Tag: 2024

Air Force One Down

  By

★★★
“Presidential immunity.”

As we head towards the 2024 election, I’m forced to conclude that the most implausible element here is not terrorists hijacking Air Force One, or a lone Secret Service agent taking out scores of bad guys. No, it’s having a President under fifty: someone who can string coherent sentences together, parachute out of a plane without breaking his hips, and personally gun down an enemy or two as well. Yeah, that’s not happening anytime soon. Otherwise, this teeters on the edge of being as generic as its title. But it passes muster due to decent performances, especially from McNamara as agent Allison Miles, and well-managed action from Bamford, who has 30+ years experience in stunt work.

The plot unfolds after Miles is assigned to the plane on which President Edwards (Bohen) is flying to Astovia to sign an oil treaty. There are people, both here and in Astovia, who are very much opposed to the deal. In particular, General Rodinov (Serbedzija, whom I recognized as Boris the Blade from Snatch) has a plan to hijack Air Force One, and make the President change his mind. He reckons without Miles, and after a spell of “Die Hard on a plane”, she and Edwards parachute out. That isn’t the end of it, Rodinov capturing them, with the intention of using her as leverage against the President. Once again: he reckons without Miles. You would think the General would have learned by now.

Indeed, the whole “leverage” thing is dubious; if I was an evil overlord, I’d put a bullet in Allison’s head the moment I captured her. Maybe that’s just me. The plot hits all the obvious notes e.g. the scene where the President and his agent bond, with a little light sexual tension [an apparently unmarried President?] But Bohen and McNamara make their characters entertaining to be around. I’d vote for him, put it that way, while she has a laudably no-nonsense approach to her work, and life in general. She may have picked it up from her uncle (Hall), also a Secret Service agent, and a long way from The Breakfast Club.

The action certainly elevates things above the humdrum. Sometimes the camerawork is a little frenetic, yet the shots are surprisingly long, and tend to make it clear McNamara is doing much of her own work. The highlight is an extended “one take” (it’s not, but done well enough to pass muster) in which she breaks out of captivity, and makes her way through the complex, eliminating enemies in a variety of interesting ways. It will stick in your mind considerably longer than most of the plot-based shenanigans, albeit slightly diminished by Miles then having to be saved by the President. I’d love to have seen more of that style, because it’s genuinely innovative stuff. If nothing else reaches this level, the movie remains a decent piece of entertainment overall, where the positive elements counterbalance an uninspired storyline. 

Dir: James Bamford
Star: Katherine McNamara, Ian Bohen, Rade Serbedzija, Anthony Michael Hall
The film is released in cinemas today, and on digital from February 13.

La Madre

  By

★★½
“Is there such a thing as whiteface?”

I ask, because this film, made in Mexico City and starring mostly Mexicans, seems to be trying to take place in America. It’s not doing a good job of it. The heroine is Martha (Mazarrasa), a single mother running a shop in a border American city with the help of her two daughters, Eva (Reynaud) and Raquel. Then Eva is kidnapped by evil Mexican cartel boss, El Chacal (Guerrerio), and held by him, even after Martha pays the requested ransom. However, it turns out Mom has a hidden past, which gave her a set of special skills. With the help of sympathetic cop, Juan Cinderos (Dulzaides), she sets out to bring down his organization and retrieve her daughter.

It might have worked better if everyone has spoken Spanish, and they’d actually set this in Mexico. Not that Mazarrasa’s English is bad. It’s far better than my Spanish. But early on, she tells her daughters, “Our family has been in this [American] city for generations.” Yet she sounds like she’s still dripping wet out of the Rio Grande: “Ey neeeed tu dooo zees!” It feels particularly fake to me, since I’m married to a first-generation Hispanic immigrant, so know Chris and her siblings sounds completely indistinguishable from native citizens. Literally nobody in the film speaks without a notable accent: the closest is El Chacal, the character you’d least expect to know English. It’s all tremendously off-putting.

The rest of the plotting is similarly shoddy, in particular the way Martha is able to infiltrate El Chacal’s operations and get them taken down from the inside, in a way Paul and his pals have been utterly unable to do. I get that she’s operating outside of the usual legal encumbrances, but building her history and doing more than slapping a wig on her as a disguise, would have gone a long way to avoid my eyebrow entering “Oh, really?” mode. The way a random cop like Paul gets to take part in police actions South of the “border” – quotes used advisedly – didn’t help. All told, too many elements here seem to have wandered into this Tubi Original, from a script discarded by the Hallmark channel.

Yet it’s not entirely worthless, with Mazarrasa just about able to hold things together through a decent central performance. She had a long-running role in Camelia La Texana, so has a handle on the more soapy elements here, and is capable of putting over the raw emotion appropriate to the circumstances. The individual pieces could have been re-arranged into an effective combination. Perhaps if Martha had gone full Liam Neeson from the moment Eva was kidnapped, telling El Chacal, “You just messed with the wrong madre…”, instead of wasting time faffing around, naively trying to negotiate and pay the ransom. That is quite at odds with the street-smart, take no prisoners approach she later shows. Maybe her brains were in the wig as well.

Dir: Mitchell Altieri
Star: Tamara Mazarrasa, Giovanna Reynaud, Javier Dulzaides, Alex Guerrero