Tag: s

Supergirl, on its 40th anniversary

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★★★
“Revisiting the original Maid of Might”

Before Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow arrives on our screens in 2026, starring Milly Alcock from House of the Dragon in the title role, I thought, it would be a good time to revisit the original Supergirl movie, which was released in the United States forty years ago this month. So what is Supergirl? A campy trash/cult classic? A fine, forgotten superhero movie? A guilty pleasure? A lame forgettable flop of the 80s? Hopefully, after reading this review you’ll be able to make your own, well-informed judgment!

Originally, the character of Superman’s cousin was supposed to appear in Superman III, but after a new script was written, the character was moved to her own movie. Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the producers who had given Superman life on the big screen in form of Christopher Reeve, probably thought they might score as big with Supergirl as they had with the first two Superman movies. Unfortunately, when Superman III came out in 1983 it was heavily criticized, and fell well below financial expectations, which caused Warner Brothers to give distribution rights to the Salkinds, who would sell it to Tri-Star.

It may not have been the best move, for it seems the film got little marketing (though did get a royal premiere in Britain), and was also sharply edited down. It’s a bit difficult to be certain how many versions of the film exist, but three are well-known: 1) The theatrical cut that runs a bit over 90 minutes. 2) The international version, also called “European theatrical”, though that did not come out in German cinemas. 3) The so-called director’s cut of 138 minutes, which is overly long, especially by 80’s standards. Nowadays, you’re happy when a big movie doesn’t exceed the 2-½ hour mark. How times have changed!

The box-office also ended far, far below expectations and resulted in the Salkinds selling their rights to make any further Superman-related movies. Which is… kind of regrettable, I think, because this movie is not half as bad as it is usually made out to be. I’ll go into its obvious flaws later. But what is the story about? Introducing Supergirl to the film world was not so easy. After all, we had all seen Superman’s home world Krypton blow up in the original movie. But the film actually followed, without really explaining how scientists did it, the original comics which introduced Supergirl in 1959. Argo City, home of Kara Zor-El’s (Slater), was saved from the catastrophe that befell Krypton and in the film survived in “inner space”, whatever that might be – today we would probably call this another dimension.

Here, Kara lives with her parents, other families and scientist mentor Zaltar (Peter O’Toole). The parents are played by Mia Farrow and Simon Ward in cameos; obviously the producers wanted to give Supergirl the same support, with famous or well-known actors, as they did for the Man of Steel. After losing the Omegahedron, the power source of the city, Kara follows it via unexplained Kryptonian technology to our Earth to bring it back. Unfortunately, evil wanna-be witch, quack doctor and esoteric Selena (Dunaway) has taken it with plans to conquer the world. Their mutual interest in young gardener Ethan (Bochner) and Kara’s need to conceal her real identity, going by the alias of school girl Linda Lee, complicate matters further.

From that summary, you should be clued in to what the movie is. It’s a loose repackaging of the Superman story; though some aspects are different here, at the core it’s the same. Maybe this was one of the reasons why the movie failed to attract audiences. But the story and some characters chosen for it come with problems too. While Superman could still be seen as science fiction, Supergirl seems more like a fantasy movie. While Clark Kent’s continuous attempts to dupe Lois that he is Superman were used in the original two movies to wonderfully hilarious effect, this aspect doesn’t appear here at all.

Then again, how could it? Supergirl has just arrived on Earth, differently to Superman. Christopher Reeve’s Superman was originally heavily involved in the script but Reeve politely declined; maybe he didn’t want to play second fiddle to someone else? So the script was rewritten, with Superman on a “special mission” in another galaxy. Neither her room mate – who happens to be the younger sister of Lois Lane – nor Jimmy Olsen, the only character from the Superman movies to appear, know her, so there can be no “A-ha!” moment. Nor can love-struck gardener Ethan see that the brunette school girl he was just talking to, is also the blonde girl in the super-dress. Whoever wrote this should get a “D-” in basic logic. At least Superman changed totally in behavior and wore glasses when he played Clark Kent. Here, there is no believable excuse for it.

The film has other problems. One is a lot of unnecessary characters that are neither needed, nor add anything essential to the plot. It’s especially apparent with actors probably cast for their comedic talents. Peter Cook, often well-matched with Dudley Moore on stage and film, might be a good comedian but is totally unfunny here. The same goes for Brenda Vaccaro as Dunaway’s sidekick: compare her to Ned Beatty’s Otis, alongside Gene Hackman, and you’ll see how ineffective Vaccaro’s role is here. I’ve already mentioned Lucy Lane and Jimmy Olsen. Why are they here? What do they add to the story? Do they do anything that has an impact?

Trimming should have happened in the writing phase. If they would have eliminated, reduced or at least given these characters something of meaning to do in the plot, the movie might have been much better. Additionally, there is a side-plot of female bullies picking on Kara, seeming only to serve the purpose of showing that Kara has the same heat-vision as her cousin. Other strange decisions were made by the screenwriter, and slid past the producer and director. When Kara lands on Earth the first people she meets are two drunk, wannabe rapists who try to molest her. Hurray for feminism, I guess, as Kara shows them that a Kryptonian teen can defend herself. It’s an ill-fitting scene in a movie apparently intended to be family- and kid-friendly. Wonder Woman 1984 also had such a stupid, distracting scene. So either there is something I  don’t understand, or film directors and screenwriters have not learned much over the four decades between the movies!

Also, the “love story” between Ethan and Kara is essentially a “non-love story”. His love for her is induced by Selena’s magical potion, who wants the man for herself. If the first person Ethan saw after waking up had been a cow, would he have fallen in love with a cow? The length of the movie was already criticized when it originally came out, even though it was shorter at the time. And the version that I knew from seeing the movie in the late eighties on German TV was even shorter. You can hardly expect a movie, of whatever quality, that has been edited down so much to still make much sense at all.

It’s no surprise O’Toole and Dunaway were nominated for Razzie Awards, though it’s not all their fault. Obviously, director Jeannot Szwarc had no problem with Dunaway going as campy as she wanted. It’s a pity because her role could have been convincing or even menacing, played straight. There is no doubt Dunaway, with a fine reputation of playing difficult characters, could have given a good, villainous performance. Heck, she already played a first class femme fatale in the Musketeer movies for the Salkinds in the 70’s. Of course when you go camp, you can hardly blame Dunaway for trying to repeat what Gene Hackman successfully did as Lex Luthor, But you have to be really funny, something that worked for the Hackman-Beatty pairing but not here.

O’Toole has only two significant scenes in the movie, at the beginning and the end. His performance in the first seems a bit uninspired and odd. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was drunk while doing it; the actor was famous for this, like Richard Burton or Oliver Reed. The second, where Zaltar seems to have given up all hope and sacrifices himself for Kara, is quite well done and touching. Although a strange decision was made in the German dubbing, where someone came up with the idea of casting the German voice of Clint Eastwood for him!

For all the negatives I have listed, there are quite a few positives, shining bright in this movie pursued by bad luck. Helen Slater probably gave the performance of her career. She is really, really good playing the female version of the true-blue hero, as well as the innocent-looking big-eyed teenager in Argo City, and her cute school girl role of Linda Lee. Slater was even nominated for a Saturn Award for her performance. If the film had been better – or at least financially successful – maybe she could have had a similar career to the one Christopher Reeve enjoyed due to his Superman role? Alas, it wasn’t to be…

The special effects of the film may look dated today – and they are. But considering all of it was before the advent of CGI, digital and computer effects, it’s impressive what could be achieved by in-camera-tricks, visual illusions, miniature and composite effects. Sure, a lot of effects could be simply generated on the computer today. But even a cardboard photo cut-out of Supergirl, drawn quickly out of the water, is astonishingly effective and can only be recognized for what it is today, due to DVDs and Blu-Rays. How do you show Supergirl almost torn to pieces by a monster in 1984? At that time all the filmmakers had were some distortion effects by a changed perspective – nevertheless, it works, and there are some very nice effects.

As kitschy as it seems, I personally loved the aerial ballet of Supergirl when she arrives. For the first time too, we get to see the Phantom Zone: it’s constantly mentioned in the Superman movies, but here it is actually a set in Britain’s Pinewood studios (used for many Bond movies), and must have been one helluva work to create. Selena’s traps and the shaking, fiery ground are impressive, as are her manipulations in the abandoned event park. My favourite effect might be Kara fighting an invisible monster which you only can recognize by its impact on the environment, e.g. giant footprints on the ground, breaking fences, etc. This seems directly inspired by the classic “ID” monster from Forbidden Planet.

All in all, the effects were as good as possible at the time, so shouldn’t be judged by today’s standards. The film in addition boasts great production design, luscious exterior shots, a well-timed tractor-on-the-loose action sequence, appropriate and good-looking costumes (especially for Dunaway), all of which are undeniable pluses. Then there is the – as always – great Jerry Goldsmith score which makes up more than half of the movie’s atmosphere. It’s especially impressive, considering I could hardly imagine anyone else being able to step in the shoes of John Williams, who scored the original Superman score.

Supergirl is still not a great comic book superhero movie. Nor a bad one: more somewhat mediocre, but kind of sympathetic. As mentioned, the movie had bad luck, being both too late and too early. Too late, as it seems audiences had started to grow tired of the whole Superman circus: within six years people had been exposed to four Superman-related movies. The “All-American” hero had become kind of passé with Schwarzenegger, Stallone and co. introducing the new, harder and gritty anti-hero who would dominate the screens for the next decade. Alternatively, you had more goofy heroes like Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop or the Ghostbusters. A simple, straightforward hero didn’t fit into this time anymore.

But the movie might have been too early as well. At that time, audiences were simply not interested in female comic book heroes as flops like Red Sonja, Sheena and Brenda Starr proved again and again. Even a further attempt in the early 2000s with Elektra, Catwoman and the like failed. It’s only recently that movies like Black Widow, Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman are really scoring big at the box-office. This was also before the “girl power” era. In the late 90s and early 2000s, with TV shows like Charmed, Buffy, Xena, Kim Possible and movies like The Craft, Mean Girls or Legally Blonde, a movie about a school girl fighting an evil, powerful witch could have scored big – but well… not in the 80s!

So… maybe “Supergirl” was just a bit ahead of its time. Judge for yourself.  What about my interest in the movie? Well, I saw photos of it in film magazines, years after it was in cinemas. At that time the movie had not been shown on TV and my family had no VCR yet. All I had was some photos and my imagination to tell me what the movie might be about. For me the film belongs in the category of enjoyable fantasy movies of the 1980s together with fare like The Neverending Story or Highlander. That photo of young Helen Slater with her clenched fist, flying with the glowing sun in the background, still hangs on my wall! So I may be a bit biased concerning the film. But aren’t we all regarding our favourites?

Dir: Jeannot Szwarc
Star: Helen Slater, Faye Dunaway, Hart Bochner, Peter Cook

The Shadow Strays

  By

★★★★½
“Dog eat dog”

Director Tjahjanto gave us one of the best action films of the last decade in The Night Comes For Us, a gory and relentless assault of jaw-dropping hand-to-hand mayhem. Follow-up, The Big 4, was a little underwhelming, but I was still stoked to hear about this, in which he puts a heroine front and centre. This is perhaps a step or two short of Night – it’s clear the lead here is not a lifelong practitioner of martial arts like Joe Taslim and Iko Uwais. However, it’s the best film I’ve reviewed on this site in 2024, likely edging out Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, through a combination of sheer force of will and arterial spray.

The Shadows are a sect of assassins, who are basically unstoppable. 13 (Ribero) is a teenage trainee, who screws up a mission in Japan alongside her instructor, Umbra (Malasan), and barely survives. 13 gets put on administrative leave, and her enforced idleness is where the problems start. In a thread strongly reminiscent of Leon, she watches a neighbour get killed by a gang, and takes care of the son, Monji. However, he vanishes, apparently abducted by the gang, and 13 isn’t standing for that. Beginning by turning low-level enforcer, Jeki (Emmanuel), she works her way up the power structure, which goes right to the top of Indonesian political society. The resulting chaos threatens to expose the Shadows, so Umbra is then dispatched to terminate their rogue agent.

This runs a chunky 144 minutes – just a handful shorter than Furiosa – which seems a fair while for a martial-arts film. The Raid 2 and John Wick 4 are the only ones which come to mind as longer. But I can’t say this particularly felt like it; there’s not much slack. We open with the absolutely blood-drenched Japanese operation, which sets the tone early. To be honest, it does such a good job, most of what follows falls slightly short. Ribero is a model and singer, and it feels like Tjahjanto underlights a lot of scenes to help paper over this. But then there’s the final battle, between 13 and Umbra. It’s likely behind only Crouching Tiger as my favorite female vs. female fight ever: utterly relentless, and brutal as hell.

It is a little less impressive in between the fights: originality is, as noted previously, not necessarily the film’s strongest suit. Other threads are set up and them ignored, such as the Shadows’ miraculous serum, which is used by Umbra to resuscitate 13 in Japan, and never mentioned again. Maybe it’ll play more of a part in the sequel, to which the ending strongly hints, bringing in a face familiar to fans of Indonesian action. I’d love to see it, since this is definitely pushing the boundaries of action heroine cinema, in all the right ways. While imperfect, at its best this is enough to make me consider introducing a six-star rating, because it goes places I’ve never seen. When it does, the results are glorious.

Dir: Timo Tjahjanto
Star: Aurora Ribero, Kristo Immanuel, Hana Malasan, Taskya Namya

The Solid-State Shuffle, by Jeffrey A. Ballard

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

There’s an interesting setting here, and the concept isn’t bad. However, the author is flat-out terrible at explaining things, and that derails the book badly. There were entire pages which seemed to be an written almost in another language, such was the level of technological gobbledygook spouted – and I write as someone who works in the field. Too often, it felt as though the writer was using technology as an alternative to magic: whatever needed to be done, there seemed to be some gadget, gizmo or app which the heroine or her allies could whip out to perform the necessary task. 

This takes place in a future America where the coastal areas have fallen to the rising sea levels; for example, much of what was Seattle, is now under water. Into this largely submerged city comes Isa, the leader of a trio of thieves who had to high-tail it away from the East coast for reasons that are unexplained. They’ve now set up in Seattle, and we first encounter them robbing the vault of a bank that is now under water (literally, rather than in the financial sense!). They successfully heist an SSD drive, intending to loot the cryptocurrency they believe is on it. Except, it doesn’t contain money. Worse still, it belongs to Colvin, the local boss of criminal activity. Strike three? He then hires Isa and her team to recover his stolen property and find out who’s responsible.

The suddenly sticky situation results, obviously, in the trio having to execute a lot of fancy footwork, in order to find out who set them up, and play the reverse Uno card. Unfortunately, this is where the author loses the plot (again, literally). There are real drives, fake drives and copies of drives whizzing around between the various factions, like a game of three-card monte. And just like three-card monte, once you’ve lost track, you’re probably going to lose interest. I know I did, and the story limped towards the (largely predictable) finish line thereafter, with only the characters doing much to sustain interest, and that in a split decision.

For all of the three are problematic. Isa, who’s the main protagonist and the first person perspective, is a mouthy bitch to put it mildly. It’s a personality trait which gets her into trouble and renders her mostly unlikable, since the targets of her poison tongue are not always deserving. Then there’s Winn, her lover and newest member of the gang, who is too angsty for my tastes, suffering a perpetual crisis of conscience over their activities. Finally, we have Puo, who is the technical support. I just wish the tech support people I have to work with were one-tenth as supernaturally competent, managing to get the drop on even those supposedly more skilled. At least the author ended the story without a cliffhanger. Take your positives where you can.

Author: Jeffrey A. Ballard
Publisher: New Rochester Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 5 in the Sunken City Capers series.

Deep Fear

  By

★★
“Shallow entertainment”

Naomi (Ghenea) is sailing a schooner single-handed in the Caribbean, returning it from Antigua to Grenada so it’ll be ready for a charter customer to take out. Her boyfriend, Jackson (Westwick) has already gone ahead to prepare things there. But a squall diverts Naomi off course, and she then stumbles across boat wreckage to which Maria (Gómez) and Jose (Coppet) are desperately clinging. They tell her there’s still a survivor trapped on the sea bottom, and Naomi dives down to rescue Tomas from his watery tomb. However, on returning to the surface with him, she gets a nasty surprise and finds her work is not over. For the survivors were also transporting 200 kg of cocaine.

Naomi is now key to salvaging it, whether she wants to be or not. Complicating matters is the presence of a large, predatory shark prowling the area, which makes simply going up and down from the sea bottom a perilous endeavour. Especially after one such encounter, where we get the immortal line, “The shark bit into the bags and now the shark is probably high on cocaine.” Sadly, hopes that this was going to become a sequel to Cocaine Bear never materialized [there is a film out there called Cocaine Shark, but it’s so bad, even a hardened connoisseur of badfilm like I, couldn’t get through the trailer] . Instead, there’s just an awful lot of sub-aqua shenanigans, and there’s really only so much SCUBA-ing I can take.

I will say, it all looks lovely. Malta actually stood in for the Caribbean, and if you’re looking for a picturesque tourist destination, combining beautiful scenery with clear water, it seems a good bet. However, as a thriller, it’s distinctly lacking in thrills, whether it’s a shark whose diet seems exclusively to consist of the bad people, through a cast for whom English is not their native tongue in many cases, to a heroine whose lips appear recently to have encountered a swarm of wasps [I note Ghenea’s credit in Zoolaander 2 as “Hot Shepherdess”]. The pacing is also off, especially early, when irrelevancies like Naomi and Jackson renting an apartment show up, serving no apparent purpose except delaying her arrival on the scene.

Gómez, whom you might remember from SexyKiller, is likely the best element the film has to offer, switching from cowering victim to manipulative sociopath. For instance, Maria conceals her nautical skills because if Naomi realizes she’s surplus to requirements after bringing up the coke, she might not be willing to do so. That kind of smarts is something the film needs to have more, ideally replacing the apparently endless amounts of moist mischief. I did like how the shark attacks don’t hold back on the blood, something you don’t see often. However, the creature rarely feels more than a toothy plot-device, thrown into scenes whenever the film-makers run out of other ways to generate tension. And that is far too often, to be honest.

Dir: Marcus Adams
Star: Mãdãlina Ghenea, Ed Westwick, Macarena Gómez, Stany Coppet

The Squad

  By

★★½
“#SquadGoals: Try not to suck.”

I was braced for this to be terrible, based on IMDb user comments which were either scathing, or came from accounts with one review – a sure sign they were astroturfed. On that basis, I guess I was pleasantly surprised. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not great, and only occasionally brushes against good. But it’s semi-competent, at least once the director calms the hell down, and stops giving us musical montages in lieu of content. The titular trio are Gina (Carrasquillo), Bella (Hansinger), and Dani (Evans), orphans who grew up together and have now turned to a life of crime. In particular, this spring break is spent by a lake in Oklahoma, seeking to muscle in on the local drug trade.

If you have ever seen Ozark, you will know that such activities are never received kindly, and it’s not long before the expected trouble shows up. This is most notably in the shape of rival drug dealar J.C. (UFC fighter Avila), but she is only the tip of the problem-shaped iceberg. People want The Squad out of the way, and/or to provide the source of their supplies. Double-crosses, backstabbings, police activity, abductions, rescue and a fairly significant body count follow as a result, though largely in a by the numbers approach, all the way to an ending that is clearly hoping for this to become a franchise. I would not be holding my breath for this to come to fruition, shall we say.

The three leads are both the best thing this has to offer, and its biggest problem. They’re photogenic, and spent much of the time wearing bikinis, which is not a chore for this viewer. However, when it comes to being convincing drug dealers, the results are much less consistent. It’s only now and again that they succeed in projecting the necessary sense of threat when facing off against their rivals: Gina probably does best in this department. The rest of the time they feel more like coeds cosplaying as drug lords, and seem about as dangerous pushers as Ed from Shaun of the Dead. The whole orphan thing feels like padding, despite the short running time of seventy-eight minutes.

To a certain degree, it feels like it wants to be Charlie’s Angels for bad girls, though regrettably, seems more inspired by the “gritty” reboot version, than the fluffy concoction of the original movie. It’s also hampered by the lack of personality to be found here: there is only one character, sliced up thinly and divided across the three protagonists, where again, Gina seems to have co-opted the lioness’s share of proceedings. Despite a plot that does keep moving forward – occasionally, a little too forward – the action is nothing special, with the trio ending up having to be rescued by a man on more than one occasion. Not exactly empowering. Looks better than it sounds, and I think that applies to almost every aspect of this.

Dir: Rick Walker
Star: Meghan Carrasquillo, Alea Hansinger, Grace Evans, Julia Avila

Special Delivery

  By

★★½
“Good only in car parts.”

Based on the trailer, I was hoping for something like a Korean version of The Transporter. It seemed to promise this, with Jang Eun-ha (Park) playing a courier for Baekgang Industries, a company who will transport things – mostly people, it appears – from Point A to Point B, when regular delivery methods are not possible. For example, because the passenger in question is being chased by enemies, and needs to make a quick exit from the country before he’s found. Her latest mission involves baseball pitcher Kim Doo-shik, who has blown the whistle on a match-fixing scandal, so needs to escape before those behind it get hold of him and young son Kim Seo-won (Jung).

So far, so sprightly, especially after an enthralling early sequence which showcases Eun-ha’s mad driving skills in avoiding pursuers through the narrow streets of Busan. However, the attempted pick-up of Kim Sr. goes badly awry, as he’s being chased by Jo Kyung-pil (Song). Jo is a corrupt cop who is also behind the gambling ring involved in the match-fixing. Eun-ha ends up in possession of Seo-won, and… Hang on, didn’t we write about three different versions of this story in October 2022? Yeah, for much of the rest of the film is basically another take on Gloria. Brash, beer-drinking Eun-ha is lumbered with a kid whom she cannot initially stand, yet inevitably, comes to care for Seo-won over the remaining course of the film.

Now, this isn’t all that different from The Transporter, where Jason Statham was also lumbered with an unwanted human package, in his case Shu Qi. However, there, it was the jumping off point for some cool and generally entertaining action, e.g. the classic garage fight, involving a well-oiled Statham. Here, not nearly so much, even though Jo is keen to get hold of the kid, who has a computer dongle which is key to the recovery of $30 million. While this could have been the source of multiple exciting car-chases – and as the opening shows, technically, the makers were more than capable – it feels as if director Park is more interested in how suddenly enforced maternal responsibility changes his heroine. I can’t say I’m with him there.

The concept can work, but seems incredibly trite here, and doesn’t help matters that Seo-won is a very generic child, with little personality compared, say, to Newt in Aliens, or Mathilda in The Professional. Consequently, Eun-ha’s decision not to drop the child off at the nearest police-station seems contrived for plot purposes, rather than resulting from a natural release of suppressed nurturing emotions. It’s well-enough assembled that it never becomes unwatchable, yet proceedings remain just that: assembled. It’s not without merit, since both protagonist and antagonist make for interesting characters. But it the end, Chris described it as “cute,” and that’s borderline damning with faint praise in her vocabulary – one step above “interesting.” I can’t honestly say she was wrong in her assessment.

Dir: Park Dae-min
Star: Park So-dam, Song Sae-byeok, Kim Eui-sung, Jung Hyeon-jun

Safehouse

  By

★★
“Safehouzzzzzz…”

I ended up having to watch this twice. The first time, I literally fell asleep. In the film’s defense, it had been a tough day, highlighted by a trip to the dentist to get a crown reattached [in related news, I’m now off Milk Duds]. But a couple of days later, I watched it again. While I did manage to retain consciousness this time, I can’t say I enjoyed the film significantly more than the dental work. This is mostly down to a script which seems to mistake being confused and borderline incoherent, with being mysterious and interesting. Not giving the audience enough information simply results in them tuning out, rather than becoming intrigued. 

Carla Perez (Delgado) lives in the dangerous border town of Mexicali, with her brother, and hoping to become a doctor. He’s playing a dangerous game, informing on the local cartel to the American authorities. This, inevitably, gets him a visit from their hitmen. In the ensuing gun-battle, he is killed and Carla, fleeing for her life, finds a tunnel in a scrap yard. Using it to escape, she surfaces on the other side of the border, in a residence being used by federal agents Caskill (Seay) and Marshall (Jenkins) as a safehouse for a key witness. However, before even meeting them, she finds herself on the wrong end of a shotgun being wielded by a wounded woman. While fleeing that, she discovers a corpse in the next room. 

It is, sadly, more or less downhill from here, in terms of a plot, with the film almost willfully concealing relevant details from the viewer. This simply allows us the chance to ruminate on the ludicrous central idea. Specifically, that the best place to hide a cartel witness is… right by the Mexican border. In a house which just happens to have a smuggler’s tunnel exiting in it. And when things go pear-shaped, don’t bother to call in reinforcements, or anything like that. Mind you, Carla’s actions don’t exactly make much sense, right from the point she pops out of the tunnel like a cork, and just kinda hangs around, rather than high-tailing it to anywhere else. It’s not as if she’s being chased by the carte… Er, never mind. 

This is a shame, since some of the other elements aren’t bad. The performances do the job, and Street seems to have a decent amount of directorial talent, shooting the action in a way that is energetic without being hyperactive. Carla isn’t an especially action-oriented heroine, yet she shows plenty of courage, and empathy for those she ends up nursing (though the medical elements are probably not a strong suit!). Other female characters do more, such as the blonde cartel sharpshooter who shows up for the final assault (top). She’s cool. In the end though, I think that my initial reaction – falling asleep – was probably an accurate assessment of the film’s overall quality, and I should have stuck to that.

Dir: Paul Street
Star: Alondra Delgado, Robert Seay, David Thomas Jenkins, Jessica Martin del Campo

Snatched

  By

★★½
“Everything comes to he who waits. Eventually.”

The title here seems quite deliberately a nod towards Taken, which similarly has an ex-government operative chewing up and spitting out bad guys, after they make the fatal mistake of abducting the operative’s child. In this case, it’s CIA operative Angela (Bozeman), who lost her husband Jason in murky circumstances, but subsequently put away Dmitri (Weber), the criminal mastermind responsible. Now, six years later, she can get on with living her life, bringing up son Jason Jr. (Cheatham), and hanging out with fellow agent Byron, who seems a possible husband replacement. Well, until Dmitri escapes from prison and starts killing off everyone he considers responsible for putting him behind bars.

Sooner or later – and as we’ll see, it’s not the former – that brings him into Angela’s circle, and ends up in him kidnapping Junior, with the aim of luring her into his (very well-appointed, it has to be said; I particularly liked the chandelier) lair. However, he doesn’t realize what he has done. Once this all gets going, it’s not bad. If hardly seeming an accurate portrayal of CIA practices, unless they’re utterly slipshot and incompetent, it’s kinda fun as long as you don’t ask awkward questions. Such as, where the heck does Angela get those groovy remote-controlled gun-toting little cars? Was Andy Sidaris having an estate sale? Dmitri also has a groovy bad-ass sidekick, Sophia (Camille Osborne), though her fight with Angela is disappointingly brief.

The problem is mostly the long, meandering, roundabout and largely uninteresting way in which the story gets to the amusing stuff. The first half or more is largely comprised of extremely conversational scenes of merely passing interest. In these, Angela talks to Byron about wanting to retire. Or talks to Junior about the realities of her career. Or talks to her mother, Carolyn (Hubert), about her not really a relationship with Byron. Dear lord, it’s far from the action-packed trailer, and you would certainly be forgiven if you gave up on all this soapy drama. Though I was eventually entertained by Carolyn’s ability to kick ass in a grandmotherly way, like Pam Grier on an AARP outing. At least until she encounters Sophia, anyway.

The score above is likely a composite, with two stars for the first half and three for the second, when things do reach an acceptable level of entertainment. Bozeman seems better known as a singer, but does a decent job of portraying the highly upset mother, and has a terse style of close-combat that is effective. On the plus side, it is quite gory, with a number of head-shots and other fairly graphic deaths. On the minus side, these are mostly CGI, as is apparent from the blood spray never landing on anything in the environment. You probably want to have something on hand for the sluggish early proceedings: either a good book, some snacks or an alcoholic beverage would all serve that purpose.

Dir: Chris Stokes
Star: Veronika Bozeman, Charlie Weber, Jered Cheatham, Janet Hubert

The Swimmers

  By

★★
“Sink or swim.”

This is the story of Syrian sisters Yusra Mardini and her sister Sarah, played by real-life sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa. Growing up, they were trained by their father, a professional swimmer himself, and had the goal of reaching the Olympics for their country. The (still ongoing) Syrian Civil War led to the sisters leaving their homeland, and this is mostly the story of their journey, through Turkey, across the Mediterranean in a very flimsy dinghy to Greece, then across Europe to Germany. It’s a journey fraught with peril, on which predators looking to scam migrants (or worse), lurk at every turn. However…

I don’t typically like to get political here, but when a film explicitly does, I will go there. I have every sympathy for refugees, who want safety. But once you leave your home country and reach a safe destination, that’s it. If you then decide to move on – making a beeline for a country where lax immigration laws let you pull the rest of your family with you – you’re not a refugee, you’re an economic migrant. My sympathy for you drops a whole order of magnitude. It’s like if your house burns down, I feel sorry for you. It doesn’t give you the right to move into the neighbourhood’s swankiest residence. Most of the film’s attempts to pull on my heartstrings failed due to this. As soon as the sisters left the Turkish beach, they were 100% responsible for putting themselves back in danger.

Rant over. What about the film? It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Having sisters playing sisters definitely works. Especially at that age, this is the kind of relationship which is hard to simulate for teenage actors. There’s a genuineness here, for obvious reasons, which makes the family devotion at the film’s core, easy to see and appreciate. Less successful is the apparent random switching between languages. Many conversations occur in a hodge-podge of English and Arabic. While I can’t speak to the authenticity of it, as a viewer, it was jarring to switch repeatedly from listening to reading subtitles. I ended up basically tuning out the dialogue and sticking with the subs.

I appreciate the necessity of bending the facts to fit a cinematic narrative, but this probably goes too far. It’s one thing to have Yusra overhear snark from other competitors about how she doesn’t deserve to be there. But maybe avoid this when the movie then omits to mention the only swimmers she beat were, basically, other charity cases? The Olympic Selection Time was 60.80 seconds. Mardini finished in 69.21, and even her personal best is more than five seconds off the OST. The awkward truth is, she really did not deserve to be there, but few are greater at virtue-signalling than the IOC. It all feels like there are probably better refugee stories which could have been told. All the gloss this applies to its tale. can’t disguise that it is uncomfortably close to well-made propaganda.

Dir: Sally El-Hosaini
Star: Nathalie Issa, Manal Issa, Ahmed Malek, Matthias Schweighöfer

The Secret Weapon

  By

★★★½
“Woo’s the boss.”

After enjoying The Kill List, I thought I’d dip my toe again into the new wave of Thai girls with guns films with this, and it’s another solid entry. As there, the main influence seems to be Hong Kong action cinema of the nineties; this in particular falls into the category of “heroic bloodshed.” But there’s a clear nod to Nikita as well. Joy Phaendin is a soldier whose father, Maj. Gen. Phaendin (Sawasdee), is a member of a special operations team, killed while on a mission. Filled with a desire for revenge, Joy signs up for the same unit, under the command of Maj. Gen. Nakhom (Midaim), and becomes a “Busaba” for the government. This is “A person without a name, without a face, without friends, without a history.”

Being one requires absolute obedience to three rules. #1: When accepting a mission, you have to complete it without any hesitation or question. #2: Do not leave any trace that will lead back to the organization. #3: If you need to give your life on a mission, you must do so. The training is particularly brutal. When it comes down to the final two candidates for the spot, they’re ordered to kill each other. Joy is saved here by the other girl, known only as #34 (Wongtipkanon), taking her own life, the two women having formed an attachment. Joy a.k.a. #29 is then tasked with taking out, one by one, the organization who were responsible for her father’s death. Or so her commanding officer says, anyway.

You will not be surprised to learn that this is hardly the truth, the whole truth or nothing but the truth. When she spots a tattoo matching her father’s on one intended victim, Joy realizes there’s more going on that she has been told, and pulls her shot. From here on, it’s a wild ride of betrayal, deceit and counter-deceit, as well as an awful lot of slow-motion – again, it’s clear the makers have seen a lot of John Woo films. A good rule of thumb is, don’t believe anything the film tells you. This is true straight from the off, with a fifteen minute sequence where Joy is playing the part of a property agent, that is not what it seems. 

Thereafter, much the same applies, and it does become a bit of a stretch. Having one character “come back from the dead” is pushing it; when it happens more than that, you’ll get a sad shake of my head. It’s a pity, since there is a good deal here to admire, such as its bleakly downbeat attitude which goes through to the rolling of the credits. Yoosuk is okay in the action scenes; she’s more than okay when being super-intense. For example, when marching towards the bad guys, spraying automatic gunfire, with the blood of someone dear, spattered across her face. Enthusiastic squibbing is the order of the day too, and I was definitely left interested in seeing further examples from this promising new source.

Dir: Nopachai Jayanama
Star: Pichana Yoosuk, Napassakorn Midaim, Wanchana Sawasdee, Ticha Wongtipkanon