Tag: Action Films

Doctor Strange (2016)


Benedict Cumberbatch goes into battle with magic. Silly but in a good way.

Director: Scott Derrickson

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr Stephen Strange), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Karl Mordo), Rachel McAdams (Christine Palmer), Mads Mikkelsen (Kaecilius), Tilda Swinton (The Ancient One), Benedict Wong (Wong), Michael Stuhlbarg (Dr Nicodemus West), Benjamin Bratt (Jonathan Pangborn)

Arrogant surgeon (is there any other kind in the movies?) Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) loses the fine motor control of his hands after a car crash caused by his reckless driving. With science unable to find a cure, he travels across the world to find another solution, eventually joining a secret group of sorcerers, led by The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), who use energy from parallel universes to perform feats of magic in our world. Trained by Karl Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) he is absorbed into a clash between the sorcerers and a rogue former protégé of The Ancient One, Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) who wants to destroy the boundaries between worlds and unleash chaos.

In a film franchise that threatens to get increasingly samey, Doctor Strange is in many ways a breath of fresh air. Its twisting, mind-bending special effects (part Escher, part Inception) are stunning and showcase a great deal of visual and narrative imagination in the film, immediately making it look different from the dozens of city-smashing films we’ve seen in the Marvel franchise. It’s also told with a fair amount of wit, tongue-in-cheek beats and some lovely sight gags (Strange’s Cloak of Levitation is clearly inspired by the Carpet from Aladdin). This lightness of touch is essential to stop this concept feeling silly: with a more po-faced style this story, full of magic and things like “the Eye of Agamatto”, would have stumbled over its own ridiculousness.

This is however pretty close to being the best comic-book origins film, and certainly in the top five of this franchise. For a start, despite the visual glory, it feels like a focused more personal story: there are only really 6-7 characters (compare that to the sprawling cast of Captain America: Civil War), and the real heart of the film is the lead character’s struggle to overcome an existential crisis and find a new purpose while rediscovering his humanity. Even the final confrontation is a spin on the formula, avoiding city-wrecking super-punches in favour of intelligence and humour saving the day. It still crams in the action, and the characters are still cartoons made flesh, but at least they have been given a real depth here. There is an emotional weight to the story that makes you care about Strange and his world.

No actor right now is better able to embody intellectual brilliance matched with cool arrogance and societal disconnection than Benedict Cumberbatch. So in many ways, Strange is a part that falls well within his comfort zone. But Cumberbatch shows he can carry a major motion picture by making Strange a charismatic lead who grows and develops. Strange is deliberately unlikeable at first, but Cumberbatch invests him with an underlying vulnerability and a cocky charm that is increasingly broadened and shaded as the film progresses. Almost without realising it, you find yourself actually rather liking him halfway through (while still happy to give him a smack in the mouth for his cockiness). Cumberbatch is in almost every scene and carries the film effortlessly.

The film is dominated by it’s lead character, but gives moments to the rest of the cast. Tilda Swinton overcomes the controversy of her casting by investing The Ancient One with both a serene wisdom with dark hints of anger and impatience bubbling under the surface. Ejiofor is good as an increasingly disillusioned mentor and Wong has some great comic beats. Mads Mikkelsen, one of the greatest actors in the world, is rather wasted as a villain who never becomes quite as interesting as you’d hope. Most misused is Rachael McAdams, whose character serves very little purpose other than “ex-girlfriend” – even the director, in an interview, described her role as being there to love him, so that we can see why we should love him.

It’s still a Marvel film, and it still follows the Marvel formula, however newly presented it might be. The arc of despair, rejection, slow progress, revelation, disillusionment, rallying and overcoming personal problems is pretty recognisable from everything from Thor to Iron Man. But it is enough of an inversion, it’s got a good enough script, it’s directed with enough focus on character as well as action, and it has a sufficiently good leading actor to lift and elevate the whole idea into something that feels richer while keeping it entertaining. It’s a very good comic book movie, and it’s trying to do something different, And it mostly succeeds.

John Wick (2014)


Keanu Reeves: Architect of violence in this witty pulp thriller

Director: Chad Stahleski, David Leitch

Cast: Keanu Reeves (John Wick), Michael Nyqvist (Viggo Tarasov), Alfie Allen (Iosef Tarasov), Adrianne Palicki (Ms. Perkins), Bridget Moynahan (Helen Wick), Dean Winters (Avi), Ian McShane (Winston), John Leguizamo (Aurielo), Willem Dafoe (Marcus), Lance Reddick (Charon)

When B-list movie-making works, it can be a treat. John Wick is such a film. Set in a very distinctive criminal underworld, the recently widowed super assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) has left the life of crime behind but is dragged back in when the son (Alfie Allen) of a Russian mafia kingpin (Michael Nyqvist) murders his dog, a final gift from his wife. Wanting revenge for the loss of his last link with his wife, Wick undertakes a roaring rampage of revenge.

John Wick is a film all about momentum. It’s sharp and brutal, with fights and events piling on top of each other. However, it’s also a film told with quite a bit of wit and imagination – it’s got a cool sense of humour, and presents a tongue-in-cheek view of its super assassin story. The film’s pace and immersive action is punctured regularly and very effectively with amusing moments that really hit home. The idea of the criminal underworld having its own secret code, rules, havens and even currency is several times expanded wittily to bring an everyday element into the extraordinary. As an exercise in briefly and simply “building a world” you could look at few better examples than the script for this film.

Keanu Reeves is actually a fine choice for the lead role. His limitations as an actor have always been based above all in his flat and unmodulated Dude voice, so it’s only at moments of vocal emotion (there is one such angry outburst that he struggles with in the film) where even the audience feels that awkwardness of watching an actor at the limits of their range. But his best quality has always been his inherent lovability. As an audience member, you can’t help but care about him. Combine that with his physical brilliance and you have the perfect combination required for this role: you can believe totally in him as a ruthless killer, while also feeling a great deal of affection for him.

With Reeves’ physical abilities, the fights are then very well framed to showcase the fact that the actor is doing the stunts himself. If Quantum of Solace is perhaps the most inept example of high-cut frenetic action, this is at the other end of the scale totally. Simple, clear camera set-ups allow us to follow what happens at all times. Establishing shots and tracking shots show us exactly what is going on and where. This means you can relax and settle into the crackingly efficient violence that fills the film. The fights are inventive, shot with wit, and highly enjoyable in their execution without being excessively bloody or violent. The calm angles and stable camera serve to really accentuate the speed of those in the fights, making the fights visually very original. Despite the enormous body count, it never revels in violence. The patient build up to the first burst of violence also serves to really bond us to Wick’s backstory and his grief at his loss.

However, it’s not perfect. Strangely, despite the fact that the film is quite short, it’s still too long. There is a natural culmination point in the film at the end of Act Two that feels like a very natural, thematic stop point. Act Three resets the table hurriedly to reposition another character as a principal villain and to bring us another confrontation: this time however, the motives are less clear, and the action  just a little too much more of the same. It feels less witty and original than some of the other sequences in the film and to be honest I felt my attention drifting it a bit; the motivation for the final clash just isn’t there in the way it is with the initial enemies.

But this is a very enjoyable piece of pulpy film making, its wit and imagination embraced by some very enjoyable performances from the actors. The fight scenes not only have a unique look to them, they get the balance exactly right between violence and enjoyment. It’s almost the definition of a guilty pleasure .

The Bourne Legacy (2012)


Even with two guns and Jeremy Renner’s face, Aaron Cross isn’t that interesting

Director: Tony Gilroy

Cast: Jeremy Renner (Aaron Cross), Rachel Weisz (Dr Marta Shearing), Edward Norton (Col. Eric Byer), Stacy Keach (Adm. Mark Turso), Dennis Boutsikaris (Terrence Ward), Oscar Isaac (Outcome #3), Joan Allen (Pamela Landy), Albert Finney (Dr Albert Hirsch), David Strathairn (Noah Vosen), Scott Glenn (Ezra Kramer), Donna Murphy (Dita Mandy), Michael Chernus (Arthur Ingram), Corey Stoll (Zev Vendel), Željko Ivanek (Dr Donald Foite), Elizabeth Marvel (Dr Connie Dowd)

What do you do when the people want more sequels to your film series but you can’t persuade the star and director (no matter how much money you offer) to make another film? Well you can either re-cast or you can put another character front and centre in a sequel. The Bourne Legacy goes for the latter approach and invents a new series of characters and shady CIA programmes so that we can put the old chase-and-fight formula back to work.

Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) has been mentally and physically enhanced as part of a series of CIA black ops, overseen by shady CIA bigwig Ed Norton. After the events of Bourne Ultimatum (which overlap with the first quarter of this film), the CIA cuts its losses and orders the deaths of all the agents (including Cross) and the scientists (including Rachel Weisz’s Dr Shearing). Of course both Cross and Shearing survive and go on the run. Despite the writing tying itself into knots to connect its story to the previous films, that’s the sum of the plot. Hardly gripping.

This strange historical curiosity spends the first half of its running time attempting to justify its existence. Extensive narrative hoops are jumped through and new footage carefully interwoven with clips from the previous two movies to try and suggest “a plot behind the plot”. It’s a mistake. No one needs to know why the film exists: we just want to get on with a cracking story. Instead we spend an inordinate amount of time unravelling this “sidequel” attempt at franchise expansion, meandering around unengaging and complex plotting that totally fails to engage the interest.

So long winded are these plotting gymnastics, it’s a good two-thirds of the way into the film before our villain becomes aware of our hero’s survival. Our hero never becomes aware of the villain (an unclear flashback is put into place so they share the screen) and only guesses at who is chasing him. This means the chase elements of the film never really click into place and lack anything for the viewer to invest in. The “hero” is an assassin whose objective is to keep hold of his enhanced intellect, obtained from drugs on the “programme”. Well good for him, but its hardly a sympathetic reason for us to root for him. He’s still an unrepentant killer.

This isn’t helped by the giggle-worthy flashback scenes of Jeremy Renner in his pre-enhanced state, where Renner seems to be aping Ben Stiller’s performance of Simple Jack in Tropic Thunder. In his enhanced state, Cross is fully aware he is an assassin and a willing volunteer – embracing the very dark secret Bourne was so ashamed of. Neither Cross nor Shearing ever have their actions questioned, or display any sense that they have done anything wrong – it seems clear that they would have continued their dirty deeds quite happily without the plot’s intervention. It’s fine to have morally compromised heroes in a film – but this film doesn’t seem to realise or comment on this at any point.

Whatever your views on the characters, the fact remains that this is a chase movie where the chase is not interesting, takes far too long to get started and never really gets the viewer feeling the tension. As an editor of action, Gilroy is no Paul Greengrass and the fight sequences have the same cold distance to them that the rest of the film has, a by-the-numbers series of clashes where it’s hard to really care what happens.

A brilliant cast of actors is totally wasted. Poor Jeremy Renner does his very best here – he has charm, he’s a charismatic performer, but this is a dull character who we are given no real reason to invest in. Rachel Weisz plays the sort of damsel distress (matched up with the “film scientist” trope) an Oscar winner surely can do without. Edward Norton as with so many other films makes his contempt and boredom with the film totally apparent. Allen, Finney and Straitharn have little more than single scene cameos. A host of great character actors (Isaac, Marvel, Stoll, Ivanek, Keach, Murphy) are totally wasted.

This is a dull, formulaic, unloved sequel that spends more time trying to place itself into the timeline of the previous movies than developing a storyline and characters we actually care about. It moves slowly from location to location, sprinkling in some inadequately filmed fights and chases, never once persuading us that we should care about anything that happens.

The Peacemaker (1997)


Clooney and Kidman flee an exploding cliché

Director: Mimi Leder

Cast: George Clooney (Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe), Nicole Kidman (Dr. Julia Kelly), Marcel Iureş (Dušan Gavrić), Aleksandr Baluev (Gen. Aleksandr Kodoroff), Rene Medvešek (Vlado Mirić), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Col. Dimitri Vertikoff) 

In the late 1990s, Steven Spielberg, music tycoon David Geffen and the former chairman of Disney Jeffrey Katzenberg banded together to pool their knowledge and resources to found their very own film studio, DreamWorks. Excitement abounded – what would be the first film released from DreamWorks? How would all that genius and experience express itself? The answer was The Peacemaker.It’s a film cobbled together, Frankenstein-like, from bits and pieces of other movies. Russian separatist soldiers steal nine nuclear warheads. The USA immediately leads efforts to locate these bombs, their efforts spearheaded by a maverick Army colonel (George Clooney) uneasily paired up with a by-the-book White House Nuclear Weapons expert scientist (Nicole Kidman). The trail leads them to dodgy Eastern-European officials playing both  sides  shoot outs in picturesque locations such as Vienna and non-descript ex-Soviet republics, and  a cat and mouse chase in New York for a man on a very personal mission of revenge.

It’s quite something, an achievement almost, to sit down and watch a film and see nothing original in it at all. That’s the case with The Peacemaker: there is literally nothing in this film that you won’t have seen in any action film made between 1980 and 2000. It’s such a perfect capturing of clichés and tropes it could almost work as a time capsule piece. A reasonably film literate person could probably take a decent stab at writing down the plot of the film in advance with nothing more than a cast list and brief one-line synopsis.

It’s also fun now to see Clooney and Kidman play such dumb, by-the-numbers roles like this, having seen how far both of them have come since the 1990s. Back then, Kidman was best known for being Mrs Tom Cruise and Clooney as the star of ER struggling to break Hollywood. Both of them go through the motions with assurance, though Clooney is basically Doug Ross in an army uniform while Kidman plays a sort of Hepburnish scientist, overtly unimpressed (but secretly very impressed) by her macho comrade. There is a retrospective interest seeing them in something you can’t imagine either of them touching with a barge-pole today.

The film is routinely directed by Leder, then a staple on ER’s director payroll, with a habit of expressing the same clichés over and over again. Most of the action sequences lack any real flair, though a truck chase is reasonably well done and the final half hour chase around New York works well enough.

The plot is straight forward, although like many of these things it doesn’t really make any sense at all when you sit down and think about it (twice I think I’ve watched this in my life, and I still don’t understand how the baddies fund their operation). But everything has a back-of-a-fag-packet briefness to it, not least the yawningly familiar tale of our heroes slowly growing to respect each other. In fact the most original beat of the film is probably that they don’t end the film locking lips.

I guess you could say The Peacemaker is exactly the sort of safely dull, totally forgettable, paint by numbers bland piece you could expect a fledgling studio to dip its toes into the water with. It goes with the sort of formulaic familiarity that’s worked for countless films in the past. It’s inoffensive enough and (good judgement by them) they snagged two actors whose fame has increased exponentially since the making of the film, meaning it will always have a lifespan on TV repeats. DreamWorks went on to much better things than this TV-Movie of the week, but at least this one-for-the-money job is okay, you won’t mind wandering in and out of the room while it’s on, and you might even enjoy some of its spirited retreads of worn clichés.

The Equalizer (2014)

Denzel rests up. In about five seconds of screen time that scolding hot coffee will probably be in someone’s face.

Director: Antoine Fuqua
Cast: Denzel Washington (Robert McCall), Marton Csokas (Nicolai Itchenko) , Chloe Grace Moretz (Alina/Teri), Melissa Leo (Susan Plummer), Bill Pullman (Brian Plummer), David Harbour (Frank Masters), Johnny Skourtis (Ralph)

In the 1980s Edward Woodward had a sudden massive success in the States starring as Robert McCall, akaThe Equalizer, a former agent of a Government Agency, making atonement for past misdeeds by offering his skills free-of-charge to help the innocent and falsely accused. It ran for four seasons and then largely faded from memory. As such, it seems a strange choice for Denzel Washington to bring back to life – until you remember that Washington has a fondness for appearing in trashy action films. Kinda like I have a fondness for watching them.

Because I’ll be honest, this film is more or less exactly what you would expect from a film whose poster is the star male actor holding a gun (and, after watching this on Netflix and seeing my recommendations I am now aware how many films out there have posters of late middle age actors holding guns. Liam Neeson has a lot to answer for. Half of Hollywood’s middle aged men should be paying him some sort of commission.)

Here McCall is reimagined as a quietly retired man, works at a hardware store, is beloved by his colleagues and in mourning for his wife, who of course he promised he would leave his old life behind. There are hints that he has a certain level of OCD, and meticulously times every action he carries out. Concerned at the poor treatment handed out to a teenage prostitute by her Russian Mafia pimp, he attempts to intervene politely but firmly – but of course a blood bath of slaughtered goons ensues, and before we know it the whole Russian mafia is trying to work out who our hero is and what he wants.

It’s a pretty familiar set-up and the film wastes no time in letting us understand it before hurling us into events that will shatter any peace its lead character has. After all we all know that this zen peace isn’t going to last and that Washington will soon be dishing out pain and taking names like nobody’s business. What the film does do quite well though is sketch out the everyday folk in the film so well (with only brief moments on screen of things like baseball games) that you actually do care for them, and you actually do understand why McCall finds this life so enjoyably unstressful.

The violence when it comes is very effectively filmed. It has a great “Bourne-ish” quality to it, as McCall uses a series of everyday items with lethal effect. The final sequence takes place in the very hardware store McCall works at, and there is some imaginative use of the various products contained therein. Similarly, throughout the film McCall uses various hardware items for purposes other than those intended by the manufacturer, and niftily cleans the items to return them for sale (a great way of junking the evidence).

My one issue with the violence in this film is that I felt, at times, it was a little too graphic, a little too delighting in its mayhem. It largely gets away with this as it establishes that the victims of the violence throughout the film are mobsters and killers. The film is also slightly too long – the momentum dries up in places – and the script or direction fails to deliver a single key ‘moment’ to make this stand out from the crowd of films in this genre. It’s entertaining and good fun for fans of the genre, but it never really seems completely original, instead an effective remix of things from other movies.

Denzel Washington is of course the film’s MVP, and he tackles the part extremely well, adding a great deal of depth to McCall’s shame at his past, his discomfort with violence and his need to carefully organise his life into time managed compartments. He has the quiet, cool confidence that the part needs and suitably manages to look normal enough that you can believe he would fade into the background. Of course he could do the part standing on his head, but he still gives it a lot of interest. Marton Csorkas also does a good job as his nemesis, though the part is paper thin.

The ending feels rather tacked on and designed as sequel bait – but there are far worse films out there that will get sequels. Decent fun, nothing special, an effective remix of other films.

London Has Fallen (2016)

Rather appropriately Gerard Butler takes aim at us. After all the viewer is just about the only person he doesn’t kill in this film.

Director: Babak Najafi
Cast: Gerard Butler (Mike Banning), Aaron Eckhart (President Benjamin Asher), Morgan Freeman (Vice President Allan Trumbull), Alon Moni Aboutboul (Aamir Barkawi), Angela Bassett (Director Lynne Jacobs), Robert Forster (General Clegg), Melissa Leo (Secretary McMillan), Radha Mitchell (Leah Banning), Charlotte Riley (‘Jax’ Marshall), Jackie Earle Haley (DC Mason), Waleed Zuaiter (Kamran Barkawi), Colin Salmon (Com Kevin Hazard), Patrick Kennedy (John Lancaster)

Devoid of any sense of humour, decency,  charm or emotions at all this is a brainless and tasteless action film crammed to the gizoids with extreme knife based violence,  growled threats and paper thin characters none of whom are remotely interesting or engaging. It’s cast iron certainty, it’s self righteousness and brutality make it a deeply unpleasant, off-putting and unlikeable film.

Basically the UK PM is slain and the G8 assemble like besuited Avengers for the funeral. Unfortunately some terrorists have hatched a plan to wipe them out in revenge for a pre-credits missile strike and sure enough we have a series of assassinations in the opening seconds by villainous shady terrorists. Spreading the stereotypes fairly BTW the French leader is a yacht based dilantte, the Italian a geriatric lothario and the German a sour faced deadly serious Angela Merkel type.

The main problem with this is Gerard Butler. The film sinks completely under the weight of Butler’s self importance and chronic lack of humour . At no point in this film does Butler’s Mike Banning make any mistakes or offer up any form of human reaction such as fear or uncertainty. Compare him instead to John McClane and the moments of terror Willis dips into that role to humanise it. Also remember that Willis is charming and witty in that film. Butler however thinks alpha male certainty and grim faced contempt for everyone he meets (bar his bosses and a Scottish SAS captain) will endear us to his character. Instead it makes him border line terrifying – it would surely only take a wrong word, for Banning to turn his fury on an innocent bystander.

Mike Banning however is a violent psychopath, Butler thinking that brutally murdering a captive with a knife while growling some zenophobic one liner counts as wit. To be honest I’d be scared shitless if I was protected by this psycho who growls brutally from start to finish, all too clearly enjoying the mass killing. There is a vague attempt to humanise him with the introduction of a pregnant wife at home but instead you dread what values Banning is likely to invest the infant with in the future.

In fact the whole film has a horrible jingoism, xenophobia and racism running through its centre. It’s attitude to anything not American (or at a push British) is at best suspicion, at worst outright hatred. Anyone with a beef against America is twisted, evil, riven with jealousy and hatred of freedom and shucks we should cheer as Banning brutally tortures one of them in his final moments. America! Fuck Yeah! It gives patriotism a bad name.

The film passes the time if you enjoy seeing London destroyed (again) on film, and the body count of gruesome kills is high enough to satisfy anyone’s needs for violence, although the killing is so graphic and the film lingers so leeringly on each knifes plunge with the perversity of snuff film. A load of Brits (Colin Salmon, Charlotte Riley and Patrick Kennedy) dial in worried expressions from a control room (needless to say one of them is a traitor) while sportingly Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo, Robert Forster and Jackie Earl Haley do similar jobs in a bunker in America.

But the film is almost proud of the fact it has nothing new to say at all and seems totally unaware of its fundamental unpleasantness. It’s actually a nasty, bigoted, small minded, cruel film that hates anything different. It thinks it has a Die Hard lightness of touch – but it really, really doesn’t. Butler is charmless and horrible and the film is revolting. Avoid it.