Tag: 2023

Heart of Stone

  By

★★
“Entertainment: Impossible”

The Great 2023 Void of Action Heroines continues on. The closest thing we’ve seen to one as a mainstream hit in the cinemas is… um, Barbie. Yeah. Not going there. I was looking at the box-office chart for the year, and excluding movies which were actually released in 2022 e.g. Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is only one single film in the top two hundred we have covered here. Polite Society sits outside the top hundred, at $1,.5m [We will get round to The Wrath of Becky in a bit. It’s #181, with a gross of $168,109.] Last year, we had Everything and The Woman King in the top thirty. 2021 gave us Black Widow; 2020, Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman 1984. The complete lack of tentpole heroines this year is disconcerting.

There has been no shortage of female supporting characters who have kicked butt. We already wrote about the The Women of Mission: Impossible, while John Wick 4 also delivered in this category, among quite a few other successful movies. But if you want to see a GWG take centre-stage, you will not find it in the movies. In some ways, it’s more convenient, to be able to sit at home, in your own comfy chair, with a choice of reasonably-priced snacks, and simply push a button on your remote control. But, it has to be said: quality wise, there’s often a good reason most of these films have gone straight to a streaming service. We’ve already covered a number here. The Mother. Furies. Mercy Falls. True Spirit. Some were decent. Yet none have achieved a seal of approval.

This one certainly won’t, barely reaching the level of acceptable entertainment, and sadly, continuing Gal Gadot’s streak of swings and misses. She blazed onto the scene in Wonder Woman back in 2017, and seemed set to take over the mantle as one of the top action actresses in Hollywood. But she has singularly failed to build on that foundation. She lost a lot of public goodwill for her tone-deaf Imagine video in the pandemic. WW84 was a flop, Red Notice was a quickly-forgotten Netflix Original, and her turn in Death on the Nile was widely-panned, becoming a meme. This, however, was a chance to correct course, putting her front and centre in a movie which, it was clearly hoped, would kick-start a franchise and become the female version of Mission: Impossible.

Ain’t gonna happen.

Two minutes in, Chris turned to me and said, “Is this a movie or a TV series?” and I can see her point. Having watched this just a couple of weeks after the undeniably cinematic Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the difference is obvious. Harper directed The Aeronauts, which was decent enough, but it seems he is incapable of scaling things up from a balloon basket, to the much larger scope needed here. Part of the problem with the action sequences in particular, is the VR enhancement gimmick the heroine wears, allowing her to get real-time updates from her handler. This too often leaves everything looking like it’s a video-game, and it rubs off on other sequences, such as her parachute jump, which feels thoroughly unconvincing.

The plot is perhaps an even greater weakness, a confusing and unengaging mess. Rachel Stone (Gadot) works for a group called Charter, who use hi-tech surveillance for good (yeah… about that…). She’s embedded as an agent in MI-5, for reasons that are never made clear. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the people on her team, Parker (Dornan), turns out to be plotting to steal The Heart, the super-computer on which Charter relies for their surveillance – and use it, presumably, not for good. He has teamed up with talented young hacker Keya Dhawan (Bhatt) to this end, and only Stone can stop them, recover The Heart, and save her colleagues at Charter, including Stone’s boss Nomad (Okenedo).

Dear god, I almost lost consciousness merely typing the previous paragraph. Reviewing the previous work of writers Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder, what stands out is an almost complete lack of action movies. Rucka has worked mostly in comics (including the one which became The Old Guard), while Schroeder did, um, Christopher Robin and Hidden Figures. The lack of experience shows. Never mind not having written an action movie, it feels as if neither of them had seen an action movie. If so, they might have realized Stone’s handler flicking VR screen around by gesture, was done twenty years ago in Minority Report. The good ideas here are all like that, things you’ve seen elsewhere, and done better, while the ones the movie can call its own are uninspired in concept and/or execution.

It doesn’t help that the supporting cast are mostly bland. If Gadot does still have reasonable charisma, Dornan is completely forgettable. Bhatt is a thoroughly unconvincing hacker – I might trust her to reset my account password, and apologize for the inconvenience. That’s about it. The most irritating character though, is probably her handler. I get what they were going for, but almost every time he’s involved, it leaves the heroine feeling not much more than a meat-puppet, removing a significant degree of agency from her. I will say, some of the action set-pieces aren’t too bad. There’s a good car-chase through Lisbon, for example. But any secret organization which fills its airship with hydrogen, is certainly not going to remain secret for very long. That’s the level of idiocy we are dealing with in the writing here.

Long before the end, I had mentally checked out, as the film globe-trotted manically from [checks notes] the Alps to London to Portugal to Senegal to Iceland. There’s no denying there was a significant amount of resources expended on this production, though Netflix is notoriously tight-lipped on specific budgets. However, the film doesn’t so much jump the shark, as use it for a 3000-metre steeplechase, when the MI-5 spies have a dance break. Read the sentence again. Roll it around your brain. That it’s to a Lizzo song – unfortunate timing, that – makes it considerably worse. Everything thereafter feels like a waste of those resources, as well as the variable talents of those involved.

Dir: Tom Harper
Star: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo

Sheroes

  By

★★★
“Zeroes to sheroes.”

Twenty minutes into this, I was certain I had made a terrible mistake. These four young women were among the most grating and unpleasant characters I’d seen in a movie. I’m talking actively awful: crass, shallow and entitled. They head off to Thailand for a girls’ getaway on a private jet owned by the father of Diamond (Luss), a film producer. By the time they land, check out their mansion and enjoy the local sights, I was ready to set up the guillotines. Then there’s a luggage mix-up, leaving them with a large quantity of Thai cartel coke, and one of their number is kidnapped, in order to coerce them into returning the goods.

Which is where something unexpected happened. The film became… Well, “good” might be a stretch – plausibility is not the script’s strong suit. But it became considerably more entertaining, that’s for certain. Diamond turns out to have hidden depths, and coaches skater girl Ryder (Day) and actress Ezra (Fuhrman) on what they’re going to do to get their friend Daisy (Skai Jackson) back. They have some help from the mysterious Jasper (Kesy), but they’re mostly reliant on their own skills, at least until the very end. It also nods to other films in an occasionally meta way. For instance, Diamond coaches Ezra to deliver Liam Neeson’s classic Taken speech to the kidnappers. It’s particularly funny, because that was written by Luc Besson, and Luss is best known as the star of Anna… directed by Besson.

She is really the glue that holds the film together for the bulk of the running-time, coming over as both smart and capable, and I’d watch her in a franchise. You do have to suspend disbelief in quite a few places, e.g. the trio are capable of using a 3D printer to create a mask which Ezra uses to impersonate someone. [It was a stretch in Mission: Impossible, with all the resources of the IMF] Or Ryder being capable of taking down a trained mixed martial-arts fighter, who’s probably a hundred pounds heavier. Then there’s the final battle, where they take out an entire camp of Thai drug-runners. Yeah: this whole film might as well be titled “I’m so sure…”

Yet, I was able to put that aside, and found myself, surprisingly, being adequately entertained. There’s a lot of value wrung out from the exotic locations, while the cinematography is crisp and well-executed. And let’s be honest, the heroines are easy on the eye and spent more time than is strictly necessary in bikinis. The R-rating seems largely a result of bad language and drug use. I’d like to have seen it embraced in the action elements as well, which could have been more hard-hitting. But as a frothy concoction, this feels as if it is going down a similar line as something like DOA: Dead or Alive. Not quite as good – yet considering how very low my opinion was at the beginning, recovering to a three-star rating is impressive. 

Dir: Jordan Gertner
Star: Sasha Luss, Isabelle Fuhrman, Wallis Day, Jack Kesy

Kill Boksoon

  By

★★★½
“Joan Wick”

There’s a lot to admire about this South Korean film, though a couple of fumbles stop it from achieving the heights it threatens to do. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a knock-off of Kill Bill going by the title. But it’s as much a pun on the name of the heroine, Gil Bok-soon (Jeon). She has been an assassin since she was 17, and has worked her way up to be the top employee of the MK. ENT corporation, run by Cha Min-kyu (Sol). They are one of a number of competing companies offering killers for hire, but to ensure standards, certain common rules have been agreed, e.g. no kids, and are adhered to by all. Well… Kinda…

Bok-soon has a teenage daughter, Jae-yeong (Kim), from whom she has kept her career secret. But Bok-soon is still concerned Jae-yeong might follow in her footsteps, especially after she stabs a schoolmate in the neck. Bok-soon also breaks one of those corporate rules when she refuses to kill a politician’s son. This kicks off an escalating series of problems, largely driven by Min-kyu’s sister, Min-hee (Esom), a director of MK ENT, who had long resented Bok-soon’s special relationship with her brother. Bok-soon eventually finds herself on the receiving end of a contract, despite Min-kyu’s best efforts to avoid such a scenario, while also having to handle the teenage drama of Jae-yeong, and keep her personal and work lives separate. 

I enjoyed the world building here. It feels a little like John Wick in its creation of a shadow society of assassins, operating by its own rules just beneath the surface. There is a peculiarly corporate feel to this one, perhaps a reflection of South Korean culture. For example, Bok-soon hangs out at a restaurant with some employees of “rival” companies, shooting the business breeze. The place is run by a former assassin, and it’s all very convivial – at least until the contract on her comes out. What follows is likely the action highlight of the film (not least the fate of the poor, unfortunate owner). I also loved Bok-soon’s way of foreseeing how fights will go, like a chess master thinking moves ahead. A similar skill was seen in Zhang Yimou’s Hero; this ramps it up.

Less successful is the family drama. I’ve a low tolerance for whiny teenagers (I’ve lived through it!), and this all felt too soap-opera for my tastes. I get that the daughter’s secret is intended as a parallel for her mother’s, but it’s too obvious and generated more eye-rolling than emotional connection. With an extended running-time of 137 minutes, it certainly feels like unnecessary padding. I’d rather have learned more about the world of the assassins, rather than Jae-yeong’s (largely self-inflicted) schoolyard angst. But even discarding that, there’s still plenty to appreciate here, with Jeon’s strong performance at its core. If this were to follow John Wick in becoming a franchise, I certainly would not complain. 

Dir: Byun Sung-hyun
Star: Jeon Do-yeon, Sol Kyung-gu, Kim Si-a, Esom

Polite Society

  By

★★★½
“Almost everything, everywhere…”

Sitting somewhere between Everything Everywhere All at Once  and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, you will find this British comedy. It shares the same immigrant culture clash origin of the former, and the teenage angst of the latter – though, fortunately, without Pilgrim‘s smug self-awareness. It’s the story of Ria Khan (Kansara), a teenage daughter in an Pakistani family in Britain who wants nothing to do with her family’s expectations, and instead, dreams of becoming a stuntwoman. Her older sister, Lena (Arya), recently dropped out of art school and, to Ria’s horror, is now heading towards marriage to hunky scientist Salim (Khanna). He basically represents everything about traditional culture Ria detests.

She decides her sister must be saved from this fate, with the help of her plucky school-chums, and in increasing defiance, both of her family and the evidence that Salim is a nice guy, who genuinely loves Lena. That is, until Ria stumbles across the secret laboratory under his house, and it turns out she might have been right all along. Except, it might be his mother, Raheela (Bucha), who is the evil mastermind, with a plan to… No, I can’t say. Not so much for reasons of spoilerness, more because it’s such a dumb idea for a villainous plot, James Bond wouldn’t give it house-room. Even in the Roger Moore era. Regardless, Ria’s only hope is now to kidnap her own sister from her own wedding, under the nose of both Rahella and the bride’s parents.

This manages to tread the fine line between self-awareness and blatantly being “meta”. Ria is excellent, delivering fiercely as the committed teenager, who is 125% sure she is utterly correct, regardless of what any so-called “facts” might indicate. However, the real star is likely Khanna, who in just a few scenes manages to steal the entire movie, as the epitome of an evil overlord. I did sense some of the cultural beats might be lost on those outside Indian society. Most of the time, there’s enough context you can work out the details (and it was refreshing that the script avoided the obvious “arranged marriage” trope). But what is an “Eid” and why would you have an “Eid soiree“?

The action is surprisingly robust, setting up each fight with an introductory title. It generally delivers with emphatic oomph that provoked comment from me more than once: the fight between the two sisters was particularly savage. It was also appreciated that Ria’s idol is Eunice Huthart, who genuinely is one of the top British stuntwomen, having doubled for Angelina Jolie in Salt. I would have welcomed a bit more action, especially towards the end. It seems to be setting up a big fight between Ria and Raheela: this doesn’t arrive, instead being simply Ria landing the signature move she has been failing to complete all movie. But as an entertaining mix of dry British humour and flying fantasy, this works better than I expected.

Dir: Nida Manzoor
Star: Priya Kansara, Ritu Arya, Nimra Bucha, Akshay Khanna

Mercy Falls

  By

★★★
“Come to beautiful Scotland! And die!”

Even though I haven’t lived there since the eighties, I remain a sucker for a Scottish film. This delivers, with no shortage of rugged mountain landscapes, beautiful lochs, a ceilidh band and trees. So. Many. Trees. The foliage is understandable, because most of it takes places in the woods, where Rhona (Lyle) and her friends are looking for a cabin, deep in the wilds, which belonged to her late father. To help find it, they enlist the help of local Carla (McKeown), whom they meet down the pub when they have a pre-trip planning get-together. She initially seems fun to be with. But once they’re away from civilization, a shocking incident proves she… has issues, shall we say. And might not be the only one in the party.

The “trip into the woods goes wrong” subgenre of horror has been a staple of the industry for decades – not least because, it’s cheap to do. Why bother with expensive sets, when you can just run around a forest for the bulk of your running time? [Though from previous conversations with Scottish film-makers, the dreaded blood-sucking local insects know as midges, might make that choice of location a decision to regret!] There’s not a lot new in this incarnation of it. Having the threat come from inside the party is a moderate twist, as is having both leads being women. But horror, generally, isn’t something which requires innovation. It’s considerably more about the execution. Or, perhaps, the executionS.

There, this film is a bit of a mixed bag. If the supporting characters aren’t much more than stock characters: the slut, the jackass, the nerd (that would be the guy reading Homer in the woods!), they serve their purpose, which is mostly to die at the hands of Carla. The effects are limited, but I’d say, respectable enough. One extended impalement is likely the highlight, helped by the victim’s enthusiastic selling of their injury. The script is perhaps the weakest element, with a few moments which had us rolling our eyes, in particular the “we might be going to die, so let’s go ahead and have sex” scene. At 103 minutes, trimming might be warranted, as this stretches the material a bit thin. On the other hand: did I mention the lovely scenery?

It all builds as you’d expect, to a somewhat decent face-off between the heroine and villainess. It is somewhat problematic, in that the latter’s background should give her such an edge, as to be able to wipe the floor with Rhona inside ten seconds. Something like handicapping Carla with an injury could have helped make the playing field feel less one-sided. However, we were still reasonably invested in things by this point, and McKeown definitely makes for a convincing nemesis, capable from flicking an internal switch and going from friendly into “you are all going to die” mode in a moment. Nobody could accuse this of ambition, yet it does what it does well enough to entertain us.

Dir: Ryan Hendrick
Star: Lauren Lyle, Nicolette McKeown, James Watterson, Layla Kirk
Mercy Falls is available now on Tubi.

True Spirit

  By

★★½
“Plain sailing.”

This blandly inspirational tale from Australia is based on real events. In 2009, sixteen-year-old Jessica Watson (Croft) set sail out of Sydney Harbour, intending to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world solo and unassisted. 210 days later, she returned to Sydney safely. There: I’ve spoiled it for you. Oh, alright: in between departure and arrival, stuff happens. There is also some stuff which happens before she leaves, with certain parties questioning whether she is fit to carry out such a dangerous voyage, citing her lack of age and ocean-going experience. A close encounter between Jessica’s boat the Pink Lady and a freighter, while on a test sailing trip, only seemed to confirm there was good reason for concern.

Still, with the backing of her mom (Paquin) and dad (Lawson), as well as her sailing coach Ben Bryant (Curtis), she intends to prove them wrong. Ben is on a bit of a quest for redemption himself, his reputation as a sailor having been damaged by the death of a crew member on his watch. Just to confuse matters, no such person existed: he’s a composite of various people who helped out, and exaggerated for dramatic purposes. Speaking of facts, while Jessica did go around the world, her journey was not long enough to qualify for the official record (the closer to the poles you go, the less distance is needed). This is something the film effortlessly ignores. I guess being the youngest person to kinda do something is less interesting.

I think my main complaint is how mundane much of the 210-day journey was. A couple of storms, including one on the final leg, along the South of Australia, is about as dramatic as it gets. Otherwise, Jessica gets a bit whiny after the Pink Lady is stuck in the doldrums for a week, and has some encounters with dolphins (though I suspect these might have been digital!). That’s really about it. It’s all reasonably well-handled from a technical perspective (except for some ropey storm CGI), and Croft’s portrayal of the young heroine is decent. She’s not depicted as some kind of saint, and is given a good deal of personality, so you will find yourself rooting for her to succeed.

There just isn’t very much sense of danger here. Part of it may be the factual nature of the store: we know she survives, even subconsciously, negating any genuine feeling of peril on the high seas. But it hardly seems like she was “solo”, being in almost perpetual contact with Ben and her family through a sat-phone, and even posting regular entries to a vlog online of her trip. Obviously, having her sitting around on a yacht by herself might have been more challenging from the film’s perspective, but as is, this feels more like a slight challenge, akin to going on holiday by yourself for the first time, rather than the life-threatening endeavour it actually was.

Dir: Sarah Spillane
Star: Teagan Croft, Cliff Curtis, Anna Paquin, Josh Lawson

The Mother

  By

★★★
“Jenny from the Glock.”

It has been a very quiet year for big-budget action heroine movies so far. Here we are, more than one-third of the way through 2023, and this Netflix Original is likely the highest profile entry to date. There is a certain pedigree here, albeit of the direct-to-streaming variety, with director Caro having also helmed the (considerably more expensive) live-action remake of Mulan, which went straight to Disney+. Lopez has dabbled in the action field before, including the likes of Anaconda and Enough, but this is certainly her first full-on entry into our field. The results are workmanlike, and occasionally reasonably impressive, but there’s nothing outstanding or original enough here to make much impression.

Lopez plays an unnamed former soldier – “The Mother” is all even the credits call her – who gets involved with a pair of arms dealers, then betrays them to authorities. In revenge, one of them, Adrian Lovell (Fiennes) finds her and stabs her heavily pregnant belly. The resulting baby daughter survives, but the mother is convinced to give her child up for adoption, and vanishes off the grid herself. 12 years later, she’s told by FBI agent William Cruise (Hardwick), whose life she previously saved, of am impending kidnap attempt on her daughter, Zoe (Paez). The mother comes out of hiding to protect Zoe, though re-establishing any kind of relationship proves difficult. Not least, because Lovell is still intent on getting his revenge. Still, bonding over wilderness survival training salves all emotional wounds, apparently.

It’s all fairly straightforward, and you can likely predict where the film is going to head, at any given point. At 117 minutes, it feels somewhat too long, and there’s a split in focus as far as the antagonist goes, with Gael García Bernal playing arms dealer Héctor Álvarez. I wonder if merging his character with Lovell would have made more sense. There’s also too much time spent on the relationship between Zoe and her mother, along with a painfully obvious metaphor in the shape of a wolf bitch and her offspring, which teeters perilously close to dead horse territory much of the time. It doesn’t help that Paez has a severe case of Resting Teenager Face, and I found it almost impossible to care about her.

The film is considerably better when the characters stop speaking and begin chasing, stabbing and shooting each other instead. Even if the action sequences are sometimes over-edited, they are decently staged, I particularly enjoyed a chase, involving the Mother using her feet, a motor-cycle and a car, through the streets of “Havana” (actually Las Palmas in the Canaries). Now and again I could believe that Lopez was not just sitting in her trailer, letting her stunt double do all the work. Like most Netflix Originals e.g. The Old Guard, this will pass muster as entertainment, before vanishing off the front page of the streaming service, and heading into long-term obscurity, forgotten by most who saw it.

Dir: Niki Caro
Star: Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes

Mercy

  By

★★
“Die Hard in a hospital.”

I’m almost tempted to leave it at that, because there are points where it feels like writer Alex Wright left it at that as well. Heroine Michele (Gibson) gets down to her vest? Check. Takes a walkie-talkie off a bad guy? Check. At one point, she even lost a shoe. If she’d gone crawling through an air-duct, I’d have flipped a table. Anyway, Michele is a former military doctor, now working in a civilian hospital. Rushing in one day is an FBI agent with Ryan Quinn, son of an Irish crime family, who was shot in an ambush after agreeing to flip on his relatives. Not far behind is family boss Patrick (Voight) and Ryan’s brother, Sean (Meyers), the latter intent on finishing the job.

The resulting hostage situation unfolds more or less as you’d expect, especially after you’re introduced to Michele’s son, Bobby (Bolognese) – and wouldn’t you know it, today is his birthday! That’s one of a few moments where your eyes will be forgiven for rolling enthusiastically. I think we reached peak ocular orbital velocity when Michele heads across the hospital roof, and the cops below pause to salute her. No, really. Quite why she’s on the roof at all, escapes me, and it’s very much a case that for every step the script takes forward, it tends to take two back. The film is a bit better when simply engaging in crunchy violence, and reaches adequate levels in this department now and again.

What probably stops things from collapsing are a decent cast, who are mostly much better than the script deserves. Voight and Meyers in particular, have a very good dynamic, their relationship gradually becoming more fractured, especially after Patrick realizes it was Sean who shot Ryan. The pair are fun to watch, and in Sean we have a particularly nasty villain, with absolutely no qualms about cold-blooded murder. Even here though, the story manages to screw things up, with a ludicrous brawl between father and son. Jon Voight is eighty-four years old, people. When I reach that age, I’ll be satisfied simply to be walking without assistance, and will not be fighting anyone. Trust me.

There might be a bit less of Gibson in this than I expected, with the movie occasionally appearing to forget about her. The army background does give a solid base to explain her hand-to-hand skills: she wasn’t “just” a medic, shall we say. There’s a largely unnecessary prelude which throws in a dead husband and apparently gives Michele bomb-disposal skills, courtesy of the ghost of her husband. Ok, while I made the last bit up, it probably makes as much sense as what the finale provides. It’s the kind of film where I feel a bit sorry for the leads; I can’t help feeling they deserve better material.

Dir: Tony Dean Smith
Star: Leah Gibson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Jon Voight, Anthony Bolognese
The film is released in select theatres on May 12, on digital May 19, and is available On Demand from June 2.