Tag: u

Undefeatable

  By

★★★
“Keep an eye out for you, Stingray.”

The traditional rule of thumb is, Cynthia Rothrock’s Hong Kong movies are good, but her American ones are bad. The question is, what category should this one be placed? On the one hand, it’s a Hong Kong production. On the other, it’s filmed in America, with an American cast. On the third hand, it’s directed by notorious schlockmeister Ho, as “Godfrey Hall”. I’m painfully aware how much his work can vary in quality, though I’ll confess, I am generally adequately amused. The results here are a real grab-bad of the good, the bad and the laughable. Put it this way: Cynthia is probably close to the best actor. That’s not something you’ll hear often.

She plays former gang member Kristi Jones, now trying to go straight. But in order to put her sister through medical school, Kristi raises money by taking part in street fights, arranged through her former colleagues in the Red Dragons. Meanwhile, Paul (Niam), a.k.a. “Stingray”, another fighter on the underground circuit, goes mad after his wife leaves him. He begins kidnapping, torturing and killing any woman who resembled his departed spouse. Unfortunately, his victims include Kristi’s sister, and she’s not happy about it. With the help of police detective Nick DiMarco (Miller) and psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Simmons (Jason), Kristi makes her way through various opponents who might be involved, before focusing on Paul, and the warehouse from which he operates.

This is all, quite obviously, total nonsense. It’s the kind of film where everyone is adept at martial arts – even Dr. Simmons throws a few punches when she gets a visit from Stingray. It’s also the kind of film where a police officer will let the sister of a murder victim tag along on his investigation, because reasons. One wonders how much direction Ho was actually giving the cast. In particular, Niam, whose entire performance seems to revolve around making veins pop in his forehead. There is one (1) decent scene, where Dr. Simmons tries to figure out Stingray’s traumas and issues (his Mommy was bad to him or someting), in order to use them against him and escape. It’s the only moment this rises above the utterly basic.

On the other hand, we’re not here for the psychology. We’re here for the ass-kicking, and the film has no shortage of this, with Ms. Rothrock in decent form, both with her fists and some weapons. There’s a nice – if entirely pointless – scene of her doing forms on the lawn outside her house. But it’s mostly reasonably well-staged hand-to-hand fights, and there’s no question Rothrock acquits herself well. The end fight is slightly disappointing, in that Kristi has been hurt in a previous encounter with Stingray, so has one arm in a sling, and needs help from DiMarco. However, there are not one but two groanworthy eighties action one-liners there: the one in the tag-line above is perhaps only second worst. I couldn’t call this good, yet was I not entertained? Yes. Yes, I was.

Dir: Godfrey Ho
Star: Cynthia Rothrock, John Miller, Don Niam, Donna Jason

Under Lock and Key

  By

★★★
“From prison to fashion.”

I can’t recall seeing an action heroine movie with quite so much gratuitous nudity, even among the women-in-prison genre in which this (obviously, given both the title and the poster) operate – at least in the early going. It feels like there’s some kind of contractual obligation for a shower, medical exam or just an inmate randomly changing their clothes, about every three minutes in the first half hour. It’s helps that most of the residents appear to be incarcerated for crimes involving beauty parlours. Either that, or there is some kind of quality threshold applies for inmates. I should mention this does adhere to the standards of the nineties: and I’m not speaking about hair on the head, if you know what I mean.

It’s not entirely devoid of story-line, however, and there is an actual plot. Danielle Peters (Westbrook) is an FBI agent who has been sent undercover into the prison. Her mission is to get close to another inmate, Sarah Sands (Smith), who was the girlfriend of a drug kingpin, Carlos Vega (Anthony). Sarah still has a notebook containing compromising information, and Danielle is tasked with finding out its location. It doesn’t go well. Sarah is killed when the vehicle transferring them both gets ambushed, and to make matters worse, Vega kidnaps Danielle’s daughter as leverage. The whole undercover thing ends, with Danielle formally taken off the case. Naturally, she continues her investigation anyway – albeit after a long. hot shower – along with prison guard and new pal, Tina Lamb (Niven).

Let me be 100% clear. None of this makes the slightest bit of sense from the perspective of law enforcement or the penitentiary industry. Danielle’s wilful disregard for FBI procedure never gets her anything that a light tap on the wrist from her boss. And by FBI procedure, I mean the pair committing homicide (arguably justifiable), leading to this exchange with Tina:
    “What do we do with the body?”
    “I’ll call a friend, he’ll take care of it”
That’s not very FBI now, is it? Meanwhile, Tina doesn’t even call to let her employers know she’s going to be busy for a while, taking down an international drug lord ‘n’ stuff. Everyone involved, including their boss, is going to be faced with difficult performance appraisals, when it comes time for their annual review.

Plausibility very much aside, I can’t deny I was entertained by the ludicrous nature of this, which basically aims for the lowest common denominator of cinema, and somehow still manages to come up short. How can you not love a film containing the line, “Jennifer’s not only a high fashion model, but she also works for several European secret service agencies on occasion”? Especially when Jennifer has the blank, placid expression of a cud-chewing bovine. Westbrook does a better job, on occasion looking like her kicks and punches have impact, and having decent presence. While I’ll likely never watch this again, I’m certainly holding back any complaints.

Dir: Henri Charr
Star: Wendi Westbrook, Barbara Niven, K. Phillip Anthony, Stephanie Ann Smith

Sinister: Unhallowed, by Christopher P. Young and John Logsdon

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

This seems to come from a subset of a whole slew of Paranormal Police Department series in which Logsdon is involved with various authors, e.g. NYPPD. I don’t believe you need to have read those, although I did feel a bit dumped in at the deep end here. Evangeline is a resident of a demonic realm and member of House Sinister, a group who are all but wiped out in a surprise attack. Key words: “all but”. The job needs to be finished, but before that can happen, Evangeline flees to the human world – Los Angeles in particular – taking over the body of a rich socialite who conveniently just died in a car crash, so is ripe for possession.

Evangeline shouldn’t be there at all, and consequently ends up press-ganged into the local Black Ops wing of the PPD. This basically makes her an assassin to order, of “certain criminal elements,” alongside her partners, the hellwolf Kayson and Q, a vampire. She’s fine with that, being a hellion herself. However, those who tried to take her out in the netherworld, are keen to complete the job. They send their own operatives to Los Angeles, to locate the fugitive final member of House Sinister, and end her life. She won’t go out easily: especially when her precious me-time is broken into by one such killer: “Never interrupt a woman who is about to eat dessert!”

This is a bit of a mixed bag. The overall setting isn’t bad, with a milieu which includes every kind of fantasy creature you can imagine, from pixies through succubi and were-bears to orcs, co-existing both in the human world and on their own turf (for some loose definition of “co-exist”, anyway). Evangeline is a “hellion,” and I’d have welcomed being told a bit more about what that is: “demons mixed with dragon blood,” is about all the explanation you get, and is not particularly helpful. She is a bit – okay, make that very – sex-obsessed, and this is written in a way that it comes across as if she was still an irritating teenager. Mature subject matter, discussed in an immature fashion, if you will. Not really my favourite approach.

However, it does end up gelling better than I expected. After feeling like a moderate slog in the early going, I ploughed through the last quarter in a single sitting. In it, Evangeline and her partners are trying to assassinate crime boss Macy Bale. while simultaneously being hunted by Moloch, the entity tasked with ending House Sinister. It’s almost non-stop action, with a particularly cinematic tone. Although there is not much in terms of a resolution – more a pause than a finish – I found myself curious where the story would go. More things coming to find Evangeline seems a fairly safe bet…

Author: Christopher P. Young and John Logsdon
Publisher: Crimson Myth Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Black Ops Paranormal Police Department series.

The Undaunted Wudang

  By

★★★
“Ground and pound.”

Chinese kung-fu movies took off in the early eighties, after the success of Shaolin Temple, starring an unknown teenager called Jet Li. Over the years that followed, a slew of imitators followed, with varying success. Where these largely differed from their Hong Kong counterparts, were in a more grounded approach to combat: wire-work and trampolines were avoided, in favour of players who (like Li) were martial artists first, and actors second. I believe the same is true of the heroine here, though information about Lin is hard to come by. According to the IMDb, this was her acting debut, though it’s tricky to grade her work there, thanks to the rather clunky dubbing on the print viewed for this review.

It takes place in the late 19th century, when countries like Japan were sending martial artists over to China, to fight the local masters. Chen Xue Jiao (Lin) is part of one such family, whose father dies in mysterious circumstances, and her brother is then killed by the Japanese [it’s not clear from the context if he’s her sibling, or just a colleague in their school]. She’s also on the Japanese hit-list, but escapes with the help of conveniently passing kung-fu expert,  Si Ma Jian (Zhao). Discovering the truth about her father’s death – which I won’t spoil, but really, your first guess is gonna be correct – she finds sanctuary at the Nashan Temple in the Wudang Mountains. There, the head priest (Ma) teaches her the necessary skills to take on her treacherous classmates and the Japanese.

This just about counterbalances an extremely prosaic and cliched plot with the undeniable competence of the martial artists on view. Sun has absolutely no sense of style as a director, yet that’s really the best approach for the film. You just want someone to point the camera in the direction of the performers, so as to appreciate the grace and strength on view, of Lin in particular. The problem here is, apart from that, and some quite pretty Chinese landscapes (especially around the temple), there’s not enough to sustain interest. The pacing is questionable, with Chen not even finding out a pivotal fact about her father’s death until the half-way point. While even the training sequences have some appeal, her actual revenge occupies only the last fifteen minutes or so.

I’m in the middle between the two camps of thought in regard to martial arts films, with no particular preference for either the high-flying and spectacular, or the grounded and more realistic style. For me, it’s all about the execution, and whether it’s done well. Here, it feels as if all the effort went into the action. While the most important part of proceedings, it’s not the sole element that matters. To make a great martial-arts movie, you still need characters and a plot. Otherwise, you’ve got the equivalent of a meal where the main course may be delicious, but the dessert sucks, the service is brusque, and the cloakroom loses your coat. That’s about what you have here.

Dir: Sha Sun
Star: Quan Lin, Changjun Zhao, Yuwen Li, Zhenbang Ma
a.k.a. Wudang

Useless

  By

★½
“[Obvious comment redacted]”

Giving your film a title like this is basically asking for trouble. It gives snarky critics an extremely easy weapon to wield against the movie. That’s especially so when it’s a low-budget effort, made with considerably more heart than skill. It’s not without merit, especially in the photography. It is crisp and does a good job of capturing some beautiful Montana scenery – there’s a reason the state is nicknamed Big Sky Country – and the rodeo action. The problems are in a script which never met a cliché it didn’t like, and performances that do little or nothing to elevate the material.

The very first scene has a mother professing her love to her daughter, Jessie (Wilson). Two minutes later, she dies in a car accident. That’s a good indicator of the level of plotting you can expect from this. Jessie goes to live with her uncle Mick (Bracich) and mopes around. A lot. She is eventually brought out of her shell after Mick buys her an equally broken equine called Lucky – I presume this is where the title comes from. Girl and horse bond, help each other to heal, and take part in the sport of barrel racing. This had apparently been her mother’s favourite pastime; not that we knew anything about this before she died, of course. I also hope you know all the intricacies of barrel racing, for the film assumes you do, rather than bothering to explain anything about it.

I get that Montana is a different world, with a slower pace of life. Yet the dramatic approach here is beyond low-key, to the point of soporific. Even when Mick has a stroke (damn, this family has some poor luck), Jessie’s reaction barely registers above the level of slight annoyance. It feels very much that Wilson was chosen, not for her dramatic abilities, rather her talent in the saddle.  To this non-horse person, she looked solid there: it turns out she was the 2017 Montana High School Rodeo Association Champion Barrel Racer, and has been in the sport since she was 4. So her action scenes are authentic and work. When she opens her mouth? Not so much. The subplot in which she has to chose between nice nerd Kyle (Christensen) and bad boy bull-rider Blaze (Olson), falls flatter than huckleberry pancakes as a result.

At the other end of the spectrum, is the musical score. This doesn’t so much enhance proceedings, as signal the intended emotions enthusiastically. It’s probably the first time a soundtrack could be accused of blatantly over-acting. Not that there is any particular sense of dramatic escalation. Instead of, say, building to a big barrel racing competition, things peak with an illicit party at which – gasp! ‐ alcohol is being drunk. While there is a contest at the end, with no build-up, it is also severely lacking in impact. It’s clear this was a project born out of and fuelled by passion. It’s also very apparent, that alone falls well short of being enough. 

Dir: Josiah Burdick
Star: Brooke Wilson, Mark Bracich, Michael Christensen, Brian Olson

Unchained

  By

★★
“Needs a short leash”

This likely suffered, having been watched the day after Boyka: Unleashed which, while not an action heroine film by any stretch of the imagination, is a near-perfect demonstration of how brutal, no-holds barred fights should be filmed. I can only guess that “Raphaello” never saw Boyka: Unleashed. And since he also co-wrote, co-produced, shot and edited this thing, pretty much all the blame for its shortcomings has to be laid at his feet. I say this, since the performances, if hardly Oscar-winning, are likely the least of the film’s worries. Even if Eric Roberts may have literally phoned, or these days, Zoomed in his role, straight from his living-room couch, as the story-telling father of the heroine.

She is Aella (Mulroney), an ex-soldier who is now desperately seeking work to fend off the bills that are piling up. She goes to audition for a role in a movie about an underground fight club, only to be bopped on the head, and wake up in – what are the odds! – an underground fight club. There’s she is forcibly trained by The Warden (Andrews, looking like the resurrected corpse of Lemmy from Motorhead) and his sidekick Regina. The latter is played by Valkyrie – that’s not her real name, she’s a pro wrestler whom we remember from Lucha Underground,  and is married to the more well-known John Morrison. From here, things progress more or less as you’d expect, with Aella and her fellow captives fighting each other, while plotting a break for freedom.

It is, as noted, the technical aspects which are woefully inept here. “Raphaello” seems incapable of holding the camera steady and pointing it in the same direction for more than two seconds during the fight scenes, which are borderline unwatchable as a result. Mind you, the participants appear largely unfamiliar with how to throw a punch; odd consider Aella’s supposed military background. Not helping matters are the tedious training montages, terrible soundtrack, and resources which fall well short of the high-end operation supposedly taking place, where women are sold for six-figure sums. I’m pretty sure the entire film did not cost anywhere near six figures. Then there’s the ending, where a giant fireball kills all the bad people, while the heroine escapes unscathed… by turning her back on it. I kid you not.

If more a disaster movie than an action one, in the sense of being a disaster, I will say, I did keep watching. As noted earlier, this is mostly due to decent performances. Mulroney has about the right mix of resilience and insolence for the role, while both Andrews and Valkyrie are cut from suitably villainous cloth. In better hands – such as the people behind Boyka: Unleashed – the actors and actresses could have been part of something entertaining. As is, it largely goes to prove that, no matter how many hyphens “Raphaello” may string into his credentials, there’s no substitute for talent. 

Dir: Raphaello
Star: Mair Mulroney, Larry L Andrews, Taya Valkyrie, Maricris Lapaix

Underwater

  By

★★★
“Beneath the sea, no one can hear you scream…”

You know the story: A team of experts in a closed contained space, having to deal with ugly monsters and struggling to survive. The blue-print of this variation on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (better known as: Ten Little Indians) was obviously the classic Alien (1979) that introduced us to one of the defining girls with guns, Ellen Ripley. This format was then repeated endlessly by Hollywood, as well as anyone else.

A special sort of subgenre of this story formed in the late 80s, when studios came to the idea of exchanging outer space for the inner space of the (deep) sea. That resulted in usually trashy but mostly entertaining movies such as Deep Star Six, Leviathan, Virus, Sphere or Deep Rising. Heck, even AlienS director James Cameron created a more positive version of the usual underwater interaction, with friendly aliens, in “The Abyss” (1989). But as far as I can see this genre faded with the 90’s. Recent watery efforts were more shark- or crocodile-focused!

The Alien franchise seemd to be stuck in the hands of Ridley Scott, who wasn’t willing to give anyone else a shot at the series, He said, before Alien: Covenant and about Prometheus, “I thought we should move on. I thought the aliens were done.” Well, if what you deliver is worse than what we got before, why bother? And if you think like that, maybe you shouldn’t cling on to ownership of the franchise. Audiences usually wont the same experience they had last time and if you don’t deliver, will be disappointed. Here’s another pearl of wisdom: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! So 20th Century Fox came up with the idea of resurrecting this subgenre under water. And it has to be said, while Underwater is hardly original, and definitely derivative if you know the Alien movies, it is better and certainly more entertaining than the last two Alien entries from Scott. It never drags, and the “idiocy level” that too often comes with this genre and its tropes, is credibly low.

The story in brief: Deep sea engineers are faced with a sudden accident, after water has flooded their facilities, destroying a large amount of the installation and probably killing off many of the workers who didn’t manage to get to the escape pods. A couple of survivors who find each other must go on an obstacle course deep, well… under water to reach these pods. Okay, that plot probably wouldn’t trouble a match-box, but that does not necessarily have to be a negative. I’ve found in the past, that very often those movies with a simpler, more straighforward premise are the ones which are the most efficient in delivering the goods.

So it proves with this. Yes, we all have seen it before – but not necessarily better. When I look at the list above of “underwater horror movies”, most of them were not good at all. And what the Alien franchise itself delivered, starting probably with David Fincher’s life-less Alien 3 (1992) and ending with Scott’s efforts “to move in a new direction,” was also not very satisfying. Considering that, Underwater is actually quite decent. There is no long build-up with character presentations that have tended to fall flat in recent films of this ilk. The movie goes into action almost immediately, hardly giving Kristen Stewart (with her short-cut blonde hair bearing a strange similarity to 90’s Lori Petty) the chance to finish brushing her teeth.

And it continues at quite a brisk pace, within an economic and more restrained than usual running-time of 95 minutes. We get action, tension, deep sea monsters attacking and reducing the crew, some decent character interaction, a tiny droplet of blood and rather too much of T. J. Miller joking and Jessica Henwick screaming while running around. I’ve seen worse. Much worse, and recently. Indeed, if you are just looking for some good horror survival action and a distraction from your daily routine, this film may do it for you.

Stewart herself seems to have some bad luck. After years making indie-movies in a post-Twilight wilderness, the hope was obviously to return to big Hollywood movies. But this seems to be even more of a financial failure at the box-office than her recent “woke” Charlie’s Angels remake. Though this is actually good entertainment, and free of the usual agenda that has sadly become commonplace nowadays in Hollywood movies. That may have to do with the fact that the movie was already finished – like the upcoming The New Mutants from Fox – in 2017! For reasons I don’t know it was kept back. Did Scott exercise some power to distance it from Alien: Covenant, which also came out in 2017? Did they want to wait until Covenant had squeezed out all possible financial revenues?

Whatever the reason, it became part of Disney when the mega-conglomerate bought 20th Century Fox. And obviously, Disney didn’t really care for the welfare of this movie, so they just threw it out there, with what felt like hardly any marketing. Which is a pity, because it’s a nice bigger-budget horror movie that could have attracted more people in cinemas. I personally guess it might get a second life on Netflix or the new Disney online streaming service later.

The film also stars Vincent Cassel who was the only other actor I knew of the underwater crew, apart from Stewart. Mind you, you are not spending much screen time with most of them. Nevertheless there are some interactions that, if not really going deep, give enough of an emotional connection at least to wish they will get out of this unfortunate situation alive. But mainly it’s a showcase for Kristen Stewart who – and I really have to stress I don’t typically care for her much at all – gives a good and credible performance here.Though you’ll have to deal with the fact that she is playing a deep sea rig engineer here, a role I would probably have associated with a muscle-bound man!

I personally wish the last two Alien films by Scott would have been something like this. It could have been a lot more satisfying than the time we had to spend with David, the Fassbender-android. That said the Alien formula – like the Terminator one – seems to have had its day, thanks to having been exploited what feels like a few hundred times. It’s really time for Hollywood to come out with some new ideas. Therefore only 3 stars from me, albeit well-earned ones!

Dir: William Eubank
Star: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr.

Until Morning Comes boxed set, by J.T. Sawyer

  By

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

This omnibus edition contains the first three volumes in Sawyer’s post-apocalyptic story: Until Morning Comes, In Too Deep, and The Way Back. The central character is 31-year-old Secret Service agent Carlie Simmons, who is on secondment to Tucson, Arizona to provide protection for the President’s daughter, Eliza Huntington, who is attending university there. Things take a sudden wrong turn, with the outbreak of a fast-spreading infection, which turns its victims into psychotic flesh-eating ghouls.

Yes, folks: this apocalypse is of the well-known zombie flavour. Carlie’s first task is to secure Miss Huntington, and take her to a secure location. Thereafter, she becomes part of the effort to find a cure, involving a trip first to New Orleans, then to a former Soviet research facility in Cuba – the latter mission going particularly wrong. Meanwhile, Eliza’s life is little better, after Air Force One goes down in a remote part of Idaho.

It’s a genre which has been more or less done to death over the past decade – regardless of whether you mean TV, movies, graphic novels or books. As such, there isn’t much here which is particularly new or interesting. The virus responsible appears to be of Russian origin; yet towards the end, there are hints a faction of the US government was also involved in its manufacture. But it’s mostly a fairly steady killing spree, with heads exploding from the liberal application of firepower, or when the ammo runs out, enthusiastic use of machetes and other sharp implements.

It’s probably Eliza’s arc which is rather more interesting, despite her story being the minor one over the three volumes. Carlie is a bad-ass from the get-go, and there’s not much development from there (to be fair, not much is needed). Eliza, however, has to transform from being the First Daughter into a zombie-killer, willing to survive by any means necessary. The question of what cost this transition has on her humanity is more implied than explicitly discussed, yet Sawyer manages it in a way that it’s considerably less implausible than it sounds. The author’s background as a survival teacher also helps give the more technical aspects additional credibility, and I’m always pleased to see any locally-set entertainment; Arizona is hard done-by there!

Working against these positive aspects, however, is the sheer predictability of it all. Simply depicting a zombie apocalypse isn’t enough, especially not given the extent to which they have dominated the horror landscape over the past fifteen years. The Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004 probably kicked things off, with Season 5 of The Walking Dead in 2014 probably the point at which I reached my personal fill. The first of these books was originally published in October that year. But the five years since have not been kind, and I suspect even at the time, this would have seemed lacking in inventiveness or originality. While good enough at what it does, what it does isn’t quite good enough.

Author: J.T. Sawyer
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, only as an e-book
Book 1-3 of 5 in the Carlie Simmons series.

Undercover Law

  By

★★½
“The law of declining returns.”

This one had a good deal of promise, to the extent that even Chris expressed an interest in watching it [she bailed on discovering it was 60 episodes in length!]. However, it almost completely fails to go anywhere much: what you see in the first ten episodes is, by and large, what you get over the remaining fifty. It’s the story of four women, all of whom work as agents in the Colombian police, and are trying to take down the local drug cartel. This had been run by a man called Lerner, before he was killed by the authorities; now, his son Junior has taken over the business. The women seek to infiltrate various parts of his operation, from the jungle manufacturing arm, through the distribution side to the money laundering and finance wing, and discover the identity of the mysterious “Bluefish”, who heads the cartel from the shadows.

Which would be fine, if the show had actually concentrated on this aspect of their lives. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Each of them have their own soap-drenched subplots, typically involving family members, love lives, or some combination thereof. For example, one has a child whose parentage is uncertain. Could the father be her police partner? Or could it even be Lerner himself? I hope you care, because this storyline is stretched out over the entire duration of the series. Other elements which are similarly used include a junkie sister and her daughter; the search for a long-lost father; and a troubled marriage resulting from the commitment required to be an undercover officer. At times, the whole policing thing seems almost to be forgotten.

Being undercover is clearly going to limit the opportunities for overt action: when you’re pretending to be a cook, a nightclub owner’s wife or a fitness instructor, you’re not going to be kicking down doors and blowing away the bad guys. I understand this. But the characters – and the writers – need to decide what’s important: their personal lives or their work. Too often, the story instead resorts to cliché. For example, when a character gives an impassioned speech about getting out of this dangerous job and settling down, it’s absolutely no surprise they’re killed in a gun-battle, immediately afterward. [Admittedly, this remains one of the show’s few genuinely memorable sequences] Similarly, I’ve seen enough telenovelas to know that when a character is supposedly dead, unless you see their corpse, there’s about an even chance they will return.  And weddings never go off smoothly and without a hitch.

It’s a bit of a shame, since most of the central performances are solid, just deserving better material with which to work. And the commitment to focusing on the side of law, rather than glamorizing the lives of criminals, is laudable. Yet it’s so poorly-written, even the identity of the gang’s “mole” in law enforcement is an opportunity for tension, squandered to the point of being almost completely wasted, and the revelation of “Bluefish” was absolutely no revelation at all. Maybe it suffered by comparison, being watched in the same period as the far superior Netflix series set in Colombia, Narcos. Or maybe it just isn’t very good.

Star: Valeria Galvis, Juana del Rio, Viña Machado, Luna Baxter

Unlocked

  By

★★½
“Lisbeth Salander vs. Elf”

That would have been a more appealing title. Although the incredibly generic one here reflects the incredibly generic plot, which sinks this, despite the efforts of a well above-average cast. CIA agent Alice Racine (Rapace) has, at her own request, been assigned to the backwater of an East London community, after blaming herself for failing to stop a bombing in Paris. She’s called out of her semi-retirement to interrogate a terrorist courier, believed to be carrying a message about an imminent biological attack on a US target in London. She cracks the subject and hands over most of the intel, only to discover the recipients are not the agency employees they claimed to be, and will kill her as soon as they get what they need. She goes on the run, unsure of who she can still trust: her mentor (Douglas), the MI-5 boss (Collette), or a burglar she encounters who happens to be a former British commando (Bloom). Can she stop the attack before it’s carried out?

Yeah, if you ever wanted to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo go hand-to-hand against Legolas, this film is for you. Anyone else? Probably not so much. It’s the kind of striking boilerplate spy vs. spy shenanigans we’ve seen a lot of lately. This reminded me particularly of Survivor, with Rapace standing in for Milla Jovovich, though to be honest, neither film makes much impression – and what they do, isn’t necessarily good. For example here, I spotted what the target was going to be as soon as it was mentioned, and a laughably long time before the movie’s characters were able to work it out. I hope American’s real intelligence assets are considerably smarter than the ones depicted in this film. The way in which Bloom’s character, Jack Alcott, is shoehorned into proceedings is no less clunky, and the story overall has no flow, lurching through the components to its finale (obviously not endorsed by the NFL, given the non-specific names used!).

The positives here are mostly from the performances, with the exception of Bloom, who seems woefully mis-cast – though it may partly be my difficulty in taking anyone with a man-bun seriously. Rapace gives a good account of herself, kicking ass with terse efficiency, particularly when escaping from the hotel room where she’s carrying out the interrogation. Collette, previously known to us from United States of Tara, turns out to be as good with a British accent as she is with an American one, especially considering she’s neither (Australian). There’s also John Malkovich as the CIA boss, and he’s watchable as ever, albeit underused. Seems like the Czech Republic largely stood in for London, which may help explain the limited sense of place, and Apted’s direction is little better here than in one of the more underwhelming Bond flicks of recent times, The World is Not Enough. Rapace needs to keep looking for the right vehicle, one which will make use of her undeniable talents.

Dir: Michael Apted
Star: Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, Toni Collette, Michael Douglas