Tag: assassin

Killing Time

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★★★½
“Probably the second-best thing to come out of Newcastle that isn’t in a bottle.”

We Brits don’t do girls-with-guns movies: too busy drinking tea and arranging matchsticks, I imagine. This is a rare exception, and works not badly, combining a striking ‘Italian’ hitwoman in Maria (Torgan), with the bone-dry sarcasm of Guy Ritchie – at least, before he started making movies starring his missus, Madonna. Maria is brought in by Newcastle cop Bryant (Fairbrass) after the local crime lord (Leach) leaves a fellow policeman nailed to Bryant’s front door. Only, Bryant can’t afford to pay her, so blackmails some local thugs, led by Charlie (Thirkeld) to kill her after she’s done the job. Needless to say, things don’t quite go as planned, and the dead bodies start to accumulate, in a most non-British way.

The least convincing aspects of this are actually the action – it seems that everyone in Newcastle has a gun, but no-one could hit a barn if they were standing inside it, and a lengthy gunfight in the main railway station attracts no attention from police or bystanders (actually, the film has no bystanders. Everyone in the movie, is in the movie…). That aside, and the tinny, synthesized soundtrack, the dialogue alone is worth your attention; it’s almost Tarantino-esque, though comes off with far less pretension But I note, with interest, the presence on the video cover of the same Trek quote used to open Kill Bill, Volume 1…and, also, the credits containing the classic Godard quote about a movies, a girl and a gun.

Fairbrass has been in some real cinematic stinkers, such as Beyond Bedlam, but this is much better, with memorable characters and situations, not to mention the same setting as the best British gangster film of all time, Get Carter. Obviously, this isn’t in the same league, but if you’re in need of…well, Killing Time, there are many worse ways to go about it. Co-writer Neil Marshall would go on to write and direct other pics reviewed here, including The Descent and Doomsday, and if you enjoyed those, track this one down too.

Dir: Bharat Nalluri
Star: Kendra Torgan, Craig Fairbrass, Nigel Leach, Stephen D. Thirkeld

The Job

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★★½
“What Elle Driver did before joining DIVAS? Might explain why she hates The Bride…”

If I ever become an assassin, I will never utter the words “last” and “job” to anyone – it’s just begging for trouble. Hannah plays cold-hearted assassin CJ, who is supposed to recover 20 kilos of drugs stolen by Troy (Renfro), before he can sell them on. Only to do so, she must kill Emily (Swain), Troy’s heavily-pregnant girlfriend, and CJ’s qualms take over there, because she’s just discovered she too is expecting (a likely inevitable result of her fondness for casual sex with strangers). Angst, rebellion and an excruciating scene involving a hot bath and a coat-hanger follow, before a final showdown which had Chris snorting derisively about male scriptwriters and their wildly inaccurate concepts of childbirth. I’m not arguing: partly because Chris has been through pregnancy twice and I haven’t, and partly because even to me, the finale seemed pretty implausible.

I was expecting an action film, but CJ spends more time agonising over her state than shooting people. Meanwhile, Emily and Troy appear to be rehearsing for an appearance on Jerry Springer, and there’s an entirely unnecessary subplot where CJ and a former priest(!), played by Eric Mabius, have a unconvincing relationship. If the scripting leaves a lot to be desired – particularly at the end – both Hannah and Swain are convincing, and Alex Rocco is excellent as CJ’s boss Vernon, bringing a creepy power to his role; the other male cast members are largely left in the dust. Despite some shallow psychology (her mother was a prostitute, ergo CJ is all screwed up), there are interesting parallels between CJ and Emily, which could have been explored further. While the overall execution leaves a good bit to be desired, it’s not entirely without merit as a take on the usual ‘final mission’ cliches – especially if you think of it as a minor planetoid in the Kill Bill universe.

Dir: Kenny Golde
Star: Daryl Hannah, Brad Renfro, Dominique Swain, Eric Mabius

Quick

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★★½
“Slow, slow, Quick…”

Polo plays Quick, an assassin whose job is to take out mob accountant Brewer (Donovan) after he turns stoolpigeon. When her employer tries to double-cross her, she goes on the run with her target, who has hidden $3m in ill-gotten gains. Her corrupt cop boyfriend (Fahey) also has designs on the money, raising the suspicions of his partner (Carrere, an effective but wasted performance).

Despite the potential here, this 1993 film ends up being remarkably sluggish, with Brewer and Quick mostly driving around and, inevitably, going through the Stockholm Syndrome thing, wherein they eventually bond. While the sleeve wants you to believe she’s the ultimate bad-ass (“Young, hot and deadly…She’s Quick. You’re dead. She’s the perfect assassin”), the heroine is actually a bundle of badly-controlled neuroses. Which may be the point: everyone in the film seems to be controlled by someone or something else, save perhaps the top mobster, played by Robert Davi, who could do this kind of role in his sleep.

Polo, who’d go on to find stardom as the girlfriend in Meet the Parents, does make Quick an interesting character, but we’re given no reason why she turned killer, for example. And while the aim here seems more psychological than action, she’s not cold-blooded enough, or sympathetic enough, to be memorable. If the film occasionally manages to be surprisingly earthy, the overall effect is otherwise almost completely forgettable.

Dir: Rick King
Stars: Teri Polo, Martin Donovan, Jeff Fahey, Tia Carrere
a.k.a. Crossfire

Dangerous Prey

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★★★
“Daft, but entertaining, soft-porn angle on Nikita.”

If you must stab someone with a knitting needle, you should take time to work out what to say afterwards. Instead, Robin (Whirry) comes out with the immortal line, “Knit the devil a sweater, asshole”, which is not a one-liner that’ll go down in cinema history. But like Fatal Conflict, this is a Lloyd Simandl film, the man perhaps most worthy of inheriting Andy Sidaris’ girls-with-guns crown in the 1990’s. And as such, this is no disaster.

When the arms-smuggling shenanigans of Robin’s boyfriend get her sent to jail, she is busted out by a secret project which turns women into assassins, who seduce men before killing them. Robin is none too impressed with the idea, but Dr. Drexel (Laufer) has implanted a device that can kill her on command. After an impressively sleazy opening, which mixes sex and violence to heady effect, this has more in common with the women-in-prison genre. For example, Robin has to deal with current top bitch Tanya (Hunter, Miss Canada 1988) who is unhappy to have competition. It’s no surprise to discover the two end up, er, bosom buddies as they, um, bust out. There’s certainly plenty of eye-candy, with the women showing all the expected devotion to personal hygiene.

Whirry is actually pretty convincing, and Hunter acquits herself well, in the face of a script that hardly bothers to motivate her character. Laufer, on the other hand, appears to have been instructed to extend the running time. By. Saying. His. Lines. As. Slowly. As. Possible. However, best of all is a cameoing taxi-driver (Ahmed Rahim), whose quirky character almost steals the film, though it’s not explained why an Indian is driving a Czech cab. The action is sound if unspectacular gunplay, plus occasional cool moments such as Robin’s concealment of a razor-blade. Overall, the impact falls short of the potential, but as a B-movie, it’s solid, knows its limitations, and works within them.

Dir: Lloyd A. Simandl
Star: Shannon Whirry, Ciara Hunter, Joseph Laufer, Beatrice de Borg

So Close

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★★★½
“…and, yet, so far.”

For action alone, this is certainly worth a look, with some stunning and imaginative set-pieces. But the bits between are so badly-handled, I actually dozed off – twice – which is barely permissible in a drama, never mind an action movie. It’s a tale of two sisters, who form a team of assassins: big sis Lynn (Shu Qi, from The Transporter) does the deed, little sis Sue (Zhao) is hi-tech backup, using gadgetry handed down from their father. But the police, led by eccentric forensics expert Hung (Mok), are on the trail, so a client opts to tidy the loose ends by targeting all three women, forcing a partnership between cop and killers.

Unfortunately, as well as a bit of lesbian subtext between Hung and Sue, there’s a very poorly executed romance between Lynn and an old flame. Viewers should also know a cover of Carpenters’ ‘classic’ Close to You appears – repeatedly (once is amusing irony, twice is pushing it, and more than that…). These aspects suck the life from the film like a leech, though the fights remain sturdy enough, despite the presence of too much CGI glass [most obviously when Yuen repeats a stunt from Yes, Madam, which Michelle Yeoh did with real glass!] Overall, an ideal movie to watch on fast-forward, or with some other distraction to hand.

Dir: Corey Yuen
Star: Shu Qi, Zhao Wei, Karen Mok, Song Seoung-Heon

Her Name is Cat

  By

★★★
“A mix of the horribly effective, and the plain horrible.”

Clarence Ford seems to be after a PG-13 rated version of his hit, Naked Killer, reining in the sex while keeping the action. That it doesn’t succeed is more due to staggering ineptness in the superfluous attempts to give it emotional depth. Any movie is in trouble when someone says, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” never mind a kick-ass action flick. Fortunately, that side is luscious, well-staged and shot, and it’s this that saves the film from being a disaster. The above rating is thus a composite: 4.5 for action, 1.0 for drama, divide by two, and round up for the wildly gratuitous, wholly inaccurate, very non-PC poster.

Wong plays Yin Ying (a.k.a. Cat, I guess), an assassin from China who falls in love with the cop hunting her (Michael Wong), and wants out of the murder business. But he wants her employer too, who thus sends other killers after the policeman. She defends him, and battle is joined. The Cat/cop relationship is awful, impeded by a portentous voiceover and an apparent ignorance that this has been done a million times before. You may also find yourself wondering whether a full wedding dress is standard gear aboard Hong Kong yachts.

It doesn’t help that Michael Wong is wooden as ever, though even Anthony Wong would be hard pressed in scenes requiring him to mope over home videos of his ex-wife and kid, as mournful easy-listening music plays. When Cat goes to war, however, the results are excellent: particularly outstanding are a brawl in a burning building, and a death nicked from The Omen. Could have done without the workout footage, but given the amount of noodles Cat eats (a nice touch, since her family died of starvation), it’s probably necessary.

Dir: Clarence Ford
Star: Almen Wong, Michael Wong, Kenix Kwok, Ben Lam

Black Cat 2: The Assassination of President Yeltsin

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★★★

blackcat2While neither Nikita nor The Assassin ever resulted in a sequel, the success of Black Cat lead, immediately to a follow-up. This is both good, in that it forced D&B Films into coming up with some new concepts, and bad, because what they came up with is a barely coherent mess. They take Leung – who had won the ‘Best Newcomer’ award – and give her a role where she gets to speak twice. The real star is Robin Shou, well before his Mortal Kombat days, and with a much better haircut too.

He plays a CIA operative – the laserdisk subs say this stands for Central Intelligent Agency, clearly dating this before 9/11 – who is investigating a group out to assassinate President Yeltsin. Their chosen hitman has been beefed up with some kind of ill-explained technological wizardry, but luckily, one person can detect the radiation he gives off: Black Cat, who now has a chip in her head (to match the one on her shoulder, hohoho). This leads to an amusing sequence where Black Cat heads off on her own, charges into a mall, and shoots an old lady because – wouldn’t you know it? – the senior citizen just happens to be giving off the same kind of radiation, courtesy of her medical treatment. Well, I found it amusing, anyway; there’s something about a head-shot which spatters the face of a nearby clown with copious amounts of blood. Er, just me, then? :-)

 Okay, the movie may never be dull, and is certainly not short on action. Yet it doesn’t make any sense. Why would the CIA send operatives into Russia to save their president? And what are they doing operating in America? Isn’t that illegal? Oh, I forgot – it’s the CIA we’re talking about here. Leung’s robotic performance – even though entirely appropriate, since she now comes with an remote-control off switch – also feels like a terrible waste of her talents. There’s a lot of wire-work in the action sequences, but it’s not badly done; the highlight is probably a fight in a steel-works where both Robin and Jade have to take on large numbers of adversaries. The final battle, when Black Cat fights the assassin around the wreckage of a crashed plane, is cool too, with the two antagonists bouncing off the debris.

However, the overall impact is bitty and sporadic. While there are some nice ideas, they are poorly thought-out and developed, and the script doesn’t meld them into any kind of satisfactory structure. The action sequences feel equally bolted-on, though I did like the use of a President Yeltsin lookalike (at least, one presumes it was a lookalike, though I recall the real ex-President Gorbachev did appear in a Wim Wenders film). After the critical acclaim that greeted her debut, Jade Leung could have turned her skills in any direction; unfortunately, this disappointing follow-up is largely symptomatic of the poor choices that seem to have dogged her subsequent career.

Dir: Stephen Shin
Stars: Robin Shou, Jade Leung, Zoltan Buday, Patrick Stark

Black Cat

  By

★★★½

blackcatBefore the official remake of Nikita came out, Hong Kong had already delivered its take on the matter. The film starts in New York, and a large part of this is in English, though the acting there is so woeful as to make you lean towards the Chinese dubbed version. The heroine, Erica, is made more sympathetic: while she still kills a cop, she’s not a junkie, and is “shot” while trying to escape. She wakes up under the watchful eye of Simon Yam, in the “Uncle Bob” role (though here, he’s a ‘cousin’).

From here, the plot is similar to Nikita – missions, qualms, romance, escape attempt, etc – and interestingly, her boyfriend (Thomas Lam) is a photographer, an idea also used in the later Point. There are, however, significant differences in the details. For example, Erica has a chip implanted in her brain, supposedly, to help her achieve her full potential, but all it seems to do is give her raging headaches [admittedly, a potentially useful control mechanism]. They also skip the etiquette lessons, which seemed irrelevant to me anyway – how do good table manners help, when your mission solely involves the use of a sniper rifle?

The specifics of her missions are also altered. The final test, rather than an assassination in a restaurant, is to kill the bride at a Jewish wedding, for reasons left unexplained – but given the heavy weaponry carried by a lot of guests, it’s perhaps no bad thing! Others involve shooting an executive of the WWF (the nature group, not the wrestling federation!), a throat-slitting at a Japanese hot spring resort, and, in the best-staged sequence, dropping a lot of metal from a great height onto the roof of her target.

However, the movie’s main strength is Jade Leung, who fully deserved the Best Newcomer award she won at the 11th Hong Kong Film Awards. Every facet of her character is consistent and believable, certainly more so than Bridget Fonda – it’s at least the equal of Anne Parillaud, and arguably may be even better. Yam is perhaps a kinder, gentler handler: he doesn’t shoot his protege in the leg, for example, yet the relationship between them is missing the romantic spark which lurked in the original. As for Thomas Lam, he’s not Dermot Mulroney, and that alone is an improvement.

The film is undeniably flawed, not least in a soundtrack that is often wildly inappropriate, and seems to have been pulled at random from easy-listening CDs. But its core is solid, and in a lot of ways, this is a more justifiable movie than Point of No Return. While the story remains the same, Black Cat does at least bring a bottle to the party, adding enough new twists to make it interesting (and avoid a lawsuit). Leung’s fine performance is an unexpected bonus.

Dir: Stephen Shin
Star: Jade Leung, Simon Yam, Thomas Lam

Point of No Return

  By

★★★

ponrThis was called The Assassin in Britain, though a more fitting title would be Remake of No Point. I hadn’t seen this since it originally came out, and it was a quite deliberate choice to watch it first for this article, hoping to escape the sense of deja-vu. Unfortunately, I couldn’t: its strengths are exactly those of Besson’s original, while the weaknesses are largely its own.

I can see the purpose of remakes, be they of old movies or foreign ones, when you bring something new to the table. However, it’s entirely understandable that Luc Besson passed on directing the American version, pointing out that he’d already made the movie he wanted. For Venice, read New Orleans. For Nikita, read Nina. For Jeanne Moreau, read Anne Bancroft. About the most significant difference in the storyline is that Fonda listens to Nina Simone.

Balancing the cast off, most are fractionally less effective than their French counterparts, although not so much that you’d notice. There are two exceptions: Dermot Mulroney fails miserably as Maggie’s boyfriend, J.P, to the point where I would have run screaming out the door, and that was after less than two hours in his company. Their relationship fails to convince, and since Badham places it close to the centre of the film, it’s a major flaw.

On the other hand, Harvey Keitel comes perilously close to stealing the whole show as Victor the Cleaner. Jean Reno was good in the original, yet Keitel brings a whole new dimension of menace, and clearly inspired Tarantino for Pulp Fiction. They missed the chance for a spin-off of genuine inventiveness there.

 But what little originality actually is brought to the film, largely doesn’t work, in particular a sappy romantic montage between Maggie and J.P. As a director, Badham does a good job with the action sequences – you’d expect nothing less given his track record in the likes of War Games – even when all he’s really doing, is recreating scenes such as the kitchen shoot-out (watch those desserts fly!). There does seem to be rather more Fonda underwear footage too… :-)

Relocating everything to the States is not such a bad thing. While I don’t know about the French government, a school for psychotic murderers is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility – the infamous School of the Americas does much the same for Latin American death squads. And, taken on its own, this is not a bad film. But if you have ever seen the French original, then the American remake becomes entirely superfluous and, as mentioned above, it feels more like you’re watching an English dub, albeit a credibly well-voiced one.

A remake was supposed to be necessary because American audiences wouldn’t watch a subtitled film, but when the box-office spoke, Point took only $30m. The original was a French take on a mostly-American genre, but something is definitely missing when it comes home. Perhaps Badham should have slept with Fonda during production, as Besson did with Parillaud.

Dir: John Badham
Stars: Bridget Fonda, Gabriel Byrne, Dermot Mulroney, Anne Bancroft

Nikita (film)

  By

★★★★½

nikitaLuc Besson’s original contains all the necessary elements which would become standard for the field. A criminal is “killed” by the government, only to be resurrected into a new life as an assassin for the authorities. Initially resistant, she eventually embraces her new life, but a romance reminds her of the world she left behind, and becomes a potentially lethal threat to her existence when it starts to interfere with her professional capabilities.

This kind of thing has been done so often since, in one form or another, it’s hard to remember how fresh and invigorating it seemed at the time. Even so, not many movies since have had the courage to make their heroine a junkie cop-killer, and it says a lot for both Parrilaud and Besson that Nikita still comes over as sympathetic. She’s a victim of circumstance, her only use to the state as a trained killer, but the film strongly makes the case that she remains a person, with feelings and emotions like the rest of us.

It is these that eventually prove her downfall, when she encounters Victor the cleaner (Jean Reno), and realises that he is what she will eventually become. Seeing him kill people, as easily as we would swat a fly, it’s clear that, no matter how lengthy her indoctrination and training, she still kept her essential humanity and there is a line she won’t cross. Mind you, the original ending was rather more explosive, with Nikita turning her skills to exact revenge on her creators. Whether through a lack of resources, or a desire for a less confrontational finale, this was dropped in favour of a softer, more ambivalent ending which was also copied by subsequent versions.

Though this might have been nice from an action heroine point of view – as is, you wonder why they bothered with all that specialized training – I’m more than prepared to settle for the actual version of the film. The performances are all sound, Parillaud’s in particular (her “singing” voice is a stroke of genius!), and Besson’s style shines through a bluish haze of raindrops, wet streets and car headlights. Avoid, at all costs, the English dubbed version: that’s what Point of No Return is for. Even if you can’t or won’t read subtitles, you will have little difficulty in understanding the film, such is the raw emotion the actors put into their portrayals.

At two hours long, there is perhaps a slight deficit of actual action, not least in comparison to the hyperkinetic pace of contemporary genre entries. Some facets of the film, such as the romance, seem overplayed, albeit largely because the actors get the significance over so well. However, it’s not as if you’ll find yourself looking at your watch, and – if you’ll pardon the pun – the execution here is almost flawless.

Dir: Luc Besson
Star: Anne Parillaud, Tcheky Karyo, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Jeanne Moreau