Tag: 2017

The Vault

  By

★★★
“It’s always somebody else’s vault…”

In an effort to pay off gambling debts their brother Michael (Haze) has run up, sisters Leah (Eastwood) and Vee (Manning) plan and execute a bank robbery. While smart in intent – they set up a diversion, and have a cunning escape route prepared – it’s not long before the operation goes wrong. The bank’s safe does not hold anywhere near the expected haul: fortunately, the assistant manager (Franco) helpfully informs them of an undisclosed vault in the basement holding six million dollars in cash. Sending some of their gang down to the vault, The sisters can only watch on CCTV aghast, as the men are picked off by mysterious figures. For, it turns out, the bank was the site of a robbery in 1982, leading to a hostage situation that ended in multiple deaths. The ghosts of those involved are still in the basement, and opening the vault has apparently released them to take revenge.

I don’t think I’ve seen a film which combined a heist flick with a ghost story before, and it works fairly well. I say “fairly”, since it feels uneven. The bank robbery side is meticulously assembled, to the point that it could have been better if that been the movie’s sole focus. Eastwood, who made a strong impression in M.F.A., is equally as good here, playing Leah as a cunning strategist who has put a lot of thought into her meticulous plan, only for it to be derailed by factors outside her control. Vee, on the other hand, is a loose cannon, driven by her emotions, and reacting to events rather than managing them. You understand perfectly why the two sisters have led separate lives prior to reuniting to help Michael, though the specific details of the estrangement are never revealed.

It was almost an annoyance when the supernatural elements began to kick in, for those were not handled as effectively. Perhaps it’s a case of over-familiarity, with the horror genre being one with which I am particularly well-acquainted; the barely-glimpsed dark figures just didn’t do it for me. Some elements reminded me of the dumber excesses of the genre too. For instance, the willingness of the robbers to stumble around an extremely dimly-lit basement, without going, “Hang on… This makes no sense”. Or given the spectacular and murderous nature of the original robbery, it stretches belief that these local robbers had apparently never even heard of it. That’s a bit like someone from Hollywood not having heard of Charlie Manson.

While never derailing entirely the solid foundation of character and story-line set up in the first half, I couldn’t help but feel slightly disappointed by the relative weakness of the second portion. Matters are likely not helped by an unsubtle coda which appears to have strayed in from a far worse film. This adds little if anything to the movie, and isn’t the sort of final impression you’d want to leave on an audience. The performances definitely deserved better.

Dir: Dan Bush
Star: Francesca Eastwood, Taryn Manning, Scott Haze, James Franco

The Bad Batch

  By

★★
“After the apocalypse, there will still be photocopiers. And raves.”

In the film’s defense, it’s not clear quite how post-apocalyptic this is meant to be, since we don’t see anything of the world at large. Everything takes place inside a stretch of desert which has been used, apparently for some time, as a dumping ground for the dregs of society. Into this environment is dropped Arlen (Waterhouse), who soon gets first-hand experience of the situation, when a cannibal mother and daughter capture her, and cut off an arm and a leg. She escapes, and is found and rescued by the Hermit (Carrey), who brings her to Comfort, the nearest the zone offers to civilization. When she’s well again, Arlen returns to take revenge on the mother, but believing the daughter to be innocent, takes her back to Comfort. Which provokes the ire of Miami Man (Monoa), a tattooed behemoth who turns out to be the girl’s father, and wants her back.

There’s also Keanu Reeves, running around as “the Dream,” a rave promoter, drug pusher and overall lord of Comfort, who has a harem of pregnant, gun-toting women, all sporting “The Dream is inside me” T-shirts: probably the film’s most memorable image, despite its undoubted ludicrousness. But it all fails to gel into anything coherent or interesting, except in very sporadic moments. It’s a long slog through the first 30 minutes, which are almost entirely dialogue-free, to get to what passes for the meat of the story – though it’s more like undercooked tofu, to be honest.

For the movie never achieves anything like a consistent direction or even tone. Even its Wikipedia page calls the film a “romantic drama horror-thriller”. Good luck juggling all those genres. Is it aspiring to be Mad Max? A spaghetti Western? My best guess could well be, merely a six million dollar budgeted excuse for the director’s favourite Spotify playlist, the soundtrack roaming with jarring inconsistency from Culture Club to Die Antwoord, while we endure lengthy shots of Arlen wandering the desert, high on the Dream’s product. And don’t even get me started on the Hawaiian Momoa playing a supposed Cuban, with a cod-Mexican accent. I’m just glad Chris (whose family is genuinely Cuban) wasn’t around, or all Momoa’s scenes would have been overdubbed with a stream of her derisive snorts, emanating from next to me on the couch.

I did appreciate the look of the film, with some striking imagery: the towering wall of shipping containers, parked in the middle of the desert, for example. That just isn’t enough to sustain a 115-minute running-time, especially when the film seems to get bored of its own ideas, and forget about them. Miami Man, for example, despite proclaiming that his daughter is the only thing he cares about, apparently abandons this search and drifts away from the picture, apparently preferring to do something else for much of the second half. This viewer’s interest was right there beside him.

Dir: Ana Lily Amirpour
Star: Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey

Black Mirror: Metalhead

  By

★★★½
“Run Bella Run”

Black Mirror has consistently been the standard for thought-provoking, usually (although not always) dystopian science-fiction since it first aired in 2011. The latest season, the fourth, premiered on Netflix just before Christmas, and the fifth episode falls squarely into our wheelhouse. Filmed entirely in black-and-white, it’s set in a post-apocalyptic landscape following some unspecified catastrophe. A group of three people prepare to raid a warehouse in search of supplies – and, in particular, one item. However, their search alerts a security robot, which looks somewhat like a greyhound made of black metal, and makes quick work of two intruders, leaving only Bella (Peake) left to pursue. The robot’s combination of stamina, speed and absolute lethality will require all her human ingenuity, if she’s to escape.

The influences here are numerous. You could start from Terminator crossed with Night of the Living Dead, though there was a 1953 SF story by Arthur Porges called ‘The Ruum’ which was also built around someone pursued through a rural landscape by an unstoppable robotic pursuer. As such, this is always going to be a limited scenario, especially when there’s only person on the other side. It was probably wise for the makers to keep this at a crisp 41 minutes; the other entries in the season run as long as 76 minutes. However, I still had a feeling they left food on the table, storywise: this was especially true at the ending, where the strength of character Bella had shown to that point, apparently deserts her entirely. It seemed to me she still should have had fuel left in her tank, and this made for a disappointing conclusion.

Until then, however, it was a very well-constructed thrill-ride, with Bella using her smarts to deal with everything her dogged (hohoho!) adversary can throw at her. The balance ebbs and flows between the two, as human and robot tussle across the battlefield, both using what they can find along the way to help themselves. [Sideline: why is it, whenever anyone picks up a knife in a kitchen to use as a weapon, it is always the Psycho knife?] Especially in the latter stages, when the setting moves from the countryside to inside a house, it almost seems to nudge over into slasher film territory, with Bella as the “final girl” – albeit one rather more mature than the usual, teen-aged inhabitants of that trope.

Like the best dystopias, there’s more than an element of plausibility here, with the robot’s shape and movements inspired by the (somewhat creepy) products already being put out by Boston Dynamics. It’s also more straightforward than many Black Mirror episodes: creator Charlie Booker specializes in the final “gotcha”, a twist that radically re-defines what has gone before. Here, this is limited to a last shot in which the viewer discovers the purpose of the raid on the warehouse, and it’s more poignant than upending. It may not be one of the most memorable Mirror stories, which stick in the mind long after it has finished. Yet it’s an efficient and lean effort, capable of standing alongside any other episode.

Dir: David Slade
Star: Maxine Peake

Valley of Ditches

  By

★★
“Dull as ditches-water”

After a brief prelude, we first see the heroine Emilia (Todisco) tied in the back of a car belong to her abductor, Sean (Fenton), who is nearby digging what appears disturbingly like a grave. He is seriously unhinged and driven by his loony religious faith to punish those whom he perceives as deserving the wrath of God. Which in this case would be Emilia and her boyfriend, Michael (Sless). Emilia’s first escape attempt does not end well, and she finds herself in the hole in the ground, handcuffed to the corpse of her boyfriend. Now what?

The answer, unfortunately, is “not nearly enough.” I think it’s the lack of any real development of the characters up front which is the main problem. There’s something to be said for cutting straight to the meat of the matter. Except here, we don’t have any reason to care about Emilia, before we’re thrown in alongside her, and immediately expected to root for her escaping this predicament. There’s no particular motivation given for any this, beyond Sean’s burbling about Old Testament stories, including the one which gives the film its name. He’s the same, cookie-cutter slice of fundamentalist fruitcake we’ve seen a million times before: I’m not in the slightest religious, and even I found this more annoying than convincing.

There are various flashbacks to Emilia’s earlier life with an abusive father (Novell), and I read that abuse is supposed to be one of the film’s main themes. It says a lot that I had to read this, because the film certainly does not do enough to put its point across, whatever this may have been intended to be. There’s an awful lot of sitting around in the desert, and the heroine takes about ten times as long to reach the necessary decisions as I would, given the same circumstances. [I’d start with the principle: “Look, he’s already dead…” and quickly figure things out from there]

I will admit, there’s something to be said for the sparse approach here. There are really only three characters, and the location is mostly the desert, both aspects which cut back on the potential costs. It’s a setting which could be leveraged into a taut, effective thriller, pitting Emilia against Sean in a lethal struggle. Yet instead, there’s precious little tension generated after the first few minutes, particularly after Sean appears to have wandered off entirely, for some ill-defined reason. There’s a final face-off, in which vengeance is sought; I’m not sure it makes much sense, based on what has happened to that point.

This is probably all a little too “indie” for its own good, not least in the soundtrack, which seems to have strayed in from a hip, locally-owned coffee bar. The points it’s trying to make might have been better served by another genre, rather than dressing it up in the guise of a thriller, that doesn’t appear particularly interested in providing any thrills.

Dir: Christopher James Lang
Star: Amanda Todisco, Russell Bradley Fenton, Jeremy Sless, Andrew Novell

Ingobernable: season one

  By

★★★
“Dirty politics, Mexican style.”

This is not quite a telenovela, for this has only 13 episodes and aired directly on Netflix, without appearing on any television channel. It’s also a little more punchy and gritty than most, and rather than going down the well-trodden path of what I guess we should call the narconovela, is rooted instead in political conspiracies.

Mexican President Diego Nava Martínez (Hayser, the male lead in Camelia la Texana) plummets from a hotel balcony to his death. The prime suspect is his estranged wife Emilia Urquiza (del Castillo, the original Reina del Sur), though she was actually unconscious at the time. Rather than sticking around, Emilia decides to leg it, and is helped by some old friends in the Mexico City slums. It turns out the President was preparing to announce an end both to the war on drugs, and the resulting secret detention camps, run by the military. This appears to have triggered an assassination by a murky coalition involving the army, the CIA and a secret group known as “X-8”. Can Emilia prove this is more than tin-foil hat malarkey, and clear her own name?

Weirdly, the show was filmed without its star ever setting foot in Mexico. She is still on thin ice there, as a result of her relationship with jailed drug lord, El Chapo, and a subsequent – trumped-up, according to del Castillo – money-laundering investigation. Despite this, it does a good job of depicting life at both the very top and bottom of Mexican society, and pointing out the stark difference. As Castillo said, “The real criminals are the ones who wear white shirts and a tie.” Though this is likely heavy on the working-class hero trope, with the noble peasants banding together to stick it to the man.

Still, there’s enough to appreciate here, with Emilia being harried from one place to another, while trying to get to the truth. It helps that, before marrying the president, she was involved in security operations, which gives her an insight into their tactics – and more importantly, how to avoid them. If this is never quite leveraged as much as it could be, it does at least help explain her action heroine abilities! Emilia isn’t the only woman who knows her way around a gun either; given the reputation of Mexico as a very macho culture, these are quite surprising characters.

They include Anna Vargas-West (Ibarra), who pulls triple-duty as Chief of Staff of the President’s Office and the dead president’s lover… while also being a somewhat reluctant CIA agent, under the command of Pete Vázquez (Guzmán). And then there’s Patricia Lieberman (Marina de Tavira), the tenacious special prosecutor appointed to look into the President’s death. But the most striking cultural difference is when Emilia and her team are trying to get evidence about the detention centers, and decide that merely catching the Defense Secretary at an S&M brothel wouldn’t be sufficient to discredit him. Suspect that would be more than plenty in Anglo-American politics!

Annoyingly, the 15-episode series ends in a cliff-hanger, without any true resolution: something I should likely have guessed, once it was revealed that the Defense Secretary had nothing to do with the President’s death. Fortunately, the show has been renewed for a second season, or I have been severely peeved. Overall, I was reasonably impressed by the first, and if you’re looking for something with aspects of both Jason Bourne and House of Cards, this should fit the bill.

Dir: José Luis García Agraz
Star: Kate del Castillo, Alberto Guerra, Erendira Ibarra, Luis Roberto Guzmán

Strip Club Massacre

  By

★★
“Secondary staged carnage.”

After Megan (Watson) loses her job, boyfriend and the roof over her head in the same day, she decides to head off to Atlanta, where friend Amanda (Riggs) puts her up for a bit. Amanda’s boyfriend (Rollins) is manager at a strip club, and gives Megan a job as a cocktail waitress. But after realizing the gap in earnings between those employees who keep their clothes on, and those who don’t, Megan decides to make the jump into strip-tease. This rapidly brings her into conflict with Jazz (Brown), another stripper who rules the club through terror and intimidation, along with the help of her cronies. She takes it upon herself to make Megan’s life hell. However, she can only be pushed so far, before Megan and Amanda, push back.

A classic grindhouse title, which somewhat delivers on its premise: nearer to the “massacre” than the “stripclub” side, I’d say. Indeed, it’s rather more restrained in terms of nudity than I’d have expected. The gore, on the other hand, is plentiful in volume, if not necessarily quality: some of the special effects count as “special” in roughly the same way as “special education”. The story is basic to the point of simplistic: Megan is somewhat sympathetic, yet you’re never brought along on her descent into psychotic violence. It’s more like a switch is suddently flipped: I can imagine the film-makers thinking, “Right, 15 minutes to go, enough of this characterization nonsense, time for the rampage sequence.” It’s still about 20 minutes too much, and this perhaps needed a better outside hand, to cut down on what often feels self-indulgent fan fiction.

The most interesting character in all this is probably Jazz. If Brown looks familiar, you should probably be somewhat ashamed of yourself. That’s because she was previously known as Misty Mundae, and starred in a large number of films with titles like Gladiator Eroticus, Lord of the G-Strings and Spiderbabe. About which, I know absolutely nothing. :) She has now moved on from such things, and clearly knows her way around a script in a way that Watson (understandably, this being her feature debut) doesn’t. Jazz thus becomes hateable, in the same way Megan should have been likeable. She’s a vicious, coke-snorting bitch, who treats the club as if it were high school, and Jazz head cheerleader. A great villain, they should have made the film around her.

As a result, Jazz’s death is about the only one which packs any kind of emotional impact – it’s not too dissimilar to one I saw in La Esquina del Diablo, actually. The rest are mostly exercises in sloppy gore – as noted, some of which work, others which don’t. For instance, the (male) death by crowbar rape is perhaps more likely to put you off tacos than anything. [They could at least have used a fireplace implement, and had Megan cheerily quip, “How’s that for strip poker?”] And why does Amanda enthusiastically join in the mayhem? No credible explanation is ever offered. It’s all very clearly a small-budget effort, made with more passion than anything else. Unfortunately, outside of Brown, it does little to escape the obvious limitations imposed by its resources.

Dir: Bob Clark
Star: Alicia Watson, Erin Brown. Courtney Riggs, Stefan Rollins
a.k.a. Night Club Massacre

626 Evolution

  By

★★
“The voice-overs in my head are urging me to kill this.”

Rarely, if ever, have I seen a film so thoroughly derailed by one bad decision. There’s potential here, and those involved have some decent track records as well. Director Lyde did the last two installments of the Mythica saga, including the best one, Mythica: The Iron Crown, which was far more fun than it should have been. Chuchran, similarly, proved eminently worth watching in Survivor, also directed by Lyde, so I was hopeful the combination of the two would strike further pay-dirt with this collaboration.

There are two heroines here, both of whom are young women, and who possess psychic abilities including telekinesis. The younger one, known as 449 (Jones), due to the tattoo on the back of her neck, is a foster kid in an abusive home, who doesn’t have much better luck with life at school. After thinking she has killed her foster father, she runs off, but is fortunate enough to bump into 626 (Chuchran), who is similarly blessed/cursed with mental talents. Recognizing a psychic sister, she takes 449 under her wing. But it soon transpires, that both women are being tracked by the shadowy scientific research company behind them both, and who are far from willing to let their assets escape. Rather than running, 626 opts to head into the lion’s den, and find out the truth about their murky past.

The approach taken is heavy on the found footage, with a lot of material which is supposed to be taken from security cameras, drones, etc. as well as the cameras with which both subjects have unknowingly been implanted. If you’ve got a high tolerance for first-person POV, this aspect doesn’t work badly, and is an interesting commentary on our modern “surveillance society,” where just about everyone is being watched, all the time. Chuchran also carries her scenes more than adequately, right from the first time we see her, engaging in a brawl in a car-park. She knows her way around a fight scene, and I’m going to keep following her progress. The visual effects depicting the powers are lightly used but effective enough – as much to enhance scenes, as carry them entirely.

Then we get to the mistake. For some, inexplicable reason, the film adds a narration – I’m presuming by Jones – which is just horrendous. It’s entirely superfluous, never adding anything of note: it’s less an internal monologue, than a sub-MST3K wannabe. Imagine being trapped in a cinema, next to a precocious 12-year-old hyped out of her little mind on sugary treats, who insists on providing a running commentary to the film. That’s about what you get here, though it’s likely even worse in the execution than your imagination. I have no clue why anyone ever thought this might enhance proceedings, because they were wildly incorrect. It takes what could have been a decent slice of small-scale paranoia, and turns it into something which occasionally becomes nigh-on unwatchable. Pity, really.

Dir: John Lyde
Star: Danielle Chuchran, Ruby Jones, Michaela McAllister, Brandon Ray Olive

The Mae Young Classic

  By

★★★★
“Girlfights.”

The WWE and women’s wrestling have had a fractious relationship over the years. For every two steps forward, there has been one – or, more often, two – backward. But under Executive Vice President of Talent Paul M. Levesque, better known by his ring-name of Triple H, there have been hopeful signs of progress. Perhaps the biggest of late was WWE staging an all-woman tournament this year, featuring 32 wrestlers from 13 different countries. This was named the Mae Young Classic, in honour of one of the field’s pioneers and longest-serving members; she wrestled from 1939 through 2008, and passed away in 2014.

It was a little surprising that both Japan and Mexico, likely the biggest pro wrestling markets outside the US, only had one competitor each (fewer than, say, Scotland or Australia). This could be a result of most existing talent already being under contract to federations in those countries. Otherwise the 32 wrestlers included a surprisingly broad range. There were both veterans and newcomers: Mercedes Martinez has been wrestling since 2000, while Indian Kavita Dalal only started training last year. Similarly, styles represented a broad range: some had MMA backgrounds, others were pure pro wrestlers.

In terms of looks, there was generally a certain “body type”, lean and muscular – though that didn’t quite apply to Scotland’s Piper Niven, billed at five foot five inches, and 207 pounds, though remarkably agile for it. But there was a significant variety in size, ranging from the 5’1″ Kairi Sane, up to those a foot taller (the pic, top, significantly evens this out!). However, as they say, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, and that was proved frequently true over the 31 matches in the tournament. You could never be sure who would prevail. [Just to be clear: I am entirely aware that all the results were pre-determined. But “good” pro wrestling, like good cinema, is at its most enthralling when it avoids predictability]

One thing I noticed was the particularly direct nature of the episodes. If you watch a typical episode of, say, Monday Night RAW, considerably less than half of each show will be actual, new wrestling. Between the various story-lines, chit-chat in and out of the ring, recaps and so forth, our son may not be far wrong when he calls it “soap-opera on steroids. The Classic was much more streamlined: with typically four bouts per episode, it had to be. Before each, you’d get a minute or so about each competitor, and then it was straight to the in-ring introductions. I was fearing this would end up being some kind of Total Divas-like, bitchpocalypse atrocity: those concerns proved completely unfounded.

It’s a little difficult to review without spoilers, which we were largely able to avoid – like any “real” sport, it’s a lot more fun to watch wrestling when you don’t know the outcome. So I’ll just go with some notes on the five competitors who stood out the most for us, in alphabetical order. Wild horses could not make us reveal whether or not they won any of their matches. :) I will say, it was a heck of a lot of fun, and I’d love for it to become an annual fixture on WWE’s calendar.

  • Shayna Bayzler (USA). Chris described Bayzler as “a female Brock Lesnar,” and that’s likely an accurate comparison. She became the wrestler we loved to hate, mostly for her thoroughly intimidating, take no prisoners attitude. While she’ll need to work on her wrestling technique, which is a little rough, there’s a lot of promise here, particularly as a heel.
  • Jazzy Gabert (Germany). At 6’1″, the tallest competitor, and with her short, platinum blonde hair (seen above), reminded us strongly of Brigitte Nielsen. Another veteran, wrestling since 2001, if you were going purely on who looked the part most impressively, she’d be the winner of the tournament. Only disappointment? She didn’t say, “I must break you…” to her opponents pre-fight.
  • Dakota Kai (New Zealand). Was already signed to a contract to WWE’s developmental show, NXT. Kai’s match was far and away the most-watched first-round contest on YouTube. Her kicks are lethal, many and varied. She looks like she has been teleported straight to the ring from a video-game like Dead or Alive.
  • Mercedes Martinez (USA). You could really tell the depth of her experience, both in terms of ring technique and psychology, and that helped elevate her less well-practiced opponents. Seemed to be playing the “gangster” heel for the purposes of this show, and did so effectively enough to irritate the hell out of Chris during her run. Which was likely the point!
  • Kairi Sane (Japan). Won us over completely with her heart and attitude, as she looked genuinely pleased to be there, and her elbow drop from the top-rope is a thing of wonder. [Typically, wrestlers break their fall somewhat with their legs, but Kairi leads with her elbow. This GIF likely explains it better!] Her first-round contest against Tessa Blanchard might have been the match of the tournament. Here are some highlights.

 

Rogue Warrior: Robot Fighter

  By

★★
“Barb Wire… In space!”

Actually, if only this had been that, it would likely have been a great deal more entertaining. The most obvious point of comparison is lead Birdsall: as the poster on the right shows, she bears more than a passing resemblance to Pamela Anderson. The setting is also dystopian SF, though even more so than in Barb Wire. This takes place after a decade-long apocalypse, which pitted mankind against the artificial intelligences we had created, they having decided we were more a problem than a solution [coughSkynetcough] What remains of the human race, is now struggling to survive in the blasted landscape which remains.

Among them is Sienna (Birdsall), who hears of a planet which contains weapons that can fry the AI circuits, before they can carry out their nefarious plan to download all of humanity’s consciousness into the Matrix. She puts together a plucky team of stock cliches – the geek (McGrath), the muscle-bound fighter (Crawford, clearly the low-rent Vin Diesel. Seriously, he used to be on the British version of Gladiators, and his character was literally called “Diesel”), the robot with a line of snappy repartee – and flies off in a spaceship to find the bombs which are humanity’s last chance. On the way, they meet up with another robot – this one a pleasure model (Park) – and learn some rather disturbing revelations about Sienna’s own past [coughTyrellCorporationcough].

These revelations do, admittedly, explain her stylistic choices – and, cynics might suggest, her approach to acting. In between a fair amount of futuristic chit-chat of varying interest value, there’s a lot of running around deserts, pretending to fire laser weapons at robotic enemies that, very obviously, aren’t there at all. The physical look of the film isn’t actually too bad; the cinematography has a fairly epic scope to it. The main problem from a visual standpoint, is the CGI has been meshed very badly with the real footage: you never escape the knowledge that the former has been pasted on top of the latter. If your script is going to span the galaxy and feature multiple human vs. robot confrontations, you need to be able to deliver. It has been twenty years since Starship Troopers came out, and its CGI still kicks this film’s ass from here to Klendathu.

While not entirely devoid of pleasures, the ones to be found here are mostly minor. Birdsall does actually have some screen presence, and certainly looks the part, in a Barbarella-esque kind of way. There’s a nice scene at the beginning, where she’s trying to escape in a car which has an auto-pilot, and it refuses to leave until it has gone through its entire checklist of new driver items. That kind of self-effacing humour is something the film needed in greater quantities, and would have helped defray the woeful inadequacy of the technical elements, for wit is cheap. Though on the evidence of this, not as cheap as the visual effects software used here. If that isn’t good enough to let the audience take your film seriously, you probably shouldn’t either.

Dir: Neil Johnson
Star: Tracey Birdsall, Tim McGrath, Daz Crawford, Ashley Park

The Villainess

  By

★★★½
“Action cinema levels up in Korea.”

This opens with a blistering seven minutes of action which starts off in first-person perspective, looking like the most deranged video game ever, as the protagonist slices, dices and shoots their way through a building to a confrontation with the final boss. After being slammed head-first into a mirror, the point of view changes and we see the attacker is a young woman, Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin). Finishing her slaughter, she calmly accepts arrest, but the Korean intelligence services recruit her, hoping to channel her skills to their own ends, after a spot of plastic surgery to ensure a fresh start. When training is completed, under Chief Kwon (Kim Seo-hyung), she’s given an apartment, unaware that the man next door, Jung Hyun-soo (Sung), is actually her handler. However, he’s not the only person with something to hide. Because Sook-hee is out to leverage her new position, and is still after long-awaited revenge on the man who killed her father.

With a storyline that’s little more than equal parts of Nikita and Kill Bill, deep-fried in a crimson vat, the only way this is going to survive is to be all about the style. Fortunately, it delivers on that aspect by the bucket. I watched that opening sequence three times before I could bring myself to proceed, and other set-pieces are almost as spectacular (and slightly less motion sickness inducing!), such as the sword-fight on speeding motorbikes. Or the final battle on a bus. Or… Yeah, let’s just say, when this is in motion, it’s utterly glorious, demented and bloody beyond belief. The problems are when it isn’t, with a horribly muddled narrative structure which also seems cribbed from Tarantino. So it’s extremely heavy on the flashbacks, and leaps around the heroine’s time-line like an amphetamine crazed mountain-goat. The payoff, when it arrives, certainly isn’t worth the effort: I’d figured it out, well before the dramatic revelation arrives on-screen.

So convoluted and murky is the story, that I found myself increasingly tuning out, and was more or less disinterested in the characters’ fates, most damningly that of Sook-hee. About the only person I cared about was her little, moon-faced daughter, whose serious expressions provoked more emotion in me than all the contortions performed by the plotting. Director Jung, like David Leitch of Atomic Blonde, has a background as a stuntman before moving into direction, and perhaps that explains why it feels as if the attention and effort here have gone into those elements. In comparison, the script is something which could well have been cobbled together on the back of a beer-mat, after an all-night video session, and then run through a shredder in an attempt to instill it with some artistic merit. Jung is certainly an action director to watch, and I’ll be very interested to see where he can possibly go from here. Is there a setting for cinematic violence above eleven?

Dir: Jung Byung-gil
Star: Kim Ok-bin, Shin Ha-kyun, Sung Joon, Kim Seo-hyung