Tag: USA

Girl

  By

★★½
“Axe me another question.”

Thorne appears dedicated to destroying the wimpy image created by her role as the heroine in Twilight. A little while ago, we reviewed Chick Fight, in which she played the bad-ass nemesis at a female fight club. Now, she’s the unnamed heroine (whom I’m going to call Girl, as the credits do), who shows up back in her home-town of Golden after a prolonged absence. She has returned to protect her mother (Lavallee) from her estranged father, only to find someone beat her to the punch. Dad is dangling, lifeless, in the shed, and those responsible are after a stash of cash which he supposedly squirreled away. Not helping matters, those responsible are led by the local sheriff (Rourke), and they are convinced Girl knows where the money is. Fortunately, Girl has acquired some unusual survival skills of her own, in particular, throwing a mean axe, as suggested by the poster.

I would say though, the film would have benefited from more axe-tion, as it were. While it’s established early on that’s she’s packing in this department, you have to wait a good while before the payoff comes, and it’s merely adequate. Until then, there’s the feel of a modern Western, not least in the lack of people – if the streets here don’t quite have tumbleweeds rolling across them, they might as well have. Into this, moseys the lone gun-slinger (or axe-slinger) into a town both controlled and terrorized by corrupt leaders, seeking to right a personal wrong, with the side benefit of cleaning up this here territory. The locals give what support they can, yet are too scared to actively fight back, leaving the heavy lifting to Girl.

While a convincing depiction of small-town America as hell, there’s also a curious lack of tension here. Golden is the kind of place which feels like it would be ground zero for the opioid crisis, yet that seems to have infected the film, with most scenes feeling like they have taken Oxycontin. There’s just such a lack of energy in all the performances. Even Rourke, whom you would expect to bring a certain swagger to the role, as lord of his domain, opts for largely understated, to the point of gently soporific. Of course, as expected, deep-buried family secrets end up getting revealed, not least concerning the relationship between the sheriff and  Girl’s mother.

Thorne gives a decent performance, as someone who has clearly been through a lot, and come out the other side embodying the phrase, “That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.” It feels as if director/supporting actor Faust is aiming for Winter’s Bone, and probably comes up short, perhaps because Girl is too abrasive to be sympathetic. She’s the kind of girl whose sports the chip on her shoulder as ostentatiously as the piercing through her nose, and that’s probably not the kind of character with which I want to spend time. And similarly, if I never go back to Golden again, I’m probably fine with that.

Dir: Chad Faust
Star:Bella Thorne, Mickey Rourke, Chad Faust, Tia Lavallee

Vanquish

  By

★½
“Red, white and blew”

I want to like Rose, who seems to be making a concerted effort to become an action heroine. It hasn’t always worked out – see The Doorman – but she keeps plugging away. It’s against that background I watched this, which I knew going in ranked among the worst-reviewed action heroine movies, certainly of this year, and probably all-time. As I write, it’s at 4% on Rotten Tomatoes and 2.7 on the IMDb. For comparison, the latter scores both Barb Wire and Catwoman at a 3.4. Hell, even Bloodrayne comes in at 2.9. But surely Vanquish could not possibly be worse than that? Unfortunately, I am here to tell you: yes, it can. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a wax bowl of fruit. LOOKS like the real thing, but contains no nutritional value, and isn’t even a pleasure to eat.

Michael Caine famously said of his role in Jaws 4, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built and it is terrific.” I can only imagine Freeman needed a new home – or more likely a kitchen remodeling – for there’s no other reason for him to have taken this part, and he all but sleepwalks his way through it. He plays Damon, an ex-cop now confined to a wheelchair, from which he runs a crime empire. His career, Victoria (Rose), is an ex-soldier who needs help with the medical expenses of her little daughter. She agrees to carry out a series of collections for him, over the course of one night. 

There are so many red flags here, not least his threatening her daughter, a pointless bit of leverage. Then the first collection brings her face-to-face with the man who killed her brother. Really, what are the odds? Any normal person might go, “Hang on a moment…”, consider the possibility Damon might just have a hidden agenda, and turn their mad skills on him. But we need the movie to happen, and so Victoria ploughs on, through a series of non-escalating and largely uninteresting confrontations. She has cameras strapped to her, so Damon can follow her actions, and yell marginally helpful advice at sporadic intervals. It’s less than 15 minutes before the end, that any genuine sense of free will appears for the heroine.

I will say, it is framed and shot in a competent manner, with some nice use of colour palette. Otherwise, though, this is startlingly uninteresting. It is not, of course, the worst film I’ve covered here, by a long shot. But this clearly wasn’t cheap. I’ve not been able to pin down a budget, but I’d say $20 million seems a minimum figure, unless the producers had compromising pictures of Freeman. Among other GWG movies with eight-figure budgets, this does definitely need to be in the conversation for worst ever, possessing almost no redeeming features. Poor Rose needs to have a word with her agent, before her career goes the route taken by Michelle Rodriguez

Dir: George Gallo
Star: Ruby Rose, Morgan Freeman, Patrick Muldoon, Nick Vallelonga

Chick Fight

  By

★★½
“Fight Club: Ladies’ Night”

You are probably not going to see a more relentless parade of cliched storyline elements than here. Anna (Akerman) is seeing her life fall apart. Her coffee-shop business is failing, her car just got repossessed and her love life is entirely non-existent. Best friend Charleen (Sloan) takes her to an underground fight club for women, who need to deal with their issues in a less feminine form than society allows, i.e. by beating the crap out of each other. There, she incurs the wrath of club bad girl, the undefeated Olivia (Thorne), who challenges Anna to a bout in two months. Luckily, she’s introduced to a boxing coach, Murphy (Baldwin), who used to train Sugar Ray. There’s romance too, in the shape of club doctor, Roy (Connolly), though Olivia has also set her sights on him. Can Anna overcome her inner doubts, and triumph over adversity, after a welter of training montages?

It hardly would count as a spoiler to reveal the result, with almost everything here being horribly underwritten. Anna is given a dead mother necessary to the plot, and a father who has just come out of the closet, which most certainly isn’t. I also question the entire underlying principal of the entire concept. In what universe does it make sense, when you are out of work, broke and on the edge of being homeless, to spend all your time training for an amateur MMA bout? DEAL WITH YOUR EVERYDAY PROBLEMS, PEOPLE. Naturally, all of those get conveniently hand-waved away, in another of the plot’s convenient contrivances. See also: the manner in the which the final fight unfolds, which is seriously foreshadowed in the most unsubtle of manners; the thoroughly unlikely way in which it proves to be a bonding experience between Anna and Olivia; or the disposal of the legal charges against the heroine.

Yet, there are a couple of elements which meant it did manage to hold my attention – though it was touch-and-go at some points. Akerman does a good job of selling her character, giving her an airy, if likable, persona that does leave you wanting to see her prevail over her misfortunes – even if they are, largely, of her own making [struggling business owners shouldn’t have a Prius]. But the most pleasant surprise was the action. I was expecting little or nothing on that front, yet mad props are due to fight choreographer Shauna Galligan, who delivers brawls that wouldn’t be out of place in a Scott Adkins or Jason Statham film. That begins early, with Anna’s first fight lasting only about five seconds – and if you can make the chick from Twilight look like a serious bad-ass in the cage, you’re clearly doing something right. It’s never going to be enough to salvage a script that’s intent only in ploughing along paths that are painfully well-travelled. Yet it did provide some unexpected pleasures, and I was left feeling my time had not been entirely wasted.

Dir: Paul Leyden
Star: Malin Akerman, Kevin Connolly, Bella Thorne, Dulcé Sloan

The Lioness

  By

★½
“Yes, another strippers-on-the-lam flick.”

This will be rather shorter than my typical review. But then, the film is rather shorter than the typical movie. In fact, it only runs 46 minutes and 20 seconds between opening and closing credits. At first, I felt cheated. However, by the end, I was positively grateful for the makers’ economy in this department. A standard running-time, and I’d probably have been gnawing my own leg off to escape. It’s also an object lesson in not taking IMDb reviews at face value. There are currently eight for the movie: all very positive, averaging a score of 8.7. But when you look closer, you realize that every single reviewer has only reviewed this film, with all but one apparently signing up just before posting their reviews. That’s a red flag.

A bigger red flag is, the film sucks. That’s apparent right from the opening scene, where a trio of strippers are debating the stage name one of them, new arrival Megan (Hartselle), should pick. Approaching four minutes are spent on this, so we’re getting close to 10% of the movie’s effective running time in meaningless drivel. It ends with one suddenly proclaiming, “I heard that there’s this stripper, she goes from club to club, stays there a little bid, robs the place. No-one knows who the hell she is.” Cut to Megan looking extremely guilty, and I think a small piece of me died inside. This feeble effort on both script and performances continues the rest of the way, complete with Megan breaking the fourth wall repeatedly to speak to the camera. Which might have been okay if she had anything interesting to say.

Anyway, there’s an opportunistic crime in which another stripper, Goldie (Orebaugh), swipes the night’s takings and runs off, accompanied by Megan. Except, the haul turns out to be rather more than expected, due to the club being used as a front for money-laundering by owner Anna (Ivanova). Consequently, the resulting heat is also above expectations. Stuff subsequently happens, such as another employee, Linda (Gutierrez) wanting in on the take. but I will admit to having largely lost interest after it became clear these “strippers” were going to perform without ever taking their clothes off. They might as well have been nuns. It’s an appropriate summation of the movie: this lioness is more like a toothless moggie.

Dir: Richard Poche
Star: Lacy Hartselle, Gabriele Orebaugh, Giuliana Gutierrez, Desi Ivanova

Gunpowder Milkshake

  By

★★★★
“Jane Wick.”

Yeah, it’s kinda like that. As in John Wick, the hero(ine) is an assassin for hire, in a world where there exists a significant infrastructure of support for hitmen and hitwomen. After they fall foul of the wrong people, our hero(ine) becomes the target, but has more than enough skills to be able to fend for themselves, and takes the fight to their aggressors. Oh, yeah, and it also borrows significantly from Leon: The Professional, in that the assassin becomes the protector of a young girl. Hmm. But this leverages those two with very large injections of style. Not quite to the level of Sucker Punch, but heading that way. Thiscand enough original ideas, made it work for me, despite the familiar elements. 

It has been interesting to read the reviews, which seem sharply divisive. Critics appear either to like it or hate it, with not much “It was alright.” I think this is one of those films where you need to buy into the approach as much as the concept. For example, it seems to take place in a world inhabited solely by people in the film. There are few if any bystanders. The location is deliberately vague (it was filmed in Berlin), with a deliberate attention paid to the colour palette used. According to the director, for example, yellow represents death – such as the large, yellow duffel-bag with “I ♥ Kittens” on the side, in which the protagonist totes her weapons. If you’re not down with this approach, I can see how this could annoy rather than amuse.

Said protagonist is Sam (Gillan), a killer with abandonment issues ever since her mom (Lena Headey) walked out on her, fifteen years earlier. Sam is tasked by her employer, Nathan (Giamatti), with recovering a haul of stolen cash. But she finds the thief was coerced into action, after his eight-year-old daughter (“8¾!”, as we are reminded on several occasions), Emily, was kidnapped. Likely reminded of her younger self, Sam takes custody of Emily, though the cash is destroyed in the process. This, and a previous job where she killed the son of a very important person, makes her persona non grata, and the hunter becomes the hunted.

Fortunately, she’s not without allies. In particular, there are the Librarians, three women who run the armoury available to all assassins [like the Sommelier in John Wick]. This trio, played by Yeoh, Angela Bassett and Carla Gugino, have a lot of previous history with Sam and her mother, and opt to take her side in the impendng war. Of course – and the development is so obvious, it doesn’t count as a spoiler – Mum also returns. The 5½ women (counting Emily as the fraction), have to stand their ground, first at the library, then in a final battle at the diner, the neutral ground (coughContinentalcough) where Sam’s mother left her, all those years ago. 

The action is good, rather than great. It is, at least, not over-edited and is definitely helped by Papushado’s dedication to style – it all looks striking, which makes it (literally) punch above its weight. Nowhere is this clearer than an amazing slow-motion pan down the length of the diner towards the end, which is the kind of shot you’ll want to rewatch several times, in order to see everything that’s going on. It does feel as if Yeoh was somewhat underused, though I should probably give up expecting anything Crouching Tiger-like these days. That was over twenty years ago, and Yeoh turns 59 in less than a week. That said, she still holds her own with the less mature actresses admirably – says the man, younger than her, who needs a stunt double to change the batteries in the ceiling smoke detector.

Despite the shot mentioned above, the fight in the library is definitely the film’s highlight and in terms of pacing feels like it should have been the climax. With the women defending their turf, it has the feel of an Alamo-like final stand. Instead, things potter on for a further 20 minutes thereafter, with the makers feeling like they have chosen to coast over the finish line, rather than engaging in a final sprint. I felt another area of criticism was the use of music, which often seemed to reach Baby Driver levels of over-emphasis. I once described that film as “like I was trapped inside Edgar Wright’s iPod, while he hummed along to his own mix-tape,” and if this isn’t quite as bad, there’s even less reason for the songs here. They’re a grab-bag that don’t offer a sense of time or place. I blame Quentin Tarantino.

It is notable that the film is split firmly along gender lines. with every one of the protagonists being women, and every one of the antagonists being men. However, it’s fortunate that seem largely to be about the extent of the messaging, and nobody particularly pays attention to this. Everyone is kept quite busy trying to kill each other. It’s also a bit less of an ensemble piece than I expected from the trailer. Especially in the first half, it’s Sam vs. the World, with the Librarians introduced, and then shuffled off to one side until Sam is ultimately forced to turn to them for help. That’s not particularly a criticism. I like Gillan, who was born about 25 miles from where I was, so is likely the nearest I have to a local action heroine. She can carry a film perfectly well, even if I’d rather have heard her natural Scots accent.

Comparing this to Black Widow from a few weeks ago, both films got four stars, but only Milkshake merited our seal of approval. I think it’s because the latter’s strong sense of visual style does give a rewatchability that the relative pedestrian approach of Widow didn’t achieve. You’ll see things here which you have likely never seen before, and while that originality definitely does not apply to all the plot elements, it does at least have the grace to take those things from some very, very good movies.

Dir: Navot Papushado
Star: Karen Gillian, Chloe Coleman, Paul Giamatti, Michelle Yeoh

Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)
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Jolt

  By

★★★
“Crank-ette”

Certainly the kind of action film for which you need to suspend your disbelief. In this case, the closest parallel is, as the tag-line above implies, the Jason Statham vehicle, Crank. In it, Statham’s character was poisoned, and had to keep his adrenaline permanently up for the rest of the film. to avoid dying. Here, it’s almost the reverse. Beckinsale’s character, Lindy, was born with a rare condition, “intermittent explosive disorder”. This is pretty much what it sounds like: uncontrollable aggressive outbursts, like a physical version of Tourette’s. This is a real thing. Not so real? Lindy is also “blessed” with high levels of cortisol, which make her faster and stronger than anyone else. Somewhere in the middle? Lindy controls her IED with electric shocks from a handheld device given to her by her therapist, Dr. Munchin (Tucci). All told, I’m tagging this as SF. #ChangeMyMind

She’s just about coping with life, until her new boyfriend, accountant Justin (Courtney), turns up as a corpse. Turns out he was working for some very shady characters, and apparently paid the price. Time for Lindy to put her affliction to good use, despite the efforts of the cops, such as Detective Vicars (Cannavale) to prevent her. She works her way up the criminal food-chain towards Gareth Fizel (David Bradley – who played Walder Frey in Game of Thrones, so knows about getting hunted by single-minded young women!), cracking heads as appropriate. Yet, things may not quite be what they seem. Not least, after the opening narration by Susan Sarandon, we kept expecting her to show up. You’ll have a wait. It’s also obvious that someone like Lindy has her uses, as a blunt instrument with which to solve other people’s problems.

While the ending is very clearly trying to start a franchise, I’m not certain there would be much more to offer. It is a pleasure to see Beckinsale kicking butt, in a way we haven’t seen in a few years (probably since the last Underworld film, Blood Wars). However, I can’t help thinking she doesn’t seem “right” for this kind of characters, which I would have expected to be all rough edges, rather than Beckinsale’s smoothness. It almost feels as if it was, perhaps, originally written for the likes of low-budget action god Scott Adkins, only for them to do a quick search-replace of “he” with “she” in the script, after Beckinsale showed interest and they got more money. Even there, it might have been more convincing with somebody like Ruby Rose as Lindy, who could bring the necessary edge to proceedings.

To be honest, the action was a little disappointing too – perhaps more so in quantity than quality, as it does have a couple of decent, well-choreographed brawls. I didn’t feel particularly as if there was much sense of escalation to proceedings; I mean, it’s not as if Bradley is going to pose much of a threat, is it? I can’t help comparing it to Black Widow which, despite its flaws, did build to a rousing climax. Here, although I was never bored, it is kinda easy to see why this bypassed cinemas and went straight to Amazon Prime.

Dir: Tanya Wexler
Star: Kate Beckinsale, Bobby Cannavale, Stanley Tucci, Jai Courtney

Black Widow

  By

★★★★
“The name’s Widow. Black Widow…”

I said it in my review of Captain Marvel, but it probably bears repeating here. I’m basically completely unfamiliar with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Avengers: Infinity War? It may have become the biggest film in cinema history, but I’ve never seen it, and that’s par for the course. Of the 13 MCU films released since the beginning of 2015, I have watched just three. So if this required any prior knowledge, or information not present in the actual movie, I was going to be hosed. Another concern coming in, stemmed from one of those three movies: Captain Marvel. It was the epitome of the dumb comic-book film, and more a chore than a pleasure.

This had been long-delayed too, and that’s never a good sign, though it’s hard to blame the makers in this case. It was originally slated for release in May 2020, but of course, COVID-19 scuppered that, causing several reschedulings. The split release, simultaneously coming out in theatres and on streaming service Disney+, also came as a bit of a red flag. That’s because I’ve found films which debuted on streaming have largely been underwhelming. From Mulan through Wonder Woman 1984, as well as non-GWG entries like Godzilla vs. Kong and Mortal Kombat, the results haven’t impressed me. Could Black Widow buck the trend and deliver the summer box-office blockbuster which never happened last year? Well, if you counted the stars at the top, you’ll probably have worked out that it did, more or less avoiding the potential pitfalls. 

However, it has also become the first four-star film not to get our seal of approval. Put simply, while it delivered 2+ hours of very solid entertainment, I have no interest in seeing it again. To me, that is a key element in awarding a seal; the film must be one capable of getting (and standing up to) repeat viewings. This didn’t – though again, I want to stress I’d be more than happy to go see the future installments, which seem highly likely to follow. I think it was mostly a lack of emotional involvement which capped my appreciation for it. While a fine, well-crafted spectacle, that does work as a stand-alone film, I still felt like I had arrived in the middle of the show. For example, a relatively brief explanation of her origins in a nineties Russian sleeper cell is followed by “21 years later,” and that’s an awful lot of water under the bridge.

Clearly, a lot of significant stuff had happened in that time. Piecing the parts together, it appears the two “sisters” from the sleeper cell, Natasha Romanoff (Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Pugh), became part of the “Red Room” program to create super-soldiers. Natasha defected back to the West to become part of SHIELD, and killed Dreykov, the man in charge. But Yelena remained in the system, until an encounter with a gas that undid her mind-control. She sent a batch of the gas to Natasha, which brought her into the sights of Dreykov, who was not so dead as previously assumed. He is very keen to get the antidote to his programming back under control, but Natasha and Yelena decide to take the fight to him instead. However, they need to start by finding out the Red Room’s location, which will involve an awkward “family re-union” with their pseudo-Mom (Weisz) and crypto-Dad (Harbour).

I was talking to Dieter about the film, which he had already seen (in the cinema, the mad, impetuous man!). He said it resembled “a classical spy-ploitation movie, like Bond movies might look today, if there hasn’t been that strong change in style and towards more realism with the Craig era.” That raised an eyebrow for me, and certainly didn’t seem a typical Marvel film approach. But having now seen it myself, I can definitely see where that’s coming from. In particular, I felt that Dreykov (played by British heavy Ray Winstone) would have fitted right in as a villain from that ‘classic Bond’ era. His lair makes the one inside a volcano from You Only Live Twice look like a doll’s house, and he even makes the classic, “Now you are helpless in my power, let me over-explain things to you” mistake. Notably, there’s a scene early on where Natasha is watching Moonraker on her lap-top, so I very much suspect none of this is by accident.

A couple of other elements also seem to echo Bond. Natasha has a somewhat Q-like “fixer”, Mason (O-T Fagbenle), who keep her supplied and gets irritated by her more outrageous demands. Dreykov has a monstrous and hyperviolent sidekick; despite her gender, she’s not unlike Jaws, who appears in the Moonraker clip mentioned above.  Like him, she is won over to the side of good by kindness. There’s also a dry humour present, which does hark back to the days of Roger Moore. Much of this comes from Harbour’s character, but Yelena also has a self-effacing wit. For example, she rags on Natasha about her fight poses, though inevitably, subsequently finds herself in the same posture. After the dour Captain Marvel, a little appreciation of the underlying silliness which is embodied by the comic-book genre, goes a surprisingly long way.

Indeed, I would not mind if, as the post-credit scene implies, Yelena becomes Black Widow going forward. [Though that scene was all but entirely lost on me, I believe a change is needed, due to things which happened in films I haven’t watched… He said vaguely!] Pugh, whom we enjoyed seeing on this site in Fighting With My Family, brings a no-nonsense approach to her character that I really liked. Johannson may, despite her complaints, have been getting paid the big bucks here, but I’d rather see Pugh step into the PVC body-suit going forward. Admittedly, I’d also rather see more genuine stunt-work and less obvious CGI. While it’s understandable at some points, e.g. the climax, there were times where it felt like a character couldn’t walk down a corridor without it being rendered against a green screen. I think I may be shouting at clouds in this department, however…

All told though, it’s the first film I’ve seen in a long time which made me at least somewhat sorry I hadn’t seen it at the movies. It has been about 20 months since my last cinema outing, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever again miss the theatrical experience. Black Widow has proven otherwise, so we’ll see if this does translate into an actual movie-going experience down the road.

Dir: Cate Shortland
Star: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, Rachel Weisz, David Harbour

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The Queen of Hollywood Blvd.

  By

★★★
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary.”

This is definitely not your typical action heroine. For it’s Mary’s (Hochschild) 60th birthday when the events of this film unfold. She runs a long-running strip club on the titular location, when Duke (Smith) spoils the party, by demanding she hand over ownership of the establishment, to settle a loan taken out decades earlier. Mary isn’t having any of it, and when Duke’s lackie Punk Rock Charlie (Berkowitz) shows up to take over, she beats him up and leaves him for dead in the Bronson Caves – which, as the film helpfully tells us, was used as the Batcave for the Batman TV series. But Duke is ahead of her, and has kidnapped Mary’s son. To free him, he demands she do another job: kill an accountant who is being too talkative for Duke’s liking. 

Unfolding over the course of a single day, there are some interesting elements to this, yet it’s very definitely a mixed bag. Not least among the former: the director is Hochschild’s son, and also plays her son in the movie. She is probably the film’s strongest card; in virtually every scene, without a good performance, this could well have been unwatchable. She puts over a proud, fiercely independent character, who refuses to compromise her morality. We see this early, when she rescues underage Grace (Mulvoy-Ten) from the pimp trying to sell her. Yet she has no qualms about later using Grace to get to the accountant, because her son is simply more important to her. It makes for a fascinating character, one not often seen on-screen among women her age.

Less successful is… Well, a lot of the other stuff. The supporting characters, in particular, rarely rise above a series of clichés. [I’ll give an honourable pass to cult star Michael Parks, in his final role before passing away, even if he does look like death not very warmed up] The pacing is also off, especially at the end, where 45 seconds of action takes about 10 minutes to unfold, thanks to some extraordinary languid dialogue, plus Oblowitz’s love of slow-motion and the glaringly obvious. I mean, did we really need to have her friends cart a throne into the strip-club for Mary to sit on, purely to emphasize the title?

A number of other reviews have compared Oblowitz’s style to Nicolas Winding Refn, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s not a good thing. There are times when I had to suppress an urge to make a “hurry up” gesture towards the screen. Considering her son had been kidnapped, Mary’s lack of urgency seemed questionable, especially when it seemed to be for no other reason to allow Oblowitz his directorial flourishes. The strength of Mom’s performance renders the flashier elements superfluous, and they may even take away from it. Oh, not that it matters, but I strongly suspect the exterior of the club is actually “played” by legendary strip-club Mary’s in Portland, which at one time employed Courtney Love.

Dir: Orson Oblowitz
Star: Rosemary Hochschild, Ana Mulvoy Ten, Roger Guenveur Smith, Matthew Berkowitz

I am Lisa

  By

★★★
“Another packet of Ginger Snaps”

Lisa (Vaganos) is a young woman who runs a second-hand bookstore, but has fallen into the bad books – hohoho! – of local bad girl Jessica Huckins (Anello) for some reason, who makes poor Lisa’s life a misery. There’s little Lisa can do, because Jessica’s mother (Halliburton) is the local sheriff and is fiercely protective of her daughter. The feud between Lisa and Jessica escalates, until it topples over into extremely violent unpleasantness. Sheriff Huckins orders Lisa’s near-dead body to be dumped in the nearby forest, as food for the local wolves. However, after only slight nibbling, she is rescued by a mysterious woman, and nursed back to health. Returning to town, she opts to lie low with best friend Sam (Seward), only for Lisa to notice she’s not the same person she used to be. For example, this former vegetarian now has a fondness for raw meat, and is considerably less passive, deciding to take the fight to Jessica, her pals and, eventually, to Sheriff Huckins.

I’ve seen werewoman movies before. Indeed, I’ve reviewed a few here before – most obviously Werewolf Woman, but also When Animals Dream, Blood Redd and The Big Bad. I’ve also seen plenty of revenge films, to the extent there is a dedicated tag for those on the site. But this is probably the first movie which is both. Such innovation is almost enough on its own to get through the running time, even if it’s inevitably going to be compared to the wonderful Ginger Snaps, and be found wanting. Bonus points here for skewing so thoroughly female, with the five lead characters all women, and it’s also clear there’s a lot more going on, of which Lisa is unaware. The opening scene proves this before we see the heroine, with the sheriff gunning down another werewolf and proclaiming “I guess we gotta find another.” Given this, it is a bit difficult to grasp why Jessica’s cronies are so surprised by subsequent events.

The script is rather undeveloped in some of the other directions it seeks to explore. For instance, it opens with two quotes, one pro-revenge, the other anti. Yet there’s never much sense that Lisa’s vengeance is other than justified, and it appears to have a relatively minor impact on her psyche. Well, compared to turning into a werewolf, anyway. It also took me a while to get into the head of the main character; Lisa as savage predator is considerably more interesting and engaging than Lisa as vegetarian bookshop owner. Obviously for budgetary reasons, the actual transformation is very restrained – not much more than claws and contact lenses. I guess it’s good enough to get the concept over, if you don’t look too closely. The restraint elsewhere is a bit disappointing, and harder to explain: I never got the sense Lisa was overtaken by, or surrendered to, her newly-found feral nature. However, it still makes for an interesting watch, even if the central character is more werepekinese than -wolf.

Dir: Patrick Rea
Star: Kristen Vaganos, Jennifer Seward, Manon Halliburton, Carmen Anello

Queen of the South, season four + five

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Season 4: ★★★★
Season 5: ★★½
“There’s only one way to be safe in this business — be powerful enough that no one can touch you.”

I only just realized that I had not reviewed the fourth series of Queen of the South at the time of its broadcast. I’m not 100% sure why that slipped my mind; it may have been a reaction to the rather underwhelming nature of the third season. In some ways, the show did get back on track – it did, at least, stop trying to fake badly Arizona, largely relocating to New Orleans. This brought with it a new slate of rivals and enemies for Teresa Mendoza (Braga). This was a necessity, the show having sent the main antagonist from the early series, Camila Vargas, into exile at the end of season three.

The main replacement was likely Cecil Lafayette, a corrupt local judge who seemed to have his finger in every pie, as well as cooking up a few more of his own. He wants an ever-increasing slice of Teresa’s endeavours, as he comes to realize how large her empire is. There’s also Marcel Dumas, a well-established gang leader in New Orleans, who initially wants to co-operate with her. Their relationship becomes increasingly fractious over the first half of the series, and Judge Lafayette sees the opportunity to pit them against each other, while apparently acting as a mediator.

Meanwhile, inside Teresa’s organization, we see the first inklings of dissension in the ranks. Boaz, who had been running her operations South of the border in Sinalioa, is beginning to show dissatisfaction with Teresa’s approach. But there are new opportunities too. I guess, perhaps to replace Vargas, we get Oksana Volkova (Cherny), who is the public face of the Russian mob in New York, operating on behalf of her extremely reclusive boss, Kostya. She offers a potential pipeline into the lucrative East coast market, from Miami up the coast through Atlanta to the Big Apple, for Teresa and her product. However, there’s opposition to her expansion, in the form of an existing Cuban mob, under El Gordo.

After the weakness of season three, this was a strong return to form. It got back to the basics, of Teresa Mendoza seeking to expand her empire and consolidate her power, despite opposition from existing players. The violence which almost inevitably flows from such a struggle was present in copious quantities, with at least one shocking and unexpected death (well, we only expected it about two seconds before it happened!). In Judge Lafayette, well portrayed by David Andrews,  there was a solid villain, whose cunning, along with his local connections and allies, proved a tough nut for Teresa and her cartel to go up against.

Probably my only complaint was our heroine not quite getting as deeply involved in the action as previously. Outside of an assault on the base of some mercenaries sent to kill her, there hardly seemed to be any significant firearms use for Teresa. Perhaps that was an indication that she was beginning to seek an exit strategy, moving into more legitimate businesses, and away from those where killing is a standard technique of operations. The news that the fifth series would be the show’s swansong, seemed to support this theory.

To start at the end of it, however, the grade for this season loses a full star simply on the basis of its chosen ending. While skirting around spoilers, we utterly called almost every aspect, down to the specific beach-side location of the final scenes, as early as end of the previous episode. Maybe we’ve just seen too many telenovelas in which this particular plot twist has been done to death. There was a real lack of any sense of karmic balance, considering the number of dead bodies Teresa had left in her wake. We also kept hoping, right up until the final credits rolled, that we would get closure for Camila Vargas. If the actress playing her, Veronica Falcón, just wanted to leave the series after #3, the character deserved a far better send-off. Meanwhile, Teresa Mendosa barely appeared in the final episode, which instead focused on long-time sidekick, Pote (Madera).

Up until that point, however, the season had not been terrible. It was fairly broad in scope, mostly hopping between New Orleans and New York, though with a side-trip to “Berlin” [quotes used advisedly, since unlike the Maltese excursion in series three, I’m fairly sure the production did not go to Germany, instead throwing in a couple of bits of stock footage and faking the rest]. As expected, Teresa was seeking to diversify into legal business, in particular property development. Though she quickly found out that “legitimate” did not necessarily mean those involved could be trusted. Still, no problem there, that methods from her usual field of work can’t solve.

Particularly effective was her ongoing dealings with the Russian mob. I will admit, I did wonder for a while whether their supposed leader even existed, since Oksana was the only person who ever seemed to talk to Kostya. There were a number of tense moments, as Teresa tries to convince the Russian to turn on her boss, because the Mexican offers a better long-term future. While Oksana was not up to the level of Camila Vargas, she did offer a good foil. She possessed an impenetrable air, reminding me of the famous Churchill quote about Russia being “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” You just never knew what she was planning.

And so, it all ends – not with a bang, but in a considerably more peaceful way than I expected.  I think that. perhaps, after so long, writers tend to fall in love with their characters a bit too much. I’ve lost count of the number of shows, from Buffy through Dexter to Game of Thrones, which have had trouble creating a satisfactory ending, and we can now add Queen to that list. Its departure does still leave a gap on television. In terms of truly bad-ass heroines, prepared to go to any ends to reach their goals, Teresa Mendoza is without parallel. Now, let’s get a US remake of Rosario Tijeras…

Star: Alice Braga, Hemky Madera, Peter Gadiot, Vera Cherny