Category: Review

Reign of Assassins

  By

★½
“I liked it much better it the first time, when it was called Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

The most disappointing film of 2010? I went in with huge expectations, based on reviews that said, “The best swordplay film since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon..” O RLY? I know Crouching Tiger. Crouching Tiger is one of my favourite movies. And Reign of Assassins, you’re no Crouching Tiger. It’s a confused, poorly-shot mess that proved a struggle to endure and a challenge to stay awake, right from the opening lump of introduction. Stick with me for this synopsis. The remains of a Buddhist monk, split in two, are said to turn whoever has them into a kung-fu master. The Dark Stone gang, under the Wheel King (Wang), want to possess them, and get one half, but gang member Drizzle makes off with the body parts, undergoes plastic surgery that turns her into Michelle Yeoh and takes up a quiet life as a fabric seller. She meets and marries Jiang Asheng (Jung), until her secret identity is revealed in a bank raid, and the Dark Stone gang come after her again. However, turns out Jiang isn’t who he seems either…

While obviously, some suspension of disbelief is necessary when watching wuxia films, we’re expected to believe they had plastic surgery? And I thought it was supposed to take years off, not turn Kelly Lin (aged 34) into Yeoh (47). That kind of problem cripples the entire film, as does the leaden romance, with none of the passion seen in Tiger: instead, if we get Jiang offering to help close Drizzle’s stall when it rains once, we get it half a dozen times. Is she too dumb to get a damn canopy? Such thoughts interrupt your train of thought far too often, and as a result it fails to engage, with the bad guys a selection of one-dimensional stereotypes, such as Turquoise (Hsu), Drizzle’s replacement, who drops her clothes at the drop of…er, a cloth. Though her over-acting is at least fun to watch; we simply wanted the Wheel King to get some cough lozenges, his raspy voice being the most irritating since Christian Bale in The Dark Knight.

Much of this could be forgiven if the action was coherently put together, but it isn’t. Ang Lee was wise enough to step back, leave the camera rolling and let Yeoh and Zhang ZiYi do their thing. Neither director here exactly has a pedigree in the swordplay genre – and boy, does it show. Filmed with too many close-ups – it felt pan-and-scanned even though it wasn’t – and edited in such a choppy fashion, you have little clue what’s happening or who’s doing the fighting. Sitting through tedious relationship stuff, only to find the battles largely an incoherent mess, including mediocre CGI, was the final straw. Our interest, already flickering, was finally snuffed out.

Dir: Chao-Bin Su and John Woo
Star: Michelle Yeoh, Woo-sung Jung, Xueqi Wang, Barbie Hsu

Double Dare

  By

★★★★½
“Zoë Bell, you’re our heroine. Never change.”

The day after watching this documentary, I was clearing out the shed in preparation for our house move. I twisted my back, and thought about giving up, but soldiered on until the job was done – because that’s what Zoë Bell would do. It’s now my life philosophy: WWZD? She’s the main focus here, from working as Lucy Lawless’s double on Xena in New Zealand, through an unsuccessful attempt to break in to Hollywood, and on to a second try, where she’s hired to stand-in for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Paralleling this, it looks at Jeannie Epper, a veteran stuntwoman who shadowed Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman. Now nearing her 60th birthday, Epper is still active and seeking work, fighting against the problems of being a female in an extremely male-dominated industry.

The thing that comes over is how delightfully un-Hollywood Bell is, innocent almost to the point of naivety – she’s blissfully unaware of the need, for example, to have head shots, and drops F-bombs with a marvellously casual air. The cameras are rolling when she gets the call telling her she’s got the Kill Bill job, and her obvious, genuine delight at the news, brought a huge grin to our faces, and is completely endearing. It’s to be hoped that Hollywood doesn’t change her in the slightest, and Zoë remains the same, down-to-earth, well-grounded person shown here, who is now even more solidly entrenched among our favourite contemporary action heroines.

I have some concerns there, based on Epper; her contemplation of plastic surgery and liposuction at her age is more sad than anything else, as is watching Jeannie working the phones, basically begging for work, even though she’s a legend in the business. There’s a good heart beating in there (Epper donated a kidney to a friend, for instance), but she has clearly been ground down by her decades in the film industry, and become a lot more cynical and battle-weary as a result. That’s no wonder, when you witness her struggles trying to get equal treatment for women at the annual awards ceremony. It’s a somewhat grim reality-check, warning of the potential perils ahead for Bell in her career.

But aside from the contrast in the two heroines, this is a fascinating study in a side of the business that doesn’t get anything like the recognition it deserves. As one comment I read elsewhere said, “If you liked Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Zoë Bell is the reason why,” and that sums up the shadows in which stuntwomen work. This film shines a light into that darkness, and both Epper and Bell deserve enormous respect and admiration for putting their bodies on the line, in the name of our entertainment. And while I’m not really a big Tarantino fan, if he turns out to be responsible for bringing Bell to a wider audience, then it’s perhaps the biggest gift his career will have given us.

Dir: Amanda Micheli
Star: Jeannie Epper, Zoë Bell

Les Femmes de l’ombre

  By

★★★★
“Wartime derring-do with the Inglourious Bastardettes.”

It’s May 1944, and the imminent D-day landings by the Allies in France are imperiled, when a geologist, sent to check one of the beaches, is injured and ends up in hospital. A team of five Frenchwomen, from various backgrounds and led by Louise (Marceau), a trained sniper whose husband was recently killed by Ze Germans, is sent in to occupied territory to rescue the geologist before he is found by Colonel Heindrich (Bleibtreu), and forced to give up the location of the invasion, allowing the Germans to meet it head-on. However, that turns out to be just the start of their dangerous mission.

First off, the French title, which translates as “Women of the shadow”, is a good deal more evocative than the bland “Female Agents” one, and conveys much better the…well, shadowy nature of the enterprise. It feels somewhat of a cross between The Dirty Dozen and Inglourious Basterds, with the team cobbled together from irregular forces, such as Jeanne (Depardieu, Gerard’s daughter), a prostitute who faced the hangman’s noose for murdering her pimp, or Suzy (Gillain), who used to be Heindrich’s mistress. This could have led to caricature – the whore, the smart one, the devout Catholic – yet the film, largely avoids this. Even Heindrich is not a stereotypical Nazi, another aspect that reminded us of Basterds, though the Allied force here is far less brutal.

It’s a solid piece of action/drama, which managed to keep both of us awake, despite a session earlier in the evening at the “all you can eat” fish fry; normally, that requires 30,000 Volts to keep us from sliding into post-gluttony unconsciousness. I think Chris enjoyed the movie a little more: I was somewhat on the fence about giving it the seal, finding some of the plotting a little convoluted and occasionally implausible, but her endorsement of this as “great” provided sufficient impetus. Marceau is particularly good, exuding steely resolve to hold the team together, and Bleibtreu makes an excellent foil, coming across as equally smart and committed as Louise. Their conflict is the glue that binds the story together, and makes it one of the best efforts in the wartime heroine genre to date.

[Note: The film is loosely – very loosely – based on Lisé de Baissac, who did operate undercover in France during the second-half of the war. However, there’s little or no evidence of any mission that parallels the one depicted in the film. In the time leading up to D-day, she was doing reconnaissance work in Normandy, scouting out holding grounds for airborne troops.]

Dir: Jean-Paul Salomé
Star: Sophie Marceau, Julie Depardieu, Marie Gillain, Moritz Bleibtreu
a.k.a. Female Agents

Hora (The Whore)

  By

★★
“Grindhouse, Norwegian style.”

Crime-writer Rikke (Vibe) heads out to her former home in the country for a quiet few days catching up on her work. There she bumps into a guy whom she hasn’t seen since she was eight, but who still seems to have the hots for her. She declines his advances, telling him of her husband back in the city, but he persists in his efforts, along with his policeman friend, and the backward clerk in a local convenience-store. A dead animal is left on her doorstep, and that’s only a precursor to a long, brutal assault on Rikke that leaves her battered and bruised, almost beyond recognition. However, barely have the rapists left, before she is already planning her revenge on each one of them, and it will be every bit as unpleasant.

Yes, it’s basically I Spit on Your Grave with a Scandinavian accent, and I’m not sure this is quite what the world needs. While I’ve no problem per se with rape-revenge movies, I am far more interested in the revenge part of the equation. See, for instance, Ms. 45, which gets to that side of things inside about 15 minutes, and is all the better for it. Here, once you get past the opening scene, the first 45 minutes are largely Rikke lounging around the cabin in her dressing-gown. She pecks away on the computer, occasionally chats to her husband (who seems more than a bit of a jerk, especially when drunk), and has uncomfortable interactions with her admirers. Then there’s the attack itself, which is vicious and unpleasant – exactly how cinematic rape should be, of course, but this doesn’t make it any more pleasant to watch, especially at the length depicted here.

Finally, we get to the revenge, and it’s pretty much as you’d expect. Indeed, the entire thing is more or less what you would imagine from the synopsis, and that’s perhaps the main issue. There’s only a couple of moments where Kiil shows flair and while Vibe (a stripper and porn star) is decent enough in the role, you don’t get much sense of Rikke’s character or personality. That’s where the impact – both from the rape, and the subsequent revenge – originates, and as a result, this left me feeling a bit like a poorly-made martini, neither shaken nor stirred.

Dir: Reinert Kiil
Star: Isabel Vibe, Jørgen Langhelle, Kenneth Falkenberg, Gaute Næsheim

The Apocalypse Code

  By

★★★½
“Proof that cheerily mindless action pics are not the exclusive domain of Hollywood.”

About ten minutes into this, as another large explosion filled the screen, Chris turned to me and said, “Is this a Michael Bay movie?” While it isn’t, confusion is understandable: this is just the kind of dumb action film for which he is renowned, featuring basic plotting and large-scale mayhem. Terrorist Jaffad is just about to sell four nuclear warheads he has hidden in major cities worldwide back to the Americans, when his entire compound is taken out, at the command of a mysterious figure known as “The Butcher.” FSB Agent Marie (Zavorotnyuk), who had previously been working undercover to get to Jaffad, just manages to escape the slaughter, and is now assigned to track down the Butcher, by getting close to his financial advisor, Louis (Perez). Jaffad gave parts of the eleven-digit code that can be used to detonate the devices, to trusted colleagues in Italy, Norway and Malaysia, and Marie needs to find the code before the Butcher.

Expensive by Russian standards, yet relatively cheap ($13.5m budget) by American ones, this certainly provides bang for its buck, whizzing around the globe like the Bond movie it mostly wants to be, while putting its heroine in a selection of glamorous costumes and wigs (prefer blondes? Marie can provide for you too, as shown in the pic at lower-right). Shmelev has a good visual eye for proceedings, shooting and framing the action with some beautiful work, and makes the most of his locations. Zavorotnyuk has good screen presence, and I liked that no-one made much mention of her sex; she’s just another agent. It gets bonus points simply through its origins, which confer a different approach – when the Americans show up (though it’s difficult to tell, since everyone speaks Russian), they aren’t particularly good or bad, just there.

However, the plot is not novel at all, the efforts to give Marie backstory are near-laughable, and once the novelty of the Russian heroes wears off, the script has little to offer: significant fragments don’t make much sense, and other scenes seem to be there, just to prove the makers actually went to the locations. Action-wise, it’s somewhat of a mixed bag; it seems pretty clear the lead actress isn’t doing much of the action herself, but there’s a nice fight at the end between Marie and the villain, in front of the console which can be used to detonate the bombs, as a self-destruct timer counts down. You can also enjoy a gun-battle on a boat, and Marie stocking the corridors of a hotel [you’ll understand why I spelled it like that, hohoho].

It originally came out in Russia more than three years ago, and I’m a little surprised the film apparently hasn’t had any kind of official release in the UK or US. It’s glossy, well-produced nonsense, that completely fails to engage the brain or heart, yet kept me adequately interested for 105 minutes, with plenty of eye-candy [note to Chris: I mean the exotic locations, darling…] and giant fireballs. While I’ve already forgotten much of what happened in this, it is as good a stab at creating a female Jason Bourne as anything Hollywood has yet managed.

Dir: Vadim Shmelev
Star: Anastasiya Zavorotnyuk, Vincent Perez, Vladimir Menshov, Oskar Kuchera

Mutant Girls Squad

  By

★★★★
“X-Men, as directed by Peter Jackson. And not LotR Peter Jackson. Brain Dead Peter Jackson.”

It makes sense that this stems from a drunken agreement between the three co-directors at a film festival, because this is the sort of film you would only make under inebriated terms, and it’s probably true to say that drunk is the best way to watch this. That’s not a bad thing per se, just that its loopy sensibilities and over-the-top antics would seem to go particularly well with a few beers. Rin (Sugimoto) hits her sixteenth birthday not too happy, being bullied at school. However, the bullies have a surprise in store, as it turns out Rin is half-human, half-Hiiko, with her father being from a mutant race with extraordinary powers. They have largely been hiding from humanity, but are now fed up of being persecuted, and under the leadership of Kisaragi (Sakaguch), are about to declare total war on us. Rin, along with Yoshie (Morita) and Rei (Takayama), are to lead the strikeforce, though Rin is less convinced over the need to target all of mankind.

This is right up there with Brain Dead in terms of the goriest movie ever, with fountains of blood, real and digital painting the entire screen, including the lens, though rarely affecting our heroine’s sailor-suit school uniform. Which, one assumes, is part of the joke, for everything about this is so amazingly excessive, it’s impossible to take any of it seriously, even as it is played completely straight-faced. The talents, for instance, include a waitress whose breasts each sprout a sword and a cheerleader, concealing a chainsaw in a place power-tools are not normally located. No explanation for any of this is ever given. It just is, and you either buy into it or you don’t. Yet there’s also a moment or two of poignancy, as Rin struggles to decide whether to align herself with a human race which has largely rejected her, or her new “family,” weird and incredibly ultraviolent as they may be.

While the gore is certainly present in buckets, as we’ve seen, that isn’t enough by itself to make for entertainment, and the insane imagination on view here is equally impressive. This is particularly true at the end, when Kisaragi reveals his final form. Let’s just say, breasts that squirt acid milk is one of the lesser of his talents. This kind of lunatic invention makes the film work, and while you undeniably need a large tolerance for arterial spray, and some of the FX are rubbery, to say the least, it is thoroughly fun schlock, unlike anything produced by even the most warped Western company.

Dir: Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, and Tak Sakaguchi
Star: Yumi Sugimoto, Suzuka Morita, Yuko Takayama, Tak Sakaguchi

Samurai Princess

  By

★★½
“Whoever knew arterial spray could be so…dull?”

Ok, “dull” is perhaps not quite the word, but Chris voted on this one with her closed eyelids and heavy breathing, and I was struggling to avoid joining her, despite some impressive ideas. It’s set in the Forest of Infinity, a strange locale where past, present and future all seem to merge. Hence, you’ve got renegades with samurai swords and Buddhist nuns and a party of a dozen young women whose paths cross with the former, resulting in the rape and death of 11. The un-named survivor (Kishi) is rescued by a scientist who creates mecha – cyborgs – and he uses the organs of her friends as a core to rebuild her, with the nun adding their 11 souls. The new super-powered samurai princess goes after the killers, and then Red Dragon and Butterfly, who instigated the murders in the name of what they call “art.”

It’s not as good as it sounds. I think it’s a lesson that gore, no matter how impressive, does not make a “good” film, because plot and characters still matter. That’s where this falls down, with too many scenes between the blood-letting that fail to go anywhere. It’s a huge letdown, especially after a undeniably spectacular opening ten minutes, highlighted by the heroine turning her breasts into a sort of ‘flying guillotine’ device that she shoots out on a chain and… Well, you gotta see it. [And, since the whole thing is now legally available through Youtube, feel free to do so. We’ll wait here.] But beyond that, the script wanders off on tangents, like the two female detectives apparently hunting mecha builders, with muddied motivation for a lot of the characters and performances which, too often, rely on pulling faces in place of acting.

It’s a shame, as I liked the concepts, underexplained as they were – is the Forest of Infinity anywhere near Versus‘s Forest of Resurrection? – and the fusion of elements from different periods. However, it felt as if the makers concentrated all their efforts on the gore effects, and that will only work if your entire running-time is composed of these. Though at times it felt like this was the case here, it wasn’t so, and the makers could learn from other, better entries on matters like pacing and characterization.

Dir: Kengo Kaji
Star: Aino Kishi, Dai Mizuno, Asuka Kataoka, Mitsuru Karahashi

A.F.R.I.K.A.

  By

★★
“Thelma & Louise go to Korea, and leave their intelligence at home.”

Ji-Won (Lee Yo-Won) and her friend So-Hyun (Kim) make a trip to the seaside, borrowing a car from a friend. However, the auto turns out to have a couple of guns in it, lost by a gangster and cop in a poker game. The weapons come in handy when the girls need to escape from some assailants, but when they are joined by a manic waitress with no sense of gun-control, the now-trio find themselves on the run from police. A clothing-store owner with a grudge, completes the quartet, as they try to make their way back to Seoul – and they are pursued not only by the cops, also by the previous owners of the guns, who need to get them back to prevent issues of their own. Conversely, their exploits and subsequent media attention are getting them fans of their own, with the titular website (it stands for Adoring Four Revolutionary Idols Korea Association) extolling their virtues and provoking copycat crimes.

The main problem here is a film that can’t work out what it wants to be. Comedy? Thriller? Social satire? Drama? Action? There are elements of all those genres here, and most of them show occasional flashes of potential; yet none of them are done well enough to prove particularly memorable. The women largely come across as flimsy characters, with little in the way of background or even distinguishing traits, and there’s hardly any kind of a character arc for them, though I enjoyed the subversive message of “personal empowerment through fire-arm possession” – it’s especially surprising from a country like South Korea, where guns appear to be very strictly controlled [“You are only allowed to own a gun for hunting purposes, and the few who do, have to keep these guns at the local police station. When you want to hunt, you go to the police station, check your gun out, hunt, and return it to the station when you’re finished.”]

Even exploring this angle, of gun culture in a land without guns, would have been a potentially intriguing approach. Instead, there’s hardly any dramatic impetus, even when the tensions mount between the four girls over where their crime spree should take them next. Instead of building, the film peters out at the end, and is nothing more than forgettable commercial entertainment, slickly-made and unsatisfying.

Dir: Shin Seung-Soo
Star: Lee Yo-Won, Kim Min-Seon, Cho Eun-Ji, Lee Young-Jin

Salt

  By

★★★½
“See Salt?”

Angelina Jolie is the undisputed US box-office queen of action heroines. With Lara Croft: Tomb Raider‘s $131 million, and the $117 million this had earned to date, she owns two of the top four all-time genre entries (the other two being Crouching Tiger and Charlie’s Angels). While that’s not adjusted for inflation – Aliens would likely come out on top there – it’s still an impressive feat, and there probably isn’t any other actress in Hollywood capable of opening a large-budget action movie on this scale. Even in a supporting role, e.g. Wanted, she has credibility as an action heroine few can match.

Here, she plays Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative who returns from time in captivity in North Korea, and resumes her cover as a company executive. She and her colleague Ted Winter (Schreiber) are called in to interview a Russian defector, and decide if he is telling the truth. He spins a tale of a long-running project, dating back to the Cold War era. Young children were groomed from a very early age to become sleeper agents abroad, leading normal lives without suspicion until the time comes to activate them. That time has now come, with one agent tasked with killing the Russian President, currently on a state visit to the US. Oh, yeah – and that agent’s cover name is… Evelyn Salt.

When Salt can’t contact her husband (Diehl) and the defector escapes from custody too, Salt bolts from the impending custody closing around her and goes on the run. Is it because she wants to rescue her husband and prevent the assassination, to clear her name? Or is she the double-agent claimed? The film doesn’t hold out too long in this regard before committing itself. However, that isn’t the main focus, as the script then swerves in a different direction, and it also turns out that the assassination attempt is not an end in itself, only the start of a more far-reaching, and disturbing, plan to incite Armageddon.

I confess to being somewhat disappointed, especially after I realized this was written by Kurt Wimmer, who gave us Equilibrium and Ultraviolet [the former was a lot more warmly-received, but I’ll defend the latter to my dying breath as pure adrenalin/popcorn nonsense]. This is rather more restrained, which likely explains why it took nine figures at the box office, yet is also rather less memorable as a result. Not to say it’s “bad”, or anything like that; just that it’s very easy to see it, as originally envisaged, starring Tom Cruise. Pretty much run a global search and replace on the script, changing the lead character’s name [to, oh, I dunno: “Jason Bourne”?] and you’d be there. It’s too generic to be a true classic of the action heroine genre.

Still, it’s entertaining and keeps moving. Credit for clocking in at a brisk 100 minutes, rather than stretching things out beyong what’s necessary: there’s isn’t much unnecessary fat on its scriptual bones, and a refreshing lack of romantic chit-chat. There are a couple of solid action set-pieces, most notably an early, frenetic chase through the streets, and Salt overall has an ability to withstand falls that Wile E. Coyote would envy. Towards the end, she descends a lift-shaft leading to the presidential bunker, without bothering to wait for the elevator, and can also turn a few common cleaning supplies into an impromptu rocket-launcher. These are talents I’m sure we all could use occasionally.

Despite this, and Jolie’s undeniable screen presence, it lacks any truly memorable moments, and has little you won’t have seen before, assuming a passing knowledge with action franchises like Bourne, 007, Jack Ryan, etc. [Worth noting that two entries in the last-named series were directed by Noyce] We sniggered more than once at the way Salt always seems to have a new outfit, even as she runs from the entire weight of federal law-enforcement, and Salt’s husband is never developed enough to justify the pivotal role he plays. However, the ending is left wide-open for a sequel, pointing in a definite direction, presumably in the hope of a franchise emerging. The $162 million this has taken overseas, in addition to the US earnings, make that a distinct possibility, and I would certainly not be averse to the prospect of another helping of Salt.

Director: Phillip Noyce
Stars: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor, August Diehl

Whip It

  By

★★★
“Mostly harmless.”

Bliss Cavendar (Page) is stuck in the hickville of Bodeen, Texas: her mother (Harden) coerces her into small-town beauty pagents, but Bliss’s heart isn’t in it. On a shopping trip to Austin, she picks up a roller-derby flyer, and on attending the event with her friend Pash (Shawkat), falls in love with the sport and decides to try out. She has to lie about her age to do so, and also keep her attendance a secret from her parents. Bliss has a natural talent, and helps her team, the Hurl Scouts, previously the doormats of the league, to the championship game against the Holy Rollers, under Iron Maven (Lewis). The confidence Bliss gains is not without its issues however, bringing her in to conflict with her boyfriend and Pash, as well as her parents…

In many ways, it’s A League of Their Own for the modern era, right the way down to the male coach, trying to get his girls to play the game the way he wants. Adversity must be overcome, friendships formed, life lessons learned, etc. These aspects are more like a chick-flick with a roller-derby backdrop, but it does manage to avoid the usual pitfalls of that genre. While skipping over some details of the game, the film does gets the “feel” of roller derby right, with the participants – Lewis in particular – capturing the cheerful anarchy at play, and the way they live for the game [it’s also nice to see Zoe Bell as one of her team-mates].

It’s a bit much to believe she can skip out for an entire season of games and practices, without her parents noticing, and Page is probably too much a physical lightweight to be truly convincing, though that’s disgused well enough you don’t really notice. However, the story is completely predictable, and without giving too much away, even the ending is little surprise at all, and fits in with the generally feel-good nature of this. As warm, fuzzy sports movies go, roller-derby may not be the most obvious choice, yet Barrymore has made a nice promo for the sport, and if the film would certainly have benefited from more conflict on the track, and less soap-opera off it, I certainly can’t claim to have disliked this.

Dir: Drew Barrymore
Star: Ellen Page, Alia Shawkat, Marcia Gay Harden, Juliette Lewis