★★★½
“Fists of Fury”
I think it’s safe to say that I came into this with low expectations. That’s despite the presence behind the camera of Corey Yuen, who has made some great films in the past; he’s best known in the West for The Transporter, but Savior of the Soul is a personal favorite, and Yuen is no strange to the action-heroine genre, having also directed Yes, Madam and She Shoots Straight. Still, this was utterly buried on its theatrical release – it lasted a whole week at the cinema – and then consigned to ‘Exclusive to Blockbuster’ DVD oblivion. Almost two years after its originally-scheduled US release of August 2006, and 13 months after finally escaping, the movie finally made it onto the screens at GWG Towers.
And…it’s not as bad as we feared it might be. Admittedly, I am not the best person to judge its merits in comparison to the video-game from which it was adapted. While I’ve mashed buttons on it and got my ass kicked by our son occasionally (and, somewhat oddly, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, despite being a jiggle-fest of epic proportions, was a great favourite of our daughter), I don’t care one whit for how accurate the movie is to the game. The fact that Character X does not have the right colour hair, or Character Y’s kung-fu is from a different school, does not bother me in the slightest.
No-one is ever going to mistake any of the supermodel participants as great, unsung martial-arts talents, but between the editing, wirework, doubling and occasionally impressive moments from the actresses themselves, Yuen does a credible job of putting things together. There are certainly no shortage of action scenes, and while the editing is, of necessity, from the rapid-fire school, it does manage to retain coherence – thereby putting it above many action films, which really ought to know better. Particularly memorable is the introduction of jewel-thief Helena (Valance), who beats up a few of Interpol’s finest, unencumbered by clothing. It’s sufficiently tongue-in-cheek to come across as fun, rather than sleazy, and captures the spirit of the original nicely.
It remains, however, a movie based on a video-game, and almost inevitably this means the storyline is absolute pants. Yet another martial-arts tournament, sponsored by a rich ne’er-do-well; has nobody ever seen Enter the Dragon? [Actually, there are a couple of nods to suggest the writers have indeed done so] In this case, the particularly ludicrous Donovan (Roberts) intends to capture the skills of the participants using nanobots, and turn them into a pair of nifty sunglasses which give him all their fighting abilities. As you do. However, Kasumi (Aoki) is seeking her brother, who vanished at the same tournament last year – but because she left her clan, an assassin (Natassia Malthe) is on her trail. And so on, and so on.
The weakest link in the film is likely Roberts. Not only does he sport an embarrassing pony-tail, he may also be the least convincing martial-arts star since Julian Sands in The Tuxedo, and even Yuen is hard-pushed to make him look even slightly-convincing. When Jamie Pressly has got better moves than you, it may be time to rethink your choice of roles. One yearns for someone with genuine skill to show up as an adversary for our heroines: about the closest we get to it, outside the stunt doubles, are Robin Shou, star of Mortal Kombat, who bookends the film as a pirate. Another issue is it is often difficult to tell Tina, Christie and Helena apart, especially when they are playing beach-volleyball in bikinis. That is my excuse, anyway, for why I was playing particularly close attention during those scenes. :-)
Characterization is about as deep as you’d imagine: not very. Helena is the only one who comes over as having more personality than could be scrawled on the back of a console cartridge. This really isn’t much of a problem, since no-one involved with the project is under any illusions about why the viewer is watching this, and it isn’t for subtle character studies – any more than that’s why we play the game. That’s really the key to getting the most out of the sugary confection, thinly disguised as a cinematic experience, to be found here. If the film is eminently forgettable, that will just make it all the more entertaining the next time you watch it.
Dir: Corey Yuen
Star: Jamie Pressly, Devon Aoki, Eric Roberts, Holly Valance
It’s been at least a decade since I read this – probably more – but it is still a thoroughly-enjoyable read, and a major improvement in just about every way (plotting, art, pacing, imagination and characterization) over the first stab. Of particular note is the solid way in which the two separate threads of the story are woven together. While on holiday, Kei and Yuri bump into Shasti, a former colleague of theirs in the WWWA. She was actually an android, who went rogue after a criminal’s personality was implanted into her, part of a (failed) experiment to see if it would help with his capture to have her think like him. She’s now apparently leading a group of “freedom fighters” who are planning to hijack a luxurious space-liner, crammed with VIPs and new technology. Has Shasti gone all political? Or, if not, what is she up to?
★★★½
In the near future (next week, actually at the time of going to press), Glasgow falls prey to the Reaper virus, which is exactly what it sounds like. The government in London deal with the problem by building a 30-foot wall along the border and sealing off Scotland – which is basically the approach taken by the government to problems in Scotland since, oh, about 1707. [Hello, born there!] 30 years later, however, the virus breaks out in London, and all of a sudden, the information that people are still alive in Scotland, suggesting they found a cure, is now of more than academic interest. To get the cure, they send Eden (Mitra) up North, to find Kane (McDowell, appearing in about two scenes, then taking his salary and leaving), who might just have the solution. However, things do not go as planned, needless to say, not least because Glasgow is inhabited by nothing but psychopathic thugs with poor dress sense and bad skin, stuck in the past. So, no change, then. [Hello, 
It all builds to a monumental car-chase, though you have to suspend disbelief there, as apparently Bentley cars will start right out of the crate, even if they’ve been sitting there for thirty years. You can also plough them through an exploding bus, amongst a litany of other torments, and they’ll come out the other side with barely a scratch. Again, if you’re going to ground your film in the ‘real world’, admittedly a questionable concept given the plot synopsis above (and I haven’t even got to the more outrageous elements yet!), then mis-steps such as these should be avoided. They’ll just give the more moronic end of the critical fraternity – paging Jeff Otto – blunt objects with which to whack your film about the head, as they ride off on their high horse. They only bothered me slightly, since I was already in full-on disbelief suspension, and since the resulting car-chase was cheerfully destructive, I’m inclined to give it some slack.
Let me be perfectly clear: one of the above stars is purely for entertainment value, since this is one of those movies which is so bad as to become enjoyable, purely on that level. There is hardly an aspect of this film which is not badly-executed: the script is badly thought-out, the performances are almost without exception woeful, and the continuity has to be among the worst of all time. One actress goes from a colored top and no bra, to a bra, to a white top and no bra, in successive scenes, while another enters a pool in a bikini, comes out topless, and five second later has the top back on and is dry. We laughed like drains, I tell you. Oh, you want the plot? Mousy scientist Helen (Kitchen) is trying to find a brain chemical that will unleash humanity’s psychic powers, using imprisoned serial-killer Horn (Marks) as her source. Even though the resulting chemical is green and glowing, in a way not seen since Re-Animator, she decides to test it on herself. This unleashes her alter-ego, Cassandra, who embarks on a plot to enslave mankind to her will. It’s up to her assistant Gary (Klitzner), along with a homicide detective (Rivers) to stop her.
It should be entirely clear which series the distributors of Dark Queen are hoping you’ll mistake their film for an entry in. In reality, this is not fit to lick Natasha Henstridge’s boots; it’s really much closer to Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, yet as such, is still a dismal failure – that whirring sound you hear is Robert Louis Stevenson spinning in his grave. However, even as it fails on just about every cinematic level, fans of bad cinema may find this has its merits. However, even there, it may still divide opinions: I had rather more fun with this than Chris [she, on the other hand, liked the midget-vampire movie, Ankle Biters, which I found almost unwatchable]. You can certainly sense where they were aiming with this; however, the execution is, frankly, so awful as to drain any potential from it, almost entirely.
★★½
“This is based on a true story…sort of” is how the pre-credit disclaimer goes. Which does, at least, show far more honesty by Tony Scott than the usual claims in such things – Blair Witch and Wolf Creek shuffle their feet nervously. Unfortunately, my response would have to be, “This is a watchable movie…sort of.” Scott brings his usual, hyper-kinetic style to the table, but I was prepared for that and so didn’t mind it. No, the major problem was the derailment of the film from the potentially fascinating and probably unique character of Domino, into yet another heist movie. So instead of any insight into personality, we get to watch a bunch of gangsters and low-lives, of whom Domino is merely one, double-cross each other. It’s an hour of watching the corpse of Barbaro being beaten, if you get my drift; even Scott has been here before, to better effect, in True Romance.
The film is filled with distracting stunt casting in the minor roles. This includes Christopher Walken, Mena Suvari, Lucy Liu, Jacqueline Bisset, two guys from Beverly Hills 90210 playing themselves, Macy Gray, Tom Waits and even Jerry Springer, though the episode of his show here is far duller and more earnest than the real thing. Walken is, inevitably, the only one to make much of an impression, playing a reality TV producer who wants to make Domino a star. He’s described as having the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth, probably an adequate metaphor for the film as a whole. It lacks the patience to stay with and develop any of the characters, so sniffs around them for two minutes, before scurrying off to find someone else instead.
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