who are uneasy about exactly what she might uncover.

This is based on a very unpleasant reality, also covered in the Jennifer Lopez movie, Bordertown, but one senses that was sanitized for American palates. This doesn’t soft-pedal anything: the brutality, corruption, sexism and poverty depicted makes for pretty challenging viewing. You may recognize de la Reguera from her role as the nun in Nacho Libre, but this is right at the other end of its portrayal of Mexico: barely controlled anarchy where, if you pick the right person, it’s possible to get away with murder. This is personified by the story, running parallel to Blanco, of a young women, who arrived in Juarez to seek work, and her eventual fate. While harrowing, this angle doesn’t shed much extra light on proceedings, and probably dilutes the film’s focus.

The central performance, however, is solid, with Blanco portrayed as someone willing to put everything she has – her career, or even her life – on the line, to protect those who have little or no protection in the eyes of the law. If the film has little to offer in the way of surprises (especially if you’re a fan of Dexter, you’ll be able to spot the psychopath a long way off!), and nor does it offer much in the way of resolution, it’s a decent, if grim, look at a world just a couple of hours drive from where I’m writing this in Arizona. And it’s a world I’d rather keep at arm’s length if possible.

Dir: Carlos Carrera
Star: Ana de la Reguera, Asur Zagada, Marco Pèrez, Alejandro Calva

No Contest II: Access Denied

  By

★★½
“Second time’s the not-so charming.”

In many ways, this is a shameless rip-off of a shameless rip-off, trying to recapture the success of the original. It’s not quite as successful, lacking the gleeful sense of energy which help its predecessor overcome its (obvious) limitations. Once more, Tweed plays action actress Sharon Bell, this time filming her latest work in Eastern Europe. She arranges for the film to do some location work in a gallery owned by sister, Bobbi (Heitmeyer), which is just about to open an exhibition, showcasing artefacts that were looted by the Nazis in World War II. The gallery is taken over by Eric Dane (Henriksen) and his crew, who seal the place off from the outside world, intent in stealing a lethal German nerve agent hidden in the base of one of the sculptures. Unfortunately, inside at the time are both sisters, along with the movie director Jack Terry (Payne), who is scouting the place out.

To be honest, the plot makes little sense. Why does Dane – who has apparently had access to the statue for quite some time – wait until it is installed in the gallery, behind a hefty security system, before going after the nerve-gas? And when he does, his subsequent actions and plan seem to be designed more to artificially generate tension for the movie plot, than any practical purpose: for example, his decision to leave one of the canisters, attached to an unstoppable time, in an air-duct, while he is still present in the sealed building. Meanwhile, the heroes prove adept at fashioning tear-gas and lethal blow-darts from everyday materials (or, at least, everyday materials for an art gallery).

If you don’t look too hard, this is still passably entertaining, with the art gallery providing an interesting location for some battles (the cat-fight between Sharon and Dane’s henchwoman comes to mind, ending on a piece of unfortunately-pointy artwork). Henriksen us good value as ever in the psycho role, e.g. shooting people because they can’t deliver Shakespeare to his liking and, while Payne is better known as a villain, he does decent work here in a more sympathetic role. However, the film doesn’t use them as effectively as before, and the film needs to be less obviously stage-managed towards its conclusion, which is obvious well before it happens. The flaws are likely not much worse here – just a little more obvious.

Dir: Paul Lynch
Star: Shannon Tweed, Lance Henriksen, Bruce Payne, Jayne Heitmeyer
a.k.a. Face the Evil

No Contest

  By

★★★
“No originality, no budget… But no disaster, either.”

An almost-entirely shameless Die Hard rip-off, this stars Tweed as Shannon Bell, the host of a beauty-pageant, which is interrupted by Oz (Clay) and his gang, who take a half-dozen of the beauty-queens and Bell hostage, up in the penthouse, and demand $10 million in diamonds for their release. Bell manages to slip away and, fortunately, her character is an actress, famous for playing action heroines [yeah, it’s all a bit ‘meta’ – except, it came out in 1992, largely before ‘meta’ became popular…]. So she gets to go all John McClane on their asses, crawling round air-ducts and assisting ex-federal agent Crane (Davi), who was bodyguarding one of the participants, who is a politician’s daughter, but popped outside the building for a fortunately-timed smoke.

The script is hackneyed, certainly, but it’s a stellar B-movie cast, that works well, and largely keeps things entertaining. This is where the thought has gone in. While Oz is undeniably brutal, he is as far from Hans Gruber as can be imagined, a foulmouth sleazeball rather than a suave sophisticat, and Bell, similarly, is the opposite of McClane, despite her action pedigree (one character describes the roles she plays as, “Bruce Lee with boobs”). Endearingly, she bursts into tears after she has to kill someone. Davi, of course, was in the original, playing Special Agent Johnson [“No – the other one…”], and we’ll watch anything with Piper in it, after They Live. It’s clear Tweed is not exactly in the realm of Lee, but does credibly enough to paper over the cracks, action-wise, and perhaps surprisingly, keeps her clothes entirely on.

Things do fall apart at the finale, which is convoluted and strained, to say the least: the film is much better when sticking to its basic premise – or, more accurately, someone else’s basic premise. But, having sat through much the same film with Anna Nicole Smith in the lead, this is an enormous improvement. Certainly, it’s cheap and cheerful, the kind of thing you can imagine seeing in an early 90’s videostore, with an appropriately lurid cover. But it is entertaining, and given the sights of the makers were clearly aimed no higher than that, has to be judged a success.

Dir: Paul Lynch
Star: Shannon Tweed, Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay, Roberto Davi, Roddy Piper

Monica la mitraille

  By

★★½
“Bonnie et les Clydes.”

I think this really comes down to a question of managing expectations. Hearing this was a film based on the life of Monica Proetti, Canada’s premiere female bank-robber, responsible for 20+ hold-ups before being gunned down by the cops… Well, seems like plenty of potential for action, doesn’t it? The reality is less concerned with the robberies, than the events which lead up to them. Monique Sparvieri (Bonnier) lives in the Montreal slums, working part-time as a hooker, for fun and profit. Her first husband Michael (Schorpion), is a safe-cracker who vanishes after his planned robbery is snatched from under his nose. She then hooks up with Gaston (Huard), another member of the team, and begins her own life of crime. When he is sent to jail in the mid-1960’s, she is left with limited options to provide for her children, and goes full-bore into the banking business, with yet another lover, Gerald (Dupuis).

It certainly shines light into the “whys” of her life, one that offered little or no hope of escaping the poverty of her upbringing. Crime, of one form or another, was the main way out, and that led to an extremely relaxed attitude towards law-breaking for Monica. The film does take too long to make this point: it’s 125 minutes in total, and could easily lose half an hour off that, though the performances, Bonnier’s in particular, are solid enough not to make it too much of a chore. But the raids themselves are perfunctory. They’re more snatch-and-grabs, with the gang aiming to spend little more than 30 second in the bank. The only one where there’s any real tension is the final robbery, where the gang gets lost in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, while Monica’s previously-jailed confederates huddle round a radio tuned to the police-band, from prison.

What we have here illustrates the tension between real-life and cinematic drama. The two rarely align perfectly, and I get the feeling this example was more concerned about factual accuracy and, inevitably, the entertainment value suffers as a result.

Dir: Pierre Houle
Star: Céline Bonnier, Roy Dupuis, Patrick Huard, Frank Schorpion

Requiem pour une Tueuse

  By

★★★
“Emotionally chilly, and not as clever as it thinks, but well-acted and shot.”

The French have a decent pedigree of action heroines, going back to Joan of Arc. Cinematically, the likes of Bloody Mallory, Adele Blanc-Sec, and one of the most influential of them all, Nikita, have kept the tricouleur flying. This is closest to the last-named, with Lucrece (Laurent) fed up of the assassin game, but talked into that old standby of the genre, one final mission, by her agent (Karyo, who of course was also in Nikita). This involves posing as a classical singer and taking part in a performance of Handel’s Messiah. For the target is the bass singer (Stills), whose Scottish distillery occupies land an oil company wants for their pipeline. Lucrece is pretty disenchanted with the whole thing, and this may explain why her early attempts mis-fire. Fortunately, the special agent (Cornillac) sent to track her down, is equally as unenthusiastic. But is Lucrece the only killer in play?

The picture is pretty misleading, since Lucrece never touches a gun the entire movie – she’s a poisons specialist. It’s pretty chilly, emotionally, but both Laurent and Cornillac do bring some humanity to their roles, and are both very watchable [there’s one scene between them that is particularly good]. It seems to be aiming for a Hitchcockian twistiness rather than an action-packed thrill-ride; it doesn’t quite pull this off, and you’re left to appreciate the Swiss scenery and the classical music more than the plot. It’s too heavy on the cliches of the genre, and feels more like a lazy effort to tidy up loose ends on a long-running TV series, than a solid standalone work – Lucrece’s relationship with her daughter seems particularly thrown in. A character like Lucrece would certainly have plenty of interesting stories to tell; this doesn’t seem to be one of the more memorable.

Dir: Jèrôme Le Gris
Star: Mèlanie Laurent, Clovis Cornillac, Tchéky Karyo, Christopher Stills

The Vanquisher

  By

★★
“Coherence? It’s vastly over-rated. Especially in Thailand, it appears.”

Thailand appears to have become a hot-bed of action-heroines in the past couple of years. Jeeja Chocolate Yanin is obviously a key component, but others appear to be leaping on the bandwagon: this one plays like an entry in the Angel series, a Hong Kong classic in its day. Unfortunately, so little effort is put into explaining what is going on, or who is doing what to whom, that the copious action feels like a showreel for participants. Both Chris and I nodded off for a bit in the middle, which is about the worst condemnation any action film can receive. Hence, I turn to Amazon.com for a synopsis.

“After completing a covert mission in southern Thailand, CIA agent Gunja (Sriban) finds herself forced to fight off operatives who’ve been ordered to take her out at all costs. She survives and after two years of laying low, re-emerges in Bangkok to face her old foes and foil a plot to detonate a bomb in the city.” Oh, so that’s what it was. Actually, I seem to recall a good chunk being about trying to capture a renowned terrorist, but that must be the “plot to detonate a bomb” bit. It’s filmed in a clunky mix of Japanese, English and Thai: I can’t speak for the first and last, but the English spoken appeared, far too often, to be of the second-language type. And the non-Caucasians in the cast were even worse. Hohoho.

The action is plentiful enough in the second half, especially compared to a first half that throws characters and plot-lines across the screen, largely without explanation as to purpose. It does improve somewhat in motion, with three kick-ass characters; or at least, who might be kick-ass, if the editing and cinematography ever gave a chance to see them doing so. Instead, it’s about 10% “Oh, that was cool,” and 90% “What happened there?” – in other words, about the same ratio as the plot. A nice idea, than in the right hands could have been an awful lot better.

Dir: Manop Udomdej
Star: Sophita Sriban, Jacqui A. Thananon, Saito Kano, Kessarin Ektawatkul
a.k.a. Final Target